Epifanio Galindo

Epifanio Galindo is a Santa Teresa police officer whose career unfolds amid investigations into women’s killings and a police force strained by limited resources and compromised authority. He appears both as an investigator and as an enforcer of the department’s informal loyalties: he questions suspects, works alongside Juan de Dios Martinez, and acts with Police Chief Pedro Negrete when an officer under arrest has become more useful to the force than to its official procedure.

Identity and Background

Epifanio’s position is defined less by a personal history than by the work and relationships the narrative shows him performing. He is identified as Pedro Negrete’s right-hand man during the overnight questioning of Ezequiel Romero after Luisa Celina Vazquez is found dead. Later, he serves with Martinez and takes part in operations under Negrete’s authority. Those scenes place him within the working structure of Santa Teresa policing, where investigations depend on a small number of officers and where official assignments can be redirected when priorities change.

The book does not provide a comprehensive biography or a private account of Epifanio’s motives. Instead, it characterizes him through acts of authority: conducting interrogations, accompanying a superior on a recruitment trip, monitoring police custody, and helping decide how the department will treat one of its own. This limited, procedural view makes his actions particularly revealing. His loyalties become legible through what he does when institutional rules and police solidarity pull in different directions.

Investigations and Police Work

After Luisa Celina Vazquez is strangled, Epifanio conducts an all-night interrogation of her partner, Marcos Sepulveda, and his associate, Ezequiel Romero. Before morning, Romero confesses to having had a relationship with Luisa Celina and to killing her after she ended it. The confession gives the police a suspect and an account of the immediate crime, but the investigation does not stop there: Romero is kept in custody while the officers try to connect him to the earlier murder of thirteen-year-old Esperanza Gomez Saldana. He refuses to implicate himself in that killing. The episode shows both the practical value and the limits of the interrogation. A confession to one death does not establish responsibility for another.

Epifanio also works with Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez on the Penitent case, a sequence of attacks on churches. After the killing of Father Carrasco and the caretaker, Martinez reasons that the perpetrator must use a car to move between distant parts of the city and may keep a change of clothes in it. Epifanio contributes to the discussion by estimating travel times between neighborhoods, including the journey from Lomas del Toro to Kino. The exchange makes his work concrete and local: the investigation relies on knowledge of Santa Teresa’s distances as much as on deductions about the suspect.

The Penitent inquiry is eventually deprioritized rather than formally closed. Martinez is ordered to investigate armed robberies in Colonia Centeno and Colonia Podesta; the church surveillance detail is reassigned because the suspect appears to have vanished, the investigation has stalled, and Santa Teresa has too few investigators to cover every case. Epifanio is part of the policing environment in which such choices are made. The shift does not resolve the Penitent case; it leaves the investigation suspended while other demands take precedence.

Negrete’s Associate and the Recruitment in Villaviciosa

At one point, Epifanio accompanies Negrete to Villaviciosa, where the police chief intends to hire someone trustworthy for his old friend Pedro Rengifo. Negrete questions several young men about their ability to shoot, their reliability, and their willingness to earn money. After selecting the youngest, he asks Epifanio privately for his view. Epifanio looks the candidate over, considers the others, and cautions that the boy might be suitable but that there is no certainty about him.

Negrete makes the choice. After a drink with two elderly residents of the town, he tells the young man he has been selected and instructs him to say goodbye to his mother. The boy says nothing and leaves the bar; afterward, he and Epifanio are seen leaning against the car and talking. The sequence presents recruitment as an informal personal decision rather than a fully explained institutional process. Epifanio’s brief assessment is cautious, but he remains alongside the chief as the new recruit is brought into the arrangement.

Lalo Cura and the Limits of Procedure

Epifanio’s most consequential appearance comes after Lalo Cura is wounded while intervening in an attack on Pedro Rengifo’s wife and her friend. Cura kills two attackers, one of them a state judicial police inspector, and is then taken to Precinct #1. His arrest turns the distinction between suspect and police ally into an immediate test of the department’s conduct. Rengifo’s wife is told that Cura has not arrived at the clinic; she learns instead that he has been detained and calls her husband.

Negrete arrives at the precinct with Epifanio. They find Cura in a basement cell, injured and being questioned by officers who want to know why he killed the two gunmen. Epifanio responds by grabbing one interrogating policeman and slashing his face with a switchblade, then asks Cura whether this is the officer who hurt him. Negrete orders the handcuffs removed. The officers explain that the dead man was Patricio Lopez, a state judicial police inspector, and that Cura’s former partners had fled. Negrete reframes Cura’s actions as a response to shock and argues that Lopez would have killed him if given the chance. The scene ends with the police chief and the other officers talking and smoking, while Epifanio escorts Cura afterward.

The episode does not present a formal exoneration or a transparent inquiry into the shooting. Instead, the immediate outcome is secured through rank, force, and the chief’s interpretation of events. Epifanio’s intervention is therefore more than a display of personal aggression: it helps convert an arrested, wounded officer into a protected subordinate. His conduct makes visible a police order in which the same institution can detain an officer, injure the officer questioning him, and then restore the suspect’s place through an informal agreement.

Complicity, Routine, and Narrative Significance

Epifanio’s role in the La Riviera episode further locates him within a police culture that fails to protect women in its custody. After Leticia Contreras Zamudio is found dead in a private room at the nightclub, the staff are taken to Precinct #1. Lalo Cura hears disturbance in the cells and discovers that police officers are assaulting women from the club. Epifanio is in the corridor, watching what is happening in the other cells. He tells Cura that another woman has been killed; when Cura asks whether the officers in the cells are involved, Epifanio denies that he is. They leave together for the street rather than intervening. The narrative thus distinguishes his stated nonparticipation from his presence and inaction as abuse continues nearby.

His other investigative appearances reinforce the institutional pattern without making him the sole explanation for it. The murder of La Vaca is handled jointly by Epifanio and Inspector Ernesto Ortiz Rebolledo, with Martinez brought in as support, and the arrangement is marked by mutual dissatisfaction. Elsewhere, the police redirect Martinez from the Penitent investigation because personnel are scarce. Individual cases move through a system that can gather evidence and conduct inquiries but repeatedly narrows, postpones, or compromises its own work.

Epifanio is consequently drawn through paired functions: he helps investigate violence and also participates in the coercive practices that shape the department’s response to it. His caution about the recruit in Villaviciosa, his practical contribution to the Penitent inquiry, his attack on an officer questioning Cura, and his decision to leave the precinct with Cura after the abuse of detained women all belong to the same portrait. The book does not resolve him into either an effective investigator or a simple villain. It shows how police authority operates through personal alliances and selective action, while the women whose deaths initiate many of these investigations remain vulnerable to neglect and abuse.