Sean Black - The Devil's bounty

‘Go and wait in the car,’ Rafaela said.

He shrugged her off and kept walking. Perhaps not wanting to make a scene, she let him go. As Lock reached the bodies, the fireman had covered two. The others lay on their backs, clothes burned from them, faces blackened by smoke.

He knelt down beside them, recognizing the American who had given him the picture of the bodyguard. There was a gaping hole in the man’s chest. Before he’d been asphyxiated by the smoke, he had been shot.

‘ Senor! ’ A fireman waved at him to move back. A couple of local cops were eyeballing him. Lock filtered into the small crowd of bystanders.

Ten minutes later, Rafaela got into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. She had spent several minutes talking to one of the fire crew as the bodies were loaded on to a truck for the short journey to the local morgue. ‘They were all men. One American, your friend, the bartender and two locals. They’re saying it was an electrical fire.’

‘What about the gunshot wounds?’ Lock asked.

She gave him the same sad smile as when he’d asked about arresting the bodyguard. ‘You must have a fertile imagination. They are saying no one was shot, even though I saw the same thing you did.’

‘Any sign of the girl?’ Ty asked.

Rafaela shook her head. ‘Did your friend tell you what she looked like?’

Lock detailed the thumbnail sketch he’d been given.

‘If she was American, we can check the hotels, see if anyone has been reported missing,’ Rafaela said, turning the key in the ignition and pulling away from the sickly sweet smell of charred flesh, which hung in the air. ‘If she’s missing, they may have taken her with them.’

‘And if they have?’ Lock asked. ‘What then?’

Rafaela stared straight ahead. ‘It might be better for her if she had died in the fire back there.’

They stayed in the car while Rafaela went inside each of the hotels that catered to American tourists. When she emerged from the third, they knew before she reached the car that it was bad news.

She got in, massaging her temple. ‘I spoke to the manager. They are trying to keep it quiet but an American girl went missing at the same time as your friend saw the girl in the bar with Mendez. Her parents are going crazy. They’ve contacted the American consulate.’

‘What about the local cops?’ Ty asked. ‘I mean, they have to make it look like they’re doing something, right?’

‘When they first went in to make the report, they told them that a person has to be missing for forty-eight hours before they can do anything,’ Rafaela said.

‘I take it that’s not procedure,’ Lock said.

‘No, it’s not. They have to start investigating as soon as a report is taken, but if they say they can’t take a report and the person doesn’t insist, they have forty-eight hours. They use it all the time to put off the families of the girls who go missing.’

‘I’m guessing these folks didn’t buy it,’ Ty asked.

‘No. They went straight to the American consulate so the cops are out looking for her,’ Rafaela said sombrely.

Lock leaned forward. ‘And after that?’

‘They’ll get to her,’ said Rafaela, her shoulders slumping. ‘But she won’t be alive when they do. Then they’ll find someone to take the blame. They’ll arrest them, plant evidence, torture a confession out of them, send them to prison, wait until things settle down, and then it will start all over again.’

Lock met her eye. ‘You know who’s doing this, don’t you?’

‘Knowing isn’t enough, Mr Lock.’

‘Listen, your hands are tied down here. But ours aren’t. Let us help you. If we can find the girl, find Mendez, then maybe we can get you the evidence you need.’

Rafaela’s home was a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a four-storey walk-up where the communal areas smelt of fetid garbage and even staler urine. Lock knew that he could be sure of one thing about her now: she wasn’t on the take.

Inside, the place was clean, tidy and ordered in the way you’d expect of someone who lived alone and spent most of their time at work. It was a look he recognized. As Rafaela made tea and coffee for her guests, he and Ty settled themselves on a couch in the tiny open-plan living and kitchen area.

‘You can take a shower if you want,’ she said, dunking a teabag in a mug of hot water.

They thanked her. As the tea steeped, she disappeared into the bedroom. They heard her rummaging in a closet and then she reappeared with a large blue binder. She handed it to Lock.

‘These are my girls,’ she said.

Lock had a feeling he wasn’t about to flip through a family album full of cotton candy on sticks and visits to whatever passed for Disneyland down here. As he opened the binder, he wasn’t disappointed. Photographs of every murdered girl had been slipped into a clear plastic sleeve. Two for each victim, sometimes three or four where there had been some level of dismemberment. The first showed a girl alive — as an awkward teenager in a school uniform or a younger girl in a confirmation dress, all gangly limbs and big brown eyes and gappy teeth — and the second was of the dead body, either laid out on a stainless-steel mortuary platform, on waste-ground, or simply dumped at a roadside.

Rafaela plucked the teabag out of the mug and put it into the garbage pail. ‘That’s this year.’

Flicking through, Lock reckoned there had to be at least thirty victims. One year, he thought. Sweet Jesus. He reached the back, where the sleeves were empty, awaiting the next communion photograph, the next dead girl, and passed it to Ty. ‘When did the killings start?’ he asked.

Rafaela brought over two mugs of coffee, handing one to Lock and one to Ty. ‘Twelve years ago.’

Ty glanced up from a teenage girl with her hair in braids and a small silver cross at her throat. ‘And no one’s been caught?’

Rafaela blew on the hot tea in her mug. ‘Sure. Lots of people have been caught. Caught, convicted, sent to prison. One or two might even have had something to do with one or two of the killings.’ She caught Lock’s expression of surprise. ‘I’m sure there have been copycat murders as well.’

‘But you think you know who’s really behind it?’

She put her tea on the counter that separated the kitchen from the living area and went back into the bedroom. This time there was no binder, just a thin brown folder with half a dozen or so newspaper clippings. She handed them to Lock, who flicked through them. He had expected crime stories but instead found puff pieces about local dignitaries.

The first article concerned a local politician called Manuel Managua. He was in his early forties, and good-looking in a bland sort of way, with the horn-rimmed glasses and studious look of an accountant. The article talked about him as a rising star, who was almost certain to serve as city mayor, a stepping stone to bigger and better things. Managua was pictured with his wife and two cherubic little boys, every inch the family man. ‘What’s this guy’s story? You’re really saying he’s caught up in this?’

‘I know. A politician. Hard to believe,’ Rafaela said, her sarcastic tone not lost on him.

‘Feeling up a Congressional page or photocopying your wing-wang and sending it to your secretary, that I’d believe. But Lock’s got a point here. This is heavy stuff for a guy who wants people to vote for him,’ said Ty.

‘Getting elected in Mexico is about money. His friends,’ she said, gesturing at the clippings, ‘have all the money.’

That was certainly the case with the second person featured in the file. Lock already knew the name. Federico Tibialis was the alleged leader of one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico. This piece was an interview with him in which he volubly denied any involvement with drugs and complained about the endless rumours. He was, he said, merely a businessman. Lock guessed that indeed he was. It was just that his business was death and despair. Rafaela leaned over to jab at the clipping. ‘He is the one they all look to. The real leader. The boss of bosses. He funds Managua’s campaigns. He has money in most of the local businesses around here.’