stand. She remembered that day. “I saw the body,” she said, “but it was covered up, so we couldn’t see who it was. Three streets down, somebody had been missing for a couple of days, so we thought it could be them.” Later, word came back from the cops that the body belonged to a real estate agent from another part of the country. When I asked what happened to the missing neigh- bor, the drink-stand woman said that the family had just moved on.

I wandered around taking photos, looking for signs that Jime- na’s horrible discovery had somehow transformed this otherwise ordinary place. If the body had left a mark, it wasn’t visible.

We piled back into the van, and on the drive to the station I asked the detectives whether they often encountered corpses in Taytay, a city of just over 300,000 people. “Sometimes over five in a month, but not over ten,” Arada said cheerfully. “It’s kind of a well-known place to dump bodies. Don’t tell the chief!” He laughed. The cases were difficult to solve, he said. The bodies were often mutilated or “broken up and stuffed in garbage bags.”

I asked if I could look at the case file, and to my surprise Del Monte turned and handed it to me. Photos taken at the crime scene showed Lee’s body, unwrapped, dressed in a black jacket and jeans, lying facedown with her feet in the road. A crowd stood at the edge of a police cordon. The facts in the file were spare: A team from the national police’s Scene of Crime Operations division had arrived at 7:50 that morning. An autopsy report listed the cause of “instantaneous death”: a gunshot wound under each eye.

The investigators had little trouble identifying the victim. She was found with her identification: Catherine Cristina Lee, forty- three, from Las Piñas City, an hour south of Taytay. Also with the body were a cellphone, an Anne Klein wristwatch, a silver brace- let, and a pair of rings, one silver and one gold. She had not been robbed; there was no sign of sexual assault.

Flipping through the file as we drove back to the police station, I came across mention of a 2015 meeting between Filipino officers and a special agent from the DEA’s Los Angeles office, along with