by Sam Hawken
“He was attacked by another prisoner.”
Sevilla shook his head. “That’s impossible. He was in his cell alone.”
“It’s very crowded at El Cereso. He was placed with a prisoner awaiting trial on drug charges. He was a nonviolent offender; no one could know he would attack like this.”
“Where is this prisoner now?”
“In solitary.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
Quintero waved the words away with her hand. She was poised in person just as she was on television. The FEDCM was the Special Task Force for the Investigation of Crimes against Women. Whenever a feminicidio occurred, someone from the FEDCM was on television to make a statement or a comment with the offices of the Procuraduría behind them. The faces changed over the years, but the message was always the same, waved away with a hand.
“There’s no need for that,” Quintero said. “Captain Garcia and his people will handle it.”
Sevilla winced. “And what about Estéban Salazar?”
“Who?”
“The other suspect,” Sevilla said. “He’s the dead woman’s brother. Paloma Salazar is the victim.”
Quintero turned toward Kelly and Sevilla couldn’t see her face. “I’ll have to check on that.”
Sevilla wanted to take the woman by the arm, but he didn’t. He kept his voice low. “Señora, I don’t mean any disrespect, but I think I should—”
“Let’s go outside,” Quintero cut in. She favored Sevilla with a smile. “Have you had any breakfast? I’ll buy you some.”
They left Kelly and passed through the cops outside the door. Quintero led the way out through the emergency room. A baby cried and a young man waited patiently on a vinyl-upholstered chair with his bloody hand wrapped tightly in gauze.
Out in the sun, Quintero lit a cigarette with a disposable lighter. She offered Sevilla one. He took it. Quintero’s brand was Marlboro Lite. Sevilla lit it with his own lighter and for a long moment they stood in silence breathing nicotine and smoke.
“You’re a narcotics investigator, yes?” Quintero asked at last.
“That’s right.”
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Nearly thirty years.”
“That’s impressive, señor.”
“Thank you,” Sevilla said.
Quintero flicked her cigarette away half finished. She turned to face Sevilla and her expression was stolid. “I’m forty-three,” she said, “so I don’t have your experience, but I’ve worked for the office of the Procuraduría for eleven years. I’m good at my job. That is why I’m here, doing this: because it’s important work that can’t be made a mess of.”
“I understand,” Sevilla said, though he did not. He wanted to read Quintero, but he couldn’t; nothing moved behind her eyes anymore. “It’s only—”
“This American man, Courter, you knew him well?”
“Perhaps not as well as I thought. But, yes, I knew him.”
“Then you should be glad you were allowed to be a part of the investigation at all. We’ve had to deal with these feminicidios for almost twenty years. It’s a shame. It’s an embarrassment. They mock Ciudad Juárez all over the world because we can’t stop this. It was almost a relief when the cartels started killing each other; it took the pressure off.”
Sevilla took a long drag on the Marlboro, but he no longer had a taste for it. He let the cigarette fall to the pavement and ground the coal beneath his toe. “You don’t have to tell me these things, Señora Quintero,” he said.
“Kelly Courter was a fighter and a drug user and a drug dealer. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Sevilla said. He wanted to spit the bad taste from his mouth.
“Then you see where this is going,” Quintero replied. “The victim’s brother was a drug dealer, as well. You know how these narcotraficantes are, how crazy they can get when they use their own stuff. They’re running riot all along the border. Maybe we don’t know why they killed Paloma Salazar, but we’ll find out.”
Sevilla dragged his foot across the broken cigarette and smeared the ash on the sidewalk. “Not from Kelly,” he said.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Not from Kelly,’” Sevilla repeated. “I was told a confession was paramount, but now he can confess to no one. And why would Estéban do such a thing to his own sister? These things… they make no sense.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Quintero said.
