“I do,” Christensen said. “But to suggest—”
“It is no different here than there, in the United States. Adoption is a long and difficult process, no? But this operation made it quite simple. Campo de Mayo was a baby factory. Many of the adopting families understood that. Many simply found it easier not to ask questions. Some adopting parents even convinced themselves that they were doing God’s will by rescuing the babies. The mothers were subversives. And imprisoned, no less! You can see how stealing the babies became, for some, an act of charity?”
Christensen felt his pulse rise. “This was not something I understood until now.”
“We have heard this before.”
“You don’t know me.” Christensen leaned closer to the speaker. “Where the hell do you get off—”
“Stop,” Melissa commanded. “Just stop.”
A tear rolled down his daughter’s cheek and fell onto the desk. She bit her lower lip to stop its quiver. No one spoke as she composed herself. “My father is not a criminal,” she said at last. “He’s here now. He’s always been here for me. He’s the one who dug out most of the information that led me to you. Without him, we would not be having this conversation. You need to understand that, Señor Silva, or I end this now.”
Christensen let her faith wash over him. It meant so much, but he still felt stained by Silva’s suspicion.
“You are a lucky young woman,” Silva said at last. They could hear Silva tapping his computer’s keys again. “The reconciliations with the truth are not often so—ah, here. Limon, Julia. We do have some background information from her family here.”
“Her family?” Melissa voice was suddenly hollow.
Christensen could see the notion ricochet through his daughter’s mind. This wasn’t just some bloodless program for tracking kidnapped children. Behind it were people, families, looking for their own. Uncles? Aunts? Cousins? An abuela?
A father?
“You are certain, Melissa Christensen, this is information you want to hear?”
“Tell me,” she said.
Hector Silva began to speak. He described a woman until now lost to time, a journalist for the city’s largest daily newspaper, a protégé of its editor, the Nobel Prize winner Jacobo Timerman. She was outspoken and opinionated, a critic of the junta. Her columns reflected that, and she disappeared without a trace one day in 1982, November. She was seven months pregnant with her second child.
“And the older child?” Melissa said.
“A daughter. Four years, eleven months at the time her mother disappeared. Believed to have been taken along with her mother and transferred to Casa Consalva, a government-run orphanage here.”
“Me,” Melissa said. “That’s me.”
“It is possible,” Silva said.
Melissa reached across the desk and took Christensen’s hand. Their eyes locked. He knew what was coming.
“The father?” she asked. “Who was our father?”
Her hand was warm, the pressure of her grip reassuring.
“I have no information,” Silva said. “It is marked ‘unknown’ in the file I have, but I do not know exactly what that means. I am sorry.”
“What else? There’s other information about my … mother?” Melissa said the word as if she were trying it on for size.
“Not in this file,” he said. “Perhaps when the others come in this morning, they will know where to find a full biography for Julia Limon. I can e-mail to you what I have. Please, though, this is all just talk. There is a long verification process.”
“Your website talks about this.” Christensen reached for one of the pages they’d printed earlier. “This Bank of Genetic Data.”
“Blood, yes,” Silva said. “We would need a sample. It must be drawn by a doctor and specially packaged for shipping. How soon can you—”
“Today,” Melissa interrupted. She stood up.
“Let me give you an address,” Silva said. “The laboratory that handles the Abuelas cases.”
Christensen watched his daughter scribble the information on the back of one of the Abuelas printouts.
“Please, Melissa Christensen, before you go,” Silva said. There was an edge of desperation in his voice. “We would very much like more information about this nurse, Beatriz Vargas. You say that she kept a list?”
“Yes.”
“Of the mothers?”
“Yes.”
“Then—my God, we must reach her.”
Christensen held up both hands, palms out, stopping Melissa before she said more. He mouthed the words, “Not yet.”
“Let me think about that,” Melissa said, then mouthed a question: “Why?”
Christensen was following an instinct. Beatriz Vargas and her list were the only cards they had that the Abuelas group clearly wanted. He wanted to hold them close, in case he needed them later.
“We’ll be in touch about that,” Christensen said.
The speakerphone went dead silent. Melissa stared. “This is not a game, Mr. Christensen. This woman—you must understand, there are very few eyewitnesses to this atrocity who are still alive. We must know where—”
“We’ll be in touch,” Christensen repeated, and gently placed the telephone’s handset back on the cradle. It was the gesture of someone digging in his heels, he knew, but he was scrabbling for control as he slipped toward the edge.
Chapter 46
Christensen handed his daughter the scrap of paper on which he’d scribbled a name and office number. Both belonged to a friend, a serologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who came in early and had agreed to draw and package a fresh sample of Melissa’s blood for shipping.
“Get it done, then get straight home,” he said, easing the Explorer to the curb. “You know where to get the Shadyside bus.”
“You’re not going in with me?”
