Ricci smiled a little. "Them too," he said.

She kept looking at him pointedly.

"I think Megan was offering you a neat little segue there," Nimec said from the chair beside her. "Might not be a bad idea to take it."

Ricci paused a moment, then nodded.

"You two want to go inside first?" He gestured toward the sliding door leading back into his house. "It's getting pretty brisk out here."

Nimec's shoulders rose and fell. "I'm okay."

"Same," Megan said. "I can use the fresh air after all the schlepping around we've done. To use an Irish word."

Ricci sat there, his face showing not one iota of concern about the headaches he'd caused them. That irritated Megan, and she hoped the expression on her face made it abundantly clear to him. The schlep she'd mentioned had included following his pickup for nearly an hour as he'd led them to a fish-smelling wholesale seafood market on a wharf at the foot of the peninsula, where they'd had to wait while he'd spent another hour hustling back and forth between one saltbox shed and another, haggling with buyers over the value of several large plastic trays he'd been carrying in the flatbed of the truck ... or more accurately the layers of spiny, tennis-ball-sized green sea urchins inside those trays, what he'd earlier referred to as his catch. And all that after she and Nimec had traveled three thousand miles across the country by air and ground, and the unexpected confrontation with the warden and deputy sheriff.

"I suppose," Ricci said at length, "you'd like me to tell you why those uniformed humps were on my case."

Megan watched him coolly over the rim of her cup.

"That would be nice," she said.

Ricci lifted his own coffee to his mouth, sipped, and then set it down on the circular tabletop.

"Either of you know anything about urchin diving?"

Megan shook her head.

"Pete?" Ricci said.

"Only that urchins are a specialty item in foreign seafood markets. I'd assume they can bring good money."

Ricci nodded.

"Actually it's the roe that's valuable. Or can be, anyway. You ever been to a sushi bar, it's what they call uni on the menu. The bulk of it gets shipped out to Japan, the rest to Japanese communities in this country and Canada," he said. "Its price depends on availability, the percentage of roe in comparison to its total weight, and the quality of the roe, which has to be a bronzy gold color--kind of like a tangerine--if you want to fetch a premium. Those trays I unloaded had about two and a half bushels of urchins each and were worth almost a grand to me."

Megan looked at him. "If somebody had told me that when I was ten, I'd be worth millions today. My big brother and I would walk along the beach and collect them off the jetties in our plastic buckets. Then we'd fill the buckets with ocean water and try to convince our parents to let us bring them home as pets. My dad would tell us to get those damned sea porcupines out of the house."