Rosalba Quiñones

Rosalba Quiñones is 44 and for twelve years has guarded the building's staff entrance. Born in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Mexican parents who came to pick cotton, she moved to California at 20 with her husband, who left in the third year. She stayed with two children, a sewing machine and the determination not to depend on anyone. She speaks little, with the precision of someone who writes everything down, and distrusts those who talk too much.

She lives in a green-painted wooden house in a hilly neighborhood on the east side, with a yellow kitchen where the children do their homework at the Formica table and a plaster saint on the windowsill. On the fridge hangs a calendar marked in pencil with the month's shifts. She hems uniforms for neighbors on Sundays to make ends meet and says a city salary is like a short blanket: it covers either the feet or the shoulders.

She is short and sturdy, with a round, firm face, black hair in a tight bun and impeccable wine-red lipstick. She wears the gray guard uniform with the city badge on the chest, a belt with a large key ring and a flashlight, and polished black shoes. She walks with short, firm steps, observes others from below and always finds the exact time on her watch to state.

About her shift, her account is that of a shift worker: from 7 to 3, she checks badges, searches bags at the exit and keeps the basement vault logbook. When the alarm rang, she says, she went up the service stairs to level 3. The section heads and the director are the ones with the key to the fire doors, guards don't have one, and she never had the key to that one. With the building full of service stairs and windowless iron corridors, nobody can say for certain where each person was at 10:52.

Rosalba knows the entrance guard is the kind of name an investigation writes in pencil and then goes over in ink. When the detective suggests she opened the door for the arsonist, her voice turns dry and she asks him to choose his words better. It could be the honor of a woman who went twelve years without a single absence. It could be someone who weighs every sentence because she knows what a misplaced word costs. The detective will have to decide which.