“Damn.”

“Yeah, Taibbi was smart to steer clear-guy’s a survivor type, you can tell. Anyway, after he did Juan, Larison would watch his back even more carefully than usual just to make sure the rest of the gang, if there was a rest of the gang, wasn’t on his ass. Nothing happens, though, and anyway he’s only in San Jose sporadically. And all this was three years ago. So at some point, he figures these were the only two guys he had to worry about. And he doesn’t have to worry about them anymore.”

“What did Taibbi mean when he said ‘whatever you’re planning to do’ with Larison?”

Ben glanced at her, then back to the road. “He meant, what do you think happens to someone who tries to read the angel of death his rights?”

“What are you going to do if we find him, then?”

“I’m not going to wind up like Carlos and Juan, I’ll tell you that.”

“What are you supposed to do?”

“All I’m supposed to do is find Larison. So if we tree him, I hope you’re not going to try to arrest him, okay? You bring that mind-set to the job, you’ll be at a lethal disadvantage. And I don’t want to fill out the paperwork.”

“I’m touched that you care, really.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes.

Paula said, “Where’d you get that ID?”

Ben glanced at her, then back to the road. “You knew there were other alphabet soup agencies involved in this. You said so yourself.”

“I want to know which one you’re with.”

“I told you, forget about it.”

“You’re some kind of assassin, aren’t you?”

“I’m just here to find Larison,” he said again. The weird thing was, it was the truth. So why did it feel like a lie?

“Taibbi said you looked like Larison. What did he mean by that?”

Ben looked at his watch. “Why don’t you tell me what our next move is. You know, don’t you?”

“Are you talking down to me?”

“Not that I was aware of. But I can if you’d like.”

“Our next move is, we canvass restaurants and bars around the sewer where Juan’s body was found. Larison couldn’t have moved him far-the body would be heavy, for one thing. He wouldn’t have time, or concealment, for another. So wherever Juan was found, Larison was nearby that night. If we show his picture in a few places, and if Larison’s been back or if he was a regular, we might just catch a break.”

Ben nodded. “How’s your Spanish?”

“I can get by. You?”

Ben’s Farsi was fluent, his Arabic decent, and his Spanish high school rusty. “I think we’ll need to rely on you in that department,” he said. “And by the way, it’s not just that Larison must have been close by to where he did Juan. It’s also that, when he killed Carlos, it wasn’t in a place that mattered to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’d already spotted the surveillance. He wasn’t going to lead them all the way to his correct address. He’d either get off the bus early, or ride it well past his actual destination. Barrio Dent comes up before Los Yoses on the way from the airport. My guess is, Larison’s real destination that night was Los Yoses, or maybe the next stop, San Pedro, or maybe somewhere farther east. He got off in Barrio Dent to make sure the killing wouldn’t be too close to a place he was connected with. The second time, he wouldn’t have that luxury. He wasn’t being followed, he’d been discovered. It’s a whole different dynamic.”

“So you think the fact that both killings happened near a restaurant is a coincidence.”

“I think the first one was a coincidence. The second one, maybe not. Anyway, most of the streets in San Jose don’t have names. People use restaurants and other landmarks to describe locations. That’s all Taibbi was doing.”

“How do you know that?”

“Read it in a guidebook on the plane.”

“Well, that was a good idea.”

Ben nodded. He didn’t mention that reading extensively about a place before going operational was ordinarily only the beginning of area familiarization, and that not having had time to do more than read this time made him feel like he was groping and stumbling in the dark.

“So you think his girlfriend lives in Los Yoses?” Paula said.

“Or farther east. But not Barrio Dent. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten off the bus there. Now, tell me this. You think he’d still be dining out a hundred yards away from where he put Juan in a sewer?”

“From what Taibbi told us, I don’t think we’re dealing with someone who gets indigestion from murder.”

“What about tactically? He’d practically be returning to the scene of the crime.”

“Yes, but like you said, he’s only in San Jose sporadically. A month, or six months after the murder, he knows the case is closed. Juan was some sort of street criminal. I can pretty much guarantee that if they didn’t have a suspect within seventy-two hours of the crime, they dropped the file into a cold cases basement drawer. Which would be like dropping it into the Bermuda Triangle. And Larison would know that.”

Ben nodded, glad she wasn’t asking any more assassin questions.

He ran it all through his mind again, and felt pretty sure they were looking at it the right way. And although canvassing restaurants was going to be a long shot, it wouldn’t be any longer than what Juan Cole was up against when he’d gone looking for Larison.

Which was not a comforting thought at all.

17. His Friend Nico

The drive from Jacó took three hours. The road zigzagged up through the jungle and then down again, the diffused glow of the moon behind the clouds from time to time silhouetting mountains in the distance. Here and there they passed the odd roadside soda selling tacos or a bodega advertising fresh mangoes and avocados, and the light from these tiny and invariably empty establishments would shine in the distance like a promise of permanence and then fade away behind them, leaving nothing but the headlights pushing feebly against the dark again, the jungle close on either side, the van feeling small, enclosed, improbable, a bathysphere exploring an accidental canal along some ocean’s lightless floor.

They passed the time talking about pistols, loads, and their favored carries. For someone who took a dim view of violence, Ben had to admit, Paula knew her hardware. Paula used the iPhone to find a hotel in San Jose -the InterContinental, in Escazú-and to confirm there were vacancies. Ben told her not to make a reservation. The hotel wasn’t going to sell out its remaining rooms this late, and he saw no advantage to possibly alerting someone to where he would be spending the night. Not that anyone was looking, but… he just had this weird feeling, like there were forces moving around and beneath him, forces he could sense but not understand, and the feeling was keeping his usual low-grade combat paranoia at a healthy simmer.

They arrived in Barrio Dent at close to eleven. The iPhone’s GPS function took them straight to La Trattoria, where Taibbi said Carlos had been killed.

Ben parked the van and they stepped out into the sultry night air. There was an audible whoosh of traffic from the central avenue a block away, but other than that the neighborhood was quiet, its colonial houses decaying in stoic dignity beneath the swaying palm trees.

A streetlight across from the restaurant cast a sickly yellow cone of light on the crumbling sidewalk beneath it. Outside the illuminated pall, the street was cloaked in shadow. Ben stood at the edge of the light and glanced around.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “He got off the bus on the central avenue, took a couple turns, walked past this light… yeah, he could have come at Carlos from anywhere in the dark, and disappeared as easily. Okay.”

They walked back to the van. “What does that tell us?” Paula said.

“Maybe not much. I just need to get in his head.”

“Is it working?”

Ben nodded, imagining what Carlos would have looked like spotlighted under that streetlight. “Plug in the coordinates for that restaurant Spoon, will you? Let’s see if we can figure out what happened there.”