Free The Black Minutes by Martín Solares Page B

on her way to Colegio Froebel. She was wearing a blue skirt and a white shirt with black shoes. Her distressed parents, Everardo and Fernanda, will provide a reward to anyone with information on her whereabouts.

    Twenty years later, the headlines from the following day actually seemed more like omens: LA SIERRA DE OCAMPO BURNS; DROUGHT CAUSES ANXIETY IN PORT; DAMAGE EXPANDS TO CENTER AND NORTH OF TAMAULIPAS .
    TWO SECRET AGENTS ACCUSED OF ROBBERY . Once again, agents Chávez and Taboada. Cabrera shook his head.
El Desconocido
premiered with Valentín Trujillo.
    At two o’clock in the afternoon of February 17, there was a horrendous discovery at El Palmar. A couple rowing around the lagoon found the body of a little girl, Karla Cevallos. The body was badly hidden under branches and dead leaves on a little island, just a few yards away from the busiest avenue in the city.
    Ah, Cabrera concluded, so this is what it was. How could I forget? We were working forty-eight-hour shifts to find the killer; I’d just joined the police force. Unfortunately, all the work led nowhere, and the newspapers published a number of editorials about the first girl’s disappearance: LUCÍA STILL NOT FOUND: PARENTS DISMAYED .
    On March 17, thirty days after Karla Cevallos was found,
El Mercurio
noted, GRUESOME DISCOVERY DOWNTOWN . On his way into the bathroom at the Bar León, right in front of La Plaza de Armas, office worker Raúl Silva found the remains of a second girl. But it wasn’t Lucía, it was Julia Concepción González, who had disappeared just a few hours earlier. The resemblance between the two deaths was obvious, and the police had to accept the existence of just one killer. POLICE LOOK FOR INDIVIDUAL ACCUSED OF SERIOUS CRIMES .

JACKAL STILL ON THE PROWL : Agents of the Secret Service focus all their resources on the difficult search for the personwho carried out kidnappings and attacks on several young girls in the last few days.

    Newspapers speculated that the offender was passing through the city. It was said he was mentally ill. Both papers interviewed Dr. Margarita López Gasca, a psychiatrist from the health center in the nearby city of Tampico, and at their request she worked up a profile of the killer:

We are dealing with a person unable to function socially, who lacks a moral conscience and who repeats the same acts compulsively, because his greatest satisfaction is to be found in the punishment awaiting him.

    She is credited with another comment, obviously inserted by the journalist at
El Mercurio:
“All evidence suggests he will attack again.”
    Collective hysteria unleashes in the harbor. Teachers warn their students about the danger, and surveillance is doubled.
    That same week in March, when the police announced they had a firm lead in the case, another singular fact occurred, but due to the horror of the crime it went by almost unnoticed: the French archaeologist René Leroux announced he had finally discovered the exact location of the legendary and mysterious pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell. Anyone who has lived in the harbor knows that the legendary pyramid of a thousand flowers and a conch shell was located in the garden behind Mrs. Harris’s house. The mound was about thirteen feet tall and covered by a thick layer of grass. According to the French archaeologist, those thirteen feet were just the tip of the iceberg. According to the legends in the area, the pyramid was four thousand years old andover three hundred feet high and might be home to important treasures. To support his claim, he said all you had to do was ask the residents of the neighborhood how hard it was to build their houses’ foundations and have them show you the clay objects found during the construction work. The mound’s neighbors, including Mrs. Harris, didn’t want to hear a thing about it, so the pyramid stayed buried for more than twenty years.
    Just a few days apart, both papers published incendiary editorials,