I.

On the evening of July 29 2011, in the Quebrada de San Lorenzo, a subtropical nature reserve in northern Argentina, a tourist was admiring the view. The man was standing with his family where he could see across the muggy, green valley with its broadleaved Tipuana and Cebil trees, all the way down to the sprawl that made up Salta city. He excused himself and trudged into the undergrowth to urinate. He was vaguely aware that pumas and bears were known to lurk nearby and didn’t want to be long. Then he noticed something a few metres away. Clothes. Hair. A hand.

“There’s a dead person in there! There’s a woman’s body in there!” he shouted as he leapt out of the bushes. His face was ashen, his voice tremulous. He’d seen a woman with long, dark hair sprawled facedown in the underbrush. She wore a pullover and black trousers. Another visitor heard the man’s cries and bolted up the slope, through the jagged bushes and squeaky, damp leaves. It didn’t take him long to confirm the discovery. The woman looked like she hadn’t been dead long.

The two men stumbled down the valley to inform authorities. By 7.45pm, a search team composed of police officers and park attendants began searching the area. They couldn’t immediately find the body because of the encroaching darkness, so they called for back-up. Firefighters and a K9 unit arrived and, just over an hour later, they found a body lying facedown just 25 metres from the viewpoint. At 11.15pm, a second woman’s body was discovered. She was lying on her left side, wearing torn trousers similar to the first victim and black trainers. An entry ticket to the nature reserve was found among the victims’ belongings. Checking park records, the police noted that visitors from France had entered on July 15 at 4.23pm.

Some officers wondered whether the bodies should be left in situ so forensic pathologists could work in daylight. Maybe then they’d be able to find more clues. But that order was countermanded by the investigating judge. (In Argentina, judges are often involved in criminal investigations.) The bodies were to be transported to the morgue and prepared for autopsy immediately. They were zipped up in plastic bags with their hands wrapped to preserve any potential evidence.

The forensic pathologist began the autopsies at 4.30am on July 30. Her first observation was that the bodies were well preserved. Animals had not got to them, nor were they in an advanced state of decomposition. Her second conclusion was that both women had been shot. The first was killed by a bullet to the head and the second woman by a shot that pierced her lung. Both women had been raped and had died no more than 72 hours before being found.

The murders put local investigators on edge. They anticipated international media attention, but their anxiety was heightened because a young Argentine designer had vanished in Salta just days before. Salta is a medium-sized city with a population of 700,000 people. It is an entry point for Argentina’s cocaine trade, but murder rates were relatively low, certainly below those seen in the country’s capital Buenos Aires. The double homicide of two foreign women was unheard of.

The immediate task was identifying the bodies. The following day, Néstor Píccolo, the lead investigator, and his team visited the hostel where the women had been staying. They discovered that French students Cassandre Bouvier, 29, and Houria Moumni, 24, hadn’t been seen since July 14. Passport photos in their room appeared to match the two bodies in the morgue.

Investigators later discovered that Cassandre and Houria had met in Paris at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Advanced Latin American Studies. They’d developed an interest in various regional political and social issues and decided to travel together through South America. Their most recent destination was Salta.

II.

The first thing Jean-Michel knew was that his daughter hadn’t arrived in Buenos Aires. Cassandre was due to meet a friend there on July 30 but hadn’t turned up. There had been no call or text to advise of the delay. In Paris, Jean-Michel called the Crisis Centre at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which dealt with such problems. They might help, he thought. The person on the other end of the line assured him that they’d “call back as soon as they knew something”. At first, Jean-Michel was calm, anaesthetised by denial. Cassandre had travelled widely and was always on at him not to interfere. She’d be OK, he reassured himself. Someone would call him to let him know she’d turned up safe.

Then news reports began to saturate local TV — “Two French Girls Reported Dead in Salta” — followed by the shrill, drilling ring of his home phone. That call was from authorities, informing him that Cassandre had been found dead in La Quebrada de San Lorenzo, along with her friend Houria. Jean-Michel held his surviving daughter in his arms and cried into the early hours of the following morning. “What happened that night . . . it’s too painful to talk about,” he told me this April.

We met in a brasserie on Île de la Cité in central Paris. The restaurant had high ceilings, mirrors, polished floors and waiters that swerved around tables elegantly. Jean-Michel sat at the back of the restaurant, devoured by a squelching leather banquette, his eyes dwarfed by his black spectacles. He was in his mid-seventies, with wispy candyfloss white hair and a jaundiced beard. His clothes hung loosely off his frail frame as if tailored for somebody else. His face was haggard. The doctors suspect liver cancer, he said.

“Cassandre,” Jean-Michel murmured as we spoke. She had been his middle child. She was so curious, so idealistic. She’d wanted to solve the world’s problems. She’d wanted to help others less fortunate than her. Usually, she’d been so careful, he said. “Why her?” he wondered out loud.

Two days after Cassandre and Houria’s bodies were found, Jean-Michel flew to Argentina with representatives of the French government. The trip was a blur of official visits and emotions he couldn’t even begin to understand. Along with his ex-wife, two remaining children and Houria’s brothers, he met the lead prosecutor and local politicians and shook innumerable hands, all the while feeling empty and useless. He had doubts about certain things he was told, and there were questions he wanted to ask, but they seemed to disappear in a fog.

Some moments seemed especially odd in retrospect. For one, the investigators let him walk around the crime scene freely. “I probably left my DNA everywhere,” he told me. “They could have convicted me.” But what he remembered most vividly were the hours after he’d identified Cassandre at the morgue in Salta. He had locked himself in the bathroom and stared into the mirror. Life could be so cruel in its randomness, he recalled thinking. Seeing his daughter on that cold metal slab in that grey, anonymous room. Pale, bruised and ravaged. Her eyes still open. Unknown men had raped her. They’d killed her because she was a woman. He felt revolted. Was that what a man was? If it was, Jean-Michel didn’t want to be one any more. “I was going to castrate myself,” he said. He wanted to rid himself of the same masculinity that had killed his daughter. “I didn’t go through with it, though. The mere consideration wasn’t the same as the will to do it.”

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