Blood Ties

by Verónica E. Llaca

Genres: Classics; Amateur Sleuth; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

Once upon a time, there was a woman the press called the Hyena-Woman. Infant Annihilator. Witch. Child-Chopper. Butcher of Little Angels. Monster. The Ogress of Colonia Roma.

Julián and I called her Mother.

When the writer Ignacio Suárez is sent photographs of two murdered women, mirroring a passage of his very own detective novel, he drops everything to uncover who is responsible. What no-one suspects is that the origin of these crimes lies in the forgotten, real-life story of Felícitas Sánchez, the midwife turned child-killer who became known in the 1940s as "The Ogress of Colonia Roma".

Diary entries and newspaper articles come together in this gripping tale to reveal how the woman called Felícitas, who grew up in a small community in La Huasteca, Mexico, became the infamous child trafficker and murderer in the country's capital, and how her long-ago crimes are linked to a wave of killings.

Verónica E. Llaca evokes a tale of cursed bloodlines, forcing us to question the origin and inheritance of evil and how far we can truly escape our past.

Release date: March 28, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 304

Sample

The wind will not let her sleep. It creeps into Virginia’s dreams and flutters about her ears like a pigeon in the sunlight, sounding like a death rattle. The nightmare seems to issue from the bodies she handles at the funeral home. It has been five years since she married the owner of Funerales Aldama and still she is not accustomed to death.

She reaches for the clock on the bedside table, groping carefully so as not to wake her husband, and pushes the button in the middle, which casts a bluish light on her face. Five in the morning. Fearful of the nightmare’s return, she gets up, throws on a sky-blue bathrobe over her nightgown, and goes into the bathroom. When she lowers herself onto the toilet, she realises her underpants are damp. That happens with a bad dream. “One of these days I’m going to wet the bed,” she thinks as she changes into dry underwear.

After brushing her teeth, she looks in the mirror, fluffs up her hair with her fingers, then tiptoes down to the funeral home on the first floor. In the parlor, where the caskets are on display, she runs her fingers across the surface of one and thinks it will take all morning to dust them. She unlatches the front door and heads outside with a broom, intending to sweep up the dirt and litter that the night winds have blown onto the sidewalk.

Above the door hangs a sign: Funerales Aldama. The street lamps begin to fade with the first rays of the sun. She lays the broom down when she discerns a shape leaning against the wall of the building, directly under the window.

Approaching slowly, squinting to bring into focus the girl sitting on the sidewalk, she reaches out and shakes her shoulder. The girl does not respond; she looks asleep. Drunk, Virginia thinks. As the sun rises higher, Virginia crouches to get closer and confirms what she already knows. She sees dead bodies every day, but never here outside the building.

Concentrating on the violet face of the dead girl, she does not hear the footsteps of a neighbour behind her.

“Virginia!” the woman cries, making her start and tumble backwards. The neighbour rushes to help, and Virginia hurriedly straightens her nightgown to hide the underwear she just put on. She points and the neighbour stifles a scream, hand on her mouth, eyes on the girl, who is seated with her legs spread apart, her hands on her big pregnant belly, her gaze vacant, mouth open, long brown hair entangled, and her make-up a smeared mask that accentuates the rictus.

Their cries alert the homes nearby. Virginia’s husband is the first to arrive. He grabs hold of his wife’s arm, helps her up, and she takes refuge in his arms.

“Call the police!” Señor Aldama tells the neighbour’s son, who has come to get his first close look at death.

An hour later and five blocks away, Leopoldo López, the proprietor of Funerales Modernos, emerges from his office, coffee in hand. He spent the night here, since it was impossible to pry the widow from the man lying in chapel number two. Neither he nor anyone else could get her to leave before four in the morning.

He sets to work. He opens the lid of the coffin to make sure the man is as he was the day before, albeit a bit stiffer. He arranges the flowers, sets up the coffee machine, exchanges dirty cups for clean ones, places new tissue boxes on the tables. Then he sprays the room with lavender air freshener, opens the windows to let the air tainted with sorrow escape, and crosses himself before the figure of Christ hanging on one wall. As he lights the candles, he hears screams in the street and banging on the door. Shaking out the match, he runs to the entrance, where his assistant is crying, “She’s dead! She’s dead!” Her tone is so sharp that Leopoldo reaches for the hearing aid in his right ear and turns down the volume. The woman seizes his arm and pulls him to the body of a teenage girl seated on the pavement with her legs spread and her head leaning against the wall where it says, “Funerales Modernos”. He knows immediately what he has before him. With the employee hanging on to his arm, he goes inside and calls the police.

