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was an alien concept. “Two years? Three? Yes, three,” she said. “For three years she was gone.”
    “Mother Taleqani—” Of all the distasteful aspects of police work, what he had no stomach for was grilling the survivors of murder. In little real sense could many be said to have survived. Endurers, he would have called them. Existers—the momentum of their broken lives rapidly winding down. The woman beside the body, judging by the whistling in her lungs each time she let out a sob, soon would be at a dead stop. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there are more questions about your daughter I must have answers for.”
    The woman grieved quietly, braced for the next assault.
    “Three years is a long time. Were you in contact with Tahera before tonight?”
    “Yes.”
    “I see.” He betrayed all the involvement of a doctor discovering a spot on a lung. “Do you know where she was?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where?” he asked.
    “She was in purgatory,” the woman cried. “But now she is in paradise.”
    The moment of calm was slipping away. “Who did this to her?”
    The woman beat her chest with such force that Darius felt the shock of the blows. “You did!” An arthritic finger, shiny as bone, pointed where the punches echoed in his heart. “You murdered her.” She took her case to the crowd outside the rope. “Stone him,” she pleaded. “Crush his skull to powder. He murdered my child.”
    “Mother Taleqani—”
    The woman screeched her misery to the heavens. She threw herself on the corpse, watered it in tears.
    A hard object jabbed into Darius’s shoulder, and he looked back at the crowd as Dr. Baghai reached him a second time with the tip of his cane. “I can give her an injection, if you like.” In hopes that he might lose a patient to a sudden resurrection the coroner went nowhere without a full doctor’s satchel. “Otherwise it may take several days before she is lucid.”
    “Will she stand up under interrogation?”
    Baghai gestured indecisively with his stick. “A drink would be better.”
    “For everyone concerned,” Darius said.
    The rope thrummed in his fingers as a teenager in a light summer chador slipped inside the cordon. She put an arm around Mrs. Taleqani’s heaving shoulders and murmured in her ear. Mrs. Taleqani shook her head. She kissed the corpse, cajoled it forgivingly to come home while the teenager tried to bundle her away.
    Darius jerked the rope. The traffic cones danced like bobbers on a struck line. “Mrs. Taleqani can’t leave. She’s a witness in a murder case.”
    “My mother knows nothing about murder,” the girl said.
    “Tahera was your sister?”
    “That’s right.”
    “And your name?”
    “Farah Taleqani. But I don’t see—”
    “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Bakhtiar, the investigator in charge. Information about your sister is badly needed. Your mother is overwrought and not responding. It’s essential that you answer for her.”
    Farah Taleqani raised the rope above her head.
    “Without your cooperation,” Darius said gently, “it will be that much harder to find the killer.”
    “I can’t help.”
    “Tell us about the last time you saw Tahera. Start there.”
    “Very well.” The young woman paused to calculate her words. “It was three years ago next month. Tahera was at school, and she told her girlfriends that she had dreamed she saw the Imam without clothes. It was a joke. That night, the Komiteh came to our house and took her away. For questioning, they said. We never saw her afterward.”
    “Where was she?”
    “Tahera was tortured to death. Word reached us from the prison.”
    “Impossible. She died tonight.”
    Farah Taleqani stared at him with her mother’s vacant eyes. “This girl is not Tahera.”
    “But Mrs. Taleqani—”
    “My mother has spent three years searching the city for her daughter. Each day she goes into the streets to look, always to look. It is not the first time she has found someone else’s