to trace it, nothing matched. He concluded that the number was probably faked. Without the van, there would be no fingerprints, no hair, no fibers.

One aspect of the crime stood out to Rivera: Lee had been shot under each eye, with what forensics determined was a .22-caliber handgun. “In our experience,” he said, “if you shoot a person dead, you don’t normally use a low-caliber firearm.” Hit men in the Philippines, he said, typically used “Armalite weapons, hand grenades, or a .40-caliber pistol. This is one of the few times that I discovered that the caliber was a .22 magnum.” To Rivera, the weapon said something about the crime, namely that it might be a type of “signature killing.” He believed that Lee’s death was not a crime of passion but a professional murder committed by someone looking to send a message. “That’s an arrogant way of killing, put- ting two bullet holes beneath the eye,” he said. “That’s not how you normally execute a person.”

After a few months, Rivera’s leads dried up. Other murders re- quired his attention. But like Jimena, he was haunted by Lee’s murder, and his failure to solve it. “I couldn’t sleep soundly at night,” he said. “I was thinking about that case. But the fact is, I cannot just proceed without solid evidence.”

For three years the Lee file languished at the NBI. Then, in April 2015, Rivera got a call from the U.S. embassy in Manila. The Americans had some information regarding the Lee murder: A man the DEA had arrested three and a half years earlier on drug charges had been cooperating with the government, and he had tipped them off to possible suspects.

A few months after that phone call, three DEA agents came to meet with Agent Rivera at the Death Investigations Division. Ri- vera walked them through what he’d learned about the case, using a PowerPoint presentation to recap the investigation’s key points. When he finished, he asked them jokingly, “From one to ten, how would you rate my investigation?” Everyone laughed. The DEA