“Not really,” said the Thai. “It turned out he had a weak heart. I introduced him to cocaine: the heart-attack drug of choice. It was my first experiment with death by existing conditions. It was nothing like murder, you see. If I’d given him the cocaine and he didn’t have cardiovascular disease, I’d have been doing him a favor. It’s not at all like being a poisoner. I haven’t directly killed anyone. If you feed your friend peanut butter sandwiches every day he’d thank you and scoff the lot and suffer no more than weekly stomachaches. But, what if he was allergic to peanuts? Oops. It led me to look more closely at the sometimes lethal combinations of conditions and medicines. I got away with young Bruce’s deliverance and nobody found the body. I adopted his ID. I started to communicate with the family in Laos pretending to be him. I’d learned the Lao alphabet when I was a kid. My Lao writing wasn’t fluent but appropriate for a boy who’d spent fifteen years in Australia. Spoken Lao was easier. My village dialect was easy enough to adapt. I apologized for my slackness at not writing. Telling them how close I was to graduating. Saying I wanted to return to my homeland. I wrote to my dear Aunt Porn who was the family’s black sheep: anti-royalist, registered Communist. Nobody else spoke to her. She wrote back to me. She was surprised I knew about her. It was like Pandora’s box opened up in front of me. She told me all the gossip: about relationships, about the resources she had at her weekend surgery. I stole pharmaceuticals and sent them to her for her stock. We became close.

“I had Bruce’s passport. We looked similar. I put on some weight and dyed my hair like him—he had this peroxide fixation—and we could have been twins. The family met me at the airport. They hadn’t seen Bruce since he was ten so it wasn’t hard to fool them. They wanted me to stay with them but I insisted on going to a hotel. I was waiting for Dr. Porn to invite me to stay with her. She lived alone so she was reluctant at first, but we soon became comfortable with one another, and I moved into her spare room behind the weekend surgery. I pretended to like her but she was sloppy. She wasn’t one for security. Her filing cabinets weren’t locked and the medicine cabinet was always open. I’d alter the labels, change the contents and she’d hand over the drugs that would kill her patients.”

“Why the journalists?” Siri asked.