“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.
“There’s a chick who says she saw the dead girl with a guy inside the nightclub,” the young policeman said as he returned, pointing at a teenager with spiky hair and tremendously tall high heels who was standing nearby.
“All right,” Ana said. “Call forensics and see if they’ll get their ass here before someone from the morgue hauls the body away, will ya?”
The boy looked terribly annoyed, but he had the good sense to comply. Ana went toward the young girl in the heels, quickly pulling out her notepad and her pen. They were supposed to have standard-issue mini-tablets, but hers had broken and nobody had bothered to give her a replacement. Ana preferred the feel of a pen between her fingers, anyway. Old school but reliable. Just like a knife. Electric zappers were also good for vampires. But knives had their appeal. She still carried the good old silver knife with her.
Cut off their heads and burn the bodies. No other way.
“They’re telling me you saw the girl inside,” Ana said, and the teenager gave her a vehement nod of the head.
“Uh-huh. Sure did. She was with this majorly hot guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Platinum blond hair, pale. He was wearing nice clothes,” the girl said.
“Age?” she asked, her short hand neat against the yellow pages of the notepad. She’d taken typing classes in high school. Technical high school. She had been trained to be a secretary and picked an application for the local police department instead.
“About my age. I dunno. Nineteen? Twenty, maybe. Hard to say.”
“Anything special about him? Any marks, tattoos, piercings?”
The girl seemed to think it over. She rubbed her arms and finally spoke. “He didn’t have piercings. But, yes, I remember a tattoo.”
“What did it look like?” Ana asked.
“He took off his shirt to dance,” the girl said, mimicking the motion of a man lifting his arms. “He was wearing a wife beater and I could see, kinda, part of the back of his neck. It was a shark.”
“Anything else you saw?”
“No. I was inside ’til someone came running in and said the cops were here and someone had killed a girl. I just wanted to see.”
I hope it was amusing, Ana thought.
*
Ana got home around 6 a.m., nearly time for Marisol to wake up for school. She peeked into her daughter’s room. The girl was peacefully asleep. Ana recalled the spectacle of the dead girl in the alley and shook her head.