“No, but—”
“It’s a terrible thing, what happened to Señor Courter,” Quintero continued, “but it’s done now. We can only work with what we have, and there’s evidence — convincing evidence — pointing to these men for the crime. If it doesn’t make sense, it’s because none of this makes sense. Ciudad Juárez doesn’t hate its women.”
“Why was Kelly removed from the jail?”
Quintero smiled a little but it was quickly gone. “That was a decision I made. The jail’s infirmary isn’t capable of dealing with a man in Courter’s condition.”
“Why not just let him die?”
“Like I said: I want him as an example. And he’s American.”
“The other,” Sevilla said quietly.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“And who knows how many other murders he’s responsible for. We’re taking statements from witnesses who attest to strange behavior on Courter’s part. Behavior that might lead to additional convictions.”
“What witnesses are these?”
“Reliable ones.”
Sevilla frowned. “I’d like to see Estéban Salazar taken from the general population in El Cereso and placed under protective custody. If it’s examples you want, you can’t have anything like this happen again.”
“I find it unlikely that lightning will strike twice.”
“All the same, it would make me more comfortable.”
“I’ll do it if the opportunity presents itself.”
Sevilla stared at his feet. He crossed the line of ash with his toe. Justicia, said an echo in the back of his mind. When he looked sidelong at Adriana Quintero, he saw she had her cell phone in her hands, texting with her thumbs. Somewhere close by an ambulance’s siren whooped once and then went silent.
Quintero put her phone away. “You are a very dedicated police officer,” she told Sevilla. “We need that, now more than ever. If you want our office to keep you informed of what’s happening with this case…?”
“Yes. Yes, I’d like that. Can I contact you directly?”
“It would be better if I gave my assistant your number,” Quintero said. “The way things go, I would miss your message and I don’t want that.”
“All right,” Sevilla said. “Here is my card.”
Quintero vanished the card into a pocket of her jacket.
“I should go. I’m sorry about the breakfast. Perhaps some other time,” Quintero said. She turned to leave.
“Of course. I understand. And señora?”
Sevilla caught a faint trace of something passing over Quintero’s face when she stopped, but she smiled and it went away. “Is there something else?”
“Paloma Salazar was a good woman. She worked hard for the dead women of Juárez. That this happened… it’s not right. We owe her the very best for her sacrifice.”
“I assure you she will get nothing less.”
“I will take your word for it,” Sevilla replied.
“Goodbye,” Quintero said.
“Goodbye, señora.”
Sevilla watched Quintero go. When the doors to the emergency room closed behind her, Sevilla walked the pavement to the parking garage, letting the morning sun penetrate him where he was cold inside. He found his car where he left it, but a scrap of paper under the wiper was new.
He expected a nasty note from a doctor angry at the lost space. Instead, the note read, They tried to kill the American.
Sevilla crushed the paper in his hand. He looke
d left and right, but the garage was still, and even the sound of engines was absent. When he unfolded the note, the words were the same; he was not mistaken.
It occurred to him to use his phone, but he didn’t know who he could call. Quintero was with Kelly and before that she had been with him. The police outside Kelly’s door had all been there when he left, but what about afterward, while Sevilla and Quintero were outside?
This time he folded the note and put it away inside his jacket. He unlocked the car and got behind the wheel, but didn’t put his keys in the ignition. For a long while he sat. He pulled the hood release and got out again.
The engine looked normal. Sevilla lowered himself onto one knee and peered beneath the frame. He felt foolish, but his mind raced ahead of him and he checked the concrete for fluid that might have leaked from a severed line. There was nothing.
He started the car and let it idle for a full minute before putting it into gear and backing out of the space. His eye strayed to the spot beneath the wiper where the note was lodged. He forced himself to feel for strangeness when he depressed the brake, but there was none. His paranoia was embarrassing; out on the street he felt his face reddening though there was no one around to know what he was thinking.
