Her destination was a tiny brick bungalow in a neighborhood of tiny brick bungalows. The neighborhood was entirely Mexican-American and it seemed like 90 percent of its population was clustered around this particular house. She had to park her car a couple of blocks away and excuse her way through the crowd until she reached the epicenter.

The center of attention wasn't the house itself; it was a pickup truck parked in its driveway. A yellow Chevy pickup, at least twenty years old, rusted in many places, with a white fiberglass camper cap attached to the back, held on to the box by means of four C-clamps. The truck's tailgate and the rear window of the camper cap was spread open like a pair of jaws to provide a view inside: a couple of bulging Hefty bags filled with clothes, and a flannel sleeping bag, zipped open to expose its colorful lining (mallards in flight over a northern wetland) and spread out flat on the rusted steel floor to soften its corrugations. There were a couple of pillows shoved into the corners and some wadded-up sheets and blankets.

And there were a lot of flowers too. A number of bouquets had been tossed in on top of the sleeping bag. More bunches were leaning against the side of the truck or resting on the roof of the fiberglass cap.

At the very center of the action were two men whom Eleanor recognized. One of them was a tall, good-looking young man in jeans and a blazer. With his black ponytail he could have passed for a full-blooded Apache. This was Ray del Valle. He was talking to a local newspaper reporter who covered the Chicano affairs beat.

Eleanor didn't pay much attention to them. She just made her way through the crowd, trying to suppress a gag reflex that was gradually rising in her throat. She got close enough that she was practically standing in between the two men, staring into the maw of the pickup truck.

Last night, the four children of Carlos and Anna Ramirez had lain down on that sleeping bag to sleep while their parents, sitting up front in the truck's cab, had driven them across the high plains southeast of Denver. They had gone to sleep quickly, and slept well, not because it was cozy but because the back of the truck was full of carbon monoxide leaking from the truck's exhaust. Three of the children had died. One was in the hospital in critical condition, with irreparable brain damage. Carlos and Anna Ramirez had not known what was going on until they had arrived here, early this morning, at the home of Anna's sister.

She knew all these things from her phone conversation with Roger. He had run through the story quickly and tersely and she had listened in much the same spirit, looking at it as a political problem to be solved. But now that she was here in the middle of a sniffling and wailing crowd, looking into the bed where the innocents had died, the emotional impact suddenly hit her like a truck. Eleanor put her hand over her mouth, closed her eyes, and tried to suppress the urge to become physically ill.

"Eleanor," Ray del Valle said, "come on, let's talk somewhere else. You don't want to dwell on this." Eleanor felt Ray's arm tightening around her shoulders. He led her around the truck and into the backyard, gently but surely, like a ballroom dancer leading his date around the floor.

She took the opportunity to rest her head on his chest for just a moment. She didn't exactly cry, though tears were in her eyes.

"It's a hard thing for a parent to look at, isn't it?" Ray said. "It's our worst nightmare come to life. Like an image from the Holocaust."

Eleanor took a half step away from Ray and drew a few deep breaths. "Are the parents inside?" she said.

"Yes. Anna has been sedated. Carlos is drinking a lot and vowing to kill himself. Anna's family is trying to keep him on an even keel. It's very difficult."

"I heard that there is a problem with the surviving child's medical care and I am here to inform the Ramirez family that Senator Marshall is at their service in whatever capacity is needed. Do you think that you could go in and relay that message to them?"

Ray snorted with just the tiniest hint of amusement and glanced down at his wristwatch. "The Senator runs a tight ship. As always."

Ray went into the house and came out a couple of minutes later with Anna's sister Pilar. From a distance Pilar seemed utterly stonefaced, but from arm's length her eyes were swollen and red and she looked stunned, rather than impassive.

"I told her what you said," Ray said. "She has authorized me to explain the child's medical situation."

"Okay."

"When they arrived this morning and found their four children unresponsive, they called the ambulance. Three children were pronounced dead at the scene. The fourth, the eight-year-old girl Bianca, still had a pulse. The ambulance took her straight to Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center."

"Why there?" Highlands was a private hospital, well endowed, certainly not the closest to this bungalow. Not the kind of place where migrant workers ended up.

"Carbon monoxide poisoning was obviously the culprit here. And Highlands has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. It is the best treatment. So that's where they went. The emergency room staff at Highlands treated Bianca but they refused to admit her for hyperbaric oxygen treatment. Instead they dumped her back to Denver County, where she is now."

"How can they justify that?"

Ray just shrugged. "As we say in the Third World, Quién sabe?"

Something clicked in the back of Eleanor's head. Maybe it was her temper breaking. She squared her shoulders and flared her nostrils. "Would you please come with me, Ray?" she said.

"Okay. Where we going?"

Eleanor realized that she didn't even know. "We're just going to take care of a few things, that's all."

The two of them got into Eleanor's car and headed in the direction of Denver County Hospital, were Ray knew some doctors.

"This happens hundreds of times every year," Ray said. "All over North America."

"What happens?"

"Exactly this situation. Remember what a migrant worker is: someone who migrates. These people cover a lot of territory and the vehicle of choice is a pickup truck. It's always the same: the parents sit up front in the cab and the kids lie down in the back and try to sleep. The exhaust comes up through holes in the floor, or else it leaks through the crack under the tailgate. In warm weather they open the windows and survive. But if it's chilly, like it was last night, they close the cab up and suffocate."

"You'd think that they would have gotten some indication before. That their kids would have gotten headaches or felt woozy."

Ray snorted. "If you drove for eight or ten hours in the back of a truck, you'd feel that way even without carbon monoxide."

At the county hospital, Ray tracked down Dr. Escobedo, a young internist who was looking after Bianca. They all sat around a table in the corner of the cafeteria.

"Should Bianca be here, or at Arapahoe Highlands?" Eleanor said.

"At Highlands," Dr. Escobedo said without hesitation, and without rancour.

"Why?"

"They have a hyperbaric oxygen chamber."

"And that is the standard treatment for this kind of thing?"

"Not exactly," he said. "That's the problem."

"What do you mean, not exactly?"

"Well, for example, there are a lot of migrant workers up in Washington State, and this kind of thing has happened up there on a fairly regular basis. Now, there is a hospital in Seattle that has a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, which is basically used to decompress divers with the bends. When you put a patient with carbon monoxide poisoning into such a chamber, it helps get oxygen into their tissues, which is what such a patient needs. So people up there have learned that when an unconscious kid is pulled out of the back of a pickup truck, you send them straight to the one hospital with the hyperbaric chamber. But this is kind of a new practice, and in the eyes of some, it's experimental."