Christensen shook his head. He was going to Bethel Park, back to see Beatriz Vargas. Based on the startled reaction of the man from the Abuelas group, he knew she had told them something far more important than Melissa’s personal history. Vargas had been an eyewitness to one of the Dirty War’s most notorious chapters, and for two decades she had been presumed dead. Not only was she alive, and not only did she know the names and faces of the people who carried it out, but she had secretly cataloged the victims—some of the hundreds of pregnant women who been sucked into a grotesque baby factory and then simply disappeared. If he was reading the Abuelas guy right, Vargas’s handwritten list had the effect of a smoking gun.
“We stumbled into something pretty big here, baby,” he said, setting the parking brake. “Something neither of us could have foreseen.”
“Beatriz Vargas?”
He nodded. “If all this is true—”
“Are you worried about her?”
The dashboard clock read 8:12, reminding him that they’d been up all night. Christensen was running on outrage now, exhausted but hardly ready to stop. “Think about it, ’Lis. This group, the grandmothers, its whole reason for existing is to figure out who might have passed through the operation at that mechanical school. Beatriz Vargas watched the whole thing, baby. They didn’t even know she was alive, much less that she has a list of names. That’s why they’re so anxious to talk to her. I just want her to know that. We owe her that.”
There was something else, and it manifested as a dull throb at the base of Christensen’s skull. He kept it to himself, but the corollary was far more troubling: If Vargas represented a breakthrough to the people dedicated to exposing this war crime, she also represented a threat to the people who were responsible for it. She knew enough to be dangerous, at least now that her secret was out. And he and Melissa were the ones who had left her exposed.
He nodded to the paper in Melissa’s hand. “James said he’d be in by 8:30. Just take the elevators to six. His office is to the left, at the far end of the hall.”
“And he knows how to package the sample for shipping?”
“Does it all the time.” Christensen dug into his wallet and handed Melissa a credit card. “Just take what he gives you to the DHL office on Fifth. You’ve got the address of the testing lab in Buenos Aires?”
“In here.” She patted her purse and tucked the credit card into her own wallet.
“Promise you’ll go straight home after that? Take a cab if you want.”
She nodded and opened the passenger side door. “I’ll walk.”
“The stop for the Shadyside bus is—”
“Dad, I could use some exercise.”
He liked the sound of that. She was taking care of herself. “Just make sure you get some sleep, ’Lis. Brenna and the kids will be gone by the time you get home, so you can just close your curtains and crash. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
Melissa straightened, and her head disappeared above the Explorer’s roofline. The car window briefly framed her torso before she turned and walked toward the Medical Center entrance.
“Make sure you tell James you’re pregnant,” he called. “I don’t know that it makes a difference in how much blood he’ll take, but make sure you tell him.”
Christensen couldn’t be sure his daughter heard him. She was walking away fast and didn’t look back.
Chapter 47
The morning sun was warming the death scene. Hasch had erected a screen around the body to keep the lookie-loos away, but it was black plastic and intensified the heat. He was starting to sweat as he stepped around it and into full view of the corralled seniors about thirty yards away. He’d phone Demski earlier, and the cop already was waiting for him just outside the screened-off area.
“Ninth floor,” he said. “I’ll show you, but first, take a look at this.”
The two men stepped into the sweltering bubble behind the black plastic screen. Hasch bent to the broken woman’s hip and pointed to the nub of the broken needle in her hip. “It’s from a syringe. I’ve ordered tox tests.”
Demski was wearing civvies—blue jeans and a T-shirt touting a boat cover company in Pleasant Hills. That was a good thing, since the Bethel Park cops wouldn’t take kindly to Hasch inviting a cop from another local jurisdiction into their crime scene. When Demski stood up, his knees creaked. The two of them must have looked like prairie dogs, popping up from behind the scene screen. Their reappearance sent a murmur through the small clumps of seniors gathered behind the yellow caution tape stretched around the perimeter.
“I’m getting too old for this,” Demski said. “Sure coulda used a day off, and I’m not sure the point you’re trying to make.”
Hasch smiled. “Follow me.”
He led Demski back outside the screen, past the worried residents, and onto the elevator. They talked as they rode the nine floors up.
“Maybe it’s something simple,” Hasch said. “A geriatric love triangle. Couple phone calls, you bust the cheating lover by midafternoon, the world is safe for democracy, and you’re home in time for dinner.”
“That’s on TV,” Demski said. “You get a name yet?”
Hasch flipped through his notes. “Vargas. First name Beatrice, or Beatriz, something like that. Lived alone on nine. Cops upstairs think she jumped. Found a chair at the balcony rail, and they’re thinking maybe she used it to step up and over.”
Demski was getting impatient. “Connect the dots for me here, Mike.”
The elevator’s electronic floor announcer intoned their arrival on nine, and the doors rolled open. They turned down the hall and stopped just short of the one marked 914. Someone had taped a small rectangle on the smooth floor, around what looked like a faint brownish shoe print. Hasch stooped to it, as usual using his Bic pen as a pointer.
“Looks like somebody stepped in potting soil out on her balcony. Probably a man, but I suppose it could be a large woman in really ugly shoes. There’s others inside, on the carpet, but this one on the linoleum shows the tread pattern best. Look familiar?”
Demski recognized the pattern right away. “Same as the one in the fat blue guy’s place?”
