The Art of Political Murder. Francisco Goldman

the plastic ball the dog had obligingly fetched for prosecutors at the parish house a month before. A transparent laminated sheet had been laid over one of the photographs on the table, which showed Gerardi’s skull. The locations of the four puncture wounds had been circled with a black marker. The forensics specialist set the plaster cast down on the transparent sheet, and the points of the teeth fit precisely over the arc of four tiny circles marking the wounds. A crushingly convincing presentation!

      But there was even more proof, and there were more photographs. The puncture-like wounds at the base of the bishop’s index finger and on his thumb were also explained as a dog bite. The four parallel streaks on the bishop’s neck had been caused by Baloo’s claws. Some muddy smears on the bishop’s jeans had been left by the dog’s paws. A chest-high condensation of bloodstains on the inside of the bishop’s jacket had been formed by the weight of the dog’s front legs and paws. On and on it went. Then the psychologist spoke: the priest had an infantile personality, he reported, and was overly dependent on his mother.

      Mario Domingo and Nery Rodenas, the two lawyers from ODHA, sat listening to the prosecution’s presentation, incredulous and downcast. Rodenas asked Otto Ardón when he had first begun to suspect the dog. “Don’t believe it was just my idea,” Ardón replied. He gestured toward his secretary, Noemi, a skinny, large-breasted young woman in a miniskirt. “She was the first to say, ‘Look, licenciado, I think these are dog bites.’” Just the other day, Ardón related, Noemi had had a dream in which she came to a fork in a dirt path and a man wearing a priest’s black cassock, but lacking a face, appeared to her and said, “Go on, go on, you’re on the right path.”