“How do I know you aren’t a reporter or something?”

“I’m former FBI, former ATF. You ever heard of theNationalForensicAcademy?”

“That big training camp out there in theEverglades?”

“It’s not exactly in theEverglades. We have private labs and experts and an agreement with most of the police departments inFlorida. We help them out as needed.”

“Sounds expensive. Let me guess, taxpayers like me.”

“Indirectly. Grants, quid pro quo-services for services. They help us, we train them. All sorts of things.”

She reaches into a back pocket and works out a black wallet and hands it to him. He studies her credentials, a fake ID, an investigator shield that isn’t worth the brass it’s made from because it’s also fake.

“There’s no picture on it,” he says.

“It’s not a driver’s license.”

He reads her fictitious name out loud, reads that she’s Special Operations.

“That’s right.”

“Well, if you say so.” He hands the wallet back to her.

“Tell me what you’ve heard,” Lucy says, setting the video camera on top of the counter.

She looks at the locked front door, at a young couple in skimpy swimsuits trying to open it.

They peer through the glass and Larry shakes his head. No, he’s not open.

“You’re losing me business,” he says to Lucy, but he doesn’t seem to care very much. “When I had a chance to take over this space, I got quite an earful about theQuincysdisappearing. The story I heard is she always got here at seven-thirty in the morning so she could get the little electric trains running on their tracks and light up the trees, turn on the Christmas music and do all this other stuff. It appears she never opened up that day. The closed sign was still on the door when her son finally got worried and came looking for her and the daughter.”

Lucy reaches inside a pocket of her cargo pants and removes a black ballpoint pen from the holder of a concealed tape recorder. She slips out a small notebook.

“Mind if I take a few notes?” she asks.

“Don’t take everything I say as gospel. I wasn’t here when it happened, just passing along what I’ve been told.”

“I understand Mrs. Quincy called in a take-out order,” Lucy says. “There was something in the paper about it.”

“At the Floridian, that old diner on the other side of the drawbridge. A pretty nifty place, if you’ve never eaten there. It’s my understanding she didn’t call it in, didn’t need to. They always had the same thing ready for her. A tuna plate.”

“Something for the daughter, too? Helen?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Mrs. Quincy usually pick it up herself?”

“Unless her son was in the area. He’s one of the reasons I know a few things about what happened.”

“I’d like to talk to him.”

“I haven’t seen him in a year. For a while early on, I did. He would drop by, look around, chat. I guess you could say he was obsessed for maybe the first year after they disappeared. Then, it’s my opinion, he couldn’t bear to think about it. He lives in a real nice house inHollywood.”

Lucy looks around the store.

“There’s no Christmas stuff here,” Larry says, in case that’s what she is wondering.

She doesn’t ask anything about Mrs. Quincy’s son, Fred. She already knows from HIT that Fred Anderson Quincy is twenty-six years old. She knows his address and that he’s self-employed, into computer graphics, a Web designer. Larry goes on to say that on the day Mrs. Quincy and Helen disappeared, Fred tried numerous times to reach them and finally drove to the shop and found it closed, his mother’s Audi still parked in back.

“We’re sure they actually had unlocked the shop that morning?” Lucy asks. “Any possibility something happened to them after they got out of the car?”

“I suppose anything’s possible.”

“Were Mrs. Quincy’s pocketbook, her car keys, inside the shop? Had she made coffee, used the phone, done anything at all that might indicate she and Helen had been there? For example, were the trees lit up, the toy trains running? Was there Christmas music playing? Were the shop lights on?”

“I heard they never did find her pocketbook and car keys. I’ve heard different stories about things being turned on inside the shop. Some say they were. Others say they weren’t.”

Lucy’s attention wanders to the doorway in the back of the store. She thinks about what Basil Jenrette toldBenton. She doesn’t see how it’s possible that Basil raped and murdered anybody in the storage area. It’s hard to believe he could clean up and remove the body from the shop, place it in a car and drive off without being seen. It was daylight. It is a populated area, even during the off-season of July, and such a scenario certainly wouldn’t explain what happened to the daughter unless he abducted her, perhaps killed her elsewhere, as he did to his other victims. A gruesome thought. A seventeen-year-old girl.

“What happened to this place after they disappeared?” Lucy asks. “Did it reopen?”

“Nope. Wasn’t much of a market for Christmas stuff anyway. You ask me, it was more an eccentric hobby of hers than anything else. Her shop never reopened, and her son cleared out the merchandise a month or two after they disappeared. Beach Bums moved in that September and hired me.”

“I’d like to take a look in back,” Lucy says. “Then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Hog pulls down two more oranges, then grabs at grapefruits with the claw like basket on the end of the long-handled picker. He looks across the waterway, watching Scarpetta and Detective Wagner walk around the pool.

The detective gestures a lot. Scarpetta takes notes, looking at everything. It gives Hog extreme pleasure to watch the show. Fools. None of them are as smart as they think. He can outsmart all of them, and he smiles as he imagines Marino running a little late, delayed by an unexpected flat tire that could have been remedied easily and quickly by driving here in an Academy vehicle. But not him. He couldn’t stand it, would have to fix it right then. Big, stupid redneck. Hog squats in the grass, breaks down the picker by unscrewing its aluminum segments, tucks them back into the big black nylon bag. The bag is heavy, and he props it on his shoulder like a lumberjack shouldering an ax, like the lumberjack in The Christmas Shop.

He takes his time walking through the yard, toward the tiny white stucco house next door. He sees her rocking on her sun porch, looking through binoculars at the pale orange house on the other side of the waterway. She’s been watching the house for days. How entertaining is that. Hog has been in and out of the pale orange house three times now, and no one has noticed. In and out to remember what happened, to relive it, to take all the time he wants in there. No one can see him. He can make himself disappear.

He enters Mrs. Simister’s yard and begins to examine one of her lime trees. She trains the binoculars on him. In a moment, she opens the slider but doesn’t walk out into the yard. He’s never once seen her in her yard. The yard man comes and goes, but she never leaves the house or speaks to him. Her groceries are delivered, the same man each time. It might be a relative, maybe a son. All he does is carry in the bags. He never stays long. Nobody bothers with her. She should be grateful to Hog. Pretty soon she’ll get plenty of attention. A lot of people will hear about her when she ends up on Dr. Self’s show.

“Leave my trees alone,” Mrs. Simister says loudly with a thick accent. “You people have been out here two times this week and it’s harassment.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’m almost finished up here,” Hog says politely as he pulls a leaf off the lime tree, looks at it.

“Get off my property or I’m calling the police.” Her voice gets more shrill.

She is frightened. She’s angry because she is terrified that she will lose her precious trees, and she will, but by then, it won’t matter. Her trees are infected. They are old trees, at least twenty years old, and they’re ruined. It was easy. Wherever the big orange trucks roll in to cut down canker-infected trees and grind them up, there are leaves on the road. He picks them up, tears them, puts them in water and watches the bacteria stream up like tiny bubbles. He fills a syringe, the one God gave him.