Falsely Accused

FOURTEEN

Karp and Marlene sat at their round dining room table and watched Murray Selig look at photographs of corpses. Marlene had turned the track lighting up to its highest setting and brought her halogen desk lamp in from her office, so that the cozy domestic space shone with the unforgiving light of the autopsy room. As Selig studied each picture with the aid of a hand lens, Karp studied Selig. The man was not happy. Oddly enough for someone who had been fired for purported deviations from procedure, Selig was in fact a procedural fanatic. He did not at all like being asked to view unofficially obtained autopsy snaps, and even before he sat down to look at them, he had argued vehemently against the possibility of coming to any valid conclusions from photos alone.

Forty minutes passed. Karp got up once to go to the bathroom, and Marlene went to her office to call her service and answer some calls. Business was brisk, although many of the calls were from women who wanted their exes beaten up on general principles or frightened into coming across with child support. Returning to the dining room after several unpleasant conversations with angry women, Marlene found that Selig had put his magnifier down and removed his glasses.

“Done?” she asked.

Selig rubbed his eyes and looked up at her bleakly. “As done as I’m going to get. Are you two going to tell me what this’s about? I’ll tell you right now, I don’t like it at all.” In his mild way, he was quite angry.

Karp said, “Murray, first you have to tell us, is there anything fishy about the finding of suicide in these?”

“Fishy?” Selig looked away. Karp knew from past experience that Selig was extremely loath to contradict the findings of other pathologists, especially any who had worked for him in his former position.

“Yeah, fishy,” Karp pressed. “Did the two kids who supposedly hanged themselves really do it?”

Selig put his glasses back on and furrowed his brows. “It’s really impossible to state authoritatively without an examination of the bodies,” he said sententiously, lifting the stack of photographs and letting them drop.

“Murray, damn it!” Karp said, his voice rising. “You’re not in court on this. You were clucking like a mother hen looking through those pictures. Will you please for crying out loud tell us what you saw!”

“I don’t see why-” Selig began huffily, but Karp cut him off with a look and a warning snarl.

“Okay. There was no reason for Dr. Rajiv to have noticed it, but seeing the Ortiz and Valenzuela shots together … look, here are the posterior photographs. It’s the ankles.”

Both Karp and Marlene stared at the backs of two pairs of dead men’s legs.

“What are we supposed to see?” asked Marlene.

“You can see them better with the lens. Notice the transverse bruising on the posterior surface of the Achilles tendon. The bruising runs around the foot just distal to the medial malleolus.”

They looked and agreed that there was a mark there, in the same place on both corpses.

“What does it mean?” asked Karp.

“Well, the funny thing is, the marks on the throats of the two men are just right. They were made by hanging: that is, their bodies, the neck tissues, that is, were pulled with their own weight, at least, against the suspending fabric. There’s the characteristic inverted-V bruising. But the marks on the ankles are like mirror images, if you will, of the neck bruises. Which could suggest that, well, a rope was passed around the ankles and force applied in a direction opposite to that exerted at the neck.”

“Murray, in plain English,” said Karp, “are you suggesting that there might have been foul play here?”

“Let’s say it’s a plausible hypothesis,” said Selig carefully. “If you wanted to fake a suicide hanging, there are two ways you could do it. One is, you tie somebody up and actually hang them from a fixed point, like in an old-style execution. The other way is do the whole thing horizontally. You tie a rope around their neck, tie that to a solid object, tie a rope to their feet, and heave. You’d need considerable strength to do that, though, or some mechanical help. To get the neck bruises to look right you’d need to exert a force equal to the weight of the victim, in these cases in the hundred-and-thirty-pound range.”

“I don’t understand,” said Marlene. “Why would anyone go through the trouble of killing someone that way?”

Selig shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. People do funny things to people. If you just showed me the picture cold, without knowing it was a prisoner, I would’ve said a sexual ritual gone wrong. Knowing it’s a prisoner, I’d guess … torture? A little sadism? The killer wanted to be in control. The pulling part, I mean.” He cleared his throat and there was a moment of silence while they all thought.

“Gone wrong,” said Karp at last, almost to himself.

“Yeah,” said Selig. “And now that you’ve dragged me up here to show me this stuff and bullied me into speculation, would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

“One more question, Murray,” said Karp. “You didn’t do these autopsies yourself. Why not? A prisoner death? Two prisoner deaths?”

“When did they occur?”

Marlene told him the dates.

