Read Cartwheel for Free Online

in that strange halting way—disappearing and suddenly rematerializing three feet away—that was particular to people on security tapes. Andrew leaned forward. They looked guilty, and why was that? He realized it was because you only ever saw people on security footage when they were suspected of a crime; the way they dropped out of sight and then popped back up began to seem intentional, furtive. On the screen, Lily and Sebastien looked ghostly and very young. They moved through the store picking out basic, sensible things—a toothbrush, some toothpaste, the necessities for a person locked out of a house. At the end of one aisle, Lily lingered and, incredibly, produced a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She put one in her mouth without lighting it. Andrew felt a muted, faraway surprise that he knew, under any other circumstances, would be much larger—he had never known his daughter to smoke. On the screen, Lily turned to look at Sebastien and nodded toward the shelf behind her—which, Andrew could see now, was lined entirely with condoms. She raised an eyebrow and Ojeda paused the tape, freezing Lily’s face into an expression of strange, nearly vulpine suggestiveness.
    “That,” said Velazquez, pointing, “is what they’re going to play.”
    “Who?”
    “The television.”
    “What?”
    “That she gave him this provocative look with the condoms.”
    “I wouldn’t really say it’s provocative,” said Andrew, even though he knew it didn’t matter. He was beginning to see how this was going to go. “I mean, it’s not like she bought them, right? It’s just kind of silly, I think.”
    “You have to understand, this is five hours after she’s learned of Katy’s death,” said Velazquez.
    “She’s just making a joke,” said Andrew.
    And Velazquez looked at Andrew blankly and said that that’s exactly what he meant.
    On Thursday, Andrew and Anna took a taxi to Lomas de Zamora police station.
    “Aren’t you hot?” said Andrew. He had told Anna to wear something modest, and now she was wearing a high-necked sweater and he worried she was hot. He was hot.
    “No,” said Anna. She was resting her head on the window. Andrew managed not to comment on this, though he flinched every time they hit a bump. He had to figure that she’d quit it if she wanted to quit it.
    From the outside, the police station looked normal enough—like a place you might voluntarily go, certainly, if you were in some kind of trouble. Andrew reminded himself for the hundredth time that this wasn’t Russia: This was a country where you were encouraged, on balance, to find the police if you had a problem. Inside, Andrew and Anna were conducted through a multi-phased entrance; they relinquished their documents to a man in a lucent box and were ushered into a small waiting room. Andrew was again relieved: The walls were papered with flyers for social service programs, and there wasn’t a single festering wound or homicidal gang in sight. The huge light on the ceiling was spackled with the desiccated bodies of a few electrocuted flies, some of them still twitching; in the corner of the room lurked an enormousspindly-legged bug, as grand and improbable looking as a lobster; the smell of cloying disinfectant half-obscured the smell of something heavily organic. But in general, the room looked okay—like a place where petty obligations were fulfilled. A DMV, perhaps. Though Andrew saw how this place’s innocuousness could be dangerous; maybe it was why Lily had not realized the threat she was under—letting things go on in Spanish, failing to ask for a lawyer. He could scarcely believe it about the lawyer. Hadn’t she watched enough TV growing up to know to reflexively demand one, no matter what? Perhaps she actually hadn’t—they’d been stingy with TV, allowing only the most tedious and high-minded of programming, protecting their daughters from exposure to the mind-coarsening and the lurid. How funny that the most