Deocampo closed the folder. “You seem like a good man,” he said. “There is a lot of sadness here because of this. It is easy to get people’s hope up. Is that how you say it?”

I nodded. Hope, hopes, it was the same thing. I saw no need to correct him on such a small thing, or even a bigger thing.

“Maybe the police in New Mexico will listen to you?”

As he said this, I wondered why I had not gone to the New Mexico police at first. Perhaps it was because I saw them as white, but, frankly, they scared me, seemed too much like the men I was reporting. More likely it was because I didn’t have a real story to tell them.

“There are others,” I said. “I think some white men are holding them as prisoners. Slaves.”

Deocampo put the folder back into the cabinet and pushed in the drawer. He paused his hand on the handle.

“I don’t think the police in America will believe me. I think my story sounds crazy. It does, doesn’t it?”

“Not so crazy. You believe you saw a missing woman. It happens every day. Here, a woman goes missing every day.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Where do you live?”

“Los Angeles.”

He looked at me, I thought, as if that piece of information helped him better make sense of all of this and me. “Go home, Mr. Wells. Be with your daughter.”

“You’re not going to call anyone, are you?”

Deocampo looked at his watch. “How much time do you have? Do you have time for a drive? An hour?”

“Of course.”

Some said that three hundred young women had been killed or disappeared in some twenty years. Others said it was closer to seven hundred gone. People are like that about numbers. They will say it is not seven hundred but only three, two hundred, as if one hundred would not be truly horrible, fifty, twenty-five. No one knew who killed and kidnapped these people. Maybe drug cartels, some said. Maybe roving gangs of sexual predators. Devil worshippers. Perhaps invaders from space. Men. It was men. It was always men. Always men.

The numbers were so very large, obscene, fescennine. Olga Perez. Hundreds of women have no name. Edith Longoria. Hundreds of women have no face. Guadalupe de la Rosa. Names. Name. Maria Najera. It was so uncomplicated, safe, simple to talk about numbers in El Paso, a world away. Nobody misses five hundred people. Nobody misses one hundred people. In Juárez, it was one. One daughter. One friend. One face. One name. Somebody misses one person. Maybe Rosalita Gonzalez.

Deocampo’s car was royal blue, late eighties, a Buick sedan, as clean as the day it rolled off the assembly line. Even the floor mats were pristine. I hated putting my big boots on them. He could see my stiffness.

“Do not worry,” he said. “I will clean the mats. I clean them every week.”