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In December-and these were the last victims of 1996-the bodies of Estefania Rivas, fifteen, and Herminia Noriega, thirteen, were found in an empty house on Calle Garcia Herrero, in Colonia El Cerezal. They were half sisters. Estefama's father had disappeared soon after she was born. Herminia's father lived with his wife and daughters and worked as a night watchman at the MachenCorp. maquiladora, where the girls' mother was also on the payroll, as a machine operator. The girls themselves were still in school and helped with the housework, although Estefania planned to quit the following year and go to work. The morning they were kidnapped they were both on their way to school, along with two younger sisters, one eleven and the other eight. The two little girls and Herminia went to Jose Vasconcelos Primary School. Every day, after Estefania left them, she walked the same fifteen blocks to her own school. The day of the kidnapping, however, a car stopped next to the four sisters, and a man got out and pushed Estefania into the car and then got out again and thrust Herminia in and then the car disappeared. The two little girls stood frozen on the sidewalk and then they walked home, but no one was there, so they knocked at the house next door, where they told their story and finally burst into tears. The woman who took them in, a worker at the HorizonW &E maquiladora, went to get another neighbor and then she called the MachenCorp. maquiladora trying to find the girls' parents. At MachenCorp. she was told that personal calls were forbidden and the operator hung up on her. The woman called again and gave the name and job title of the girls' father, since it occurred to her that their mother, being an ordinary worker like herself, must be considered of lower rank, meaning disposable at any moment or for any reason or hint of a reason, and this time the operator kept her waiting for so long that she ran out of coins and the call was cut off. That was all the money she had. Despondent, she went back to her house, to the other neighbor woman and the girls, and for a while the four of them experienced what it was like to be in purgatory, a long, helpless wait, a wait that begins and ends in neglect, a very Latin American experience, as it happened, and all too familiar, something that once you thought about it you realized you experienced daily, minus the despair, minus the shadow of death sweeping over the neighborhood like a flock of vultures and casting its pall, upsetting all routines, leaving everything overturned. So, as they waited for the girls' father to get home, the neighbor woman (to kill time and master her fear) thought how she would like to have a gun and go out in the street. And then what? Well, then she would fire a few shots in the air to express her anger and shout viva Mexico to pluck up her courage or feel a last surge of warmth and then dig a hole with her hands, with mindless speed, a hole in the packed-dirt street, and bury herself in it, soaked to the bone, for ever and ever. When the girls' father finally arrived they all went together to the nearest police station. There, after giving a brief (or scattered) explanation of the problem, they were made to wait for more than an hour until two inspectors arrived. The inspectors asked them the same questions all over again and some new ones, all about the car that picked up Estefanfa and Herminia. After a while, there were four inspectors in the office where the girls were being questioned. One of them, who seemed nice, asked the neighbor woman to come along and took the girls to the police station garage, where they were asked which car, of the ones parked there, looked most like the car that had taken away their sisters. With the information they got from the girls, the inspector said the car to look for was a black Peregrino or Arquero. At five the girls' mother arrived at the station. One of the neighbors had left by then and the other couldn't stop crying and hugging the littlest girl. At eight that night Ortiz Rebolledo arrived and organized two search teams, one to question the friends and family of the girls, headed by Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez and Lino Rivera, and the other to locate, with the assistance of the city police, the Peregrino or Arquero or Lincoln in which it seemed the girls had been kidnapped, this team coordinated by Inspector Angel Fernandez and Inspector Efrain Bustelo.