a copy of his business card. I wasn't the first person, it seemed, to travel to the Philippines and ask questions about the body.

Hoping to make some sense of what happened in Taytay, Almen- dral and I went to see Rizaldy Rivera, an agent at the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation who we'd learned had been as- signed to the Lee murder case. The NBI's Death Investigation Divi- sion was housed in a charmless room with tiled floors and the insipid fluorescent lighting that marks bureaucracies worldwide. On the wall was a whiteboard outlining agents' assignments, orga- nized by nickname: "Cardinal," "Undertaker," "Mechanic," "Hit- man," "Braveheart," "Snakedoc," "KGB."

A genial cop with a waist-length ponytail and a talent for sharp- shooting, Rivera was a natural showman. Almost immediately after we had shaken hands, he urged me to check out his target- shooting videos on YouTube. (Later I did, and had to admit that the clips were impressive—in one he cuts a credit card in half at 20 yards with a handgun, aiming over his shoulder using a com- pact mirror.) Most people called him Zaldy, but his nickname around the NBI offices was Slayer, bestowed after three shootouts early in his career, one of which left a bullet in his thigh.

Rivera had picked up the Catherine Lee case after her husband contacted the NBI and requested that it look into her murder, the day after the body was discovered. The agency is required by law to take over cases at the request of victims' families, and often those requests stem from concerns that local officers are incompe- tent, or worse. The ranks of local and national police in the Philip- pines are rife with corruption, and the NBI had a better, though not spotless, reputation for integrity. In the case of a murder-for- hire, which is what Rivera deduced the Lee case to be, it wasn't unusual to hear whispers that cops themselves were in on the job. Police work pays poorly, with as much as 60 percent of the na- tional police force living below the poverty line. Contract murder