“You have 72 hours,” the Attorney General finally replied. “Not a minute more. And if this turns out to be nothing, it won’t be the prisoner whose fate ends—it will be your career.”
Méndez hung up, walked to the office window, and gazed at the prison yard. Somewhere in this case lay a truth no one had wanted to confront, and a blonde 8-year-old girl held the key to uncovering it.
Two hundred kilometers away, in a modest house in a middle-class neighborhood, a 68-year-old woman ate dinner alone in front of the television.
Dolores Medina had once been one of the country’s most respected criminal defense attorneys, until a heart attack forced her into retirement three years earlier.
Now her days revolved around medication, soap operas, and memories of cases she could no longer fight.
The news aired during the 9 p.m. broadcast. Dramatic images from the central penitentiary. A prisoner sentenced five years earlier in the Sara Fuentes case had requested to see his daughter as his final wish.
What occurred during that visit compelled authorities to suspend the procedure for 72 hours.
Exclusive sources reported that the 8-year-old girl had whispered something in the condemned man’s ear, triggering an extraordinary reaction.
Dolores’ fork slipped from her hand. On the screen appeared Ramiro Fuentes’ face. She recognized that face—not from this case, but from another.
Thirty years earlier, another man with that same expression of desperate innocence had been condemned for a crime he did not commit. Dolores had been a young attorney then—and she had failed to save him.
That man spent 15 years locked away before the truth came to light. By then he had already lost everything—his family, his health, his will to live. Dolores had never forgiven herself for that failure.
Now, looking at Ramiro Fuentes, she saw the same eyes, the same desperation, the same innocence no one wanted to believe.
Her doctor had forbidden stress. Her family had begged her to rest. But Dolores picked up her phone and dialed her old assistant. “Carlos,” she said when he answered, “I need you to get me everything on the Fuentes case. Everything.”
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