By the time I returned to my room at 9:30 P.M., like clockwork, Juárez had filled its quota, right before my eyes.
     As it was Christmas time, I was looking for signs to take the city’s pulse.  The first noticeable thing was how sedate the mood was. More somber than quiet. There was very little in the way of public festivities or typical signs of holiday celebrations. Ubiquitous pickup trucks, filled with police and soldiers, roamed the streets with mounted machine guns. A candlelight vigil calling for peace, held in a large park in the center of town, brought only a handful of people. “Bars” my driver said when I asked about good places to visit. “You can take photos of the empty bars. Everyone is scared to go into them. People who want to drink, they drink inside their homes now.”
     I went to a lot of murder scenes over the course of seventy-two hours. All involved execution style killings.
     One young man was shot dead in his car, a big bullet hole in the side of his belly. His father was held back by other family members, screaming that it was a mistaken identity, his son was not involved with the narcos. The man I was traveling around town with whispered that in Juárez there are no accidental killings.
     Another scene I visited was in an area so deserted, the coroner’s van and a police tow truck had to follow me and my driver to the crime scene because they were lost.
     There’s a subculture of local journalists armed with police scanners. A killing happens, and NexTel walkie-talkies beep-beep volleys all over town, triangulating the location of even the most remote murders, 24/7. On occasion, I arrived before most of the authorities had shown up. A soldier and I had to draw an invisible line with our eyes because not enough “Do Not Cross” police barrier tape had arrived.
     Once I passed a speeding ambulance leaving as I neared a scene. Although I first thought there were two dead victims, it turned out one was alive and being rushed to the hospital. He had been severely stabbed and had apparently faked his death to his killers. The other guy was not so lucky, discovered in the trunk of a car, hands bound with yellow straps, his face smashed into a swollen bloody mess of red. It looked like his pants had been removed.
     Rushing from one scene to the next, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, it was easy to forget the much wider, and more devastating, impact of all this killing. For the most part, I observed lifeless bodies, people who themselves were probably killers, as cartel-on-cartel murders are the most common. After witnessing to so many scenes of death and destruction, I decided to visit some memorial services for an alternate perspective.
     I had a source inside a funeral home who was able to let me know when memorial services were taking place inside private homes. Nine times out of ten, the families were not interested in having an outsider in attendance. Given that these were narco-deaths, I was not surprised.
     One very late evening, I was finally invited to a memorial inside a home. It was twenty degrees outside and because I was dressed for winter in Los Angeles, my teeth were chattering uncontrollably. No one at the memorial spoke English except a young woman who walked me into a room containing two open caskets. One held an older woman, and one a middle-aged man. The house was filled with grieving family and friends, thirty or forty people reeling from the horror and tragedy, young kids crying quietly to themselves. One woman was inconsolable, three people holding her.