"A beautiful girl named Leanne Sullivan."

The rhythm picked up. The stream of words flowed faster.

"No Jason here."

"No reason for me to stay, then."

"Why you think he here?"

"He was seen at a sailing race in Ensenada, talking to Peter Gregory Martin, the man who was with the girl who died that night. He told Peter this was where he was."

There was a long pause, then a long exchange.

"Wha'chu know about Leanne Soolivan?"

"Leanne Sullivan and a friend got invited to a party at the home of Senator Gregory. When they got to the Senator's house, there wasn't much going on, so Leanne and her friend went down the beach with two guys, one of whom was Jason. By the time they got back to the house there was n.o.body around, so Leanne and her friend left."

"It's all?"

"Leanne liked Jason. He liked her. They wanted to get together again after that, but the Gregorys didn't want anybody talking about the girl who died. The Gregorys are very rich and very powerful people. To keep people from talking they found out what each of them wanted most in life and gave it to them. Leanne wanted to move to Hawaii. They made it possible for her to do that. Then, when she'd done what she had to do there, she came here to be with Jason."

There was a quick movement, too quick to come from the fat guy. Somebody grabbed my hood and pushed it down hard on top of my head. There was a sudden swooshing noise next to my ear, and something gave way. I tried to jerk my head to one side, but the hand held me in place. And then the hood was ripped off and I was left staring face-to-face with Leanne from the restaurant, Leanne wearing shorts and flat shoes and a man's dress shirt untucked and rolled up at the sleeves. Leanne with a vicious-looking knife in her hand.

I BLINKED.

"How did you know it was me?" she said.

"I didn't." My eyes were on the knife. It was not the kind of knife that one brought to the dinner table, or even kept around the kitchen. It was very long, and its point was very sharp.

"You just go around telling strangers I'm beautiful?"

I moved my gaze and tried to focus on her face, tried to get past the bad haircut to the freckles, the brown eyes, the full lips, the teeth that were white and straight except where they gapped in dead center. "I thought you were Jason. I thought he'd agree."

The knife moved suddenly, as if she were going to thrust it into my eye. There wasn't anything I could do but throw my head back, try to take the knife on the cheek, the shoulder, anyplace but the eye.

"f.u.c.k you," she said.

I had no response to that. I was feeling only relief that she had not actually stabbed me.

But she was still bent forward, still poised to strike. "He's got nothing to tell you."

He had nothing to tell me, he was hiding from me, and she was threatening my eyesight, if not my life. I slowly unclenched. I did it like a man balancing on a log, letting go of a branch, moving one millimeter at a time. "Heidi Telford was just a girl out for the night, Leanne. Just like Patty. Just like you."

The knife was pulled back enough to give me room to square up with her again. "Well, I was there," she said. "And I never saw her."

I couldn't just keep my mouth shut. I couldn't just nod and agree. I saw her backing off and I went after her. "Which explains why you're here now, hiding out with Jason Stockover."

She slapped me hard across the face. I didn't see it coming. I had been conscious only of her right hand, the hand holding the knife, and the slap came from her left. My head rocketed to my shoulder and I left it there, my cheek stinging, making it harder if she wanted to hit me again. Leanne Sullivan was a strong woman, and she hit like she had done it before.

"We're not hiding out," she said, spit flying through the little gap in her teeth. "We're just living."

"Living pretty well, too, it seems."

"Jason's got family money."

"And what have you got?" I tried to rub off the spit by dragging my face over my shirt, first one side, then the other.

"I've got the satisfaction of doing something good, of helping people who can do a h.e.l.l of a lot for our country if everybody just leaves them alone and stops trying to screw them over."

The surprise must have shown on my face because her expression turned both righteous and contemptuous.

"You think the Gregorys have been set up?" I asked.

"I know they have."

"By whom?"

"There's a guy who thinks Peter Martin did something to somebody in his family. He can't get him on that, so he's trying to get him on something else."

"Josh David Powell?"

"I don't know who the f.u.c.k it is. I just know it's happening. That girl you're talking about, she was followed to the Gregorys', and somebody picked her up on the street when she left. The whole thing was arranged to make it look like Peter Martin did it."

"How do you know that?"