Work and his office were both south, but Sevilla turned east. He fell in behind an American tour bus and into the clogged-heart rhythm of morning traffic through downtown. Already in his imagination he mounted the steps to Kelly’s apartment and got inside. He would begin in the bedroom and work his way out to the front room and the kitchen. Searching the whole apartment would take less than an hour because it was small and Sevilla knew what to do. The drive there would take longer.
Sevilla drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He opened the windows and let the polluted morning air fill the car. He did not play the radio.
FOUR
HE DIDN’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT the way to Kelly’s apartment; he’d driven it many times over the years for his unexpected visits. Not to roust Kelly, but to talk and put a little pressure on, chat by chat. Droplets of water could cut through a boulder, and so it was when it came to cultivating informants. Sevilla hoped Kelly would give one day, because a man like Estéban would never succumb. He was too far inside, while Kelly was always going to be on the outside no matter what else he might aspire to.
Sevilla only had to look at the neighborhood where Kelly settled to know something about him. This place, with its flat-roofed and unremarkable blocks of apartments and little businesses catering to the working poor, was far better than many around Juárez. A neighborhood like this spoke of hope and hanging on to a modest sort of success that the desolation of the colonias had abandoned long ago. Kelly could have gone headfirst into the sewage that streamed constantly from the clubs and bars and brothels, but he chose here instead.
The street was still when Sevilla parked and even the traffic sounds of the city seemed distant when he got out. He did not feel eyes on him because there were no eyes to feel; people minded their own business in a neighborhood like this one. And when there was nothing to hide, strangers weren’t a worry.
He mounted the steps one at a time. He felt heavy, and not just because temperatures were on the rise. When he got to Kelly’s door there would be no one home, and what was left behind was the terrible scene in El Cereso. What he did, Sevilla did for Kelly’s good, but that did not make the burden any lighter.
In America the police might have sealed Kelly’s door with bright yellow tape, but there were no such markers here. Sevilla paused by the railing and looked north. It was possible to see Texas from this spot, though the demarcation between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso was not a prominent one. From this perspective it all seemed washed together along the banks of the Rio Grande in the wake of a flood, with only luck determining who came to rest in the land of opportunity and who was left in Mexico.
Sevilla had a key for Kelly’s apartment. Sevilla paid the apartment manager for it with the idea that he could slip in for a search from time to time. This was how he knew Kelly was clean — except for the motivosa, of course — and how he came to know Kelly better through the evidence Kelly left when he felt no one was paying attention.
Inside, the police had turned Kelly’s home into a scattered mess. Even the few dishes were broken as the cabinets were cleared, dismantled and searched. Sevilla paused in the door, once again taken aback by the spiteful chaos, and then he went in.
He didn’t think to find anything the other police had missed. For all the disdainful talk of the cops across the river, cops in Ciudad Juárez knew how to go about their business. Or at least they could dismantle a suspect’s apartment without leaving any secret behind. Sevilla wanted… he wasn’t certain what he wanted. He simply wanted to be here.
Sevilla drifted from the front room to the bedroom and back again. Out on the rear balcony the heavy bag was unhooked from its spot, dashed to the concrete and slashed open. Stuffing and sawdust drifted from its corpse.
The remains of a sofa cushion were still enough to pad a seat, so Sevilla made himself comfortable where he had done so many times before. He lit a cigarette and looked at his reflection in the cracked face of Kelly’s broken television. It wasn’t here, that essence of Kelly, and being here did not help Sevilla understand.
A shoe scuffed on the doorstep and Sevilla looked over. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
Enrique Palencia lingered in the open doorway as if unsure whether to enter or turn away. He was a young man, seeming younger still despite the little goatee he tended into neat life. With Sevilla watching, Enrique put one foot over the threshold before drawing it back. He had guilt on his face.
“Well, come in if you’re coming in,” Sevilla said. He looked for somewhere to stub out his cigarette, but the sidetable was overturned and the ashtray was gone. Enrique came in and closed the door behind him. Suddenly the front room was very dark.
