Page 86 of Girl in the Water

Chapter Fifteen

Ian

Gustavo Santos conducted the questioning in a large but plain conference room on the ground floor of the police district headquarters. Maybe the interrogation room was too small for all of them. Or maybe they had floggers hanging on the wall that he didn’t want the Americans to see. Ian didn’t know and didn’t care. He watched the suspect.

She held a blond baby, nothing but hatred and contempt toward the police in the woman’s drug-hazed black eyes that matched her stringy black hair. Tattoos covered her neck and both of her skinny arms. She could be anywhere between twenty or forty, impossible to tell. Too many years of hard living had left deep marks on her.

“You take my baby away over my dead body.” She spat the words at them and looked ready to fight.

She didn’t have a lawyer present.

“When did you have the baby?” Gustavo Santos asked.

The questioning went on in Portuguese. Ian didn’t understand every word but got enough to know what they were talking about. And if he missed anything, he could always ask Daniela.

He sat back while Santos worked the suspect. He and Daniela were here only to observe.

The woman gave the baby’s birthday, and the detective made a note. The date was seven months ago, so the timing matched. The baby was the right age.

“Where?”

“At the Hospital Adventista.”

The detective produced a printout from the folder in front of him and pushed it over to the woman along with a pen. “I need you to sign the release of medical records form.”

“No way.”

“Then we’ll take the baby for a DNA test, and you won’t have her back until we get the test results.”

Shooting them a look of murder, the woman scribbled what might or might not be a signature.

The detective walked the piece of paper to the door, called over a secretary, and instructed her to obtain the records immediately, have them emailed over. Then he strode back to his chair and sat.

“Is your boyfriend blond?”

The woman’s chin came up in defiance. “What’s it to you?”

“You don’t see a lot of blond kids running around here.”

“Maybe his father ain’t from around here.”

“Where is he from?”

Her eyes shot sparks of anger. “He’s a fucking prison guard down in São Paulo. I got knocked up while I was in the can. Now you happy?”

The detective didn’t look happy.

Neither was Ian. While the baby was the right sex, age, and coloring, she didn’t look like the pictures Carmen Heyerdahl was showing around. Not that you could necessarily tell much from baby pictures. Fuzzy hair, no teeth, chubby cheeks—babies looked a lot alike at that age, at least to Ian.

The detective kept asking questions.

The woman answered, but with thorough contempt. You could tell from her tone that if she thought she could get away with scratching all their eyes out, she would have gone for it. She certainly had the nails for aggravated assault: long, ragged, with plenty of dirt packed underneath.

Should an altercation happen, Ian was happy to know that he’d had his tetanus shot just last year.

Santos moved on to questions about other gang members, to which the woman responded with stony silence. They went on like that for about twenty minutes.

Then the email finally came in from the hospital, and everything matched up. The little girl was hers.