“Even the cougar.”

“Mr. Reddman bought it from the farmer who killed it. We’ve tried to remove it but Mr. Shaw won’t allow us.”

“And the painting of Faith Reddman Shaw?”

“Mr. Reddman commissioned it, a portrait of his only surviving daughter.”

“What was he like, this Claudius Reddman?”

“A hard man, Mr. Carl. Even in his last years, when he dedicated himself fully to philanthropy, he was hard. Do you know what his last words were?”

“No.”

“At the end it was his lungs that rotted out. Tumors the size of frogs, I was told. The doctors kept him delirious on morphine to hide the pain. That last night, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she made sure I was there, to run for whatever the nurses needed. He was crying and shouting out and had to be restrained with leather straps. And the final thing he said before he shivered into death was, ‘It was only business.’ ”

Nat laughed at that, and turned back to his hedges, opening the shears and clipping off two shoots of green at once.

It was only business. I wondered if that would satisfy the Pooles for whatever injustices by Claudius Reddman they believed shattered their world. Well, whatever price was paid by the Pooles, it was being paid by the Reddmans too. After what had happened to Kingsley, it seemed like overkill to go after the heirs.

I had an uneasy feeling driving down out of the Main Line, back to the city along the expressway. Kingsley Shaw had said his mother was still alive and it was she who was killing his children, but as he said it he seemed to show no overt sadness over the death of his son, or of his daughter six months before, and he seemed to have no worries for Caroline or Bobby. He said his mother was alive and killing his children and still he was begging me to take him to her. Was her spirit still alive? Could she somehow be responsible? I remembered the way I bounced off the walls when I had first seen Hitchcock’s Psycho and I wondered if somehow Kingsley was bringing this tragedy down around himself, all in the name of his mother. I could see him in that room, in his wheelchair, wearing a black dress and black bonnet, a knife in his hand, screeching music in the background. I resolved on the Schuylkill Expressway, passing the very spot where Raffaello’s Cadillac had been ambushed with me inside, I resolved then and there to never ever take a shower at Veritas.

It was late afternoon already when I parked my car on Spruce Street and walked up the stairs to my apartment and found Caroline Shaw waiting for me. I went to her and put my arms around her and told her that her brother Edward had been murdered.

San Ignacio , Belize

SAN IGNACIO IS A BEAT OLD frontier town, the capital of Belize ’s wild west and the gateway to Guatemala. Its narrow streets, crowded with colorfully stuccoed buildings and lined with open sewers, wind haphazardly up the sharp hillside on which it has grown. It is a city built for logging and the gathering of the sap of the sapodilla tree, which is processed into chewing gum, and though chewing gum is now largely synthetic and logging no longer takes place, the city still has the feel of a logging town, unpredictable and good-natured.

I am staying at the San Ignacio Hotel, just down the hill from a set of Mayan ruins with the comforting name of Cahel Pech, which means the place of ticks. My hotel is an old colonial outpost with a fine swimming pool. From the balcony of my room I can see the thick jungle that chokes the hills surrounding the city. I sit on the balcony and stare at the wild green of the jungle and wonder what the man I am seeking is doing right now, wonder how much he is enjoying his wealth in this tropical swelter. He has a fortune at his disposal, the whole of the Wergeld Trust, as he so brazenly let me know by the name on his account at the Belize Bank, but instead of hiding out in Paris or Rome or on a boat docked alongside a hidden cay in the Caribbean, he has come to the jungle. It was wise of him, I guess, in planning for his infinite future, to try to grow accustomed to the heat.

I am close to him now, closer than I truly believed I would find myself when I left the United States for this country. I felt his proximity on the top of El Castillo in the ancient Mayan ruins of Xunantunich and went out to confirm it on the streets of San Ignacio. The Belize Bank branch on Burns Avenue was a whitewashed building, trimmed in turquoise, just across from the New Lucky Chinese restaurant. While Canek Panti waited outside, I spoke to the assistant branch manager on the second floor. I like assistant branch managers, they are usually so willing to please without wanting to disturb their bosses, but this one was no help. “I am unable by law to tell you anything about that account, sir,” he said, and no importuning, no playacting, no flashed American dollars would change his mind. I was puzzled that no one in the bank recognized the picture, but then, I figured, he had had a servant do his banking. He must trust his servant an awful lot if he trusted his servant to do his banking.

We checked out a joint called Eva’s on the main strip of the city, a blue-painted shack, where, Canek told me, foreign travelers and expatriots congregate. I sat at a table under a slowly spinning fan and ordered a black bean soup called chilmoles and a beer. The Belikin was good and cold and the soup was good and hot, loaded with stewed chicken, a white hard-boiled egg bobbing on the surface, and the owner of the place, an expat Englishman named Bob, was talkative. He tried to book me on a river trip or in a tourist lodge in the jungle, but all I wanted to know was if he had seen the man in the photograph. “Never,” he said, “and most of the visitors who come through town end up stopping here.”

“Any word,” I asked, “of a foreigner who has set up a ranch in the jungles nearby?”

“Not someone who hasn’t come through here. Most of the ranch owners take lodgers and use us to help book their places. But it’s a big jungle, mate. If you wanted to get lost you’d have no problem getting lost here.”

After Eva’s, Canek left to make arrangements to stay with people he had in the area. I had hired him as my guide, at ninety-five dollars a day for as long as I was in the west, and he seemed pleased by the arrangement, as was I. A friend in foreign places is rare, and one you can trust, as I trust Canek Panti, is even rarer. And who better to guide me through these jungles than a Mayan? Alone now, I took a walk around town. There were few beggars in San Ignacio, no one on the street trying to peddle me dope, and I enjoyed the walk despite the heat. I showed my photograph to storekeepers, to passersby, to the old folk sitting in the town circle at the mouth of the bridge, but no one recognized the man I am hunting. I asked the mobs of taxi drivers I saw on every corner with no better luck. I even thought to check out the waiters at my hotel. There is a restaurant overlooking the pool and it is a rather nice place that is rumored to serve the best steaks in Belize and if someone wanted to slip out of the jungle for a cocktail and a hearty meal this is where he would slip, but they all examined the picture, one after another, and shook their heads.

While on my walk, a car with speakers on top trailed a huge colorful placard through the city’s streets. The placard was advertising the Circus Suarez, in town for one night only, with its prime attraction: “7 Osos Blancos Gigantes.” The lady at the hotel told me that people were coming from all over the Cayo to see the circus and that children were being asked to bring in stray dogs to feed the seven polar bears. The circus tent was raised just up the hill from my hotel and I walked the grounds before the circus was to start, searching the waiting mob for the face of a killer. I searched until the crowd surged madly through the tiny entrance of the tent. I didn’t go in myself. I felt enough out of place in Belize as it was; I didn’t need to see seven polar bears doing tricks in the heat of Central America.