Avelino Tamalas green Ford Bronco cut through the crisp desert night, headlights revealing glimpses of scattered creosote bushes along the shoulders of State Route 238. He knew the sparsely traveled highway southwest of Phoenix from his days as a patrol deputy with the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office, before he became a detective.
Tamala still carried a gun, but no longer wore the badge he abandoned that two years earlier for a romance with one of his confidential informants, Anna Reyes, the woman in the passenger seat that night.
His knowledge of law enforcement and her connections to Mexican drug cartels now afforded the couple a lucrative career selling drugs smuggled into the United States. The green Bronco provided an ideal transport for bundles of marijuana.
But that night the cargo in the trunk was much lighter, and to them, seemingly less valuable: Reyes 3-year-old daughter lay lifeless behind them, wrapped in a white bed sheet, a shovel next to her tiny body for what would follow...
Crystal Reyes, the 3-year-old girl buried that cold April evening in 1997, would have turned 23 this year. Her short life, marred by abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to care for her, is a brief chapter in a tangled narrative of crime and love, deceit and heartbreak.
