Angel Fernandez

Angel Fernandez is a Santa Teresa police inspector who appears in the crime narratives as an investigator of women’s deaths during the city’s mounting femicide crisis. He is assigned cases at different points in the sequence, but the inquiries associated with him do not bring the victims’ identities or the broader pattern into resolution. His limited appearances place police procedure beside the narrative’s recurring contrast between meticulous descriptions of dead women and investigations that are quickly closed, neglected, or overtaken by other priorities.

Identity and investigative role

Fernandez is identified by rank as an inspector and is assigned responsibility for multiple cases. The evidence does not establish a broader biography, personal history, or private life. His characterization is therefore chiefly institutional: he is one of the officers who handle individual deaths within an under-resourced police system, where case assignments and official conclusions do not necessarily add up to an effective account of the killings.

The investigations linked to him recur in the novel’s sequence of reports on victims. One concerns a girl whose body is found in a valley; another involves an unidentified woman found in a vacant lot near an industrial park and an illegal dump. Fernandez’s cases are distinct, but their surrounding circumstances connect them to the same citywide crisis: victims are found in peripheral spaces, and the official record often leaves basic questions unanswered.

The March investigations

Fernandez handles the case of a girl found between the Casas Negras highway and a valley. She is estimated to be about ten years old, and the account gives a precise physical description, including her height and clear plastic sandals secured with a metal buckle. No one comes forward to claim her. The official police statement says she had not lived in Santa Teresa, but does not explain what brought her there or how she arrived. Her description is faxed to police stations across the country, yet the investigation is soon closed.

A few days later, another girl, estimated to be thirteen, is found in a valley on the opposite side of the same highway. Like the first, she carries nothing that could identify her. The medical examiner estimates that she had been dead for at least four days, raising the possibility that both bodies were deposited on the same day. Juan de Dios Martinez considers the practical difficulties this would have posed for a killer moving between the sites, and the narrative follows his reasoning through alternative possibilities about the vehicle, the route, and the choice of dumping places. These questions do not produce a resolution. Fernandez is again named as the case investigator, and his inquiry includes a raid in El Obelisco, where police arrest twenty people. Four are convicted of theft; another dies in custody of tuberculosis, according to the medical examiner. No one confesses to either girl’s murder.

The two cases bring into focus a divide between what the record can describe and what it can establish. The girls’ approximate ages, clothing, and locations are recorded; their names, origins, and reasons for being in the area remain unknown. The investigation’s movement from the highway-side valley to a raid in El Obelisco yields arrests for other offenses rather than an identified killer. The book gives the administrative actions their own space while leaving the central questions open.

An unidentified victim and the limits of the record

Later in March, Fernandez is assigned the case of a woman found in a vacant lot west of Colonia Remedios Mayor, near the El Chile dump and south of General Sepulveda industrial park. The medical examiner estimates that she is between eighteen and twenty. She has no identification, and nobody comes forward to claim her. After what the narrative calls a reasonable waiting period, she is buried in a public grave.

The reported examination and disposition establish a few facts, but not an identity or a history. The woman enters the official account as an estimate of age, a location, and the circumstances recorded by the examiner; without identification or a claimant, burial becomes the endpoint of what the passage relates. The account does not say that Fernandez solves the case, nor does it supply a later outcome. His assignment thus sits within a repeated narrative pattern in which a body is found, documented, and processed while the person behind the record remains unknown.

Institutional context and narrative significance

Fernandez’s investigations belong to a larger system in which cases compete for limited police attention. Elsewhere in the same sequence, Juan de Dios Martinez is told to leave the stalled Penitent investigation and pursue armed robberies in two neighborhoods. The explanation is that the suspected criminal has disappeared, the inquiry has stopped advancing, and the city has only a limited number of investigators; officers watching churches around the clock are redirected to matters regarded as more beneficial to public security. The episode does not establish that Fernandez personally makes these decisions, but it clarifies the institutional conditions surrounding the cases he handles.

That distinction matters: the narrative does not present Fernandez as the proven cause of the cases’ failures, nor does it provide enough evidence to infer his private motives or feelings. Instead, his recurring assignment to investigations that close without identifying victims or perpetrators makes him part of the procedural landscape through which the killings are recorded. The contrast is especially stark in the treatment of the two girls: the police circulate a description nationally, yet leave unexplained the official statement that one did not live in Santa Teresa; police make twenty arrests in El Obelisco, yet no one admits to either murder. Fernandez’s role is significant less as a fully developed personal portrait than as a point of contact between individual deaths and an investigative apparatus whose actions do not resolve them.