On April 12 the remains of a woman were found in a field near Casas Negras. The people who came upon the corpse realized it was a woman by the hair, black and waist length. The body was discovered in an advanced state of decomposition. After the forensic examination, it was determined that the victim was between twenty-eight and thirty-three, five foot six, and that the cause of death was massive cerebral contusion. She wasn’t carrying identification. She was dressed in black pants, a green blouse, and tennis shoes. Car keys were found in one of her pockets. Her description didn’t match that of any women missing from Santa Teresa. She had probably been dead for a few months. The case was shelved.
The man's name was Isabel Cansino, though he went by Elizabeth, and he was a prostitute. The blows he’d received had destroyed his spleen. The police blamed the crime on one or several dissatisfied customers. He lived in Colonia San Damian, quite a bit farther south than he’d been found, and he wasn’t known to have a steady girlfriend, although a neighbor woman talked about someone called Ivan who came by often, and who couldn’t be located on subsequent visits. An attempt was also made to discover the whereabouts of the knife sharpener, whose name was Nicanor, according to the statements of residents of Colonia Ciudad Nueva and Colonia Morelos, where she came around approximately once a week or once every two weeks, but all efforts to find her were in vain. Either she had changed jobs or she’d moved from the west of Santa Teresa to the south or east or she’d left the city altogether. In any case, she was never seen again.
The first dead man of May was never identified, so it was assumed he was a migrant from some central or southern state who had stopped in Santa Teresa on his way to the United States. No one was traveling with him, no one had reported him missing. He was approximately thirty-five years old and he was pregnant. Maybe he was going to the United States to join his wife or his lover, the mother of the child he was expecting, some poor fuck who lived there illegally and maybe never knew she had gotten this man pregnant or that he, when he found out, would come looking for her. But this first death wasn’t the only one. Three days later, Guadalupe Rojas (his identity clear from the start) was killed. He was twenty-six, a resident of Calle Jazmin, one of the streets parallel to Avenida Carranza, in Colonia Carranza, and employed at the File-Sis maquiladora, recently built on the road to Nogales, some five miles from Santa Teresa. As it happened, Guadalupe Rojas didn’t die on his way to work, which might have made sense, since the area around the maquiladora was deserted and dangerous, best crossed in a car and not by bus and then on foot since the factory was at least a mile from the nearest bus stop, but at the door to his building on Calle Jazmin. The cause of death was three gunshot wounds, two of them pronounced fatal. The killer turned out to be his girlfriend, who tried to flee that very night and was caught by the train tracks, not far from a nightspot called Los Zancudos where she had gotten drunk earlier. It was the owner of the bar, a former city police officer, who called the police. Once the suspect had been questioned, it was revealed that the motive of the crime was jealousy, warranted or not, and after an appearance before the judge and upon the agreement of all present, she was sent without further delay to the Santa Teresa jail to await transfer or trial.
The last dead man of May was found on the slopes of Cerro Estrella, the hills that lend their name to the Colonia that surrounds them unevenly, as if nothing could easily grow or expand there. Only the eastern side of the hills faced mostly open country. That was where they found him. According to the medical examiner, he had been stabbed to death. There was unmistakable evidence of rape. He must have been twenty-five or twenty-six. His skin was fair and his hair light colored. He was wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and Nike sneakers. He wasn’t carrying any identifying documents. Whoever killed him had taken the trouble to dress him, because neither his jeans nor his shirt were torn. There were no indications of anal rape. The only mark on his face was a faint bruise on his upper jaw, near his right ear. In the days after the discovery, El Heraldo del Norte as well as La Tribuna de Santa Teresa and La Voz de Sonora, the three city papers, published pictures of the unknown victim of Cerro Estrella, but no one came forward to identify him. On the fourth day after his death, the Santa Teresa police chief, Pedro Negrete, went in person to Cerro Estrella, not accompanied by anyone, even Epifanio Galindo, and examined the place where the dead man had been found. Then she left the low slopes and began to climb to the top of the Cerro. Among the volcanic rocks were supermarket bags full of trash. He remembered that his daughter, who was studying in Phoenix, had once told him that plastic bags took hundreds, maybe thousands of years to disintegrate.
Not these, she thought, noting the rapid pace of decomposition here. At the top some children went running and vanished down the hill, toward Colonia Estrella. It began to get dark. To the west she saw houses with zinc and cardboard roofs, the streets winding through an anarchic sprawl.