In the next room a woman was lying in bed, sleeping heavily, wasted as my mother had been by her cancer. Across the hall a young woman with dark curly hair was watching television. It was only when I looked closely that I saw she was handcuffed to the bed.

“How are you feeling, Veronica?” Lundgren called as we passed.

“I’m okay, Nurse. How’s my baby?”

Veronica had given birth early that morning. She’d be returned to the prison in another couple of days, where she could keep her infant for four months. Coolis was progressive that way, the nurse explained, releasing the lock on the door that separated the nurses’ station from the ward. She cut short a flirtation between one of her subordinates and the corrections officer assigned to guard the hall, telling her junior to pay attention to the ward while she talked to us.

“It’s hard for them to work here—it isn’t like real nursing, and then they get bored when the ward is as empty as it is right now.”

She led us into a tiny room behind the nurses’ station that held a table, a microwave, and a small television. It was the one room on the floor with actual windows, but as these were made of wire–enforced glass they didn’t offer much of a view.

Lundgren took us through the statistics of the floor without any hesitation. There were twenty beds, but they never had more than eight or ten of them filled, except one disastrous occasion when there was a major food–poisoning outbreak at the jail and some of the patients with heart trouble came close to dying.

As to how easy or hard it was for an inmate to get to the hospital, she wasn’t privy to prison decisions, but in her experience, women were pretty sick before they were brought over. “Girls are always trying to get over here. The hospital food is better and the routine is easier to take. In jail there are counts every six hours, and lockdowns and all the rest of it. For someone serving a long sentence the hospital can seem like a vacation. So the prison makes it hard for anyone to malinger.”

“And Nicola Aguinaldo? How sick was she when she came here?”

Her lips tightened, and her hands moved uneasily in her lap. “I thought she was quite ill. So ill I was surprised that she was able to move enough to leave.”

“What was the problem?” Mr. Contreras demanded. “Was it some kind of woman problem? That’s what the cops told me, but she never said nothing about that to her ma—”

“A doctor didn’t actually examine her before she left. I was told by the prison nurse that they suspected an ovarian cyst. But before a doctor could see her, she was gone.”