“What?”

“Well, one, he leaves fingerprints. The county picked up a nice set off the iron gate at the house next door, where the guy escaped. No matches with anyone they could find, but never mind that. The guy pulls off the caper of the year but forgets about wearing gloves. Thus asloppy ninja mountaineering Colombian pseudo-jaguar assassin.”

“Okay, so what’syour theory?”

“You’re not going to ask me what the other thing is?”

Morales took a deep breath. “You know, Jimmy, until just now I don’t think I ever got why every fucking detective in the Miami PD hated your guts.”

“And now you can join the crowd,” said Paz coolly. But he had to reflect on his recent observation that he had spent over two hours in a squad bay among men he had worked with for over ten years and not one had acknowledged his presence with a word or even a friendly nod. So he added, “I’m sorry, Tito. I’m a wiseass. I admit it. But those two bozos just now browned me off and I’m taking it out on you.”

“You’re forgiven,” said Morales, “and now I’m going to play the sucker: what was the other thing?”

“It was that the county lab did the same analysis on their paw print that you all did on the one at the Fuentes scene, to calculate the weight of whatever made it. And they got a figure within a pound of the first one, four hundred fifty-three point two pounds. That speaks seriously against your model-paw-on-a-stick theory.”

“Why? They could’ve had two guys stepping on a plate or something.”

“Oh, now it’s two guys, two huge fucking guys that nobody saw? I know, theythrew the sloppy ninja pseudo-jaguar assassin through the window and over the hedge and then they just melted away.”

“So what’re you saying, we’re back to the trained cat?”

“No, I’m baffled, too.”

Morales raised his eyes to heaven and crossed himself. “Oh, thank you, Jesus, I’m not a total moron.”

“Fuck!” said Paz. “I hate this shit!”

“What?”

“There’s other stuff, Tito, and I’m going to tell you and I want it to stay between the two of us. Agreed?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Okay, starting about a month ago, me and Amelia have been having dreams almost every night about a big spotted cat, starting about the time of the Fuentes murder, but before you came to see me. I think Lola’s been having the same kind of dreams, but she won’t say anything about it to me. But she’s a wreck, not sleeping, popping all kinds of pills. Also, I went to my mother’s santero and he threw Ifa for Amelia. You know what that is?”

“Sure, Santería fortune-telling.”

“Right, and he got all upset and said Amelia was in danger from some kind of beast, a carnivore like a lion. And then I gave her myenkangue and her dreams stopped, but mine haven’t and Lola’s probably…” and then Paz stopped talking and stared at nothing for a long moment, and then banged his hand down hard on the table.

“Damn!” he cried and grabbed a file folder, riffling through it until he found the county’s sketch of the mysterious Indian. “I’ve seen this guy. I took Amelia to Matheson and he was standing in a little Styrofoam skiff talking to her. He couldn’t’ve been more than ten feet away, and when he saw me, he scooted off in big hurry.”

Morales was staring at him with a disbelieving, sickly grin on his face. “Jimmy, ah, what’s your daughter and dreams got to do with two murders and a bunch of Colombians?”

“I don’t know. Look, Tito, bear with me here. You weren’t on the force when the Voodoo Killer thing went down, but believe me, it wasn’t what you think. We covered up a lot of it, or I did, I concocted a plausible story about drugs and cults, but it wasn’t like that. It was deeply weird. Mind-bendingly weird. And this is another one.”

“Uh-huh. And we’re going to go in there and explain this to Finnegan?”

“No, forget Finnegan. He’s fucking around with us, anyway. This file’s not complete.”

“It’s not?”

“No. They’ve got a surveillance going on Garza and Ibanez, right? But there’s nothing here on any such surveillance, no telephoto shots, no phone taps, which means they think they’ve got something hot and they’re not going to share it with us. I expect both houses are crawling with suspicious-looking Latin-American gentlemen.”

“But you said it wasn’t Colombians…”

“No, I said the killings weren’t mob hits. The Consuela people are in deep with some kind of Colombian mob. Victoria Calderón told me that much. But these guys are trying toprotect the Cubans. They got nothing to do with killing them. And the idea that there’s arival gang doing it is just stupid: it puts us back with our sloppy ninja pseudo-jaguar, who can’t exist. No, it’s connected with this Indian. And our one lead to this Indian is through Mr. Dreadlocks here, and our one lead to him is through his T-shirt. We need to go see this secretary again.”

They left the sheriff, after smearing a thin coat of bullshit on Finnegan and Ramirez, and while they were in the car, Paz called Victoria Calderón, and learned that the Consuela Holdings office was tem porarily closed. Ms. Tuero, the secretary, was on leave at home until the surviving principals could decide how to proceed with this aspect of their affairs.

“How’re you doing so far?” asked Victoria after conveying this information, as well as the woman’s address and phone number.

“Pretty good. Just going through the police files. Like you said, they’re thinking Colombians.”

“And what’re you thinking, Jimmy?”

“Not Colombians. Or not only. And not on the phone. How do you like being the big boss?”

“I’d like it better if I knew what was really going on. Dad kept a lot of stuff in his head, and what wasn’t in his head was in Clemente’s.”

“Who is…?”

“Oh, Uncle Oscar, the old family retainer. I’m going to have to get rid of him or ease him out, and it’s going to make a mess, but he still treats me like he did when he was sneaking me candy, age six. The books make no sense. Money coming in and out with no paper attached, purchase invoices for stuff I never heard of, I mean big expenditures: three Daewoo grapplers for twenty-two grand a pop, thirty grand for a Hydro Ax feller-buncher, all kinds of other timber industry machines…”

“You’re in the timber business.”

“So it seems, but we’re not in the timber business as far as I know. We buy a lot of construction equipment, obviously, but all this other stuff is stuck in among the legitimate purchases. I mean, what’s a boring machine?”

“The opposite of an interesting machine?”

She laughed, a little harder than the remark warranted. “Oh, Christ, Jimmy, am I glad I found you! Do you realize I have no one I can talk to about this stuff?”

“Hey, what’s family for?”

“You laugh, but I mean it. Why did we buy a fifty-grand machine for making lots of holes in wood? I mean, it’s a furniture plant item. We’re all of a sudden in the furniture business, too? Also, it’s not just the crazy expenditures I worry about, it’s the income. There are huge payments, I mean seven-figure entries, without any invoicing to show what we got paid for.”

“Another topic not to discuss on the phone,” said Paz.

Elvira Tuero lived in a modest apartment in a Souesera duplex, on a street familiar to Paz. It was just around the block from his mother’s ilé, which he took to be a good omen. They had called beforehand, and she had agreed to see them, somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Paz. There was something frightened in her voice.

And in her face, too. Ms. Tuero was highly decorative, or had been: fashionable shoulder-length blond curls, helped out by chemicals, an attractive oval face, nicely plucked eyebrows over large dark eyes. She was wearing a loose white shirt, tight toreador pants (pink), and toeless gold slippers. Paz noted that her red nail polish needed fixing on both fingers and toes, and that there were unbecoming smudges under her eyes. She took them to the living room and sat them on a dark blue velvet couch, taking for herself an armchair covered in the same stuff, across from a coffee table in which beer coasters from many lands sat under glass.