Hector Miller was the chief of police of San Jeronimo for eleven years and he had dinner at Claudia Vance’s table on a fair number of Sundays and everybody in that town knew it.

He did not destroy any evidence and he did not alter any report and he has never been accused of either.

What he did is smaller and it cost a six-year-old four months of her life.

On the nineteenth of January, a woman named Perlita Escárcega, who lives on a farm road eleven miles from the property where Maya Beltran was being held, telephoned the San Jeronimo police department non-emergency line.

She said that she had driven past a house that had been empty for two years, that the blinds were down in the daytime, that there was a car she did not recognize, and that she had seen what she thought was a child at an upstairs window at about four in the afternoon on a school day.