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that way. He was so dumb he would steal stuff he already owned. Bear was too dumb to know Cassie Blythe from a Dumpster, but still he ran through the details of the story again, stumbling occasionally, his face contorted with the effort of recalling the details that I was sure he had been forced to learn from Sundquist: how he had traveled down to Mexico after his release from Mule Creek to stock up on cheap drugs for his nerves; how he had come across Cassie Blythe drinking with an older Mexican in a bar on the Boulevard Agua Caliente, close by the racetrack; how he’d spoken to her when the guy went to the john and had heard the Mainer in her; how the guy had come back and told Bear to mind his own business before hustling Cassie into a waiting car. Somebody at the bar said the man’s name was Hector, and he had a place down in Rosarito Beach. Bear didn’t have any money to follow them, but he was sure that the woman he had seen was Cassie Blythe. He remembered her photograph from the newspapers that his sister used to send to him to pass the time while he was in jail, even though Bear couldn’t read a parking meter, let alone a newspaper. She had even looked over her shoulder at him when he called her name. He didn’t think that she looked unhappy or that she was being held against her will. Still, when he got back to Portland the first thing he did was to contact Mr. Sundquist, because Mr. Sundquist was the private detective named in the newspaper reports. Mr. Sundquist had told Bear that he was no longer involved in the case, that a new PI had taken over. Bear, though, would only work with Mr. Sundquist. He trusted him. He’d heard good things about him. No, if the Blythes wanted Bear’s help in Mexico, then Bear wanted Mr. Sundquist back on the case. Sundquist, nodding along gently beside Bear, straightened up at this point in Bear’s narrative and looked disapprovingly at me.
    “Hell, Bear here is uneasy just having this other guy in the room,” Sundquist confirmed. “Mr. Parker has a reputation for violence.” Bear, all six-three and three hundred pounds of him, tried his best to make it look like he was troubled by my presence. He was, although not for any reason to do with the Blythes or the unlikely possibility that I could actually hurt him. My gaze upon him was unflinching.
    I know you, Bear, and I don’t believe a word you’re saying. Don’t do this. Stop it now before it goes too far.
    Bear, having finished up his story for the second time, released a relieved breath. Sundquist patted him softly on the back and arranged his features into the best expression of concern he could muster. Sundquist had been around for about fifteen years and his reputation had been okay, if not exactly great, for much of that, but lately he’d suffered some reverses: a divorce, rumors of gambling problems. The Blythes were a cash cow that he couldn’t afford to lose. Irving Blythe remained quiet when Bear had finished. It was his wife, Ruth, who was the first to speak. She reached out and touched her husband’s arm.
    “Irving,” she said. “I think—”
    But he raised his hand and she stopped talking immediately. I had mixed feelings about Irving Blythe. He was old school, and sometimes treated his wife like she was a second-class citizen. He had been a senior manager at International Paper in Jay, facing down the United Paper Workers International Union when it sought to organize labor in the north woods in the 1980s. The seventeen-month-long walkout at International during 1987 and 1988 was one of the bitterest strikes in the state’s history, with over one thousand workers replaced in the course of the action. Irv Blythe had been a staunch opponent of compromise, and the company had sweetened his retirement package considerably as a mark of its appreciation when he eventually called it a day and moved back to Portland. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t love his daughter, or that her disappearance