Leopoldo López then steps back outside, approaches the body, begins to squat, and his knees crack. His brow furrows in pain. Steadying himself with the tips of his fingers on the sidewalk, he observes the dead girl, whose hands rest on her thick midriff. He reaches out to touch the hole in her forehead, between the eyebrows.

“Don’t do that!” The warning comes from the owner of the corner store, drawn by the shouting. Leopoldo has trouble getting to his feet. “Don’t touch her, Don Leopoldo. You might leave fingerprints on her clothes and they’ll accuse you of being the murderer.”

Leopoldo nods. “Can you leave fingerprints on clothes?” He eyes the girl’s red skirt and the single shoe she is wearing.

“Sure, I saw it on television,” the store-owner says. “The girl was pretty, what a shame.”

“She was an adolescent, practically a child.”

Leopoldo turns up the volume on his hearing aid and hears a siren in the distance.

By mid-morning the bodies of the two murdered girls are stretched out on steel tables in the morgue.

At the Public Prosecutor’s Office Virginia and her husband repeat what they have already declared several times. Never having set foot in such a place, Virginia finds it impersonal, frightening, stuffy, noisy, grey. She is aware of a hum that seems to grow more intense by the second.

“Why did you go out so early?” she is asked for the umpteenth time by the man who identified himself as Agent Díaz. “Did you hear anything strange during the night? Did you see anyone near the body?”

“No, I saw no-one. It was dark,” Virginia says yet again. She is exasperated, tired, sweaty. They gave her no time to shower; she was barely able to change out of her nightgown and robe. She hates going out like this, without make-up, and most of all she hates the humiliating rush of heat that will not abate no matter how much she fans herself. “It was just getting light when I stepped outside.”

A couple of desks to her left, Leopoldo López and his assistant, who is clutching her handbag, speak with another man, who identified himself as Detective Rodríguez. Out of the corner of his eye Leopoldo watches Virginia, whose shrill voice obliges him to lower the volume on his hearing aid yet again.

“What time do you usually go to work?” the detective asks Leopoldo.

“Six in the morning. When I have to work late, I sleep at the office. I keep a sofa-bed there and a change of clothes.”

“What about you?” he asks the assistant.

“At seven. Today I arrived early because the boss stayed over. I wanted to help him straighten up the room before the mourners came back. They must be so upset. The Mass was supposed to be at ten and it’s nearly noon.”

The detective gives a slight nod and returns his gaze to the papers on his desk.

“What time did the last person leave?” he asks Leopoldo, his blue Bic pen hovering.

“About four in the morning.”

“And the body of the dead girl wasn’t there?”

“I don’t know. I locked the door right away so dirt wouldn’t blow in. There was quite a wind.”

“And the people who left didn’t see anything?”

“I don’t think so. They hurried to their car. The wind had stirred up a lot of litter and dirt.”

“So you didn’t hear anything strange?”

“I wear a hearing aid,” pointing to his right ear. “I don’t hear well.”

The officer nods again, rubbing his chin. He makes a note: “Witness deaf.”

They are finally released at two in the afternoon with a warning that they might be summoned again if a further statement is required. Leopoldo López has known Virginia and her husband for years. For a time they were arch competitors, but they soon realised corpses were never in short supply.

Outside, Virginia lights a cigarette. “It must be someone wanting to give funeral homes a bad name,” she says in a low voice.

“Who would kill two girls just to make a funeral home look bad? By God, woman, don’t say such stupid things.” Señor Aldama plucks the cigarette from his wife’s hand and takes a drag.

“I don’t know. Someone.” She retrieves her smoke. “I can’t get the image of the girl out of my mind.”

“You’ve seen dead bodies.”

“This is different.”

“It’s no different, just another cadaver.”

López says, “I’m on my way. I have a dead man locked up in the parlour.” He raises his arm to hail a taxi and gets in.

“He’s annoying,” Virginia says and tosses her butt. “Let’s go.”

With the final images of her dream dissolving behind her eyelids, Elena Galván reaches out to touch Ignacio Suárez. Her fingers find only the cold white sheet. She had been dreaming about her dead brother Alberto; they were children in an unfamiliar and decrepit house, and before waking up she managed to hear the echo of his laugh. Squinting, she half-opens her eyes only to snap them shut against the wounding light that reminds her of the two bottles of red wine they drank the evening before. She shades her face with one hand and forces her eyes open.

