“Fine. Tell him you talked to Jason and he doesn’t know anything.”

“I can’t do that, Leanne, because I don’t know if Jason’s the one feeding the information to the Senator’s enemies, to this guy who thinks Peter did something to him, to whoever it is who’s causing all the political pressure that’s on my boss.”

She hesitated. I could see her replaying what I just said.

“Where is he, Leanne?”

“He’s not around.”

“Where is he?” I repeated, brave man that I was, sitting in the middle of the jungle with my hands tied behind my back, knowing that I wasn’t going to die, wasn’t even going to be left to rot, because I was supposed to be carrying a message home.

“Gone,” she said. “The Osa Peninsula.”

I knew the Osa Peninsula from guidebooks. It was down in the southwest corner of the country, a relatively undeveloped thumb of land made up of rivers and jungle. I wasn’t even sure you could drive there.

“When’s he coming back?”

Leanne shook her head. “He’s not,” she said, proving herself to be every bit as big a prevaricator as I was.

9

.

LEANNE SULLIVAN DROVE ME DIRECTLY TO THE AIRPORT, WHICH, it turned out, did not mean driving several hours to San José. There was an international airport in Liberia, which did not take more than an hour to reach, even in the dark. She had the big guy—Pablocito, she called him—ride on the backseat of her SUV with me. The smaller guy, Israel, drove the van with no shocks.

I asked if we could go by the Captain Suizo so I could get my suitcase, my clothes, my toiletries, and she told me those things would be taken care of. Marika would pack everything up and send it to the address I used when registering.

I had a rental car, I told Leanne. That, too, was being taken care of, she assured me. The boys would get it, return it for me.

Everything, she said, would be taken care of.

I WAS TO BE on a plane bound for Houston at 7:00 a.m. The airport in Liberia was about the size of a bus terminal, and Leanne left Pablocito and me sitting in the SUV. She took my passport and credit card, and was back in a quarter of an hour with a one-way ticket. Then the two of them walked me to security. They could see me as I entered the waiting area, and I could see them, standing with their arms folded, not leaving their positions, watching me until I boarded the plane.

Something wasn’t right. I show up to see Jason and he’s not there but Leanne is. I tell her why I have to see him; she tells me I can’t. And then she lets me go.

Something wasn’t right with a woman whom Howard Landry had called the best-looking girl he had ever seen, but whose most salient feature was a gap between her teeth that he had never mentioned.

I had one last look at Leanne Sullivan before I walked out to the tarmac. She dropped her hand in front of her, back of the hand toward me, and then extended her fingers forward. Shoo, she was saying. Be gone. Run home to the D.A., Mr. Becket. Explain how Jason Stockover has disappeared. Left his girlfriend, his restaurant, his fancy house. Tell the D.A. to stand in front of the microphones and tell people that. And think about what can happen whenever you look at that scar that’s going to form on your neck.

HOUSTON, July 2008

AU.S. CUSTOMS OFFICER NAMED MELINDEZ WANTED TO KNOW why I didn’t have any luggage. I pointed to my neck, showed him the blood on my collar. The shirt was black, but he could still see it. “Girlfriend,” I said.

He looked closely. Got halfway up from his seat. His eyes grew wide, then narrowed.

“I told her, ‘That’s it. You pulled that psycho stuff on me for the last time. I’m outta here.’ ”

“And you just took off?”

“Went right to the airport.”

“Left all your things?”

“Wasn’t worth it, man.”

“Local girl?”

“Hell, no. Boston Irish.”

Officer Melindez was unmoved.

“I figured, that’s the way you want to be, you can just vacation by yourself.”

“Oh,” he said, as if everything suddenly made sense, and handed me back my passport.

1

.

CAPE COD, July 2008

WAS IT POSSIBLE THAT THE BEACHES OF CAPE COD COULD be more beautiful than those of Hawaii or Costa Rica? Maybe some. Maybe for two or three months of the year. Certainly this one seemed to be.

I parked in the public lot at Craigville Beach. I had to pay because I had not gotten around to getting my resident’s beach sticker. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but it was a Saturday, and already it was getting crowded. People had driven down from Boston—families, mostly. In the old days there would have been primarily Irish and Italian families. Now there were people from all sorts of places: Indian families, wearing their street clothes, the women going into the water with full skirts and dresses, a man sitting on the sand in a white shirt and pin-striped pants, dark socks, black shoes; Russians in teeny-tiny bathing suits, even the old men with big bellies; Brazilians, already in a party mood, already playing their music too loud.

I walked west, past The Beach Club, where rich people paid big money to sit with their own kind, have good-looking teenagers arrange their beach chairs and umbrellas. Then I walked past the private homes of even richer people, who had the advantage of Commonwealth laws dating back to colonial days when the government did not have enough money to fund docks and so encouraged people to build privately by allowing them to own the beach all the way down to the median low-tide mark.

The rich people were kind enough to let the rest of us walk across their property, twenty-six houses with at least half a mile of prime real estate that we had to cross until we got to the area on the point that the town owned. The town beach, with virtually no parking but clean white sand and clear blue water for those savvy enough to find it and energetic enough to get there.

I had a long towel over my shoulder, I was carrying a small cooler with green seedless grapes and a couple of beers, and I had a radio in my pocket in case I stayed long enough to listen to the Red Sox game. It was a precaution, really. I was not going to the beach to enjoy myself; I was going to think.

I had thought on the plane from Costa Rica to Houston and again from Houston to Boston and I had not liked my thoughts. Now I was hoping to sort them out.

After the last house there was a clear strand of sand extending all the way to a natural rock jetty. Behind the strand were long, waving sea grass and an occasional scrub pine covering rolling dunes, and on the far side of the dunes was the Centerville River, an estuary, really, seawater flowing in and out from the bay. If I went to the point there would be a hundred-yard channel and on the other side would be Dowses Beach in the village of Osterville. Land of the rich and famous. Home of the Gregorys.

I would not be able to see the Gregorys’ compound from the point, it would be another mile along the coast, but I would be able to sense it, to feel it looming there, just beyond the trees, just around the bend of the shoreline on the other side of the channel. And I would be able to feel their presence: the Senator and his kids and his sisters and their kids and his late brothers’ kids. All of them, leading the lives to which the rest of us aspired.