Carmen Reyes · Bloodline

Bloodline

A Carmen Reyes Investigation

A child laid out in a dry riverbed at first light, ringed by stones in a circle deliberately left open to the sea. Carmen Reyes knows at once that this is not a beginning — and the thread she pulls runs back four generations, into her own family.

20 chapters · 67,636 words · Chapter One free for everyone, the rest for full-access readers

A note on this book: it deals with the murder of children. The violence itself is kept off the page — nothing here goes beyond what the story needs to be told honestly.

1. 01Chapter OneThe call came in at 5:52 a.m., before the heat had built and while the town still had the grey, unfinished look of a place that hadn't decided yet what kind of day it was going to be.
2. 02Chapter TwoBy the time Carmen got back to the comisaría it was gone one in the afternoon, and the building had the particular charged quiet of a place holding its breath — phones still ringing at the ordinary…
3. 03Chapter ThreeThe call came on the fourth day, at 6:14 in the morning, and Carmen knew before she'd finished reading the message on her phone — a single line from the night duty officer, second one, similar…
4. 04Chapter FourThe days between the second body and the Sunday meal went the way the worst stretches of a case always went — not toward clarity but toward a kind of exhausted, grinding sideways motion, dozens of…
5. 05Chapter FiveThe first letter was the shortest, and the least damaged, and Carmen read it aloud slowly, translating the older, formal cadence of the handwriting into something closer to how she'd have spoken it…
6. 06Chapter SixCarmen didn't sleep. She sat at her own kitchen table until past two in the morning with the letters spread in front of her under a lamp turned as bright as it would go, reading them through a fourth…
7. 07Chapter SevenThe path, if it had ever properly been one, had mostly returned to the hillside. What remained was a suggestion rather than a track — a slightly less overgrown seam threading between wild olive and…
8. 08Chapter EightThe forensic team went up to Valdenoche at first light, six of them in two vehicles that could only make it as far as the same rough turning where Carmen and Alex had parked the day before, the rest…
9. 09Chapter NineThe document specialist arrived from Málaga on the ninth morning of the case, a precise, soft-spoken man named Doctor Ferrán Aguirre who worked, Carmen had been told, primarily with the provincial…
10. 10Chapter TenAlex was still at his desk when Carmen arrived the next morning, unshaven, a second empty coffee cup pushed to one side of a desk that had, overnight, accumulated the particular controlled chaos of a…
11. 11Chapter ElevenReguero's overnight report was waiting on Carmen's desk when she arrived a little before seven, three pages of careful, timestamped observation that she read twice before allowing herself to feel…
12. 12Chapter TwelveSolano called before eight the following morning, earlier than her usual updates, and Carmen felt the particular lurch of dread that had become automatic whenever her phone rang before a reasonable…
13. 13Chapter ThirteenThey put Rafael in the smaller of the comisaría's two interview rooms, the one with the softer lighting and the table bolted to the floor rather than the more clinical room reserved for suspects…
14. 14Chapter FourteenThe briefing ran longer than twenty minutes, stretching past midnight as Ortiz assembled everything the comisaría could bring to bear on a single name — surveillance teams reassigned from Rafael's…
15. 15Chapter FifteenSolano had the notebook photographed, page by page, within two hours of its arrival at the comisaría, and by early afternoon Carmen and Alex sat together in the incident room with a printed, enlarged…
16. 16Chapter SixteenCarmen requested the meeting with Padre Cortés carefully, through the diocesan office rather than calling him directly, wanting a paper trail of the request itself in case the conversation went…
17. 17Chapter SeventeenCarmen drove back from Madrid through the night, arriving at the comisaría a little before dawn with Marisa's statement recorded, transcribed, and sitting now in a folder on the seat beside her that…
18. 18Chapter EighteenThree weeks passed before the case reached anything resembling a formal shape, the specific slow grinding of legal process replacing the frantic urgency of the preceding seventeen days with a…
19. 19Chapter NineteenCarmen returned to Valdenoche one final time, alone, on a grey morning nearly a month after Emilio's arrest, climbing the same faint path through thorn and wild olive that had, across this case, come…
20. 20EpilogueIt was nearly a week later that Teresa called, her voice carrying the same careful note it had the night of the family dinner. "There's one more item. In the tin box — I didn't mention it before…