Juan de Dios Martinez (23f7ac42)

Juan de Dios Martinez is a Santa Teresa inspector whose work on the murders of women brings him repeatedly to the limits of police knowledge and accountability. He insists on examining scenes and following leads, yet the investigations yield missing names, vanished suspects, conflicting accounts, and suspicions entangled with local power. His professional persistence does not resolve that contradiction; the accumulated cases instead become a private burden that surfaces in his troubled reflections and his conversations with Elvira Campos.

Identity and Investigative Work

Martinez works as an inspector within Santa Teresa’s police force. His cases place him among the officers responding to the ongoing killings of women, but his role is not simply to register discoveries: he questions what scenes and records can establish, seeks out people connected to victims, and recognizes when an apparent explanation leaves essential facts unresolved. His investigations unfold in a city where bodies may be found in vacant lots, on the outskirts, or in places tied to work and ordinary urban life, while institutional responses vary from active pursuit to delay or evasion.

The novel sets this work against Santa Teresa’s larger geography of poverty, industrial expansion, and rapid growth. The city’s maquiladoras, crowded neighborhoods, and inadequate infrastructure are part of the same terrain through which the cases move. The distance between a victim’s workplace, home, and the place where her body is found is not merely geographic: it marks how easily a woman can disappear from ordinary public attention and how difficult it is for investigators to reconstruct what happened.

Investigating the Women’s Murders

In the case of the woman found near the school in December 1995, Martinez discusses the placement of the body with fellow inspector Jose Marquez. They reason that the perpetrators probably arrived by car, carried the body from its trunk, and left it near the school; the distance from the highway and the effort implied by the disposal lead Martinez to infer a route toward Cananea rather than away from it. They also consider the stake driven into the body, and Martinez confirms that the woman was already dead when this was done. The exchange shows his attention to the practical details of disposal, but its deductions remain inferences, not an identification of the killer.

At another scene, he handles the discovery of Ema Contreras, who has been shot in her home. Martinez quickly suspects her housemate, Officer Jaime Sanchez, and orders a search. At Serafino’s, where a poker game continues among officers and drinkers, he arrests Sanchez and finds a Brazilian Magnum Taurus in his holster. Sanchez admits losing control and asks Martinez not to embarrass him in front of his friends; Martinez refuses to let that concern delay the arrest. The poker game resumes after they leave, a small, unnerving measure of how readily ordinary police social life absorbs the arrest of an officer accused of murder.

The discovery of Estefania and Herminia Noriega tests Martinez’s insistence on controlling a scene. He enters the house with Lino Rivera, orders him not to touch anything, and examines the rooms and bodies. The initial findings leave important uncertainty: the medical examiner reports that both sisters were shot in the back of the head, but the bullet was not the cause of Herminia’s death. Subsequent examination establishes that her death followed a heart attack during the abuse. Martinez demands that nontechnical personnel leave and restricts access while the investigation proceeds. Even with that care, the neighbors give contradictory accounts of who occupied the house, and the tenant named in the records, Javier Ramos, cannot be found. The trail leads into a property landscape connected to Pedro Rengifo, the narco Estanislao Campuzano, and the mayor’s family, but those connections do not establish who committed the murders. A meeting among the mayor, police chief Pedro Negrete, Rengifo, and Campuzano is followed by a broad search for Ramos; the police still cannot produce a convincing description of him.

The disappearance of reliable evidence and the difficulty of identification recur in Martinez’s other cases. At El Pajonal, after Americans who found human remains are detained and questioned, he returns at dawn with police and the visitors to the marked location. The bones prove to be those of a young woman, but she has no clothing or belongings to identify her, and the medical examiner cannot establish how she died. Martinez considers whether the body was brought there naked or stripped before burial; the scene supplies no answer. In another case, Maria Estela Ramos is found in a vacant lot after having been missing for days. Martinez learns that she lived with maquiladora coworkers and had a four-year-old son; one coworker, recently dismissed after trying to organize a union, says she will take responsibility for the boy. The victim’s friends identify a boyfriend known only as El Chino, but the name and description produce no trace at the hardware store where he was said to work. Martinez sends informants to search, yet the man remains like a phantom.

