“Marino?”

He comes to and looks at Scarpetta at the same time he realizes his cell phone is buzzing.

“Yeah,” he answers.

“Detective Wagner here.”

“Investigator Pete Marino,” he says, as if he doesn’t know her.

“What do you need, Investigator Pete Marino.” She sounds as if she doesn’t know him, either.

“I understand you got a family that’s disappeared from theWestLakearea. Apparently last Thursday night.”

“How did you hear about that?”

“Apparently there’s some concern foul play might be involved. And the word is you aren’t being very helpful.”

“We’d be investigating the hell out of it if we thought there was anything to it. What’s the source of your information?”

“A lady from their church. You got the names of these people who supposedly have vanished?”

“Let me think. They’re kind of odd names, Eva Christian and Crystal or Christine Christian. Something like that. I can’t think of the boys’ names.”

“Could you mean Christian Christian?”

Scarpetta and Marino look at each other.

“Something a whole lot like that. I don’t have my notes in front of me. You want to look into it, be my guest. My department’s not going to devote a lot of resources to something when there’s absolutely no evidence…”

“I got that part,” Marino says rudely. “Supposedly the church is going to start packing up that house tomorrow and if we’re gonna take a look, now’s the time.”

“They’ve not even been gone for a week and the church is already packing up the house? Sounds to me they know they’ve skipped town and aren’t coming back. What’s it sound like to you?”

“Sounds like we ought to make sure,” Marino says.

The manbehind the counter is older and more distinguished than Lucy imagined. She expected someone who looks like a has-been surfer, someone leathery and covered in tattoos. That’s the sort of person who ought to be working in a shop called Beach Bums.

She sets down a camera case, and her fingers flutter through big, loud shirts printed with sharks, flowers, palm trees and other tropical designs. She peruses stacks of straw hats and bins of flip-flops and displays of sunglasses and lotions, not interested in buying any of it but wishing she were. For a moment she browses, waiting for two other customers to leave. She wonders how it would feel to be like everybody else, to care about souvenirs and gaudy things to wear and days in the sun, to feel good about the way she looks half-naked in a swimsuit.

“You got any of that stuff with zinc oxide in it?” one of the customers is asking Larry, who is seated behind the counter.

He has thick, white hair and a neatly trimmed beard, is sixty-two, was born inAlaska, drives a Jeep, has never owned a home, didn’t go to college and in 1957 was arrested for drunk and disorderly. Larry has managed Beach Bums for about two years.

“Nobody likes that anymore,” he is telling the customer.

“I do. It doesn’t break out my skin like all these other lotions. I think I’m allergic to aloe.”

“These sunblocks don’t have aloe.”

“You carry Maui Jim’s?”

“Too expensive, my dear. The only sunglasses we got are the ones you’re looking at.”

This goes on for a while, both customers making minor purchases, finally leaving. Lucy wanders up to the counter.

“Can I help you with something?” Larry asks, looking at the way she is dressed. “Where’d you just come from, a Mission Impossible movie?”

“I rode my motorcycle here.”

“Well, you’re one of the few with any sense. Look out the window. Every one of them in shorts and T-shirts, no helmet. Some of them in flip-flops.”

“You must be Larry.”

He looks surprised and says, “You been in here before? I don’t remember you, and I’m pretty good with faces.”

“I’d like to talk to you about Florrie and Helen Quincy,” she says. “But I need you to lock the door.”

The Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Deuce with its flames over blue paint and chrome is parked in a far corner of the faculty lot, and as Marino gets closer to it, he picks up his pace.

“Goddamn son of a bitch.” He starts to run.

He yells his obscenities loudly enough for Link the maintenance man, who is weeding a flower bed, to stop what he is doing and jump to his feet. “You all right over there?”

“Fucking motherfucker!” Marino yells.

The front tire of his new bike is flat. Flat all the way down to the shiny chrome rim. Marino gets down to look at the tire, upset and furious, looks for a nail or a screw, anything sharp he might have picked up on his ride in to work this morning. He rolls the bike backward and forward and discovers the puncture. It is about an eighth of an inch cut that appears to have been made with something sharp and strong, possibly a knife.

Possibly a stainless-steel surgical knife, and his eyes dart around, looking for Joe Amos.

“Yeah, I was noticing that,” Link says, walking toward him, wiping his dirty hands on his blue coveralls.

“Nice of you to let me know,” Marino says angrily as he angrily digs through a saddlebag for his tire-plug kit as he angrily thinks of Joe Amos, getting angrier with each thought.

“Must have picked up a nail somewhere,” Link supposes, getting down for a closer inspection. “That looks bad.”

“You see anybody around here looking at my bike? Where the hell’s my tire-plug kit?”

“I’ve been right here all day and haven’t seen anyone anywhere near your bike. It’s quite a bike. What? About fourteen hundred CCs? I used to have a Springer until some no-nuts pulled in front of me and I ended up flying over his hood. I started working on the flower beds around ten this morning. The tire was already flat by then.”

Marino thinks back. He got here between nine-fifteen and nine-thirty.

“A puncture like this and the tire would have gone flat so fast I’d never gotten it into the damn lot and it sure as hell wasn’t flat when I stopped to get donuts,” he says. “It had to have happened after I parked in here.”

“Well, I don’t like the sound of it.”

Marino looks around, thinking about Joe Amos. He’ll kill him. If he touched his bike, he’s dead.

“I hate to think it,” Link is saying. “Awfully bold to come right into this lot in the middle of the morning and do something like that. If that’s what happened.”

“Goddamn it, where is it?” Marino says, going through the other saddlebag. “You got anything to plug this thing? Shit! What the hell.” He quits rummaging. “Probably not going to work anyway, not with a hole this big, damn it!”

He’s going to have to change the tire. There are extra ones in the hangar.

“What about Joe Amos? You seen him? You seen his ugly ass anywhere within a mile of here?”

“No.”

“None of the students?”

The students hate him. Every one of them does.

“No,” Link says. “I would have noticed if someone went into this lot and started fooling with your bike or any of the cars.”

“Nobody?” Marino keeps pushing, then entertains the suspicion that maybe Link had something to do with it.

Probably nobody at the Academy likes Marino. Probably half the world is jealous of his tricked-out Harley. He certainly gets enough people staring at it, following him into gas stations and rest stops to get a better look.

“You’re going to have to roll it to the garage down there by the hangar,” Link says, “unless we want to get it on one of those trailers Lucy uses for all those new V-Rods of hers.”

Marino thinks about the gates at both the back and front entrances of the Academy grounds. No one can get in without a code. It had to be an inside job. He thinks about Joe Amos again and realizes an important fact. Joe was in staff meeting. He was already sitting in there, shooting off his big mouth, when Marino showed up.