“I’m a lawyer and an investigator.” I tossed my card onto her desk. “And this is my client. How did you come to let Ms. Aguinaldo out of the hospital?”

“She ran away. She must have feigned her illness as an excuse for—”

“You calling my baby a liar?” Mr. Contreras was indignant. “If that don’t beat the Dutch. You think because she was poor, because she went to jail trying to look after her own little girl, you think she made up—”

Ms. Paxton’s smile became glacial. “Most of the prisoners who seek medical care either have injured themselves on the job or in a fight, or they are malingering. In your granddaughter’s case, without the permission of the doctor in charge I am not at liberty to reveal her medical record. But I assure you she left here of her own free will.”

“As my client said earlier, if anyone can walk out of here of her own free will, you must have a prison full of people trying to injure themselves in order to get moved to the hospital.”

“Security is extremely tight.” Her lips were opened only wide enough to spit the words out.

“I don’t believe you,” Mr. Contreras huffed. “You look at that machine of yours, you’ll see she was just a little bit of a thing. You brung her over in a ball and chain, and you telling me she sawed it off?”

In the end, he got her angry enough that she phoned someone named Daisy to say she had a lawyer here who needed proof that you couldn’t get out of the prison ward. She swept out of her office so fast that we almost had to run to keep up with her. Her high heels clicked across the tile floors as if she were tap dancing, but she still didn’t move her hips. We trotted past the information desk, down a corridor where various hospital staff greeted Ms. Paxton with the anxious deference you always see displayed to the bad–tempered in positions of power. She didn’t slow her twinkling tapping across the tiles but did nod in response, like the Queen of England acknowledging her subjects.

She led us behind the hospital to a locked ward separated from the main hospital by three sets of doors. Each was opened electronically, by a man behind thick glass, and the one behind you had to shut before the one in front of you could open. It was like the entrance to the Fourth Circle in Dante. By the time we were in the prison ward I was pretty much abandoning hope.