La Vaca’s murder, recorded in August 1994, becomes more than a case closed by the police: it is a measure of how little the people around a victim may know, and of how easily one death can be filed away amid Santa Teresa’s continuing killings of women. The novel returns to the case through an official follow-up interview with La Vaca’s friends, while setting it against other deaths and disappearances whose circumstances remain uncertain.

The Case and Its Immediate Resolution

La Vaca’s death is mentioned among the killings that accumulated in Santa Teresa: the narration dates her murder to August 1994. The supplied account does not give a full reconstruction of the crime itself. Instead, it records that her two musician friends, El Mariachi and El Cuervo, were imprisoned after a fight in which La Vaca died, and that the case was declared closed.

The inspector’s later visit makes that apparent resolution less conclusive as an account of La Vaca’s life. Juan de Dios Martinez visits the musicians in the penitentiary and brings cigarettes and magazines. He offers to help them if they provide information, explicitly framing his questions around their friendship with her. The exchange shifts attention from the police conclusion to what the surviving witnesses can—and cannot—say about the dead woman.

What Her Friends Knew

Martinez asks whether either man had slept with La Vaca. Both deny it. El Mariachi explains that she did not like men and was already macho enough herself. When asked for her full name, he admits that he does not know it: they called her Vaca. The inspector’s pointed return to the claim that they were close friends underscores the gap between emotional proximity and knowledge of a person’s identity.

The same limit appears in the questions about her money and contacts. El Cuervo says they had wondered where her money came from, since they would have liked to earn extra pesos, but she never discussed it. El Mariachi recalls one occasion when La Vaca pointed out a woman working in a downtown coffee shop and asked whether he had ever seen such a pretty woman. He says he did not know the woman’s name and had never been introduced to her. The interview leaves La Vaca’s finances and wider social world unexplained, even as it preserves small details of how she moved among her friends.

A Larger Pattern of Uncertainty

The murder is placed within a chronology in which deaths, missing persons, and incomplete identifications recur. Earlier in 1993, the first woman counted on the list of killings was identified as Esperanza Gomez Saldana, though the narrative warns that there may have been earlier victims who were never found or recorded. The police and medical examiner established that Esperanza had been strangled, but identification and investigation proceeded through a series of institutional steps that did not resolve the wider pattern.

Other accounts make the conditions around disappearance concrete without offering a single explanation for it. Margarita Lopez Santos, a sixteen-year-old maquiladora worker, vanished after a night shift and was found more than forty days later; poor lighting and inadequate roads shaped her walk home, but the narrative does not claim that these circumstances identify a killer. Lucy Anne Sander disappeared during a night out in Santa Teresa after her friend lost sight of her in the city center. These cases differ in their known circumstances, but together they show how ordinary routes—work, travel, and nightlife—can end in uncertainty.

The official handling of an unidentified girl found at the city dump further sharpens that contrast. Although investigators photographed her and sought recognition through an English academy and newspaper notices, she remained unidentified and was eventually sent to the University of Santa Teresa medical school. The record preserves some facts about her, but not her name. Against these accounts, the questions about La Vaca’s full name and unknown income make the limits of what can be known part of the event’s significance.

Attention, Reporting, and Aftermath

The novel also shows how attention to the killings rises and falls. Chucho Flores describes the pattern to Oscar Fate as a recurring cycle: numbers increase, the murders become news, and discussion grows until it fades and people return to work. His comparison of the killings to a brutal strike captures the interruption they impose on everyday life, while the return to work marks how quickly that interruption can be absorbed and forgotten.

Fate tries to redirect his assignment from a boxing match to the killings, naming the possible involvement of one or two serial killers, drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and Santa Teresa’s rapid growth. His editor refuses the proposed story and instructs him to complete the sports assignment and return to New York. That rejection places the case within a system of limited journalistic attention as well as limited police resources.

By January 1996, Klaus Haas is publicly asking how murders can continue while the supposed killer is in prison. He points to similarities between the ropes used on Michelle Requejo and Estrella Ruiz Sandoval and notes that Estrella had direct contact with him through her interest in computers. His press conference reopens doubt about the adequacy of the official account; it does not establish who killed La Vaca or connect her murder to those later cases. The event’s lasting force lies instead in the discrepancy between closure as an administrative declaration and the unanswered questions that continue to surround the women’s deaths.