“You’re fairly isolated out here,” Luc said, wondering why Prather had chosen this relatively well-off section of the North Shore to set up. “Do you do enough business in this area?”

“Not as much as we might in a more blue-collar location,” Prather said. “But we do enough. The owner rents us the land for a reasonable fee, and the truth of it is, we like the town.”

“Monroe? What so special about Monroe?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Prather said.

Just then a young woman came running toward them across the grass, crying, “Oz! Oz!”

She was short, thin, with a long ponytail trailing from her undersized head. Luc could see that she was crying. She grabbed Prather’s hand and pulled him aside. Between sobs she whispered in a high-pitched voice, her words tumbling out so quickly Luc couldn’t catch their meaning beyond something about someone named Rena being “so mean.”

He watched Prather nodding as he listened, saw him pat her shoulder and murmur in a reassuring tone. She smiled, giggled, then skipped away as if she hadn’t care in the world.

“What was that all about?” Luc said when Prather rejoined him.

“A domestic squabble,” the tall man said. “We are a family of sorts, and every family has them.”

“And you’re the father they come to as mediator?”

“Some of them do. Many in the troupe are quite adept at handling their own affairs and solving their own problems. Lena and her sister Rena, however, have a mental age of about six. Their petty disagreements seem momentous to them. I play Solomon.”

“Ah. I thought she looked microcephalic.”

Prather nodded. “They’re called ‘pinheads’ in the trade. Lena and her sister are known as ‘the Pin Twins’ under my canvas.”

Luc felt a twinge of revulsion that his face must have mirrored.

“Offended, Doctor?” Prather’s mouth twisted into what might have been a smile. “Exploitation of the mentally retarded… that’s what you’re thinking, am I right?”

“Well…” That was exactly what he’d been thinking.

“But you know nothing of their life before I found them. Lena and Rena were living in a cardboard box in Dallas, vying with rats for scraps from restaurant garbage bins, being repeatedly raped and otherwise abused whenever it suited their fellow street dwellers.”

“Dear God.”

“Now they live in their own trailer, they travel the country, and during the show they sing and recite nursery rhymes in close harmony for the customers who stop at their stall. And they are safe, Doctor.” His deep voice took on an edge. “We watch out for each other here. No one will ever hurt them again.”

Luc said nothing as Prather lifted the tent flap for him. What was there to say?

A moment later he was standing before the Sharkman cage. A pair of the vaguely canine roustabouts had one of the dark creature’s arms. Luc shuddered as he realized that one of these two could have dealt Macintosh’s death blow last month. Their powerful bodies seemed relaxed; they were expending little effort to hold the creature’s arm steady. One of them probably would have been enough. Even the creature’s stink seemed to have faded since last month.