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staying?” Haydon asked.
    “Yeah, they know.”
    Fossler waited again for another surge of traffic to subside. Haydon still didn’t know why Fossler had called him, except to inform him that the Muller girl was indeed alive. But there was more to it than that, Fossler just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He was about to.
    “Something else,” Fossler said. “There’s a guy down here says he knows you. Taylor Cage.”
    Haydon sat forward in his chair. His memory of Taylor Cage was as sharp as if only a minute had passed instead of a decade. Haydon would never forget the hot, humid night he last had sight of him, his barrel chest thrust forward as he swaggered toward the rank hold of a cargo ship berthed in the Houston ship channel. Cage was alone, and even the jaundiced glow from the dock lights deserted him as he approached the pitch-black margin that marked the belly of the tanker and into which he disappeared without hesitation. Haydon had been sure he was watching a man stroll to his execution. He had never met another man who would have done it. But Cage had done it, and because of the nature of the operation, Haydon had had to live with the silence of the unknown denouement that followed. Then five weeks later, late at night, Haydon received a collect telephone call at home from a Father Guillen in Barranquilla, Colombia. Haydon didn’t know anyone named Guillen, but when you dealt with the variety of people he dealt with, you never rejected a collect call simply because you didn’t recognize a name. He accepted the call and immediately recognized Cage’s voice: “It was a hell of an ugly trip, but I made it. I’ll be in touch.” That was it. Haydon never heard from him again, except as an item of gossip among the right kind of people, once every two or three years.
    “You do know him, then?” Fossler asked.
    “Yeah, barely. You spoke to him?”
    “Oh, yeah.”
    “What’s he got to do with any of this?” Haydon asked.
    “Damned if I’m sure,” Fossler said. “But he knows everybody I’ve mentioned. I only had a short meeting with him. Unexpectedly.”
    “Where did you find him?”
    “He found me. Came to the place where I was staying. A different place. I’ve moved. Several times.”
    “What did he want?”
    “This was before I found Lena, about five days ago,” Fossler said. “I was sitting in my room, by an open window, trying to get some air—it’s the dry season down here, summer, for Christ’s sake—and there’s a knock on the door. I get up and open it, and this guy just shoves his way in, you know, like a bulldozer, barrel chest first, and we’re in the middle of the room before I know what’s happening. Scared the shit out of me. This country, Stuart, it’s full of things that’ll scare the shit out of you. No rules down here. Everything’s negotiable—or not. Anyway, I see right off he’s American, and he starts shooting the questions. Some of them didn’t make any sense to me, and I guess he saw this. So I explain myself, straight on—the truth. He looked at me. Do I know anybody at HPD? I tell him I used to be in homicide. No shit, he says. Do I know Stuart Haydon? Of course. So I tell him about you and this case.”
    A car, its horn blaring, faded in and out of the background sounds. Fossler continued.
    “He asks a few questions about it, and I answer them. He seems satisfied. He gives me a couple of names and leaves, telling me to watch my ass and telling me to be sure and say hello to you. And that’s how I came onto Lena. The names take me right to Janet Pittner.”
    “And you haven’t seen him since.”
    “That’s right.”
    “You said he was ‘involved.’”
    “My gut tells me he’s got something to do with the reason the kids are scared. It’s just my gut, okay? And since he stumbled in on me I’ve picked up a tail. Maybe coincidence, but I don’t think so. It’s a woman, a girl. Guatemalan girl. She’s good. In fact she may have been on me a