PERLEY WAS ON THE PHONE TEN OR TWELVE TIMES A DAY, TO people in Mexico City, telling them to act—and telling them that if anything happened to her, when she was proven innocent, it would come down on the heads of those who had put her in chains. A week or so ago he was put through to a man named Alfonso Bara. He spoke and Bara said:
“Yes—of course—well, what comes of it comes of it. Things may turn out if you are patient—now is the time to be patient.”
Bara was interested in advancing his own career—and this had a lot to do with freeing Mary Cyr. But only at the right time. And he had much to weigh as well. For the idea was formed, over the past month or so—that the worse she was treated in backward Oathoa, the better it was for him in Mexico City when he freed her from those chains. Bara had learned something two months before from his own investigators, who were actually investigating Hernández and his relationship to a woman name Sonya “Little Boots” Baron. All of this had taken time, as it does anywhere—but Alfonso knew that the money given to Amigo to do upgrades was stolen, and that almost four million of it went to this woman, who ran drugs just north of Acapulco. So he knew very well, before Tallagonga had ever seen Mary Cyr, that the back-door way into the corruption of Little Boots was through Señor DeRolfo and his wife, Gidgit, and their illicit connection to Hulk Hernández.
And why did he first suspect corruption?
Because Carlos DeRolfo had built his wife a chapel in 2002.
“Quien construye una capilla podría estar esconde un pecado.”
Anyone who builds a chapel is hiding a sin.
So he had spoken to his wife’s father, a man who was always optimistically energetic, the man in the white suit jacket who had walked by the cell carrying the outboard motor the first day John had arrived. The man worked at the garage, and had the best pair of hands as a mechanic that there was. He worked on Hulk Hernández’s SUV and his imported cars. It was easy enough for him to plant small microphones in both Hernández’s SUV and Carlos DeRolfo’s Mercedes.
The information they received over the next nine months was fantastic.
People in his office asked him near the New Year if they should inform Tallagonga.
“No, no—no es importante.”
He was going to seek warrants from a certain judge.
So all of this was proceeding when the bump at the mine happened.
Then something completely bizarre occurred, with a woman named Mary Cyr.
“Bizzaro,” Bara said, after the name of the popular American cartoon. He could not believe it. He did believe the initial story; that is, that she had come down with money (he suspected a drug buy but changed his mind), and had harmed a young boy.
Everything in his case was put on the back burner.
It looked very good for Tallagonga for a moment—and Bara with his plodding and his clandestine campaigns seemed to be overshadowed.
But after a while things came together; the coal dust, as it were, settled. He had one man working in Oathoa, who he could trust, and he relied upon that man—and that man was Constable Jorge Fey.
But you see, for his own political advantage he did not want Fey to stop the case, or produce evidence to contradict Tallagonga right away—the more headlines he saw, the more damning it was. That is, if he had not played this game, Mary Cyr would have been released in four or five days after her arrest. John Delano would not even have had to fly down.
But Bara also had to be certain that Mary Cyr was innocent, for she seemed so culpable.
“You want me to keep her here?” Fey had asked.
“Just for a little while,” Bara had said.
So it put Fey in a terrible spot and made him play the role he detested. He had to say it was arsenic when he knew it was ludicrous. And he had to deflect the investigation by the Canadian officer, who was getting closer to the truth every day.
Also, the man in Oathoa—not Jorge Fey, but the military colonel sent there the day after the mine disaster—the man who had eight soldiers with him to guard the mine—to make sure that an investigation Bara was planning would not be corrupted, and who reported only to Bara—told him the morning after Mary Cyr was arrested that she was not the one who killed the child—or as he said, the children.
“Who is it?” Bara asked.
“We are not sure. But we think it might be Señora and Señor DeRolfo,” the colonel said.
Even Bara was amazed at this. “Are you certain?” he finally said.
“No, no, señor—not positive. But we think so.”
But again Bara asked them to wait.
“I have them, Hernández, Dr. DeRolfo, and yes—her, Boots Baron—only I need a few more hours—just a few more.”
But then, just when things were going to be resolved—Mary Cyr freed, the embezzled money revealed—something like an act of God happened, and the communication to the town was interrupted and no one could get a message in or out. It was the tormenta de Oathoa (storm of Oathoa) that had come two months early. The harshest storm since, people said, the asesinato de John F. Kennedy.
This storm destroyed what they had all intended. That toppled two transmission towers so even the cell phones could not ping off of them.
And when that happened, Lucretia Rapone decided it was time to be the mother she was, and to kill Mary Cyr. Or she did not decide it; her new best friend, Gidgit DeRolfo, decided it for her. It was the only way Gidgit and her husband could escape, while letting Lucretia grab the attention. They would escape everyone, and Little Boots Baron said she had a place reserved for them.
As for Lucretia, who wanted a reward:
“No, you will get no reward,” Mary Cry had told her, emphatically. “You have had your reward already.”
And how strange this reward would reveal itself to be.