XIII.

For the next five days, Maria refused to leave Roy’s side at Clínica Vesalio, one of Peru’s top hospitals. She questioned the nurses and doctors and tried to help Roy understand what was going on. One doctor told him that he had a hole in his heart, as if it had “exploded.” His health had failed him again, but this time, he had a woman committed to keeping him alive. Maria sat beside his bed at night, reciting Our Father over and over and begging God to save Roy. “He is a good person,” she prayed.

Their relationship had taken a turn. Roy now depended on her to bring him water, help him stand, for almost everything. Most of the women in Roy’s life had left when he got sick; his last serious relationship ended when the lady refused to visit him in the hospital after a hip surgery. Maria was different. She was still there.

“Thank God I have you,” he rasped.

But as grateful as he was to have her with him, he started to feel something else. For years, he’d lived alone and prided himself on his toughness. Now, when she tried to help him up, he found himself snapping at her. He liked playing the hero, not having her see him weak and wounded. Even if he needed it, he didn’t want to be cared for. What he wanted to do was regain his strength, right in front of her eyes, and return to the case.

Maria didn’t care if Roy wasn’t the fearsome warrior he continued to imagine himself to be. “You should rest,” she said time and again. The gold didn’t matter. The case didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was alive and they were together.

Roy wasn’t convinced. He wanted to believe that he had done something to save himself and argued that Maria’s fast thinking and constant attention weren’t the only things that had kept him alive in Juliaca. His jade talisman had played a part too. It was missing, most likely lost or left behind in the chaos of their departure, and he believed that it had sacrificed itself to save him.

He quickly found another piece of jade, strung it around his neck, and called Del Castillo. He insisted he was ready to get back to work. “We’ve developed enough from Puno, even though we didn’t finish what my goals were, to carry on the investigation,” Roy told him.

Del Castillo was sympathetic. His faith in Roy appeared to stem in part from the fact that Roy was a complete outsider, especially useful when there was the possibility that people within his own organization were involved in a cover-up. He agreed to let him continue.

Roy started working from the hospital. Maria wasn’t happy about it, but his tenacity was one of the things she admired about him. She also wanted him to be happy, and realized she couldn’t stop him anyway.

From his hospital bed, Roy called Terrazas and asked if he was willing to help find the gold. Terrazas said he was on board—Roy dubbed him El Resentido, the Resentful One, because of Terrazas’s feeling toward his superiors. Terrazas said he’d talk to Jessica, the girlfriend of the area’s commanding officer. He said she knew a lot and, for a price, would be willing to talk. On Tuesday, May 8, Terrazas was set to meet her in Juliaca but she never showed.

That Thursday, the doctors released Roy and told him to take it easy. He did the opposite. When Maria got him back to his apartment, he paid a military intelligence officer to pull Jessica’s national identity card, which had a photo and an address. That’s when Roy got a dumbfounding message from Yaro, the Arruntani security officer who had warned Roy to be careful in the Andes. Yaro wanted Roy to know that he already had talked to Jessica about the missing gold and that she was willing to meet with Roy.

“How the hell does Yaro know Jessica?” Roy asked Maria. She had no idea. It was doubly suspicious because it was the first time anybody in the company voluntarily had called to offer information. Yaro was clearly trying to get between Jessica and Roy. It also suggested that Yaro was making moves at the same time they were.

The next day, Yaro called and asked to have a private conversation with Roy. Maria said she’d have Roy call him back. Roy sensed a trap. He had Maria return Yaro’s call and say that Roy was off the case. He’d rather keep the guy confused and work his other channels to find out what Jessica had to say.

Roy decided to call a meeting with Del Castillo. It was time to explain that people within Del Castillo’s company might be involved in the crime. He was going to have to go after company employees, and for that he needed a green light.

