Free The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum Page B

find the answer in Halifax.
    Or maybe not.
    She was intoxicated by the same strange brew of hope and despair she always felt at the beginning of a case. One minute she knew for sure she’d crack it, the next it seemed impossible. This much she knew for sure: the first homicide in a series she investigated was always the most important. It was the benchmark. Only if you were thorough, if you turned over every rock, did you have any hope of making connections. You’d never connect the dots unless you saw where all the dots were.
    Anna was wearing her travel suit, a navy-blue Donna Karan (though the cheaper line), and a white Ralph Lauren blouse (not couture, of course). She was known around the office for dressing impeccably. On her salary she could scarcely afford designer labels, but she bought them anyway, living in a dark one-bedroom apartment in a lousy part of Washington, taking no vacations, because all her money went to clothes.
    Everyone assumed she dressed so nicely to make herself attractive to men, because that was what young single women did. They were wrong. Her clothes were body armor. The finer the outfits, the safer and more secure she felt. She used designer cosmetics and wore designer clothes because then she was no longer the daughter of the dirt-poor Mexican immigrants who cleaned thehouses and tended the yards of rich people. Then she could be anyone. She was self-aware enough to know how ridiculous this was in rational terms. But she did it anyway.
    She wondered what it was about her that rankled Arliss Dupree more—that she was an attractive woman who’d turned him down, or that she was a Mexican. Maybe both. Maybe in the world according to Dupree, a Mexican-American was inferior and therefore had no right to reject him.
    She had grown up in a small town in Southern California. Both her parents were Mexicans who’d escaped the desolation, the disease, the hopelessness south of the border. Her mother, soft-spoken and gentle, cleaned houses; her father, quiet and introverted, did yardwork.
    When she was in grade school she wore dresses sewn by her mother, who also braided her brown hair and put it up. She was aware that she dressed differently, that she didn’t quite fit in, but it didn’t bother her until she was ten or eleven, when the girls started forming iron cliques that excluded her. They’d never associate with the daughter of the woman who cleaned their houses.
    She was uncool, an outsider, an embarrassment. She was invisible.
    Not that she was in a minority—the high school was half-Latino, half-white, the lines rarely crossed. She got used to being called “wetback” and “spic” by some of the white girls and guys. But among the Latinos there were castes, too, and she was at the bottom. The Latino girls always dressed well, and they mocked her clothes even more viciously than the white girls did.
    The solution, she decided, was to dress like all the other girls. She began to complain to her mother, who didn’t take her seriously at first, then explained that they couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothes the othergirls had, and anyway, what was the difference, really? Didn’t she like her mother’s homemade clothes? Anna would snap, “No! I hate them!” knowing full well how much the words hurt. Even today, twenty years later, Anna could barely think about those days without feeling guilt.
    Her mother was beloved by all her employers. One of them, a genuinely rich woman, began donating all of her children’s castoffs. Anna wore them happily—she couldn’t imagine why anyone would throw away such fine clothes!—until she gradually came to realize that her clothes were all last year’s fashions, and then her ardor cooled. One day she was walking down the hall at school and one of the girls in a clique she very much wanted to join called her over. “Hey,” the girl said, “that’s my skirt!” Blushing, Anna denied it. The girl stuck a probing finger under the hem and