A few of the reports talk about Santa Muerte, how police think Sastre worships her. The thought fills me with an anger I can’t quite place. Yeah, I know I went to Mictlan to kill her and all, but at least I didn’t make up some Satanic Panic bullshit about her.

Or maybe I’m angry for another reason that I don’t really want to look at.

Then we get to the bodies that gave her her name. Corpses in barred cells burned down to blackened bones, elaborate tables covered in thick metal straps holding half-burned bodies, eyes wide, faces contorted in agony. She didn’t just kill people, she hunted them down, caged them, tortured them with fire and burned the skin off their bodies until they couldn’t take anymore.

A more recent set of photos have names at the bottom in letters made on a label maker and stuck to the prints. When some of the names are people I’ve heard of, Travis Niesler, LeAnna Bruce, Joy Bennett, I know they’re the mages she murdered. There are others I recognize, more for their last names than their first, members of L.A.’s more influential mage families.

Like all the others, their corpses are barely recognizable as human. Ash and split bone, cracked teeth scattered like popcorn kernels. If I went to each of these places, would I see their ghosts? Could any of them talk to me? Maybe, maybe not. I doubt they’d have anything useful to tell me other than how much it hurt.

The final page is a zoomed-in surveillance photo from a month ago showing Sastre after she’s just crossed the border into San Diego. She’s smoking a cigarette and smiling at the camera.

Considering how many watch lists she’s on it’s a little surprising. Looks like the person who compiled this file felt the same way. There’s a Post-it note stuck to it that says “WTF?? HOW DID THIS GET MISSED?” They don’t understand. They never will. But I do.

My eyes hang on her, her just-lit cigarette, her brazen attitude. I close the folder. “Fascinating stuff,” I say. “But how do you know she did it? I see the corpses, I see a picture of her coming in through San Diego, but that’s it. What do you have linking the two?” I’m fishing. Curious to see what they know, what they don’t.

“Witness reports,” Letitia says. “You hear about a warehouse club fire last weekend?”

“Must have missed it.”

“Sixteen dead, sixty-four injured. We talked to over a hundred people trying to figure out what happened. The details are sketchy on when and in what order, but they all roughly match up. A woman came into the club, shot a girl in the head, then lit her on fire.”