Precinct #2 is one of Santa Teresa’s police stations, but the novel makes it more than a setting for police procedure: it is a point where the city’s violence is processed unevenly. Suspects can be held and questioned there, while relatives seeking help for a missing child are told to wait. Across these contrasting encounters, the station becomes a measure of what the institutions choose to pursue and what they allow to disappear.

Interrogations and the handling of suspects

In the case of Luisa Celina Vazquez, neighbors alerted the police, who forced entry to her home and found her dead. Her partner, Marcos Sepulveda, and his associate, Ezequiel Romero, were taken to Precinct #2. Officer Epifanio Galindo, described as the police chief’s right-hand man, questioned them through the night. Before dawn, Romero confessed to a relationship with Luisa Celina and to killing her after she ended it; Sepulveda was released two days later.

The interrogation then changed purpose. Rather than simply resolving Luisa Celina’s murder, investigators kept Romero in custody and tried to connect him to the earlier killing of Esperanza Gomez Saldana, whose identity had by then been established. Romero refused to implicate himself in that case. The contrast is telling: the police obtained a confession quickly in one investigation, then tried to extend it to another. The station’s questioning room thus serves both the pursuit of a specific suspect and the effort to impose a broader explanation on a series of deaths.

A family’s attempt to report a disappearance

Precinct #2 is also where the family of Penelope Mendez Becerra went after the fifth-grade student failed to return from school. Her mother requested time off from work to report her missing, and her son accompanied her. A policeman recorded Penelope’s name and told the family to wait several days. When the mother, brother, and sister returned the next day to ask what had been done, the officer at the desk told them not to be insolent.

The school principal and three teachers were also at the station asking about Penelope. They led the family away before the relatives could be fined for disorderly conduct. The family’s effort to obtain help was therefore met not with a visible search or timely information, but with a warning and the threat of punishment. The station’s formal power is present; what is missing is a corresponding urgency toward the person reported missing.

Investigative priorities and institutional limits

The same period reveals how police priorities could shift away from unresolved cases. Juan de Dios Martinez was ordered to stop working on the Penitent case and investigate armed robberies in other neighborhoods. He was told the earlier investigation was not closed, but that the suspect seemed to have vanished, progress had stalled, and Santa Teresa had too few investigators to assign them all to the same case. Officers who had been watching churches around the clock were redirected to work deemed more useful to public security. Martinez accepted the order without protest.

This account places the family’s experience at Precinct #2 within a broader pattern of limited investigative resources and institutional triage. An investigation can remain nominally open while the officers assigned to it are moved elsewhere. The gap between an official claim that a case has not been abandoned and the practical withdrawal of attention gives the station’s procedures an uneasy ambiguity.

Records, explanations, and consequences

The novel also shows how the handling of women’s deaths could become fragmented across agencies. Isabel Urrea’s murder was publicly explained in several speculative ways, including a failed robbery, but there was no autopsy, and the ballistic analysis was never made public before it was lost between the courts in Santa Teresa and Hermosillo. The account does not place those failures specifically inside Precinct #2; instead, it shows the wider institutional environment in which police work at the station takes place, where evidence and responsibility can be dispersed rather than brought to a clear conclusion.

Later, the Santa Teresa branch of Women of Sonora for Democracy and Peace held a press conference to describe the degrading treatment of victims’ relatives and presented letters intended for the state governor and the attorney general. The letters went unanswered. Taken together with the family’s treatment at the station, this episode makes the consequences of official procedure visible beyond the interview room: relatives must press for recognition, while their complaints may receive no answer. Precinct #2’s significance lies in this tension between the machinery of policing and the unequal attention it gives to those seeking protection and justice.