Selig wrinkled his brow. “Oh, right. It’s because in late April and early May I was laid up. I threw my back out playing tennis. I played two sets with no problems and then I reached down to pick up some balls and that was it. For about a month I couldn’t take standing up to do an autopsy.”

“Uh-huh, they got lucky,” said Karp. “And by the time you got back, the M.E.’s office had declared them genuine suicides, and we know you hate to second-guess your people. But, even with photographs, just now, you spotted this … discrepancy. If a full-scale investigation had taken place about these deaths, and you reviewed this material, you definitely would have spotted it, right?”

“Of course. Why, what are you driving at?”

“How about your successor, Dr. Kloss?” asked Karp, ignoring the question. “Would he have spotted the phony hangings? From photos?”

“What? How should I know what he would or …”

“Come on, Murray! Would he have?”

Selig huffed a great breath and threw up his hands. “Honestly? The guy’s a hick county pathologist, he doesn’t have serious experience with the variety of situations that I’ve had. Besides which, between us, the guy’s a patzer. So, no, he probably wouldn’t have. And the point of all this is…?”

“The point of all this, Murray,” Karp said with a wolfish smile, “is that he wouldn’t and you did, and somebody knew you would, that you would have made it a point to do a jailhouse suicide autopsy, and that’s why you got canned.”

Selig’s face paled and he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. He made a helpless gesture with his hands and shook his head.

“Yeah, I know,” said Karp. “It’s hard to believe that we’re looking at a cover-up of a police murder. Murders. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“You’re implying,” Selig said in a strained voice, “that Bloom was … involved in this?”

Karp nodded. “Right. For some reason he couldn’t afford a finding of foul play in these cases, which he knew was a possibility as long as there was an independent M.E. on the job-you, in fact.” Karp sighed and rubbed his face.

“Meanwhile,” he continued, “now that we know this, we’re in potentially deep trouble with respect to your civil case. I don’t know exactly what violation we’ve all just committed here, examining illegally obtained forensic records, but until we have the whole story, this session is going to have to be kept dark. I just spent a whole afternoon convincing a jury that Murray Selig follows procedure to the letter, and now I’ve conspired with you to make an end run around strict legality.”

Selig frowned. “Then why-?”

“Obviously because I made the call that finding out about the genesis of this … plot was more important than keeping pure on minor procedure. That’ll turn out to have been the right call once we get the whole thing pieced together. Then Bloom will have a lot bigger worry than winning a civil case. We can make up a plausible fairy tale for the judge about how you came to cast your eye over these pictures, but your sin will seem so tiny compared to Bloom’s that it won’t matter.”

“The whole thing,” said Marlene, quoting him. “You mean, why he’d cover up for a bad cop?”

“Exactly. He’s certainly not doing it out of misguided loyalty. These cops must have something big on him, something worse than accessory after the fact to murder.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Selig, stricken. “The D.A.? Look, surely there’s somebody we can go to who could deal with this officially?”

“Like who?” Karp challenged. “I can just see it. The discredited medical examiner, fighting for his job, concocts a smear against his accuser with no evidence other than his own opinion that some illegally obtained photographs point to murder rather than suicide, an opinion his own staff rejected. Gorgeous! No, Doc, we’re going to have to get a lot deeper into this and find the reason Bloom did something this dumb. And until we find out for sure what it is, none of this”-he picked up the autopsy photographs and dropped them on the table-“ever happened.”

“So, what did you find out? Did you get the records?” Stupenagel was sitting up in bed, sipping through a straw from a large pink plastic pitcher that Columbia-Presby Hospital had filled with ice water, and Marlene Ciampi, her visitor, had filled with a quart of daiquiri mix and a half pint of Bacardi. Stupenagel was a good deal perkier than she had been the week before. Much of the bandaging had been removed, revealing a face colored like a relief map of Nepal, with many amusing mauves and ochres, joined as by railroads with lines of black stitchery.

Marlene hesitated before answering. Her friend observed it. They had cut down her meds enough to restore the old gimlet eye. “What’s the matter? Did you get it or not?”

“Yeah, well, I did, Stupe, but there’s a situation here.”

“What kind of situation? Were they phony suicides or not?”

“Yeah, they were, apparently, but I can’t really talk about it. It involves one of Butch’s cases.”

Stupenagel put down her drink and fixed Marlene with her ghastly raccoon eyes. “Excuse me, there must be something wrong with my hearing. Did you just say that you’re intending to cover up a couple of murders so that hubby can win a case?”

“Oh, for chrissake, Stupe, don’t be dumb!”

