Morrell handed a couple of singles to me. We walked down the street together toward Foster, where we’d both parked. Drummers was only seven or eight blocks from where I’d found Aguinaldo’s body, but it might as well have been seven or eight miles.

“I wish I knew someone who could tell me about Aguinaldo’s life before she was arrested,” I burst out as Morrell stopped at his car. “Did she have a boyfriend who beat her up when she came home, then left her to die in the street? Or was it her wealthy employer—she thought he would help her when she ran away from jail, but he hurt her instead? Someone in that building on Wayne knows, at least knows who she was sleeping with.”

He hesitated, as if debating whether to speak. Finally he pulled out a card and gave it to me.

“I’ll talk to Aisha’s family and see if they know anything about Señora Mercedes. I’ve never met her personally. If I learn anything that may be helpful to you I’ll call you. And you can reach me through the number on the card.”

It was the local number for the press agency that represented him. I put it in my hip pocket and turned to cross the street.

“By the way,” he said casually, “who is paying for you to ask these questions?”

I turned to face him again. “Are you asking in a more subtle way if INS is bankrolling me?”

“Just wondering how quixotic you really are.”

I pointed across the street. “See that late–model wreck? I’m quixotic enough for that to be the car I can afford to drive.”

I climbed into the Skylark and turned it around, with a roar of exhaust that made me sound like a teenage boy. Morrell’s Honda moved sleekly to the intersection ahead of me. He must make some money writing about torture victims; the car was new. But what did that prove? Even a person with strong principles has to live on something, and it wasn’t as though he was driving a Mercedes or a Jag. Of course, I had no idea what his principles were.

Chapter 17: Spinning Wheels, Seeking Traction

17 Spinning Wheels, Seeking Traction

In the morning I went to my office early: I had a meeting with potential new clients at eleven, and I didn’t want my personal searches to make me late. I looked Morrell up on the Web.

He had written a book about psychological as well as physical torture as a means to suppress protest in Chile and Argentina. He had covered the return to civilian government in Uruguay and what that meant for the victims of torture in a long essay in The Atlantic Monthly. His work on SAPO forces in Zimbabwe had won a Pulitzer prize after its serialization in The New Yorker.