"Everybody knows that. The girl wasn't s.e.xually molested, was she?"

I was trying to put this together. I seemed to be missing giant pieces.

"Oh, people like you," she said, as if she had known people like me all her life, been abused by people like me, wanted to inflict pain and humiliation on people like me. Her brown eyes drilled into mine. "You don't have any idea what it's like to be in the Senator's shoes."

"Jesus, Leanne, I owe my job to the Senator."

"Then why are you doing this?" The knife flicked, carving the air in front of my nose.

"This?" I said, backing my head away as much as I could. "Investigating a murder? It's what my job is."

"But everybody knows it wasn't any of the Gregorys. So why aren't you doing what you're supposed to be doing?"

I waited for her to tell me what that was. She didn't. She stayed bent, with the knife poised. I was thinking she was a big girl. With a long reach.

"Look, Leanne, I'm going to give you a name, okay?"

There may have been a slight nod of her head.

"Chuck Larson."

This time I did not even get the slight nod.

"He works for the Senator," I said, encouraging her to remember. "He's the one who got me my job. He knows what I'm doing. And I have to think that having me go around talking to everybody is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. What the Senator wants me to be doing."

"I've never heard of any Chuck Larson."

Oh, G.o.d.

"No?" I tried to make my face convey that there must be some mistake. "Well, someone sent you to Maui and then gave you money to buy a fishing boat to get Howard Landry over to Kauai. I mean, you didn't just get Howard over there on your own, unless-"

I cut myself off, but I had said one word too many. It was not lost on Leanne Sullivan.

"Unless what?"

But it didn't make sense.

Leanne advanced the knife again until its point was p.r.i.c.king the skin of my neck. I raised my chin as much as I could. It was instinctive. It also gave her more access to my throat. She could cut my carotid and I would be dead in minutes. "Unless I was in on the killing myself, you mean?"

I had not even thought about that.

She pushed the knife into my neck nonetheless, making my skin fold around it, silently threatening to slice all the way through to my artery, my larynx, my trachea, my spinal cord.

She needed to understand what would happen if she kept pushing.

"There's a lot of pressure on the D.A...." I said. It was difficult to get out the words, but I was trying. "Political pressure ... and I'm the guy he sent to ease ... that pressure."

The knife went through. I could feel the tissue give way. I could feel the blood start to gush down my neck.

"Aren't you listening to me? I'm a Gregory appointee." The f.u.c.king thing was inside my neck and staying there. And I was gasping. "The D.A. is a Gregory appointee. I don't have to go back with a right answer. Just an answer."

The knife was moving. I could feel it sawing through flesh.

"n.o.body knows anything. That's all I have to report. So the D.A. can say he investigated, okay?"

The knife came out.

I tilted my head one way and then the other, trying to stanch the flow, but I was breathing hard and it wouldn't stop.

"Are you saying what I think you're saying?"

Who knew what this woman thought? She had run away to Hawaii, seduced a cop old enough to be her father, pretended to leave him for an exterminator. Cut off her hair. Stuck a knife in my throat. "What I'm telling you, Leanne, is either you deal with me or someone else is going to come along who's not a member of the team."

" 'The team'?" She said it mockingly. The knife bounced up and down, a ripple effect from the chuckle that went through her body. Drops of my blood fell to the floor.

I stared my answer as best I could: Sure, the team, Leanne. People like you and me. People who allow the Gregorys to do what they do.

The chuckle ended with a quick exhale through her nose. "Okay, teammate, so now you've talked to me and now you're done. You can go home now."

I could go home.

Which meant she wasn't going to kill me.

She was waiting for me to acknowledge that, waiting for me to agree, to do what I had been rehearsing in my mind ever since I had been thrown onto the floor of the cabin. But now that I knew she wasn't going to kill me, I didn't have to agree. I didn't have to go. Not at this moment.

I said, "I need to speak to Jason, too. The D.A.'s got to be able to stand in front of the microphones and say he did everything he could, interviewed everybody there was, and there's no basis for any claim."

"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.

LEANNE SULLIVAN DROVE ME DIRECTLY TO THE AIRPORT, WHICH, it turned out, did not mean driving several hours to San Jose. 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sport 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.