He had thought, reading the first report, that he understood the shape of Griselda’s crime — theft, and cruelty, and greed.

He understood now that it might be something far darker than any of those, and that it had begun long before Santiago, with the death of the boy’s mother.

Chapter 14 — The Tracking

The Prosecutor’s Office, already alerted, moved quickly once the recording and the reports were in their hands.

They began to track the private ambulance that had left the building — an unregistered transport, following no lawful procedure, carrying a minor who had been committed on a forged diagnosis.

Aurelio’s car followed the coordinates the investigators fed them, north and then east, out toward the edge of the city where the streetlights thinned and the roads went dark and wet between empty lots.