“Okay, I’ll be smart. Let’s see how much brain damage I’ve suffered. A case, she says. What case could that be? Well, old Butch is suing the City because they fired what’s-his-face, the medical examiner-no, don’t tell me … Martin? no, Murray … Selig! So, we have a medical examiner and phonied autopsies. Let’s say, Marlene gets these records from … somewhere-an old friend of hers, or Selig’s maybe-and Marlene gets Selig to look at them, tell her what he thinks. But no, why should Selig do something faintly crooked just to help Marlene, who’s just doing a favor for a poor, decrepit friend? And besides, hubby would never allow it, the last thing he wants is his client doing something naughty, and so …” She paused for effect. “That must mean that the murders of these kids have a connection with the case, that helps make the case that Selig was framed. Oooh, I’m getting goose bumps. This is even a better story than I thought. So what’s the connection? The M.E. gets fired because … because somebody is afraid that an independent medical examiner will spill the beans on the gypsy cab murders, and they want a malleable schmuck in there. So who’s the somebody? Two candidates: the Mayor and the D.A. How am I doing? Getting warm?”

“No comment,” said Marlene stiffly. Then, in a feeble attempt to change the subject, she asked brightly, “So, when’re you getting out of here?”

“Marlene, don’t be a jerk.”

“I bet you’ll want to take a nice vacation back home in Ohio,” Marlene continued. “Say, a couple of months, spend the holidays with the folks, get some skiing in …”

“In Ohio? What is this message I’m receiving here, Champ? You don’t want me to write this story? Mayor or D.A. covers for killer cops?”

“Not ‘don’t write it,’ but wait. The story isn’t complete, and if it leaks halfway it’s going to warn the bad guys, one, and two, not that you would care, but it’ll screw up Butch’s case, fuck a really decent guy, and put a big crimp in our extravagant income. Butch is hanging out on this case-his boss didn’t want him to take it in the first place-”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s tight with the Mayor. It was embarrassing to have one of his people sue the City and His Honor personally.”

“So the Mayor is running this cover-up?”

“No, Bloom,” said Marlene quickly.

Stupenagel raised an eyebrow, a disturbing sight with her face in the condition it was in. “Why Bloom?”

“Because,” Marlene began, and then stopped when she realized that it had never occurred to either her or Karp that it was anyone other than Bloom. “Because, ah, the Mayor has no real contact with the M.E.’s office. The D.A.’s office is involved with it every day.”

The reporter’s face twisted into a disbelieving grimace. “Marlene, that makes no sense at all. If Selig is actually being fired to help cover up a crime, then either the Mayor or the D.A. could be the source of the cover-up. Or both of them together.”

“It’s not the Mayor,” said Marlene, sounding more confident than she now felt.

“Why not? I can think of a lot of things that the Mayor might like to cover up. A fifty-four-year-old confirmed bachelor? Maybe Vice caught him in an alleyway with an underage leatherboy. No, you’re just fixated on Bloom, you and Butch, because he tried to fuck you. This is the last act of this vendetta that those two have been running for the last-what is it now? — eight or so years.”

“Bullshit, Stupe! The Mayor’s guy said he barely knew who Selig was until Bloom began needling about how he had to be canned.”

“The Mayor’s guy? Oh, there’s an unimpeachable source! So, meanwhile, tell me what Bloom’s supposed to be covering up that’s important enough for him to help a bad cop shitcan a pair of custody murders!”

“We don’t know yet,” said Marlene weakly.

“You don’t know yet,” the reporter mocked. “But you don’t mind asking me to sit on my story indefinitely until something turns up.”

“You wouldn’t have a damn story,” snapped Marlene, “if I hadn’t got those pictures, and if Butch hadn’t got Murray to look at them.”

“Yes, but what have you done for me lately? Sorry, Marlene, but for the next three to six weeks I’m going to be huddled in my room like the Phantom of the Opera with nothing to do but work the phone and pound keys, and this just became my only priority. I mean, I don’t expect to be dating much until they fix this”-here she indicated her damaged face- “speaking of which, somebody’s going to pay for this big-time, not so much because of me personally, but because-and I know you think I’m totally cynical and don’t believe in anything, but I do and this is it-because you’re not supposed to beat up on the press, at least not with your fists, not in this country anyway, and I say this as someone who’s spent most of her adult life in countries where it’s practically the national sport. And so, while I feel bad about Selig and Butch and anybody else who might get singed in the back blast …” She left the sentence hanging.

