Free The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri

dossier’s death certificate, and the case would be archived forever.
    I looked though the whole file again. Although Fortuna was a fraud and Romano a suck-up, they were, goddamn it, right. I turned to the autopsy and reviewed its conclusions one more time. I wondered if Morales knew what they were; I figured he didn’t. I thought about his young, beautiful wife. Young, beautiful, raped, dead, and left on their bedroom floor.
    I had to tell him what was in the autopsy report. I was certain that the young man’s heart held an immense capacity for grief, but not much room for deception. Nevertheless, to inform him of what I’d learned and at the same time to reveal that the case was closed, consigned to the archives, seemed excessively cruel; I thought the knowledge might be too great for him to bear.
    I took out an eraser from the top drawer of my desk and neatly erased the date written in the margin of the last page. Then, with the slightly faltering delicacy ofone who imitates another’s handwriting, I changed the date so that the case would remain active for three more months. I stood up and put the file on a shelf where, as I knew from experience, no one would lay a finger on it for decades unless I gave an explicit order to the contrary. Neither the judge nor the clerk would ask any questions about that case. I returned to my desk and spent a long time gnawing the cap of a ballpoint pen and wondering what would be the best way to explain to Morales that his wife, at the time of her rape and murder, was almost two months pregnant.

Telephone
    C haparro knows he’ll regret ringing her up, but the possibility of hearing her voice, like everything that has to do with her, attracts him with an irresistible force. And so he gets closer and closer to making the call and regrets it every step of the way, from the moment the notion occurs to him until the moment he hears her pick up the phone.
    He starts his approach by telling himself that he needs certain pieces of information contained in the legal proceedings. Does he really need them? At first his answer is yes, because after thirty years, many minor details (places, dates, the precise sequence of events) remain in his memory as little more than a faint blur. But, he immediately objects, such precision is obsessive and disproportionate. Does it really matter whether the case was inactive for five months or six? He’s not submitting evidence for a preventive detention; he’s narrating a tragedy in which he had the dubious honor of serving as both witness and protagonist. So much strict attention to detail is, therefore, unnecessary. But this admirably balanced line of reasoning does nothing to diminishhis obstinate desire to review the case. Two days pass, days during which he barely manages to draft a couple of useless pages, before he’s able to admit to himself that the idea of looking over the case file captivates him only because it offers an unobjectionable, crystal-clear excuse for visiting Irene.
    She knows—he’s told her himself—that he’s “writing a book.” Fine. After the passage of so much time, it’s only natural that a writer would want to check a few details. Terrific. The case is stored in the General Archive, in the basement of the Palace of Justice. What better means of facilitating Chaparro’s access to the old dossier could there be than an informal call from the examining magistrate of the court that handled the case in the first place? An unbeatable ploy. It would give him an opportunity to have coffee with Irene and play the part of a writer engaged in his research. Irene likes the project he’s embarked on, and she becomes still more beautiful whenever she’s discussing something she feels enthusiastic about. On the whole, therefore, the perfect excuse. So why does it make him so nervous, and why does he hold back whenever he’s on the point of calling her? Precisely because of that, because it’s all a pretext. It’s basically