Certain Dark Things(19)
There was his answer. Mexican vampires slept in closets. Who would have thought?
Domingo tiptoed outside the bedroom, quietly closing the door behind him. His stomach was rumbling. It was time for breakfast. He could use a good bowl of birria. He grabbed the apartment keys that were dangling by a hook next to the door and stepped outside. When he reached the first landing, he slipped on his headphones and pushed play.
CHAPTER
8
People had to get themselves murdered on Saturday. Never Tuesday or Wednesday, when Ana Aguirre was off duty. Always Saturday. She shouldn’t be on duty on the weekends. As a matter of fact, Ana should have been working a pleasant desk job supervising junior officers. But Castillo had blocked that move yet again. The twat. If Ana Aguirre had ever held dreams of a real career in law enforcement, they had long been dashed under the persistent hammer of the outdated Mexican police system.
Worst of all, when she arrived at the crime scene, knelt down, and lifted the blanket, she saw it was a kid. A young girl in a tight miniskirt, her top drenched in blood.
Ana looked at the girl and couldn’t help thinking of her own daughter, Marisol, who was seventeen. Ana kept working this shit job for her daughter. But she worried. She wasn’t home nearly enough and the city had a hungry maw, one ready to swallow the young and the innocent.
Ana aimed her flashlight at the girl’s face. The neck had been torn, savaged.
“Hey, you’ve got anything for me?” she asked, turning toward a policeman who was lounging against the wall, smoking a cigarette.
“What you see’s what you’ve got. It looks strange as f*ck. Vampire, no?”
Ana tilted her head. Great. She’d left Zacatecas to avoid the vampire gangs. It seemed they were all over the country. All over except for Mexico City. Not because it was a city-state, autonomous in many respects. That was just a geographical demarcation. No. Mexico City had held tight because it was territory of the human gangs, and the gangs, usually unwilling to cooperate, had managed to come together against the single enemy that mattered to them: the bloodsuckers.
But violence lurked at the edges of the city, in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and other areas. There, in the slums, the vampires sometimes made their incursions, trying to expand their fiefdoms. They failed. For now.
“I phoned and they told me you’d know what to do,” the policeman said.
Like hell, Ana thought, but she knew why they’d placed her on this case. Because none of the others wanted to touch it. Because she was from Zacatecas and it didn’t matter if you’d lived in Mexico City for six years, you were still an outsider. Because she came from the gang lands. Because Castillo hated her. Because the shit jobs always wound up dripping her way. Because she had put forth a sexual harassment complaint against another officer one time, and everyone had laughed it off, saying no one would want to smack the ass of such an ugly woman.
“When did you find her?”
“I called it in half an hour ago. Took you long enough to get here.”
Ana wanted to backhand the punk. He looked shy of twenty. Probably thought he was God’s gift to the Secretariat of Public Safety simply because they’d issued him a baton.
“Well, anyone see anything?”
“Nobody saw nothing,” he said.
“You sure or you just guessing?”
The young man gave her a blank look. They’d already set the yellow tape across both ends of the alley and onlookers were peering curiously at the cops. A couple were even raising their cell phones and trying to take photos.
For souvenirs, she thought bitterly. She thought of lodging a complaint about this cop’s performance, then decided the paperwork wasn’t worth it. Her note would end up at the bottom of a file, anyway.
“She had the blanket on top of her when you found her?” Ana asked.
“Yeah.”
The vampire had covered her. She didn’t think it was modesty. Although he’d done a shoddy job of it, he’d probably been trying to delay the finding of the corpse. Had he simply dragged the body to the next alley he would have found a pothole so large it could probably fit half the girl’s body. It wouldn’t have taken too much effort.
Stupid, she thought.
“Go talk to your friends over there and see if they have any witnesses for me, will you?” she said, pointing toward a couple of cops who were talking animatedly with some of the onlookers.
The young man huffed, but obeyed her. Ana leaned down and took out her camera. In theory, forensics would come over and photograph the crime scene, but that was in theory. Many times they just wouldn’t show up, because there was too much shit going on, there weren’t enough of them, or they didn’t want to get up and drag their sorry asses out of bed. Mexican police work didn’t play out like in the movies. Traditionally, there was almost no investigative work. They relied heavily on confessions and wouldn’t even blink if they contaminated a crime scene. Physical evidence was used in about 10 percent of convictions and the rest were signed affidavits. Things were changing, supposedly. Ana was one of the shiny new breed of detectives, a real investigator, but that was a bunch of PR mixed with only a little substance.
She was tired of this game.
Ana snapped photos and took notes, wondering if she should even bother but doing it anyway. She was up and about already, so she might as well work. No reason to give Castillo more fuel for his fire.