Saenz is sure of one thing: she knew the man. She knew him, and she had let him in. She was polite. She made coffee. She served cookies. They talked, they drank. Somewhere between coffee and her neck breaking, something happened, an argument perhaps. He had flung her around the room, but she had flung him right back. She had been a strong woman, and she didn’t make it easy for him. If a neighbor hadn’t made an excess of potato salad for medianoche, brought it over to share with Libby, taken the open gate as an invitation and the ajar front door as a warning, Libby’s body might not have been found for days.
Saenz had taken a picture of her before they removed her body. His phone is filled with dead faces. He remembers each and every one of them, the ones he could help and the ones he couldn’t. The faces are mostly slack and blank. Sometimes the fear is unmistakable, drawn plain in the wide eyes, the twist of the open mouth.
Her dead face is different, neither blank nor afraid. When he goes to bed he tries to forget it, but her face stays in his mind, hovering in the darkness there. Several times in the night he is compelled to look at the photograph. Just one more time, this will be the last, I’ve got to get some sleep.
He finally recognizes what’s written on her face: not fear, but fury.
She’s fourteen. She comes home from school one day, her mother is sitting on the kitchen floor. There is broken glass everywhere, shards of plates whose patterns she can still recognize.
She knows her mother will be sitting on the floor like this for a while. She takes a broom and a dustpan and begins to sweep carefully around the woman.
When they go shopping for new plates days later, the girl suggests to her mother, with deliberate nonchalance, that they buy plastic ones. “It’s cheaper,” she explains, and leaves it at that.
Her name was Olivia Delgado — Libby. She was thirty-nine, and she lived alone. She read a lot, and liked Jack ’n’ Jill potato chips (twelve packs in three different varieties in the kitchen cupboard). Libby didn’t seem to have many friends, if her profile page on one of those social networking websites is anything to go by. She wasn’t pretty, but in her pictures she looked straight into the camera, relaxed, confident, the barest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t into sports but had climbed six mountains, wasn’t much into clothes but had forty-three pairs of shoes.
Saenz wants to pull aside and question the few people at her memorial service — relatives, friends, colleagues. But they recognize him from the television news; they know who he is and what he does for the police, and they actually go out of their way to avoid him. He finds this odd. He tells Rueda a few days later and Rueda grimaces.
“I thought you priests were trained to be sensitive. You didn’t think it was a bad time to be asking questions?”
“I was trying to help,” Saenz snaps.
“I know, Father. I didn’t mean to—”
Saenz waves him away. “No, you’re right. It was... inappropriate.”
Rueda has known Saenz for decades. When the priest was younger, he used to be genial, easygoing. Over the years, however, he has grown quieter, more guarded. He still looks preternaturally young — Saenz in his sixties remains a showstopper of a man — but his eyes are ancient, haunted. He’s prone to irritability and ill temper. It’s difficult now for Rueda’s younger officers to believe that the priest who comes to their crime scenes every once in a while ever used to be a “nice man.” At best he’s reserved; at worst he’s testy and dismissive. And he’s always in a rush, always telling people to hurry up. Age slows most people down, but then again Saenz isn’t most people. If anything, age seems to have sped him up, downright turbocharged him, with little patience or understanding to spare for anyone who can’t keep up.
Rueda thinks Saenz is racing to finish as much as he can, while he still can.
He slides a notepad across the table to the older man. There’s a list scribbled on the top page. “I don’t have enough people to do this, and I’ve got my hands full till Wednesday.”
Saenz rips the page off and folds it neatly, slips it into his shirt pocket, makes for the door. Rueda is grateful but he doesn’t say anything. They know each other well enough that such niceties are no longer necessary.
She’s sixteen, old beyond her years, and finally escapes high school. It’s time for her real life to start, she’s good at math, she chooses a major. She keeps everyone at bay because people are always asking questions she doesn’t want to answer.
She’s seventeen, she tries out for the swim team and makes the dean’s list, her mother breaks and heals and breaks again. She’s eighteen, she passes her driving test. She wants to wait for her father outside his office and run him down, back up, and drive over him, again and again in a loop until there’s nothing left but a stain on the concrete. It’s a fantasy, she knows she can’t do it, so she studies hard, she applies herself. She sees the future as a dark tunnel through which she must pass to get to the light, dragging her mother behind her.
She graduates with honors, gets three offers almost instantly, and chooses the best, not the one that pays the most. She combs through real estate listings, claws her way to independence. She learns to climb mountains. She bides her time.
The people on the list are cooperative. Which is a bit of a waste since they seem to know very little about Libby Delgado. Worked at a foreign bank, in a fairly senior position. Comfortable but not rich. Parents dead. No siblings. Bought the Lagro house a little over a decade before. Rented an apartment closer to her workplace but always spent the weekends in Lagro. Didn’t employ a maid or any kind of household help. Kept to herself. The people on the list are perfectly helpful but also perfectly opaque.
Something itches in Saenz’s brain, sly and relentless and maddeningly out of reach.
He asks to be let into her house again. Rueda comes with him. Everything remains as they had left it on New Year’s morning. She had few relatives, and she wasn’t very close to any of them. There has been no mad scramble for her worldly possessions, something rare in this part of the world.
Saenz walks through the house, muttering to himself. Rueda follows him around, careful not to distract him. The priest stops at a small utility room just off the kitchen, looks down at a little pile of clothing dumped on the floor beside the washing machine. Odd. Then he walks a little farther down and finds a tiny bathroom.
“Your boys dust in here?” he asks.
“Guest bathroom? Yes.”
Saenz fully alert now, almost buzzing. “The coffee cups.”
A beat, then Rueda understands. “You think he used the bathroom. You want to see if we can find a match.”
“The living room was trashed, and the upstairs. But no other signs of struggle or disarray anywhere else.” The priest moves back toward the washing machine, his eyes narrowing to focus on the pile of clothes on the floor. “Except in here.”
He bends to pick up a blouse, and the rest of the small pile comes up along with it. He is momentarily confused and then he realizes that they’re all still attached to a small, blue plastic clothes rack. Saenz carefully plucks through the clothing until he finds what he is looking for.
“Hook’s broken.”
Rueda comes closer. “So it was torn off the—”
Saenz darts off before he can even finish, looking around for a pole or makeshift clothesline — anywhere the rack could have been hung from. He finds the broken-off plastic hook on the floor of the shower stall in the guest bathroom.