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the worry, but she didn’t give a shit about her dad. Didn’t even care to talk about him. I told her about her mother’s concern, that she wasn’t going to tell her dad, that she wanted to work it out with the girl, just between the two of them. She started crying. I didn’t know what to think, whether she was afraid or relieved or depressed or what. Finally I got her calmed down. I told her to think it over, and that we ought to get together again the next morning—Friday—and talk it over. But she didn’t want me to come back to Pittner’s again, so we agreed to meet at a pastry shop.
    “I didn’t call Germaine Muller right away. I thought I’d meet with the girl one more time, get a better feel for how it was going to go. To tell you the truth, Stuart, I kind of liked the girl right off the bat. She seemed like a good kid. I didn’t want to just leave it cold. Then the next morning I’m sitting in the shop by a window so I can see the street. She’s twenty minutes late. I was about to give her up when she comes running into the shop, tells me to come with her, throws down some money, and we hurry out to the street where we jump into a car. Me in the front, her in the back. There’s John Baine, driving. We ride around, and Baine begins grilling me, like he’s checking me out, maybe I’m not who I say I am, and he’s grilling me to get to the bottom of it. Lena keeps turning around and looking behind us, and Baine is always flicking his eyes at the rearview mirror.
    “Anyway, after a while they unwind a little. I tell them they’re obviously in some kind of trouble and they ought to go to the American embassy. Baine starts swearing, and Lena says, no, no, that wouldn’t be good at all. The embassy would be a mistake. Whatever I do, don’t go there and mention them. Do not do this, she says. I said I didn’t have any intention of doing that. I was suggesting they should do that. They’re the ones with a problem, not me. No, they say. That wouldn’t be good. We kept driving.”
    Though Fossler was talking in his usual deliberate manner, rather slowly, steadily, he was betraying himself. Jim Fossler was never loquacious. If anything, he tended toward the other extreme. More often than not you had to pull information out of him, a trait that was maddening if you were trying to work with him in a high-pressure case that needed to move quickly and relied on a rapid, free-flow of information among several cooperating teams. On the other hand, you never had to worry about him gossiping away more than you wanted other people to know. A loose-tongued detective was one of Haydon’s pet peeves.
    But Fossler always addressed the business at hand, if a little too slowly, and yet here he was saying more than he needed to, failing to edit himself. He could have summarized what he had said so far in four or five sentences, but he was dragging it out inefficiently—slowly, to be sure—but dragging it out nonetheless. He was displaying an agitation Haydon had never witnessed in him before, and it made Haydon’s stomach tighten.
    “We drive around. More questioning,” Fossler continued, “until they seemed to be satisfied I wasn’t whoever the hell else they thought I might have been. But they didn’t seem to want to turn loose of me. Baine asked me if I knew anybody at the embassy. I told him no, which was true. I didn’t check in with the embassy when I got here because I didn’t want to worry if maybe somebody was watching me. Baine said that was a good call, because the embassy sucked. Baine, he’s maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, has been wandering around down here, all over Central America, six or seven years, so he’s no kid. I didn’t feel too bad about him.
    “So after a while they dropped me off three or four blocks from where they’d picked me up. Lena said they’d get back in touch and let me know what to tell her mother, what she was going to do.”
    “So she knows where you’re