“I think so.”

“You think so?”

“I didn’t pick it up.”

She was beside him, hovering. He saw that she was stern.

“I was busy.”

But she knew it was his stunned condition—he was slow and uncertain, and maybe it was his fear, a result of the visit to the homeless camp, the sense that those ragged desperate people who’d mocked his fear of the dog might find him and demand—what? Money, explanations, attention. “Busy” was the one thing he was not. She told herself he was in shock and resisted blaming him for not seeming to care.

She picked up the phone and heard the pips that indicated a message had been left. Dialing the access number, she got the robotic voice: You have two new messages.

The first was from her, one she’d left the previous day, saying she’d be home soon. He hadn’t heard it, he hadn’t noticed she was late; she erased it.

Yah, Joe, the second message began. This Stickney Medina at the medical examiner office, referencing da kine, that guy you was inquiring about. Just to let you know we got some hits.

They had phoned ahead—Olive had made the call, and Stickney was excited, not about the news he had to share but that Sharkey would be paying another visit. He asked Olive, “Joe—he’s coming too, yah?” And when Olive said yes, he’d be there with her, Stickney said, “Thing of it is, my cousin Wencil, he wants to meet him. He so stoked.”

The two men were waiting in the lobby, Stickney gesturing in green scrubs, Wencil in a torn T-shirt and board shorts, at attention on bare feet, a small stocky man, about thirty, unmistakably a surfer—the wide shoulders, the thick neck, bruised water-soaked hands and pinkish fingers, the slim bandy legs, tribal tattoos on his stomach and the nape of his neck, tattooed names on his arms, with dates—his children. And he had a surfer’s way of standing, feet planted flat, leaning back and canted slightly to the side, as though balancing on a board.

“Joe Sharkey,” Stickney said, with the gusto of a boast. “My cousin Wencil Makani.”

Sharkey said, “Aloha.”

“And his wahine,” Stickney said.

But Wencil did not take his admiring eyes off Sharkey, and he smiled as his gaze traveled from tattoo to tattoo, from his gray-flecked sunburned hair and his freckled forearms to his tattooed ankles and knobby toes. There was about both men a look of having been soaked and scrubbed and dried out thousands of times, the abrasive effect of seawater on skin, a roughened and eroded texture, a raggedness around the fingernails, a chronic redness in the eyes, bruised toes and broken toenails, a saturated and salt-rubbed body made leathery by the sun, one water creature sizing up another from the barren solidity of land.