Psychology was criminology’s cousin, and perhaps something in me also wanted to find a way to understand our grandfather’s situation. The way I despised him, and yet there were moments I wanted to conjure the pure, blunt, uncomplicated menace of the man.

But, over time, the passion I’d had for being the one to solve cases had dulled, the anger and the sadness behind it.

The verdict in my brother’s death was drowning.

I never believed it.

[21]

The only obituary Allie could find ran in a niche leftist Buenos Aires newspaper with an online presence. Just a few sentences with no photograph. The feeling of a cover-up or data wipe persisted.

Autotranslated from Spanish and cleaned up by Allie, the obituary noted that she’d died a week before, but didn’t list cause of death. “No mention of embezzlement online,” Allie wrote in the margin.

An ardent defender of the environment and animal rights, Vilcapampa, 54, was the daughter of a notable industrialist and businessman. Born in Buenos Aires, she grew up Florida but moved to the Pacific Northwest for college. In the 1990s, Vilcapampa was arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in the disappearance of five alleged wildlife traffickers but was released due to insufficient evidence. She moved back to the United States soon after to manage several of her father’s companies. She was suspected in further crimes in the early 2000s, including embezzlement from one of her father’s companies, but nothing was ever proven. Recently, Vilcapampa had been under investigation for alleged ties to bioterrorism groups.

The mention of “bioterrorism” earned a raised eyebrow from me. I knew how activism became terrorism—in part, the shifting goalposts of changed laws. But how had Silvina’s ecoterrorism morphed into bioterrorism? Banned from her country of birth after the latest round of amorphous accusations. But the U.S. had let her stay. Why?

Somehow, the father had managed to have his name kept out of even this brief mention. Fear on the part of the outlet or pressure applied?

Allie had also found a local traffic report that named “Silvina Vilcapampa” as a “hit-and-run” victim seven days before. Police were looking for an SUV or minivan. “Nothing else local,” Allie wrote. “No funeral I can find.” No idea whether she had been buried or cremated. No follow-up to the initial mention. I found that suspicious. Normally, the paper would have run some kind of follow-up, under traffic reports or the police roundup. More meddling by the father?

I tried not to imagine the violence of a vehicle hitting a human body, turned the page.

Six or seven years ago, Silvina had begun a kind of community outreach, through an arts nonprofit created by Vilcapampa Enterprises. Trying to reconcile with Vilcapampa senior? She’d briefly funded “eco-artists” who’d formed their own community called “Unitopia” on an island made with recycled plastics, out in a lake in the wilderness. This struck me, after having seen the video, as ludicrous. The kinds of things that the Silvina in the video would label “bourgeois.” But a big deal to whoever Silvina thought she was at the time.