Agnes Brzica continued to profess ignorance about the fate and whereabouts of Meredith Santos.

“Idiot’s holding out, for what I don’t know, but her lawyer’s even a bigger cretin, it’s like talking to a stain.”

He forked, chewed, and swallowed a massive chunk of tandoori lamb.

“Yum—think of this as therapy, Alex.”

“Eating?”

“It’s not merely ingesting, my friend, it’s therapeutically recontextualizing the whole food thing.”

“Self-help,” I said.

“Is there any other kind?”

The previous night, he’d treated Robin and me to dinner at a Beverly Hills steak house. Two nights before that, he’d dragged Rick out for Mexican, and twenty-four hours before that Al Bayless had treated him to “a T-bone the size of Argentina.”

I watched him make his way through the lamb and the lobster and the snow crab. Big bowl of rice pudding waiting in the wings, he had only to blink at the woman in the sari to summon more.

He was chewing hard—tough piece of lamb—when his phone rang.

He swallowed. “Sturgis.”

What he heard made him smile. He said, “Yessir!”

I reached over and triggered the hands-off.

Captain Henry Santos’s voice, sharp and clipped as ever, said, “Okay, here she is.”

A woman said, “Lieutenant Sturgis? This is Meredith Santos. I hear you’ve been looking for me. So sorry if it’s been a hassle.”

“No hassle at all. Glad you’re okay.”

“I’m better than okay, I’m great!”

“May I ask—”

“Where was I? Hold on … I’m in a different room, Dad’s kind of a … he’s kind of conservative.”

“Parents can be that way.”

“Especially parents who’ve careered in the military. Where’ve I been? Traveling with a friend. A doctor. Also a dentist. He’s both, an oral surgeon. We met at a party and just hit it off and decided what the heck, both of us had been working way too hard for way too long, why not? So we flew to Maui and—hold on, I think I hear Dad … no, it’s fine … where was I?”

“Maui.”

“Oh, yeah, we went to Maui and had fun.”

“Fun is good,” said Milo.

Merry Santos said, “Honestly, sir, it’s been a real long time since I had any. Same for Darren—that’s his name. He was in Iraq and so was I. He spent two years doing field surgery, came back and now does reconstruction at the Westwood V.A., plus he moonlights to work off his school debt. I’ve been grinding, too, sir. Lawyers can be real jerks, they think keeping you late and taking you out to dinner makes up for treating you like a peon. But no complaints, you do what you have to do.”

Milo said, “See what you mean about fun, Meredith.”