“Ignacio? What’s wrong?”

He is seated on the edge of the bed, his back to her, elbows on his knees, face buried in the palm of his left hand. His naked body trembles from his agitated, uneven breathing. Elena pulls herself over to him and the bed creaks. The furniture of her room in the family hotel has not been changed since she was a teenager. These old boards have supported various mattresses, several lovers, peaceful nights, bad dreams, and for the past three years the tender pleasures of Ignacio’s caresses.

Feeling Elena’s fingers outline the half-moon scar on his right shoulder-blade, he gives a start and runs a hand through his silvery hair. Then he covers his mouth, as if to trap any words that might escape from between his clenched teeth.

The sheet slips off her when she embraces him from behind, pressing her naked breasts to his back. “Come lie down, let’s stay a bit longer. My head aches, two bottles was too much. Do I have to beg you?”

Elena slides her fingers down to his penis. She fondles his flaccid member, but he pushes her away and gets to his feet. “Two girls got killed,” he says, and without even glancing at her he takes a step towards the window.

“What? Those things you write give you nightmares.”

“No, Elena, look,” he says, and he holds out two photographs. “Someone slid these under the door. I don’t know when. I found them when I went to the bathroom about twenty minutes ago.”

Ignacio lays two Polaroids on the bed. Elena leans over to pick them up and her nipples graze the comforter. Her long black hair, closing like a curtain, hides her face for a moment before she leans back against the dark bedstead and tucks a lock behind her ear. She watches Ignacio step again to the window, observes his naked body, the old man’s ass she enjoys kidding him about. She likes that ass and she likes the rest of his mottled body, which she has explored with her palms, her eyes, her tongue, learning its ins and outs by heart. In no hurry, she lowers her eyes to the photographs. She has never liked instant cameras; the pictures are never as good.

“They’re dead,” Ignacio says.

She squints trying to see the faces. “‘Look me up,’” she says aloud, reading the words scrawled in black on one of the shots. “Who . . . ?”

She can find no words to frame her question. The snapshots fall from her fingers as she covers her mouth with both hands.

Sitting down beside her and picking up the photographs, Ignacio sees, not the images in his hand, but others from a past that bleeds into his present and colours the life he has tried so hard to write about without equivocation.

“We ought to ask if anybody saw who left the pictures. It must be a joke. Who would think of doing such a thing?”

Ignacio shrugs and shakes his head.

“Do you recognise either of them?”

“No. But I know who killed them . . . It’s a message for me, Elena.”

“Huh?”

Ignacio remains silent. Elena picks up the photographs and looks again. Each girl is sitting with her legs spread, hands on her belly. Since they were taken at night with a flash, no surrounding details are visible. You can barely make out the kerb or the walls they are leaning against.

“Isn’t this like the murders in one of your books?” she says, holding the pictures like a pair of murdered queens in a deck of cards.

“I think so. I’m an idiot, I should have seen this coming.”

Ignacio paces the room, first to the window, where the shade seems to tremble at his approach, then to the door, then back. The hotel room is much too small for his anxiety.

From a shelf, a dozen books watch their author’s comings and goings. Elena made him sign each one with a different dedication. Eight of them feature José Acosta, the iconic protagonist in Ignacio’s fiction and a detective certainly capable of finding whoever it was who slid the photographs under the door.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Where? I’ll go with you.”

“No, I need to go alone.”

He grabs his trousers folded over the back of a chair, uncovering the shirt he buttoned carefully the night before to keep it from wrinkling. He dresses in a hurry. She leaps out of bed and reaches for her dress on the floor next to her panties, her bra a bit farther away near the chest of drawers. Ignacio leaves, still buttoning his shirt, shoes and belt under his arm.

“Ignacio, wait!”

Elena runs after him in her sea-blue floral dress, but no underwear.

“I’m going to kidnap you,” she had told Ignacio when he walked in the previous afternoon. “We’re going to disconnect from everything,” she insisted, kissing him on the lips while slipping one hand inside his trousers. He did not resist. They shut themselves into Elena’s room, unplugged the telephone, and hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the doorknob, so that none of her employees would interrupt them.

Now Elena runs barefoot across the main courtyard. A surprised guest jumps asi. . .