In the late 1980s, Jay was part of a joint FBI-DEA task force that went to Mexico in the wake of the murder of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent. Ostensibly an information-seeking force, the real job of Jay and his fellow agents was to kick ass, take names, and make sure the Mexican drug lords would sooner shoot their own young before they’d entertain the idea of shooting a federal agent again.

“I lived in Catize for three weeks,” he said. “There’s not a basement in the entire town. The ground’s too soft because the town’s built over swampland. The boyfriend getting shot in the back of the head? No way. That’s an American Mafia hit, not a Mexican one. You rip off a drug lord down there, you die one way and one way only—Colombian necktie. They cut your throat and pull your tongue out through the hole, toss your body from a moving car into the village square. And no Mexican gang rapes an American woman for six hours and lets her live to serve warning to other gringas. Warning for what? They wanted to send a warning, they would have cut her into pieces and airmailed her back to the States.”

Looking for lies and inconsistencies now, Jay identified four other alleged Level Fives whose stories didn’t hold water. It was, he’d find out as the retreat wore on, standard operating procedure for Grief Release to place these frauds in groups of truly grief-stricken people because internal studies had shown that a client was far likelier to first confide in a “peer” before a counselor.

And what pissed Jay off most was hearing the bullshit stories threaded in with the real ones: a mother who’d lost her infant twins in a fire she escaped; a twenty-five-year-old man with an inoperable brain tumor; a woman whose husband had walked out on her for his nineteen-year-old secretary twenty years after their wedding and six days after the woman lost a breast in a mastectomy.

“These were shattered people,” Jay told us, “looking for a lifeline, for hope. And these Grief Release scumbags nodded and cooed and probed for every dirty secret and every piece of financial minutiae just so they could blackmail them later and enslave them to the Church.”

When Jay got mad, he usually got even.

By the end of the first night, he noticed Lila glancing at him, giving him shy smiles. The next night, he went to her room, and far from fitting the psychological profile of a woman who’d been gang-raped less than a year ago, Lila was joyfully uninhibited and quite inventive in bed.

“You know the golf-ball-through-the-garden-hose analogy?” Jay asked me.

“Jay,” Angie said.

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

For five torrid hours, Jay and Lila had sex in her room. During breaks between rounds, she’d probe for information about his past, his current means, his hopes for the future.