I stopped in the park at Foster to give Peppy a walk. The police were sweeping the area in their three–wheeled buggies, slowing when they passed anyone with a dog, so I kept her on her leash. She didn’t like it—especially since the squirrels weren’t similarly constrained—but unlike her son she doesn’t yank my arm off when she’s tied up.

Aguinaldo had run away from Coolis without knowing that her mother had fled their apartment. And then? Had she come home, found her mother gone, and called Baladine for help, only to be beaten up? Or met up with some old boyfriend in the neighborhood with the same disastrous results?

“Those women around the pool knew something, but what? About Aguinaldo’s escape, or her injuries, or her relations with Robert Baladine? We’re no closer to having anything on Aguinaldo’s private life than we did this morning,” I said, so severely that Peppy flattened her ears in worry.

“And that smirk Mina Attar gave, when her mother said Nicola had no time for men, it could have concealed anything—the other kids implied Mrs. Attar had plenty of time for men, so Mina might have been smirking at her mom. Or maybe Mina knew something about Nicola that she wasn’t saying. It was the look of someone who felt she knew someone else’s guilty secret, that’s for sure.”

And what about this guy Morrell whom the kids had mentioned, the one interviewing people who had escaped from prison? Could he have played some role in Aguinaldo’s escape, or in her death?

Who had claimed Aguinaldo’s body? Abuelita Mercedes, the neighborhood grandmother? If so, how had she learned that Nicola was dead? From Morrell? Who was he—a social worker? A journalist? I didn’t think he could be from INS. And I didn’t think he was a cop—he’d been coming around before Nicola’s death.

I jerked Peppy away from a dead gull. I wished Vishnikov had done the autopsy when Nicola’s body arrived on Wednesday. If she’d gone to the hospital in Coolis for an ovarian cyst, maybe that had caused her internal problems, although the Beth Israel surgeon thought she’d been hit or kicked. The external injuries had been fresh when I found her, and that broken arm looked as though it had just occurred, as if she’d been struck by a car. If so, was there a boyfriend who beat her up? My mind circled back to Robert and Eleanor Baladine.

I could imagine a lot of scenarios where a man might have sex with the live–in nanny, from unregulated desire through hostility toward his wife or rivalry with his son. But would he have prosecuted Nicola for theft as a way to protect himself? Would she have turned to him for help when she escaped from prison? And then—and then what?