Marlene said, “All right, let me appeal to your journalistic instincts, since you’ve all of a sudden turned into Ida Tarbell, girl muckraker: grant me it’d be a better story if it was complete, if we knew who had set up the firing, and what the cops had on him to make him do it.”

Stupenagel paused for barely a second. “Granted. And…?”

“I’ll find out for you,” said Marlene. “I’ll find out and wrap the whole package up for you like a fish, and you can relax and get better.”

“Your concern is touching,” said Stupenagel. “How long do you think this miracle will take?”

Marlene pulled a figure out of the air. “Five, six weeks.”

“Mmm, would that be just enough to get a judgment in re: Selig?”

“I have no idea,” said Marlene stiffly.

“I bet.” Stupenagel took up her drink again and sipped it until the straw sucked dry. “I don’t know, Marlene, it’s an interesting offer, but …”

“You haven’t heard the downside,” said Marlene. “You don’t have the photographs, and all you have to indicate that the jail deaths weren’t suicides is my word about what Selig said. Shaft me on this, and not only will you not get the autopsy shots, but I’ll deny this conversation ever took place, nobody will admit anything about any murders, and when I do figure it all out, I will deliver the whole story, with evidence, to whomever I figure will piss you off the most. Jimmy Dalton, for example.”

Jimmy Dalton was a police reporter for the Post and a male chauvinist of citywide reputation. Stupenagel slammed her drink down on the bedside table, making the ice in it rattle like maracas. She glared at Marlene for what seemed like a long time, and then abruptly burst into laughter. “Goddamn, Champ-playing hardball with your old buddy! Jimmy Dalton, my ass! Okay, deal. Go get ’em! Don’t get killed, though.”

“I have a gun.”

“No kidding? Can I see it.”

“Oh, shit, Stupenagel! You’re worse than my daughter.”

From the hospital Marlene journeyed downtown by cab to the courthouse on Centre Street. She passed through the guarded entranceway to the part of the building that housed the D.A.’s office, using for the purpose an expired pass from the days when she’d had a right to be there. There was a search point in the main entrance for regular people, and she did not want to have to explain her pistol. Once in the courthouse, she filed some protective orders for clients, attended a hearing for a man who had violated one, and generally behaved like a lawyer for the rest of the morning. When the courthouse emptied out for lunch, she bought yogurt and coffee at the ground-floor snack bar, returned to the D.A.’s offices, and took the elevator to the sixth floor, where she entered a cubicle and made herself at home.

She was on the phone when the office’s official occupant, Raymond Guma, walked in, sucking on a toothpick. Guma was a short, tubby man in his late forties, with an amusingly ugly monkey face and a mop of thinning black curls. He frowned when he saw Marlene sitting in his chair, speaking over his phone.

“Hey, didn’t we finally get rid of you?”

Marlene continued with her phone conversation, but reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a long white box: a fifth of Teacher’s scotch. She placed it on the desk and gave Guma her brightest insincere smile.

Guma seated himself in a visitor’s chair and ostentatiously twiddled his thumbs while humming loudly without tune. Marlene finished her conversation quickly.

“Anybody I know?” asked Guma, indicating the phone.

“Could be. A gentleman who won’t take no for an answer. I was arguing the prudence of doing so.”

“Or you’ll get your goon to dance on his face? I been hearing stuff about you, Champ. You keep it up with the heavy shit, you gonna give the Italians a bad name.”

“Sorry you don’t approve, Raymond.”

“You know me, a woman’s place is in the home.” He removed his toothpick, examined it, and flicked it into a large brown glass ashtray in which two White Owl butts already nestled. “How’s Butch, by the way? I hear he’s making out like a bandit.”

“We’re doing okay. Look, Goom, I need a favor…”

Guma tapped the white package. “Ah, see, here I was thinking, you’re sorry for all the mean things you said to me, you decided to retire from being a witch, come by with a little present for an old pal…”

Guma’s tone was sarcastic, but Marlene sensed a genuine sadness underneath it, the sadness of someone who had worked in an office for a long time-it was nearly twenty years for Ray Guma-and had worked with a group of people, had shared struggles with them, triumph and defeat, and had seen them pass on, with many a promise to keep in touch, which promises had trickled out into a few uneasy evenings after work. In fact, neither she nor Karp had much in common with Guma outside the work of the D.A. Guma, divorced, estranged from his kids, was into after-hours clubs and cocktail waitresses. Impulsively, Marlene got up from behind the desk and planted wet kiss on Guma’s mouth.

