PROLOGUE

sit in a plastic chair, waiting for an official who never shows up. Standing on a doorstep, waiting to see if a victim's family will re- turn. Sending out pleas for information and staring at a phone, waiting for them to boomerang back. All of it, in some sense, amounts to waiting for the same thing: that one sliver of fact that will help make sense of all the ones that came before it.

In December 2015, when I flew to the Philippines to try to un- tangle the connections behind Catherine Lee's still-unsolved mur- der, I discovered entirely new magnitudes of waiting. Much of it I did in a rented van, with a Filipina American journalist I'd enlisted to assist me, Aurora Almendral. The two of us were stuck in the grip of Manila's endless traffic, crawling to appointments that would inevitably involve more waiting once we arrived. So it was that one afternoon, a few weeks before Christmas, we pulled up to a neglected cinder-block building on a steep hill in the town of Taytay. We'd been told this was the investigative division of the local police. We walked in, past a woman stapling paper holiday decorations to the wall, through a pair of swinging doors, and into a cramped room with four desks. An air conditioner rattled in the window and three detectives pecked away on ancient-looking com- puters.

We tried to rouse one of them and explain the reason we were there: to visit the vacant lot where Jeremy Jimena had encountered Catherine Lee's body. The chief of police had promised, over the phone, to take us there, but that morning he'd been called away by a kidnapping. The other cops had no idea when he would return. No one claimed to know much about the body, and in the years since the murder, those people who did know something had tended to disappear. Some murders, perhaps, were better left un- solved.

So Almendral and I settled in to wait, sitting on a bench in front of a framed police “Loyalty Pledge” that hung on the wall. “Re- member that an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness,” it read in English.