“Kevin called the lie-berry? Man, you are bucking for employee of the month. So what about the case file? That’s where you’re going to find the level of detail that will make it impossible for some Internet surfer to fake you out.”

Infante just gave his boss a look, the kind of look that conveys a world of meaning, a look available only to long-married couples or coworkers who’ve shared many years in the same bureaucracy.

“Do not fucking tell me-”

“I called for it yesterday afternoon, soon as I got back from the hospital. It’s not here.”

“Gone? Gone-gone? What the fuck?”

“There’s a note where the file should be, left by the former primary-a guy who’s since made sergeant and been posted to Hunt Valley. He was pretty sheepish when I tracked him down. Admitted he took it out for his predecessor on the case and just plain forgot about it.”

“Sheepish? He should have been shitting himself. Bad enough to let the file leave the building, but to send it off with a former police and forget about it?” Lenhardt shook his head at the excess of idiocy involved. “So who has it?”

Infante glanced down at the name. “ Chester V. Willoughby IV. Know him?”

“Know of him. He retired before I started out here, but he showed up at some of the homicide reunions. You could say he was…uh, atypical.”

“Atypical?”

“Well, for one thing he’s a fucking fourth. You might meet a junior police, but you ever know a fourth? And he came from money, didn’t even have to work. When did the file go out?”

“Two years ago.”

“Let’s just hope he hasn’t died since then. It wouldn’t be the first time that some obsessed old coot took a file home and we all but had to go to probate to get it back.”

“Man, I hope I’m not never like that.”

Lenhardt had reached for the in-house directory and began thumbing through it, then punching in numbers, starting the hunt for the old cop’s home address. “Hello-yeah, I’ll hold.” He rolled his eyes. “On fuckin’ hold with my own department. And who are you kidding, Infante?”

“What?”

“There are supposed to be cases that eat at you. If there aren’t, you’re just lucky. Or stupid. This guy caught the reddest of red balls, two angelic-looking girls, vanishing at a mall on a Saturday afternoon with hundreds of people around. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with a police who didn’t carry that with him for the rest of his life.” Then, back into the phone. “Yeah? Yeah. Chester Willoughby. You got an address on him?” Lenhardt was clearly put on hold again, and he mimed an up-and-down pumping motion with his left hand until the person came back on the line. “Great. Thanks.”

He hung up, laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“In the time that took, you coulda walked over there. He’s in Edenwald, behind the Towson Town Center mall, not even a mile from here.”

“Edenwald?”

“Retirement community, one of the pricey ones where you pay extra money so you can die in your own bed. Like I said, he comes from money.”

“Do you think that rich cops work more OT or less?”

“They probably work more, but don’t put in for it. Hey, maybe you ought to pretend you’re rich sometimes, see what it’s like to work an hour out of love.”

“Not even for your baby blues.”

“What if I kiss you first?”

“I’d rather take it up the ass and get the cash.”

“Well, that makes you a faggot and a whore.”

Whistling, Infante grabbed his keys and headed out, feeling about as content as he ever did.

“Buenos días, SeñoraToles.”

Miriam fished her keys out of her battered leather bag-“distressed” is what she would say if she were trying to sell it to someone-and unlocked the door to the gallery. She loved the way “Toles” sounded in Spanish-Toe-lez, instead of the flat, ugly syllable it was meant to be, “Tolls,” a word that denoted fees and payments. No matter how long she lived in Mexico, it never got old, this aural transformation of her maiden name.

“Buenos días, Javier.”

“Hace frío, SeñoraToles.” Javier rubbed his bare arms, which were goose-pimply. Such a March day would have been considered a godsend back in Baltimore, not to mention Canada, but it was frigid by San Miguel de Allende’s standards.

“Perhaps it will snow,” she said in Spanish, and Javier laughed. He was simple-minded and laughed at almost anything, but Miriam still appreciated his ready laughter. Once, before, her sense of humor had been a key part of her personality. It was rare now that she made anyone laugh, which puzzled her, because Miriam felt she remained capable of wit. In her head she amused herself constantly. Granted, it was a cruel wit, but her sensibility had always been on the cynical side, even when the cynicism was unearned.

Javier had attached himself to the gallery and Miriam shortly after she began working there. A teenager at the time, he hosed down the sidewalk in front of the shop, cleaned its windows without being asked, and told the turistas in a confidential whisper that it was el mejor, the very best of all San Miguel de Allende’s shops. The owner, Joe Fleming, considered him a mixed blessing. “With that walleye and that cleft palate, he probably scares away as many customers as he brings us,” he complained to Miriam. But she liked the young man, whose affection for her seemed rooted in something much deeper than the tips she slipped him.

“¿Ha vistonieve?”Have you seen snow, SeñoraToles?

Miriam thought of her childhood in Canada, the endless winters that made her feel as if her family had been exiled from some more desirable climate. She had never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why her parents chose to leave England for Canada. Her mind skipped ahead to the blizzard of 1966 in Baltimore, a freak meteorological legend. It had fallen on Sunny’s sixth birthday, and they’d taken six little girls from her class to see The Sound of Music in a downtown theater. It had been sunny and cloudless when they entered. Two-plus hours later, the Nazis vanquished and the world safe once again for family singing troupes, the party emerged to find a city in near-whiteout conditions. How she and Dave had struggled through the streets of Baltimore, delivering each daughter to her parents-literally delivering them, carrying them so their party shoes would not be ruined, handing them to mothers and fathers standing worriedly in their doorways. They laughed about it later, but it had been terrifying at the time, the old station wagon slithering over the roads, the girls shrieking in the back. Yet Sunny and Heather later remembered it as a grand adventure. That was the miracle wrought by a happy ending. You were free to relive a terrifying story as if it were merely exciting.

“No,” she told Javier. “I’ve never seen snow.”

She told such small lies all the time. It was easier. Mexico required less lying than the places she’d lived before, because it was a place full of people trying to leave various things and people behind. She assumed all the ex-pats lied as much as she did.

Miriam had come to San Miguel de Allende for a weekend in 1989 and essentially never left. She had intended to choose a less Americanized Mexican city in which to settle-and, not incidentally, a cheaper one, where she might have been able to live on her savings and investments alone, not work at all. But within two days of alighting from the train, she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She had returned to Cuernavaca to collect the rest of her things, then arranged to sell her possessions in storage back in the States. When she bought her little house, her casita, she started with only a bed and her clothes. Today she didn’t have much more. That was something else, like hearing the Spanish-soft version of her name, that never got old-waking up in a bare, uncluttered space of whitewashed walls and fluttering, sheer white curtains. The furniture, what there was of it, was pine. The Saltillo floors had been left bare. The only colors in Miriam’s apartment were in her dishes and housewares, vivid blues and greens, purchased on discount from the gallery. If she decided to move again, it would take her no more than a day or two to dispose of her things. She had no intention of moving again, but she liked having the option.