Martinez also appears at the discovery of a young woman whose body bears many injuries but whose identity is unknown. Lalo Cura tells him that the crime scene has been deliberately wiped clean. Martinez rejects the claim of deliberate erasure, though he agrees that the scene has been wiped. Their disagreement distinguishes a visible condition from an unproven intention: the evidence supports the loss of a usable scene, but not a conclusion about who caused it or why.

Cases, Power, and Uncertainty

Martinez’s investigations repeatedly encounter explanations that close a case rhetorically without settling it. In the killing of the woman later identified as Emilia Mena Mena, police pursue her boyfriend, who has already left. His family is detained, and officers follow an address in Ciudad Guzman, but he is not found; the case remains open and is soon forgotten. The sequence makes a failed search consequential in two directions: it neither establishes the suspect’s guilt nor prevents the investigation from fading from institutional attention.

The Noriega case sharpens the political dimension of that uncertainty. Martinez discovers that properties near the crime scene are owned through arrangements linking wealthy local figures, a suspected narco, and the mayor’s family. He wonders whether Rengifo or Campuzano is involved, but he also reasons that a perpetrator would be unlikely to kill on or near his own property unless he were irrational or wanted to be caught. The question remains a question. The subsequent meeting among the powerful men and the fruitless search for Javier Ramos intensify the sense that information and authority are not evenly distributed, without proving that any one person directed the killings.

His cases also place official certainty beside forensic limits. In the desert remains at El Pajonal, the medical examiner can identify the bones as human and determine that they belonged to a young woman, but neither cause nor date of death can be fixed. In the Noriega investigation, examinations clarify the sequence and circumstances of death but cannot turn those findings into an identified perpetrator. Across these cases, the body may provide precise evidence while the surrounding story—who the victim was, who brought her there, and who can be held responsible—remains incomplete.

The Personal Cost of the Work

After the Noriega sisters’ deaths, Martinez continues to think about Herminia’s four heart attacks. The thought returns during meals, late at night, and in the ordinary pauses of his day. At times he cannot switch off the light; he gets up, looks out at the street, makes coffee, and watches television. A restrained sob escapes him, but when he uncovers his face, no tear is visible. The episode gives private form to what the files and scene reports cannot contain: the difference between recording a death and living with its implications.

Martinez tells Elvira Campos what is happening to him. She is the director of an asylum and also his intimate partner; after listening, she describes her own recurring fantasy of selling her possessions, going to Paris, and beginning again under a changed appearance. Their conversation does not solve his distress. Instead, it establishes an unusually candid exchange in which both can speak of wanting to leave their existing lives behind. Her imagined departure stands apart from his repeated return to the cases, while their relationship gives him a listener beyond the police hierarchy.

The same helplessness resurfaces after Angelica Ochoa is shot. Martinez examines the sequence of wounds and thinks through the likely progression of the attack, but the police cannot find the suspected husband, Ruben Gomez Arancibia, who has disappeared. Sitting alone in his car, Martinez tries to cry and cannot. The scene echoes the earlier failure of tears after the Noriega investigation: his response is neither indifference nor a triumphant resolution, but grief that has become difficult to express.

Narrative Role and Significance

Martinez’s investigative work supplies a recurring human vantage on a larger crisis without granting him the power to master it. He can notice a body’s placement, question witnesses, pursue a suspect, and recognize the weakness of an official account; he cannot consistently turn those acts into identification, prosecution, or an end to the killings. The distinction between what he observes and what the institutions establish is central to his portrayal.

His character also links procedure to its emotional consequences. The novel presents police work through practical gestures—controlling access to a house, searching a holster, visiting a desert site, sending informants—and then shows what remains after the paperwork and questioning: sleeplessness, repeated thoughts, and attempts to cry. Martinez is neither presented as an investigator who solves the city’s violence nor reduced to a symbol of institutional failure. He is a working inspector whose persistence coexists with uncertainty, whose investigations disclose fragments of a system of power, and whose repeated exposure to women’s deaths leaves a mark that he can only partly articulate.