Paseo Monte Carlo, a quiet road with no lights. Their first stop was a large vacant lot overrun by low shrubs, a green carpet of vines, and a scattering of banana trees.

The field wasn’t an official pickup spot, but local residents often dumped garbage there, and the collectors had informally added it to their route. That morning there was a small pile of trash spilling into the road: two large bags filled with waste and a bulging, rolled-up bedspread. Jimena, a small, wiry man with jet-black hair and a wisp of a mustache, hopped off the truck and approached the pile. When he leaned down and grasped the damp edge of the blanket, he saw a woman’s foot sticking out.

Jimena dropped the blanket and ran, shouting to the driver, and the two of them abandoned the truck and sprinted to the munici- pal headquarters. There they told the local head of security what they had found, and he called the police. Jimena returned to his route in a daze.

He never spoke to the police himself, and never learned who the woman was. When I met him four years later, I didn’t tell him what I knew: That her name was Catherine Lee, and she had been an accomplished real estate agent with a husband and a child. That she’d been shot below each eye with a .22-caliber pistol, rolled up in a blanket, and dumped out of a van. That somehow, her death connected back to a pharmacist in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a warehouse raid in Hong Kong, a wrecked boat in Tonga.

Jimena didn’t seem to want to know those details anyway. Mostly he just seemed to want to forget. For years, he told me, he dreamed of her every night. The woman, wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes she would be asking him for help. Other times she would just scream.

So much of reporting, it took me a long time to discover, is wait- ing. Waiting for people to call back. Waiting for documents to ar- rive in the mail. Waiting for a plane to take you halfway across the world, only to arrive at the appointed time in a dreary office and