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bail. The police now believed that she was covering for someone, probably her boyfriend. “They do not have a motive, of course,” he explained, “since they still have not located the boyfriend, but they are speculating that Emma was cheating on him, that he walked in and found them in bed and killed him in a jealous rage.”
    At this point Jennifer interrupted, outraged. She was frankly astounded that the police would build this murderous fantasy out of such scant evidence, and she told him so. “Do they have even one shred of evidence to support this theory?” she asked. “It just sounds so cliché, like they’ve seen too many bad movies.”
    José allowed that they did not—at least not yet. But he pointed out that these scenarios were cliché because they often occurred. And there was something else, he offered with a sigh. They had discovered that the Spanish boy had gone to the bank that day and withdrawn one thousand euros in cash. It was the last night of the
feria
and his family sponsored one of the many tents, or
casetas
, that had sprung up on the fairgrounds illuminated with thousands of brilliant lights. According to his roommate, he had been asked to buy supplies and pay some of the workers. He definitely had the money in his pocket when he left to go out that night, his roommate said. His pocket was empty when the police searched his body. When Jennifer countered that he must have spent it, José said the police checked and none of the supplies had been paid for and the workers still awaited their pay.
    “He could have lost it,” Jennifer countered. “He could have spent it on something else.”
    “
Sí
, senora. Or it could have been stolen.”
    Jennifer paused. “What are you saying? You don’t think Emma had anything to do with this, do you?”
    “What matters is what the police think. And for the moment they are not saying anything about that. Their first priority is to find her boyfriend”—he scanned his notebook—“this Paco Romero, and they believe Emma knows where he is and refuses to tell them. They will hold her and try to convince her to change her mind. As I said from the beginning, if you can encourage her to tell what she knows, it will help her.”
    Jennifer felt hopelessly frustrated. They all insisted on seeing Emma as a liar at the least and possibly much worse. Even her lawyer seemed to have that mind-set. “She doesn’t
refuse
,” she practically shouted. “She doesn’t
know
where he is.”
    José suppressed his obvious discomfort, but pressed on. “We have to assume that some of what she says may not be true. According to the police, she was seen with him at the
feria
hours before the murder. This directly contradicts her claim that she hadn’t seen him for a few days.”
    Jennifer was unfazed. “I don’t know about that. Who said she was with him? Why believe that person over Emma? And I’m sure she’d love to know where he is now. Don’t you think she wishes he were here, that she feels abandoned by him, upset that he doesn’t come back?”
    José asked Jennifer to sit down, but she was too nervous to comply. He lowered his voice and spoke kindly. “I think she should not expect that kind of consideration from this man. He is not perhaps what she is used to. He is . . . we call it here . . .
un golfo
.”
    Jennifer looked perplexed. José’s unmasked sympathy made her even more nervous. “What is that, please?”
    “I think in English you say a thug. A bad egg. Trouble.”
    “What? How? What are you talking about?”
    “The police have investigated him, starting with his arrest record. He is older—thirty-five, to be exact, and though he used to be a student and is still well-known among them, he dropped out and never completed university.”
    Jennifer waited.
    “He sells drugs, senora,” José blurted. “Bad drugs—heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine.”
    Jennifer could feel an almost physical sense of dizziness but pushed past