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part of an organized search, but by a passerby, some distance off the Airport Delivery Highway in a remote area of Lote Bravo known as Zacate Blanco. Olga Alicia was one of eight young girls recovered in that same lonely stretch of desert in the four-month period between August and November of that year.
     
     
Like those of earlier victims, Olga Alicia's remains were not buried but simply left out in plain sight for others to find, as if the killer or killers felt immune to detection or capture. Indeed, corpses would quickly decompose once exposed to the harsh elements of the desert: in summer, temperatures rose well above 110 degrees, enough to rapidly increase the rate of decay. And in winter, coyotes, mice, and rats fed on the human flesh.
     
     
Olga Alicia had been missing barely one month, yet her skull was so badly deteriorated that the pathologist had to hold it together for her mother to look at the jaw. With no fleshy tissue to soften its appearance, the jaw and teeth appeared frighteningly large. Irma Pérez nearly passed out from the gruesome sight, and after only a few seconds, begged the medical examiner to halt the identification process. She could not bear to look at what authorities insisted were the remains of her only child.
     
     
It took several minutes for Irma to regain her composure, enough to acknowledge that the pretty blouse that had been found near the body belonged to Olga. Still, she was skeptical that this decomposed corpse was once her daughter. The bones were so badly decayed they appeared as if they had been exposed to the elements far longer than thirty days.
     
     
Authorities told Irma there was not enough material to conduct a DNA test on the body; she was asked to simply go on the word of officials that this was Olga Alicia. With no financial means to hire an outside party to investigate the findings, she had little alternative but to accept this bag of bones as proof of her daughter's death.
     
     
Irma Pérez eked out a measly but honest living cooking and selling hamburgers and sodas from a stand on the narrow sidewalk in front of her tiny stucco house. Like so many other parts of the city, the busy, characterless district where Irma lived had its own square, a local church, and storefronts scrawled with graffiti. The clatter of the passing motorbikes, cars, and trucks was audible even after she closed her front door at night.
     
     
Irma was a single parent. She had spent hour upon hour manning the hot grill to scrape up the money to pay the bills each month. The smell of burger grease was forever embedded in her clothes.
     
     
Her life changed significantly with her daughter's death. She suffered a stroke and was not well. The only thing that seemed to bring a faint expression of joy was talking about Olga and looking at her pictures. She lived surrounded by photographs capturing moments from Olga Alicia's short and tragic life.
     
     
Beneath her bed were shoeboxes filled with more pictures, and stacks of newspaper clippings about the murdered women of Juárez. Ever since her daughter disappeared, she'd been obsessively collecting clippings about every missing girl in the city. At night, she spread them out on the frayed bed coverlet and read them over and over, looking for any similarities, clues that might lead her to her daughter's killer.
     
     
Like Ramona Morales, Irma Pérez had quickly alerted authorities to her daughter's disappearance. She, too, was told to wait seventy-two hours to file an official report, and even then it took police six days to send an officer to the location where Olga Alicia was last seen. By then Irma, just like Ramona, had commenced an investigation of her own. She learned that her daughter had gone to the local headquarters of the reigning political party, the National Action Party, or Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN).
     
     
The regional government, which controlled the state of Chihuahua, was currently in the hands of the National