“Yep.”
Demski nodded. “I’ll be dipped.”
They rode the elevator down without talking. Outside again, Demski turned for his car. “Thanks for the heads up. Your report be ready tonight?”
“Yep. Local cops found the shoe prints, so you’ll have to coordinate with them.”
“Thanks. That’s two I owe you.”
Hasch waved away his words. “Appreciate you coming out. Hope it was worth the trip.”
They scanned the perimeter, looking into the weathered faces of the frightened and curious. Hasch imagined them as a herd standing around one of the fallen, stamping and worrying and secretly grateful it wasn’t them that was dead on the ground. His eyes eventually tracked to a green Ford Explorer that was just then pulling into the parking lot. The driver slowed and parked in the first spot he found, bouncing the SUV off the concrete stop. He was out of the car while it was still rocking, moving toward the scene. Demski noticed him, too.
“I might wander around a little,” the cop said.
Demski was staring too hard to be curious, apparently seeing something that Hasch didn’t. The driver was tall and thin, with silver hair and a matching beard trimmed short. He moved to the edge of the crime scene tape, asking questions. When a little old man directed his gaze to the ninth-floor balcony just above the body in the pachysandra, the guy’s jaw dropped open and his face turned bone white.
“You know him, Ski?”
Demski shook his head.
“What then?”
“The fat blue guy had a visitor the day he died,” Demski said.
Hasch looked again. “Green Ford Explorer?”
“That’s what the dead guy’s landlord said.”
“Silver hair?”
Demski smiled. Hasch gave the cop a playful sock in the arm.
“Well, then,” Hasch said. “Told you you’d be home by dinner.”
Chapter 48
Christensen was trembling. The old guy in the houndstooth fedora—the one he and Melissa saw in the building’s lobby the day before—was dog-paddling in memories and offering no useful information.
“BeeVee was such a doll,” he said.
“But you’re sure it’s her?” Christensen could hear the rising panic in his voice. “Beatriz Vargas?”
“Charles said he found her just like that.”
“Charles?”
“Our overnight security man. He’d know. He knows everybody here.”
“And you have no idea what happened?”
The old man straightened and hoisted his pants. “I just can’t imagine. Sweet woman, BeeVee. A nurse, I think, before she retired. Moved in two years ago March. Always smiling. And quite the fox, she was.”
Christensen felt dark thoughts scrabbling to rise. The day after he’d convinced Beatriz Vargas to tell her long-held secret, she was dead? “But I just saw her yesterday,” he said absently.
“That so?”
Christensen hadn’t noticed the grinning guy who’d moved into the open space beside him. He wore jeans and a “Tumacs Canvas Covers” T-shirt, and spoke with more than casual interest. When the guy discreetly flashed a badge and invited him away from the group to talk, Christensen felt a sudden dread. One thing he’d learned from his years living with a defense attorney: Beware the smiling cop.
“So you knew her pretty well then?” the cop asked, leading him across the parking lot toward the Explorer. Christensen could tell the cop was studying his license plate number as they got closer.
“No.”
“But you saw her yesterday? What was that about?”
“Where’d you say you were from again?”
The cop waited a beat. “Braddock PD.”
When Christensen got nervous, his left eye tended to twitch. He was glad he was wearing sunglasses.
“Know anybody in Braddock?” the cop asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just curiou
s.”
Christensen looked away. He couldn’t help himself. Trey Brosky, the towboat pilot, lived in Braddock. This guy’s curiosity couldn’t be coincidence.
“I don’t think I want to talk to you,” Christensen said.
“No?”
“Nothing personal.”
“Of course.” The cop waited another beat. “I just thought maybe you knew a guy down there. Old fat guy. Big drinker. Ringing any bells?”
Christensen felt a quiver in his left eye. “What’s this about?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
“I think you are.” The cop leaned against the Explorer’s front end and folded his arms across his chest. “It’s just interesting, is all. In the past couple days we’ve had two bodies, miles apart. How is it that you turn up both places?”
Christensen felt his stomach clench. “Bodies?”
The cop nodded to the spot at the base of the high-rise, where Hasch and an assistant were bobbing up and down behind the screen as they maneuvered the dead woman into the body bag. “The fat guy down in my neck of the woods. And now this Vargas woman.”
“Wait,” Christensen said, more reaction than response. He held up his hands, as if that might slow the rush of information. “Wait.”
“Something wrong?”
“This guy in Braddock—he’s dead?”
“So you knew him?”
“I didn’t say that. I—”
The cop’s smile spread across his whole face. He looked like a cat with a canary. Then he winked. “Hey, nice shoes. You a runner?”
Chapter 49
Christensen had come willingly, but now he was starting to regret his cooperation. The Braddock cop had spoon-fed him just enough information to make him crazy curious, and Christensen knew he had nothing to hide, so he’d followed the cop back across the city, to the small river town’s dingy police headquarters, all the way into this depressing, tobacco-scented conference room. They’d been fencing for two hours now—thrust, parry, thrust, parry. He was assembling a terrifying picture from the hard-fought puzzle pieces the cop was offering.
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