Chương 7
The next morning, Camila arrived with a list of every private locker company, bank branch, athletic club, and storage facility where the number 417 might matter.
They could not simply walk from door to door holding a key. They needed records, authority, and patience.
Javier’s credit reports showed no safe-deposit rental. His email account had been closed by the family company. The squash club had renovated its lockers two years earlier. Three storage companies refused to confirm whether Javier had been a client. One requested a death certificate, proof of executorship, and a court order.
The girls ate cereal at the table while Mariana made calls.
Lucía pushed the marshmallow pieces into a separate pile.
“Those are the best ones,” Emilia told her.
“They look dishonest.”
“How can food lie?”
“It pretends to be fruit.”
Camila muted her call and looked at Mariana. “She may have a future in litigation.”
At noon, the school director called again.
This time, a member of the board joined the conversation. He explained that photographs of armed men outside the Alcázar mansion had caused concern among parents.
“They were licensed security personnel,” Mariana said.
“That distinction may not comfort everyone.”
“My daughter watched her grandmother strike me in front of half the people funding your school. Did that concern anyone?”
Silence.
Then the board member said, “We were not present.”
“There were eighty witnesses.”
“No formal complaint has been made.”
Mariana looked at Camila.
The lawyer raised one eyebrow.
“I will correct that,” Mariana said.
She filed the police report at three fifteen.
The officer who took it was younger than she expected. He asked whether Beatriz had struck her with an object, whether she required hospitalization, whether the children had been hit, and why she had waited until the following day.
Mariana answered each question.
When he asked about witnesses, she gave names.
When he asked whether Adrián Valdés had threatened Beatriz, she hesitated.
“He said the mansion would change owners if she touched me again.”
The officer stopped typing.
“Was that a threat?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask him to make it?”
“No.”
“Did you feel threatened by him?”
Mariana thought of the key, the burned envelope, and the way he had set the car keys on the kitchen table when Camila asked whether she could leave.
“Not at that moment.”
The officer resumed typing.
Outside the station, two reporters waited beside a motorcycle.
Camila stepped in front of Mariana.
“No comment.”
One reporter called, “Did Adrián Valdés remove your children against their grandmother’s wishes?”
Mariana kept walking.
“Are you in a relationship with him?”
Her face burned.
Then the second reporter shouted, “Did your husband launder money for Valdés?”
Mariana stopped.
Camila took her elbow. “Do not.”
The reporter held up his phone. “We have documents.”
“What documents?” Mariana asked.
“Company transfers. Did you know?”
Camila moved her toward the car.
By the time they reached the apartment, the story was online.
The leaked records were incomplete. They showed payments between an Alcázar freight subsidiary and a security firm linked to Adrián. The transfers occurred during Javier’s tenure. A former employee claimed Javier had personally approved them.
Beatriz released a statement within the hour.
She described the payments as routine security expenses and expressed sorrow that Mariana, “while under the influence of dangerous individuals,” had involved the children in a private inheritance dispute.
The statement did not mention the slap.
It mentioned Javier six times.
Mariana read it twice, then put the phone face down.
Renata stood in the kitchen doorway.
“Is Grandmother going to take us?”
“No.”
“You paused.”
“I am tired.”
“That isn’t the same answer.”
Mariana rubbed her forehead. Children noticed the spaces adults used to hide inside.
“Your grandmother may ask a judge to let you live with her.”
“Can the judge say yes?”
“Yes.”
Lucía began crying from the hallway.
Mariana had not realized she was listening.
All three girls ended up in Mariana’s bed that night. Emilia kicked in her sleep. Renata kept waking to check the apartment door. At two in the morning, Mariana sat on the bathroom floor because it was the only room where she could breathe without a child measuring the sound.
Her phone lit with a message from an unknown number.
Javier kept copies where trains sleep.
Nothing else.
Mariana read the sentence until the words lost shape.
She sent it to Camila.
Then she called Diego.
He answered immediately.
“What did Javier mean by where trains sleep?”
A pause. “Rail yards.”
“The key.”
“Possibly a station locker.”
“Do stations still have lockers?”
“Not many.”
“Did Javier own railway property?”
“The company leases freight space.”
“Where?”
“I will find out.”
“No. Tell me how to find out.”
Another pause.
“The annual reports list terminals. Public filings may list leases. Some contracts will be in the documents you collected.”
“Thank you.”
“Mariana.”
“What?”
“Do not go alone.”
She ended the call.
At seven, Camila arrived carrying coffee and annoyance.
“You called a security chief in the middle of the night and then hung up after obtaining potentially dangerous information.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I wanted to confirm your judgment had deteriorated before breakfast.”
They searched the annual reports.
Alcázar Transportes held leases at two freight terminals and a disused maintenance depot outside García. The depot had been inactive for five years but remained on the books through a subsidiary called Cuatro Ríos Holdings.
Four rivers.
Javier used to invent companies with names that sounded like hotels. He said numbers frightened investors and rivers made them feel historical.
Mariana found a property expense coded as “archive storage.” The monthly amount was small enough to disappear among utility payments.
Camila requested corporate records through the probate proceeding. That would take time.
Diego obtained the name of the depot’s current caretaker in forty minutes.
May you like
Mariana did not ask how.
The caretaker, Tomás Vela, refused to discuss anything by phone. He agreed to meet Camila at the property after she sent proof of Mariana’s identity and Javier’s death.
