“In what way?”

“Did he ever tell you war stories?” Devin said.

“No. Not after we fought about the blood on his shoe that time.”

“And you’re sure it was a car thief’s blood?”

She nodded.

“Doctor Warren,” I said and she looked up at me, “if you were estranged from Timpson, why did you help the DA’s office during the Hardiman trial?”

“Stan had nothing to do with the case. He was prosecuting prostitutes in night court back then. I had helped the DA’s office once before when a defendant was claiming insanity, and they liked the result, so they asked me to interview Alec Hardiman. I found him to be sociopathic, given to delusions of grandeur, and paranoid, but legally sane, fully aware of the diffeRenee between right and wrong.”

“Was there any connection between EEPA and Alec Hardiman?” Oscar said.

She shook her head. “None that I ever knew of.”

“Why did EEPA disband?”

She shrugged. “I think they just got bored. I really don’t know. I’d moved out of the neighborhood by then. Stan followed a few months later.”

“There’s nothing else you can remember from that time?”

She stared at the photograph for a long time.

“I remember,” she said wearily, “that when I took this picture I was pregnant, and I was feeling nauseous that day. I told myself it was the heat and the baby growing inside me. But it wasn’t. It was them.” She pushed the photo away. “There was a sickness to that group, a corruption. I had the feeling, as I took this picture, that they’d hurt someone very badly some day. And like it.”

In the RV, Fields removed his headphones and looked at Bolton. “The prison shrink, Doctor Dolquist, has been trying to reach Mr. Kenzie. I can patch him through.”

Bolton nodded, turned to me. “Put it on speaker.”

I answered the phone on the first ring.

“Mr. Kenzie? Ron Dolquist.”

“Doctor Dolquist,” I said, “may I put you on speaker phone?”

“Certainly.”

I did, and his voice picked up a metallic quality, as if it were bouncing off several satellites at once.

“Mr. Kenzie, I’ve spent a lot of time going over all the notes I’ve kept of my sessions with Alec Hardiman over the years, and I think I may have stumbled on something. Warden Lief tells me you believe Evandro Arujo is working on the outside at Hardiman’s behest?”

“That’s correct.”

“Have you considered the possibility that Evandro has a partner?”

There were eight of us packed in the RV, and we all looked at the speaker simultaneously.

“Why would you say that, Doctor?”

“Well, it was something I’d forgotten about, but the first few years he was here, Alec spent a lot of time talking about someone named John.”

“John?”

“Yes. At the time, Alec was working hard to have his conviction overturned on the grounds of insanity, and he pulled out all the stops to convince the psychiatric staff that he was delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, you name it. This John, I believed, was just his attempt to establish multiple personality syndrome. After nineteen seventy-nine, he never mentioned him again.”