They had searched her, of course—but they had reckoned without her intimate knowledge of the ingenious ways in which people can end their own lives. When they opened the cell door at 6:03 A.M. the next morning, they found her lying on her back, staring at the ceiling in the same way that she had stared at the ceiling on the day Duke disappeared, except that there was an ever-widening pool of blood spreading across the floor of her cell, and she was dead.
She had pulled one of the buttons off her mattress and burrowed into the kapok filling with her fingernails, tugging out one of the springs. Then she had used the sharp end of the spring to tear open the veins in both her wrists.
At 11:17 A.M., Lieutenant Dan Munoz came into her cell to look at her. He stood by the door for a long time, wondering what it was that had brought her to this.
He didn’t notice two butterflies with almost colorless wings, which had been perched on the steel mesh that covered the windows. After he had been standing there for a while, they fluttered out the door and along the corridor, then out through the bars to the open air, and the morning sunshine, and freedom.