“Hey, Goom, you know we love you. Butch has been real busy, but as soon as we get a break, you’ll come over, you’ll eat, you’ll drink some wine. I’ll make pasta fagiol’.”

Guma’s face broke into a smile, and he made a friendly grab at her ass. She allowed the familiarity. Guma was harmless.

“This must be some favor. Who do I have to whack out?”

She sat on the edge of the desk and said, “It’s nothing, really. I just need you to call Fred Spicer and find out whether the D.A. squad is running an investigation on the medical examiner.”

“That’s it? Whyn’t you ask him yourself?”

Marlene laughed. “Because Fred wouldn’t tell me there was a fire if the building was burning down. You know Fred.”

“Yeah, I do. Okay, I’ll make the call.” He rose and picked up his phone, then hesitated. “Just a second- how come you want to know?”

“It’s a long story, Goom.”

He replaced the phone and sat down again. “That’s okay. I got time.” He grinned, showing crooked, gap-spaced teeth.

Marlene sighed and spun out the tale, omitting any reference to Ariadne Stupenagel, which was something like painting the Last Supper without Jesus, but necessary, since some years back Ms. Stupenagel had taken up Ray Guma during a period when he had information about a story she was writing and, after it was published, had dropped him on his head. Thus, in this version it was Marlene, working for Karp, who had discovered the phony suicides, and she made it sound as if the sole point of the inquiry was helping Butch with the Selig case.

When she was finished, Guma asked, “You really think some cop at the Two-Five killed a couple of beaner cabbies?”

“Hey, how should I know, Goom? I’m out of the business. My only concern right now is seeing if someone is trying to pin fucked-up autopsies on Murray Selig.”

Guma gave her a hooded look and dialed his phone. Spicer, the longtime chief of the D.A. squad, was in, and Guma spent the obligatory time talking Knicks and Rangers, after which he put the question. Marlene was able to follow the answer via Guma’s end of the conversation. When he hung up, she said, “No investigation?”

“None that Fred knows about. Of course, it might be somebody else doing the investigating.”

“No, Guma, the people at the morgue told her-I mean, told me-that the guy said he was from the D.A. Besides, who else could it be?”

“Well, if a cop’s involved, it could be I.A.D.”

She shook her head. “No, Devlin at I.A.D. swears they got nothing going on. And plus, they bought the suicide story, so why would they be poking around to see if it was legit?”

“I don’t know, kid. The snakes are a devious bunch. I tell you who you could talk to, though- Johnny Seaver.”

“Seaver? That name rings a bell. A cop, right?”

“Yeah. He’s on the D.A. squad.”

“He is? I don’t remember him at all.”

“He came on after your time,” Guma explained, “earlier this year, maybe April, May.”

“And why is he important?”

“Well, for one thing, he transferred in from the Two-Five, so if anything is going on funny up there, he might have a clue. Another thing, he made detective second real early for no reason anybody could see. That means he’s either got a rabbi way up at the tip of Police Plaza-”

“Or he’s a snake?” Marlene was confused. She knew that the NYPD recruited cadets right out of the academy to work in its Internal Affairs Division, policing the police, and that these men tended to be promoted early to make up for the hardships of spying on brother officers, but she couldn’t understand why the bosses would waste a snake in the small D.A. unit charged with investigating public corruption and doing humble chores for the A.D.A.’s.

“Not exactly,” said Guma. “He could be a snake on ice. He got blown in some cop sting, and they wanted him parked out of the way until they figured out what to do with him. Why I say that is that Fred told me he just showed with a name-requested letter from Bloom, which means it came from pretty high up in the cops: superchief or above.”

Marlene glanced at her watch. If she didn’t leave right now, she was going to be late picking up Lucy. She gathered her bag. “Okay, I’ll give him a ring,” she said, and then leaned over and patted Guma on the cheek. “Paisan, thanks a million for this. I’ll call you, okay?”

“Yeah, whenever. By the way, you ever see that friend of yours, you know, Queen Kong?”

“Ariadne? Yeah, from time to time.”

“Yeah, well, next time you see her, tell her fuck you from me.”

At the school Marlene extracted Lucy from a knot of Asian girls, refused Lucy’s whispered request to show them the gun, and walked to the car. She noticed Miranda Lanin playing with another group in the schoolyard and then spotted her mother coming down the street. Marlene waved and smiled, to which Carrie returned a stiff nod of recognition and walked on by. She had not seen Carrie Lanin since her tormentor had been convicted, and clearly the woman was not interested in renewing their relationship.

“Are you still friends with Miranda?” Marlene asked her daughter as they entered the yellow VW.

