but a nagging question still remained. “Would any of them know him? His connection to the Farm or covert missions?”
“They shouldn’t,” Price replied, “but when you’ve got billions to spend, I won’t pretend security in Wonderland is all that it should be.”
“Anything else?”
“I hate to even mention it, but yes...maybe.”
“I’m listening.”
“Most residents call Ciudad Juárez Paso del Norte and one magazine calls it the ‘City of the Future,’ but it has another nickname, too.”
“Which is?”
“The Serial Killers’ Playground.”
“The women, right?”
“Primarily,” Price said. “No two sources can agree on numbers, but at least four hundred have been murdered since the nineties, with about as many missing. There have been so many killed, in fact, they’ve come up with a special name for it. Feminicidio. Mostly young women, even girls, some of them prostitutes, the rest mainly sweatshop workers, underpaid and easy to replace.”
“You see the problem there,” Bolan said.
“Sure. Hal’s not a female and he isn’t young. Before we rule it out completely, though, remember that some serials switch-hit on victimology. They don’t all stick to one age, race or sex, much less to pattern victims who all look alike, drive the same make of car, whatever.”
“Still...”
“I grant you, it’s a long shot, but remember Mark Kilroy.”
“The kid snatched out of Brownsville by that cult in the late eighties.”
Price nodded. “One of an estimated thirty victims they took out before police caught on to them. They dealt drugs for a living, but also conducted human sacrifices, thinking that black magic made them bulletproof and physically invisible to enemies, including cops.”
“That didn’t work so well, as I recall.”
“Amen. One dipshit drove through a police roadblock, thinking they couldn’t see him or his car even when officers pursued him with their lights flashing. He led them straight back to the cult’s home base outside Matamoros, and it fell apart from there.”
“Most of them died, if I remember right.”
“Or got sent away for sixty years, the maximum in Mexico. My point is, you can have an evil person or a group of them mixing business with pleasure as the opportunities arise. And don’t forget, two of that cult’s top members were federales. One of them, the top narcotics officer in Mexico City, pulled twenty-five years at his trial. The other, who’d moved on to Interpol, murdered his second wife then shot himself. People are still debating whether his first wife committed suicide by hanging or if hubby tied the noose himself.”
“I hear you. Damn near anyone can kill for any reason. And in pairs?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, by a long shot. Cults aside, the Hillside stranglers were cousins. Same thing with Dave Gore and Fred Waterfield in Florida. In Philadelphia, Joe Kallinger would take his fifteen-year-old son along to help. Lucas and Toole were part-time lovers, traveling from coast to coast,” Price told him.
“You’ve studied up,” Bolan observed.
“Know the enemy. Never let anybody tell you they’re all carbon-copy, cut and dried.”
“So, if a pair of psychos snatched Hal, he could well be dead by now and we have no way to start looking for them. Two Latinos in Mexico? Try looking for a needle in a needle factory.”
“I know. We have to try, though.”
“Right. First thing,” Bolan observed, “will be acquiring hardware on the wrong side of the border.”
Mexico had strict laws regulating guns, at least on paper, restricting possession of most types and calibers to the military and law enforcement. The country’s only legal gun store—the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales—stood behind walls on a military base outside Mexico City. Its customers had to undergo months of background checks, involving six separate documents, and were frisked on arrival by uniformed soldiers.
That said, Mexico’s version of the US Second Amendment, written in 1857, guaranteed all citizens and legal foreign residents the right to bear arms, but stipulated that federal law “will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places” of gun ownership. The net result: while the one and only army gun store sold an average of thirty-eight firearms per day to civilians, smugglers brought an estimated 580 weapons into Mexico from the United States. Others doubtless arrived on flights of foreign origin or passed through Mexico’s forty-one seaports on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
The results of that traffic in arms—and in drugs—had been making global headlines for the past thirteen years, since officials acknowledged their chaotic, ongoing drug war. At last rough count, the butcher’s bill included 250,000 dead and 30,000 missing, with 1.6 million persons displaced from their homes. The official body count so far included 12,456 cartel members; 4,020 federal, state and municipal police officers; plus 395 soldiers slain and 137 missing, presumed dead.
Hell on Earth, in simple terms—and that was without adding in the daily slaughter of civilians in places like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros by human predators for the sheer love of killing.
“Tell me more about the killers’ playground,” Bolan said.
“Feminicide covers a world of kinks and fetishes,” Price said. “As I mentioned, no one really knows how many girls and women have been killed or when it started ramping up. Local authorities downplay it with an eye toward tourism and foreign investment in factories, and the victims never found go on the books as runaways. Officially, Chihuahua police admit 260 murders since they started keeping track in 1993, claiming only seventy-six fit ‘serial’ parameters with rape, torture and mutilation. But that’s ridiculous. Women’s groups peg the total somewhere between four and fifteen hundred when they add in missing persons.”
“How bad is it, really?” Bolan asked.
“Amnesty International counted 370 by 2005. Chihuahua prosecutors finally admitted 270 murders statewide in 2010, with 247 inside Juárez. They logged another 300-plus in 2011, with 59 percent in the state capital. Since then, the yearly stats go up and down like yo-yos, depending on who you trust.”
“With no convictions?”
“Sure, a few. In 1996 Omar Sharif—a bus driver from Egypt, not the actor—went down for three murders, sentenced to thirty years, but the killings escalated after he went away. At that point, cops claimed he was part of a gang called Los Rebeldes—that’s ‘The Rebels’—who kept killing after he was put away. Police arrested five of his alleged accomplices then cut them loose for lack of evidence. Sharif died during his fourth year in prison.”
“Any others?”
“A few. In 2001, police nabbed an alleged pair of team killers and charged them with eight homicides. One died during interrogation. Then his buddy confessed but later recanted, claiming police torture,