“I don’t want to disturb you,” Enrique said.
“You aren’t disturbing me. How did you know I was here? Did that pendejo Garcia send you?”
“Captain Garcia doesn’t know where I am. I took the day off.”
Enrique stood awkwardly by the door. Sevilla watched him until the heat of the cigarette nibbled at his fingertips. He put the butt out on the sole of his shoe. Enrique Palencia looked as though he had slept in his clothes not one night, but maybe two.
“You know, I can put up with almost all of it,” Sevilla told Enrique at last. “The things we do… I’ve done worse in my time. And I helped when old cops, wise cops, did terrible things to get at the truth. I’ve smelled the blood. I’ve had it on my hands. Now it’s your turn.”
The young cop didn’t answer. He moved into the kitchenette, crunching over broken glass and shattered dinnerware. He looked in the refrigerator where even the shelves were yanked loose. When he chanced a look in Sevilla’s direction, he never met his eyes.
Finally there was nothing else to inspect. Enrique stood with his hands awkwardly as his sides. Only then did he look Sevilla in the face. He was sweating. “I didn’t do that to him,” he said. “But I know who did.”
“I know who did,” Sevilla replied. “Oscar Garcia doesn’t believe anything he’s told if he hasn’t broken a bone to hear it.”
Enrique Palencia was silent.
“You were the one who called me,” Sevilla said.
“Yes.”
“You left the note.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell me why?”
“I couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“You stood beside Garcia,” Sevilla said. “You didn’t tell him no. You didn’t tell him stop. How many times has it been?”
“You said yourself you’ve done the same,” Enrique returned.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Time doesn’t change anything.”
To this Sevilla could only nod.
Enrique was quiet a while. “It was too much.”
“It is too much,” Sevilla agreed. “Thank you. Now come and sit down.”
Sevilla waited while Enrique salvaged another half-shredded couch cushion. They sat at opposite ends of the little divan. Sevilla put another cigarette between his lips and offered Enrique one. Sevilla saw Enrique’s hands shake when he lit up.
They passed the time smoking without talking and after a while Enrique’s hands steadied. “It wasn’t enough to turn Estéban Salazar into a cripple, but he had to do the same to Kelly?” Sevilla asked then.
“No,” Enrique said. “He didn’t have any questions. That was why I couldn’t go with him. He made fun of me, but I wouldn’t do that.”
“He went to kill him,” Sevilla said. “Just like that? Of his own accord?”
“I don’t know. He went away for his dinner break and didn’t come back for a long time. I thought he’d gone home, but then he called and said he wanted me to stay late. He showed up after shift change. He told me what he was going to do. ‘If he won’t talk, he won’t talk,’ he said. ‘What does it matter when we know he did it?’”
Sevilla considered using his shoe to stub out his cigarette again. He ground the butt into the carpet instead. It would have to be replaced anyway. Enrique sat with his own butt cradled in two hands across his knees, slumped forward and staring into the rising smoke as if memory were there. He said nothing else.
“Why tell me these things?” Sevilla asked.
Enrique stirred. He dropped his butt on the floor reluctantly, crushed it with hesitation. He spoke to his empty hands. “Captain Garcia said the American was your friend.”
Sevilla didn’t correct him. He was unsure what Kelly was to him. Once he’d told Kelly he respected him and that was true. Now Kelly was…
“You think that makes a difference?” Sevilla said. “All cops have friends. We don’t tell tales on each other.”
“I’m not telling tales!” Enrique returned. He looked up sharply and his back went tense. Sevilla saw anger and hurt in the young cop’s eyes. “This is what happened!”
“I believe you. Calm down,” Sevilla said, and he put his hands up. “But people will wonder why you come to me, friend or no friend. Ask Garcia and he’ll tell you that I deal with narcos and junkies, not killers. Why not go to Señora Quintero? Take it to the Procuraduría. Someone might even give you a medal for your honesty. But I doubt it.”