“She’s too babyish,” Lucy pronounced dismissively. “I have another tooth loose.”

“We’ll alert the tooth fairy. So, who do you hang with now? Janice Chen?”

“Sometimes. But my special best friend is Isabella. Are we going there now?”

“Yeah, I thought we’d drop by,” said Marlene. She started the car and pulled carefully around the waiting schoolbuses. “Isn’t Isabella a little old for you, dear? She’s-what? — fifteen?”

“She’s fourteen. Her birthday’s in January.”

“Really? She told you this?” Nod. “What else did she tell you about herself?”

“Um, stuff. Could we have a birthday party for her? When she gets fifteen, you’re supposed to have a big party,” she said.

“Well, we’ll see, but honey, you know Isabella- well, if she’s talking to you, then you’re the only one she talks to. Besides her brother, Hector. We don’t know where she comes from or who her parents are or what happened to her, so if you know any of that stuff, it’s really important for you to tell me.”

“She got raped,” said Lucy.

Marlene gasped and stared at her seven-year-old child.

“Urn, dear, what do you know about rape?”

“Everything,” said Lucy blithely. “I read it in a little book in the shelter. It had pictures. It’s when bad men hurt ladies with their penis.”

Marlene gulped and it was a moment before she found her voice. “And did Isabella tell you how this happened?”

“Bad soldiers shot her daddy with guns and cut him up, and then they ran away, Isabella and Hector and Isabella’s mommy. On a boat. They had to sit under the fish, and she was real scared.”

“This was in Guatemala?”

“No, in San Fanisco. That’s where she lived.”

“San Francisco?”

“Uh-huh. Then they came here and the bad soldiers chased them and Isabella got raped. And they raped her mommy too, and all the ladies got raped and they burned down their houses. That’s how come she doesn’t have any clothes or toys. We could buy her some clothes for her birthday, couldn’t we, Mommy?”

“Yes, of course-but, Lucy, did Isabella tell you her last name? Or where her mommy lives?”

Lucy shrugged and turned her face toward the side window. After a minute or so, she said, “She’s not supposed to tell ’cause of the bad soldiers. Hector says she has to stay at Mattie’s shelter until Hector is big and has a gun and kills all the bad soldiers. Then they could go to school.”

At the shelter Marlene sent Lucy to the playroom and went to see Mattie Duran.

“They killed my cat,” Mattie announced when Marlene entered.

“Oh, shit! Megaton? When?”

“Last night. He got out through a window and went down the escape. We found him all cut up on the sidewalk in front this morning. The bastards!”

“You know who did it?”

“Oh, it has to be one of our gentleman callers. We get cruised pretty regularly by guys chasing our residents. One of them must have seen the cat come out.” She moved a pile of papers off a rickety side chair and gestured for Marlene to sit. “So, I hope you’ve got a cheery story for me, like, you ripped some shithead’s lungs out.”

“I don’t know about cheery, but interesting. It’s about the mystery girl.” Marlene recounted the garbled story she had heard from Lucy.

“It’s amazing,” said Mattie when she was through, “nine months with her lip buttoned, and then she spills it all to your kid.” She seemed almost affronted.

“But what do you make of it? It seems like a … a fantasy, or a bad dream.”

“Lots of those down south,” said Duran. “Nightmares, with real blood. No, I think it sounds like what Isabella remembers, or as much as an American seven-year-old could take in and tell you. Isabella got caught in a raid in Guatemala or El Salvador, her father was killed, and she escaped with her mother and brother. Then something else happened, here in the City, and the family split up.”

“What, you think some Central American regime actually sent agents up here to chase refugees?” asked Marlene, her tone incredulous.

“It’s been known, girl. The Chilean junta killed a dissident in the middle of Washington, D.C., a couple years back. If the family all saw something they shouldn’t have …”

Marlene was at that moment thinking about Ariadne Stupenagel and the possibility that she was barking up the wrong tree looking for her attackers in a New York police station.

“But what about the San Francisco part? You think they chased them across the whole country?”

“That’s where you’re being gringocentric,” said Duran with a tight smile. “I doubt very much that she meant the city in California. There must be a couple hundred places in Latin America called San Francisco something-of-another. I think she was talking about her hometown. I could check.”

“Yeah, and look: if Isabella’s talking to Lucy, maybe we should arrange to give them some more time together. Why don’t I invite Isabella home with me tonight? Hector too.”

After a brief pause Duran shrugged and said, “It’s okay by me. If she’ll go.”