Professor Kessler

Professor Kessler is introduced indirectly, as a white-haired man whose conversation with a younger journalist Oscar Fate overhears in an Arizona roadside restaurant. He is an expert who has previously tried to help with the situation in Santa Teresa, and he offers a stark account of the killings: the city is excluded from the social order, the crimes do not all share one signature, and its apparent economic growth cannot compensate for the danger its residents face. His role is less that of a conventional investigator than of an interpreter whose language about death, social legibility, and abandonment gives the novel a way to examine what the killings mean—and what explanation cannot settle.

Identity and Introduction

Fate first notices Kessler at the next table in Cochise’s Corner, a restaurant south of Tucson. Kessler is older than his companion, with white hair, glasses, and a thick neck. He remains impassive whether speaking or listening, making a sharp contrast with Edward, the younger man, who repeatedly raises his hands to his face and reacts with visible intensity. Fate cannot see Kessler’s face clearly at first, but he hears Edward describe him as an inspiration and refer to the strength of his will and his ability to hold a gaze.

Edward identifies Kessler as Professor Kessler. Their conversation establishes that Kessler has caught a person named Jurevich, though the exchange provides no further account of that case. When Edward characterizes the killer as sloppy, Kessler corrects him: the killer was careful. The brief correction shows Kessler’s attention to distinctions in criminal behavior, a concern that later shapes his refusal to treat the Santa Teresa murders as the work of a single, uniform kind of offender.

A Theory of Death and Social Recognition

As Edward says that people have grown accustomed to death, Kessler answers that it has always been so. He then sets out a historical argument: earlier societies filtered death through words, and accounts of crime could make violence seem rarer or more exceptional than it was. In his view, language could protect people from confronting cruelty, much as a frightened child closes their eyes. The old stories and archetypes of crime and madness, he argues, were not inventions of the present; their force has instead been blunted by repetition and by the limits of public attention.

Kessler explains those limits through social membership. He contrasts the deaths of people treated as outside society—enslaved people who died during transport and those killed during the Paris Commune—with murders that became widely reported because their victims or perpetrators were recognized as belonging to society. The distinction is not that one kind of death is more real than another, but that some deaths become legible to the public and others do not. He also qualifies his account: words might reveal something even when they were chiefly used to avoid confronting it. This tension between documentation and evasion anticipates the novel’s detailed, often uncertain accounts of women found dead in and around Santa Teresa.

Santa Teresa and the Limits of Explanation

Kessler tells Edward that he has been in Mexico before and tried to help, but that the situation was impossible. He refuses to let Edward publish his unofficial views without permission. Once Edward promises discretion, Kessler gives three conclusions: everyone living in Santa Teresa is outside society; the crimes have different signatures; and, despite the city’s apparent boom, the best course for all its residents would be to leave across the desert border.

The third claim sits uneasily beside what Fate has just seen on his drive through the city. Santa Teresa appears expansive and rapidly changing, with maquiladoras on its horizon, industrial parks surrounded by poor neighborhoods, and a fence separating Mexico from the United States. Its growth is real, but so are its infrastructural failures and stark divisions. Kessler’s assessment reframes this contradiction: economic activity and urban expansion do not necessarily bring a population into the protections of social recognition. His argument is sweeping, but the novel gives it force by placing it beside the city’s concrete geography rather than treating prosperity as a simple measure of security.

Encounter with Fate and the Border

Fate overhears Kessler while traveling south to cover a boxing match, not the killings. At the restaurant, Edward asks about Kessler’s experience in Mexico and presses him for his unofficial opinion of Santa Teresa. Kessler’s insistence on consent before publication makes their talk both an interview and a negotiation about who controls the account. Fate remains an accidental listener; the exchange reaches him without becoming an authorized public statement.

The border crossing later sharpens the difference between Kessler’s recommendation and Fate’s immediate purpose. At the American checkpoint, an officer asks whether Fate is going to write about the killings, and Fate says he is going to cover Saturday’s fight. He proceeds to the Mexican checkpoint, where he must leave the car, open his suitcase, present his documents, and complete forms. From the customs house he sees the fence and four birds perched on it, their heads tucked into their feathers. Kessler’s image of the city’s residents crossing into the desert thus meets a literal border that Fate has to pass through under inspection.

The Novel’s Evidence and Kessler’s Significance

The later crime accounts give particular weight to Kessler’s distinction between deaths that can be recorded and people who remain outside recognition. The first woman in the 1993 list, thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana, is found in a vacant lot after children alert their parents; two women are praying near her body when police arrive. Investigators establish her identity and record an autopsy, but the list itself may omit earlier victims who were never found or identified. The account therefore presents official record-making as necessary yet incomplete: a name can enter the chronology without closing the larger gap in knowledge.

Other discoveries deepen that uncertainty. A woman found in a school field in 1993 is never identified, and the medical examiner cannot determine a precise time or single certain cause of death. In January 1995, workers uncover a woman’s skeleton in a field; the police issue a statement that speculates she may have been killed elsewhere and buried there by a passing driver. The statement evades responsibility rather than explaining the evidence. In October, a girl found near railroad tracks bears extensive signs of assault, but no missing-person report matches her; at the scene, Lalo Cura tells Epifanio that it has been wiped clean. These cases make Kessler’s ideas about social exclusion and the limits of words resonate as a narrative problem: documentation accumulates, yet names, causes, and circumstances remain unresolved.

The novel also complicates any account that would reduce the killings to a single signature or suspect. When Klaus Haas publicly names Antonio Uribe as a killer, he subsequently describes Antonio and Daniel Uribe’s powerful family connections, cross-border business interests, and relationships with police and drug traffickers. Kessler’s earlier warning that the crimes have different signatures does not explain who is responsible; it resists the comfort of a single pattern. His encounter with Fate supplies a provisional analytic lens, while the continuing investigation exposes the distance between a compelling interpretation and proof.