To set a positive tone, Roy bought a massive spread of food. There were mini croissants from a French bakery, sliced Peruvian cheeses, roast beef, turkey, wine, and champagne. He wasn’t entirely sure what a millionaire mining-tycoon expected. “I went whole hog,” he told Maria when he got back from shopping. She laughed at his earnestness; his enthusiasm was endearing, but she was conflicted. She didn’t want him to kill himself for the job, but she also didn’t want him to be crushed if it fell apart.

On the morning of Saturday, May 26, Del Castillo and his assistant Rolando arrived at Roy’s apartment. The assistant took the elevator to Roy’s sixth-floor apartment but Del Castillo hoofed it up the stairs, preferring the exercise even at age seventy-two. Roy was nervous. He still had a rattle in his lungs and worried that Del Castillo wouldn’t want to keep working with someone so beat-up and broken.

Now, with Del Castillo taking a seat, Maria poured tea for everybody and made small talk, something that Roy was never good at in Spanish. Del Castillo seemed at ease and Roy was thankful Maria was there. “She could charm the teeth out of a tiger,” he thought.

Roy gripped a pointer and used it to tap the wall, which he had covered with maps of Juliaca and Puno, as well as photos of the criminals and some of Del Castillo’s employees. “Puno was a win, despite my health,” he said. “I developed informants. I put more pieces in the puzzle; the puzzle is getting clearer.” Roy declared that his investigation had a 90 percent probability of success.

Maria watched him with smile. He was no longer the frail man who she had nursed back to health. He seemed larger-than-life now, an avenging crusader who was going to right every wrong. She didn’t know what Del Castillo was thinking, but she was sold.

Roy explained that his research indicated that someone within Del Castillo’s company had orchestrated the heist. The turncoat had likely coordinated the robbery with the police, who then jailed a bunch of low-level criminals and blamed the theft on them. The gold was still missing because the gang fingered for the crime wasn’t actually running the operation. Roy believed that somebody close to Del Castillo was responsible for the whole thing.

The room was quiet for a second. Del Castillo glanced at Rolando and then got up to look at the connections Roy had drawn between the thieves and Del Castillo’s security team. There were lines connecting photos of Urrutia and Yaro with Jessica and a variety of cops in Juliaca and Puno. There were symbols next to Urrutia and Yaro indicating that they had suspicious backgrounds and a notation indicating that Roy planned to conduct a financial-asset investigation on Urrutia.“I’m ready to go to hell for you,” Roy said, desperate to keep going. “I just need some more running room.”

“Okay, let’s get them,” Del Castillo said.

He seemed to be on board, but it wasn’t especially encouraging that he drank only half a glass of wine before leaving. An enormous amount of food remained on the table. The guy had barely touched it. Roy decided to count it as a win anyway, tossed back a glass of champagne and hugged Maria. He was still in it.

He again picked up the threads of the investigation, but now, in the wake of the meeting, he began to discover how fragile they were. People stopped returning his calls. He couldn’t get a hold of Terrazas, Chuchuyo, or a number of others within Del Castillo’s company. Finally, on Saturday, June 23, he e-mailed Del Castillo to point out that his efforts were being frustrated. “We sincerely believe that there are in your company employees who wish us to fail for various motives,” he wrote.

That weekend, Jessica was arrested. The authorities in Juliaca alleged that she was transporting $120,000 worth of contraband across the Bolivian border and was “the ringleader of one of the principal smuggling rings in Puno,” according to a story published in El Comercio, a national paper. As she was hauled from court, she shouted to a reporter. “Ask the chief of police why he protects his friends,” she demanded.

Maria had been trying for weeks to get permission for Roy to enter Peru’s prisons, but his application had been rejected repeatedly, each time for obscure technical reasons. If Jessica was about to talk, she was now in a place Roy couldn’t reach.

Del Castillo never responded to Roy’s message. Roy believed that he had helped Del Castillo to grasp the corruption around him—from the police to his employees—but Del Castillo cut him off abruptly. From Roy’s point of view, someone inside had gotten nervous and probably worked behind the scenes to shut Roy’s investigation down. The way he saw it, he had become too much of a threat.

Del Castillo offers another explanation. “We never got any results with him,” he now says.