Heart of the World by Linda Barnes Page A

was written in neon letters ten feet high, obvious and undeniable. “She ran away with some boy she's screwing, some no-account nothing. She's never home when she should be, she don’ care about her brothers, she don’ even do the dishes right. She's—”
    How I made it outside without doing grievous bodily harm to the woman, I don’t know, but I didn’t linger to hear the end of her tirade. I pushed my way out of the booth, leaving the beer, escaping the cigarette smog, and I was in the frigid parking lot fumbling for my keys before I remembered to put on my coat.

CHAPTER 7
    â€œSo the way you figure, the woman who got the photo from Marta grabbed Paolina?” Sam's sleepy murmur was soft in my ear.
    â€œActing for Roldan. That's what I think.” Beside him, wrapped in a cocoon of wrinkled sheets, I was warm at last, but wide awake and way too uneasy to sleep. I’d assumed Paolina was with Diego. Wrong . I’d assumed Roldan was dead. Wrong .
    â€œJust because this woman used Roldan's name on the phone.” The way he said it, he might as well have said: Don’t you think you’re snatching at straws? Maybe I was, I thought. Maybe I am.
    â€œWhy would Roldan want her?” Now Sam sounded like he was thinking out loud.
    â€œShe's his daughter,” I said.
    â€œBut why now?”
    â€œWhy write Marta? Why send her presents? After all these years?” The long and the short of it was I didn’t know. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why now . I only knew this: If she’d been taken by someone other than Roldan, I had nothing; I was nowhere. I’d run out of leads. I’d have to wait for the phone to ring. For a knock at the door.
    Sam's breath ruffled my hair. “You told the cops about all this, the woman, the photo, the statue?”
    â€œYes.” I’d gotten Mooney involved first, then the Cambridge PD,goading them till they’d changed the label on Paolina's disappearance from runaway to possible kidnapping. “Possible” was as far as they’d go.
    â€œThe feds?” He sounded casual enough, but the muscles in his arm tightened and I remembered Mooney's warning.
    â€œThe locals don’t like to bring them in unless there's a ransom demand, but Mooney's going to get them to sign on tomorrow, no matter what.”
    Unless something else turns up, the older of the Cambridge cops had said, nodding his head so his double chin wobbled.
    What the hell else could turn up? I’d thought. The chill had penetrated clear to the bone when I’d realized he meant her body. Paolina. Dead.
    â€œThe FBI will want to talk to you,” Sam said. “Tomorrow.”
    Hell with them, I thought; I’ve worked with the feebies before. I had a pretty good idea how skeptical they’d be, how slowly they’d proceed. Two weeks of paperwork and the trail would be as cold as the slush on Orchard Park Court.
    â€œYou never know with family,” Sam said. “Maybe Roldan's been keeping an eye on her.”
    It was possible. Roldan once hired a PI to check up on me. Maybe he didn’t like the way Marta was raising her. Maybe he didn’t like the way I’d been ignoring her.
    â€œIt's not your fault,” Sam said. “Stop doing this to yourself.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’re yanking your hair out.”
    It's true; I pull my hair. There's a fancy name for it: trichotillomania; rolls right off the tongue. I do it when I feel rotten about something I’ve done or haven’t done. It's an addictive behavior, a named illness. Now I was indulging the demon because I felt guilty. There was a voice in my head saying: You should have known Marta was up to something, you should have taken better care of your little sister . An old familiar tune, guilt, one I knew as well as I knew the plaintive Billie Holiday song on the CD.
    Too tense to lie still, I eluded Sam's arm and got out of