“There are other drugs besides…”

“No. I want to go home.” She sat up in the bed, clumsy with the residue of the seizure and the dream, if it had been a dream. Things still looked strange, the little speckled lights were still flashing, and the doctor’s face looked transparent-no, not exactly transparent, Jenny thought, but like she could see through the mask that she wore in the way that everyone wore a mask, and see her true feelings. The doctor was frightened, she observed, really scared behind the cool veneer. The man and the little girl were absent.

Jenny looked around the small room. “Can I have my clothes?”

“You don’t have any clothes. You were brought in here completely naked. You’d apparently been walking up Dixie Highway that way.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. Well, could you get me some?” Giving her measurements in a rush. “And some flip-flops? I could pay you back, or somebody…”

“You’d be leaving against medical advice. You’d have to sign a form.”

“That’s cool.”

“And the police would like to talk to you,” said Lola. She felt a certain satisfaction at the look on the silly girl’s face when she said this, and immediately found herself cringing with guilt. It is not pleasant for those in the helping professions to have their help spurned, and more often than is supposed, they get even.

“I’ll get some clothes for you,” said Lola the Sucker, and bustled out.

In the hall she found Tito Morales talking with her husband. “She’s all yours,” Lola said and went to the nurses’ station to sign out for an hour of personal time.

“You want in on this?” asked Morales.

“Would it help?”

“I guess. I don’t know,mano, this fucking case…did I tell you they had to let all the Colombians go?”

“No. How the hell didthat happen?”

“Garza and Ibanez. They swore up and down that these bastards were all bona fide Mexican businessmen. They showed good Mexican paper and smiled a lot. Meanwhile the federal judge and the assistant U.S. attorney are both Cubans, Garza and Ibanez are both generous contributors to the party all Cubans love, and the rest is history. We got absolutely nothing to hang a local warrant on, so it’shasta la vista, mis amigos, write when you get back to Cali.”

“What if they’re really businessmen?”

Morales gave him an eye roll. “Oh, right! Listen, you didn’t see any of them. You know how you just know when someone’s wrong? Well, thesecabrones were as wrong as it gets. The feds were chewing pencils and running around in little circles.”

“What about Hurtado. Don’t they know whathe looks like?”

“Of course, but that’s a whole different game. Everyone knows Hurtado is a drug lord, but no one’s ever been able to pin anything on him. The reward is for information leading to arrest and conviction, but there’s no such info. He’s laundered right up to the nipples. Yet another respectable businessman and our Cubans vouch for him, too. Meanwhile, I’m hoping this girl will help us out on the murder-kidnap.”

This the girl did, to an extent. She did not recognize the photos she was shown of the men arrested on Fisher Island, and her descriptions of the three men who had killed Kevin Voss and kidnapped her did not match anyone in whom the police had a current interest. But she recalled where she had been held and its approximate location.

“How did you escape?” asked Paz after she had explained how she had been bound.

“It was hot in there and the tape around one of my wrists was loose enough so I could drag my hand out and there were some tools I could reach. I used a utility knife to cut through the rest of the tape.”

“What were the kidnappers doing while this was going on?”

“They were…they left for a while,” she lied. Paz saw the lie but declined to call her on it. He left then and hung around with Amelia at the nurses’ station until Lola returned, with a don’t-ask look on her face and a Target shopping bag in her mitt. She vanished into Jenny Simpson’s room. Shortly thereafter, Robert Zwick rolled by in a wheelchair, hoisting a cane.

“Still got the foot, I see,” said Paz. “Are you comfortably medicated?”

“Barely. Are you going to drive me home?”

“It might be a while. I have to check out something to do with a police case. The mystic jaguar we were talking about.”

“Can I come along?”

“You want to? I’ll ask.”

Morales was talking on his cell phone. Paz called out, “Hey, Tito, Zwick wants to come on this run with us.”

“No,” said Morales.

“He’s the world’s smartest man. He could be a big help if there are any subtle clues.”

“No,” said Morales and continued his conversation into the cell phone.

“That means yes,” said Paz.

Morales detailed a couple of Miami cops to keep an eye on the hospital, and on Jenny Simpson, and then he took Paz and Zwick along in his car and they drove down to the place the girl had described, a blocky buff-colored building south of Dixie near Eighty-second Street with a largeFOR LET sign in front. The corrugated steel doors that led to the repair bay of the garage were down and locked, but the door of the garage office had been left open, and even from outside they could hear the insistent nasty buzz that signaled woe in South Florida, and caught a whiff of the sweetish heavy odor that went with it. In the office the TV was still crackling out a snowy image, apparently ofJeopardy!, and they passed through to the service bay. Morales found the light switch.

It was like looking at the defective television, so thick were the swarming flies feeding on the blood and the red meat strewn on the floor, although they could not actually see the meat very well because of the giant cockroaches that covered the body and its severed lumps. When the light went on, hundreds of these took to the air in a crackle of chitinous wings. The three men crouched and waved their arms instinctively, ridiculously, and Zwick spun and exited at a remarkably fast hobble. They could hear him being sick outside.

“At least he didn’t puke up the scene,” said Morales sourly. He flicked a giant cockroach casually off his sleeve. People who refuse to have giant flying roaches crawling on them do not long survive as Miami homicide detectives. “Christ, it looks like…what is that down there, a chunk out of this one or is it another guy?”

“Another guy, I think. Let’s go see.”

Morales led the way, waving his hand continuously before his face to ward off the flies, like a band conductor in hell.

Paz said, “Let’s see your flashlight, this looks like something…”

Morales handed over a powerful miniature Kel-Light and Paz directed it at the floor. “We’ve seen those footprints before, right, Tito? Your imposters must’ve had a whole collection of jaguar paws.” Paz directed the beam at a scatter of glass on the floor and then up to the dim skylight. “He broke out the pane and dropped through. What is that, a twenty-inch pane, would you say? A small guy could’ve dropped through there and…yeah, here, check this out, barefoot prints in the dust. He dropped down and someone must have spotted him because, following these footprints, he ducked behind this parts cabinet and…”

“Shine it over here, will you?” said Morales. He was squatting near a substantial pattern of dried blood-spatter. In the beam that Paz now provided it was clear that an angular object about the size and approximate shape of a carpenter’s try square, or a semiautomatic pistol, had lain in that spot when the blood had been squirted on the floor. The negative shape was clear, like the patterns of leaves that kindergarteners make on paper with toothbrushes dipped in water paints.

“The killer picked up the gun,” said Morales. “Look, there’s the mark of a shoe, a partial heel there.”

“So you think the guy who gutted these two boys was being, what,tidy?”