Paz greeted everyone affably, complimented the two chefs, finished his beer.

“Where’ve you been?” asked Lola.

“Out. Could I talk to you for a second?” He indicated with a motion of his head where he wished this conversation to take place. The two of them went to the kitchen, where Paz asked, “What’s she doing here?”

“I brought her home with me. You said the hospital might be dangerous and I wanted to keep her under observation. And she seemed like such a lost soul.”

“Did anyone see you leave with her?”

“I don’t think so. We went out the back way and down to the parking garage. Why?”

“Why? Because the kind of people who’re looking for her, when they remove people, they don’t like to leave witnesses. What’re you going to do if they come here? God, Lola, didn’t youthink?”

“Don’t yell at me! She’s my patient, all right? I was worried about her.”

“You had a zillion patients. You never brought one home before.”

Lola opened her mouth to say something nasty and aggressive. If she did that, she knew there would be a fight and a frosty dinner, with both of them speaking with unnatural calm to the child and not to each other and she didn’t have the emotional energy to endure one of those. So instead of snarling she let the toxic feelings out in a sigh and said what was the simple truth. “I don’t know why, Jimmy. It was just something I thought I had to do. And, you know, I thought of Emmylou Dideroff and how we smuggled her out of the hospital that time. She’s the same kind of…no, not really the same. Emmylou was some sort of genius and this girl, I don’t know, she seems mildly impaired, but there’s something unworldly and helpless about her. I was going to leave and I stopped in to check on her, and she was sitting there with her hands on her knees looking like she didn’t have a friend in the world and I invited her home for dinner and snuck her out. I honestly didn’t think about the danger. What it is, I think I’m beyond scared. I hear that people get that way in combat. Or with the cops. Do they?”

Paz felt his voice get thick. “Yes, they do.”

She said, “If you want, I could drive her back to her place on Ingraham-”

Paz flung his arms around his wife and hugged her. They stayed that way for a long time, so long that both of them felt a little strange, felt that they had fallen marginally out of ordinary time, and that as long as they stayed this way, nothing could harm them.

A call from the back of the house broke in-their daughter: “Hey you guys, the food is ready.”

“Oh, hell, let her stay the night,” said Paz, pulling away with some reluctance. There was a damp patch on his cheek where her flesh had rested. “I’ll get out my gun.”

They ate: sausages and chicken, banana chips and dirty rice. The adults drank California jug red. Paz kept Jenny’s glass full, turned on the charm, and without seeming to, got Jenny to tell the story of her life, or at least those parts suitable for a child’s ears. Lola was no mean interrogator herself, and she found in this subtle pumping yet another thing to admire and deplore about her husband.

Then it was dark, in the sudden light-switched way of tropical climes. Lola brought out the candles; Paz carried the wiped-out Amelia to bed. The conversation continued as it had but uncensored now, all the horrible tales of the fostered child. Jenny had never been the center of attention in an adult gathering before, no one but Cooksey had ever focused on her in this way, and she did not want it ever to stop, she sucked their attention in, spongelike, tubules long dry expanded, softened. Cooksey’s attention had been this intense, but that was about discipline, turning her into an instrument she could use in his service. She mentioned this, half embarrassed, and the conversation turned to Cooksey himself; all that she knew of his background, his tragedies, emerged into the candlelit air.

The wine slowed her speech at last, then stopped it; her head nodded. Lola took her to the daybed in the home office. The girl was instantly asleep. Lola laid a light blanket over her and went back to the patio.

Paz was in a chaise with a glass of wine. She slid in next to him, the wineglass was drained, now a little postmarital necking, too long absent, they both thought.

When breathing resumed, Lola said, “Poor kid! What a miserable life!”

“Yeah, but there’s something intact in there. Somehow she learned how to protect herself. I mean, why isn’t she a crack whore? She’d at least have an excuse.”

“One of the great mysteries, like you and me. I couldn’t help noticing you kept steering her back to this Cooksey. Why the interest?”

“Because, aside from our mystical Indian, he’s the most interesting character in this whole strange tale.”

“How so? The way she described him he seemed like just another sad refugee who washed up in Miami and couldn’t get it together to return to civilization. Not unlike myself.”

“I beg to differ. Miami is the center of civilization. It’s the only place that has Cuban food, cheap cigars,and electricity twenty-four hours a day. Anyway, Professor Cooksey. Sad, all right, but not a refugee. He could work anywhere, but he’s here, operating out of a minor environmental group-slash-commune, whose other members seem slightly nuts, or at any rate a little low-end. Why?”

“To forget his sad past?”

“No, Cooksey is not a forgetter. He’s a rememberer. Look, you’re from another planet, you’re walking on a deserted beach on a desert island and you find a watch. What does that tell you?”

“The time?”

He punched her gently in the ribs. “No, you know what I mean. It implies a watchmaker. So put together the story this kid just told us, all the stuff she’s picked up from Cooksey and this Moie character, plus the strange events of the last months, the mysterious killings and so on. Somehow a priest in the middle of the jungle knows the names of the people who’re behind the Consuela deal. How? Somehow just that priest who knows these names also has a faithful Indian companion, a kind of Stone Age guided missile, who flies to Miami in his little canoe and starts knocking off those very names. And somehow a Colombianguapo gangster is also involved in this timber-cutting scheme, and he gets called to Miami and comes, and now his boys are getting knocked off, too. What’s so important about chopping down trees that would make a Colombian drug baron leave his safe haven and travel to the U.S.? Okay, he’s laundering money through the Consuela company, we know that, but why the personal involvement? It suggests there’s something bigger going on than trees and money laundries. And in the middle of all this is the professor, who just happens to have a background in clandestine warfare. Who lost his wife because someone was illegally cutting down rain forests, indirectly, true, but maybe he doesn’t see it that way. Maybe, somehow, hemade all this happen…”

Lola snuggled closer and kissed his neck. She slid her hand under his shirt. “That’s another reason why I love you. Your vivid imagination.”

“You don’t buy it?”

“There’s nothing to buy, dear. You’re just like Amy and her fish and Bob Zwick. Things happen, and other things happen as a consequence. If you try to find patterns in it you’ll go crazy. In fact, that’s one sure sign of crazy-finding patterns where there are none.”

“I thought that was the basis of scientific discovery.”

“The beginning maybe, but not the end. That’s why we have statistical models, to distinguish the causal from the merely contingent. I notice that you didn’t include your mystic Indian’s interest in Amy in your conspiracy theory.”

“No. I have no idea how that fits in.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there’s no pattern at all, except in your head. Maybe it’s all just unconnected events pieced together by a former brilliant detective who’s bored stiff with being a cook. In any case, just now I don’t want to hear any more about it. It’s boring.” Now Lola shed her shirt, and her bra, and presented her fine breasts for his attention, which was given, after which more clothing fell to the patio paving. The candles gave their last light.