Free Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) by Rosa Montero Page B

3:00 in the morning in a deserted industrial zone, so there were no other casualties.
    Next Bruna reviewed the former executive’s record, to the extent that she was able to access it. She tracked his career in the Texaco-Repsol annual reports, the media, all the official photo archives she could find, and a few classified ones. Every life generates a huge amount of information. It took her hours to comb through it. She was desperate for a glass of wine, but she’d have to get up to fetch it, and she didn’t want to wake up the greedy-guts, who was snoring peacefully on her lap. At least I’m sparing my liver by staying put, she thought. As Yiannis kept telling her, sometimes acts of kindness toward others are simply a way of looking after ourselves.
    Bruna was searching for a man or woman who might be Gand’s lover. She assumed it would be a woman, since the guy’s profile demonstrated a marked heterosexuality. Who else would want to steal a funerary diamond of scant value from a house full of so many other valuable items, unless it was because of a bond of affection or a desire for sentimental revenge? Or at least that was the conclusion suggested by the widow’s words: “I have a suspicion that it’s someone close to me, and perhaps I don’t fancy the police knowing what’s happened.” Bruna pictured a spiteful lover who would not have been welcome at the formal funeral and who, furious at being treated like a dirty secret, had decided to keep the diamond remains of the man she considered more hers than the actual widow’s. The rep had asked Loperena if she suspected that her husband had been keeping anything from her, but the woman was too proud to admit anything: “That’s for you to find out.”
    Of course that’s precisely what Bruna was trying to do. But she hadn’t found any solid leads. Eventually, in desperation she decided to go and see the man who had been Gand’s personal secretary at Texaco-Repsol for twenty years. The slight, insignificant-looking little man appeared beside the director in the photo archives more often than anyone else, including Loperena. What a personal secretary who’d spent twenty years at the side of the dead man didn’t know, no one would.
    So Bruna finally woke up the greedy-guts, got up from her chair, and drank three glasses of white wine in a row before getting into bed and sleeping for four very restless hours. The next morning, as soon as the office opened she called the personal secretary, Roberto Belmonte, and arranged an appointment at 11:00.
    That was where she was now, seated in front of him.
    “I don’t know anything. I know nothing about the stolen funerary diamond. I know absolutely nothing. Tell his wife that from me,” Belmonte repeated for the third or fourth time.
    The expression on his twitchy face showed worry and fear. Too much worry and too much fear. What was scaring the secretary so much? The fury of the widow? Her revenge for his role as an accomplice in a possible infidelity?
    “As far as I’m aware, in the time I worked for him, my boss never had any mistresses. And I would know, since I was in charge of his entire schedule, both public and private. Of course I never saw him again after his retirement six months ago. I know nothing about what might have happened during that time.”
    He was lying. Bruna had seen pictures of the secretary and Gand together in the last few months at official receptions and meetings. They had kept in touch. The rep was about to mention this to see how he’d respond, but something held her back. The secretary’s unexpected stammering and his obvious and incomprehensible anxiety surprised her. By all the species, asking him about his dead ex-boss’s possible lovers didn’t seem so serious, so worrying, so dangerous. Or maybe it was?
    She decided to go with her instinct. She thanked Belmonte, shook his limp, sweaty hand, and left. She exited the huge corporate building, walking at a steady pace as if she