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blond then, it was a sun-streaked copper, cut blunt to her shoulders, and there was a tattoo on her lower back, a tangle of blue Sanskrit, that looked as if it had been there a while, but which proved to be window dressing. The freckles were real though, and so were the quick green eyes. And the catch at the back of his throat. And the ache he felt through his arms and fingers.
    “
Muy bien, no
?” Nando continued. “At first I think she’s a tourist, but then I’m not sure. All week I see guys make their play, and all week she’s ice. She shuts them down before they get a word out—even me, if you can believe it. Then these skinny guys check in a couple days ago, from up north, and suddenly she’s Miss Congeniality. She lets them buy her drinks, lunch, dinner, whatever, and they’re practically slitting each other’s throats to get next to her.”
    “You think she’s a working girl?”
    “She’s working something,
cabrón
. I just can’t figure out what.”
    Nando was flying up to Monterrey that afternoon for his niece’s
quinceañera
, and he picked up the check before he left and promised to let Carr buy dinner when he returned. “You keep your eye on her, bro. Maybe you can tell me what the mystery is all about.” It took him three days to work it out.
    Carr spent a few more hours poolside that afternoon, watching her talk to the skinny men. The next day, he took a room at the hotel and followed her: to the beach with the tall skinny man, into town with the balding one, on the cliff-side hiking trail with the blond one who wore a strand of Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist. Poolside, in the cottony twilight, the men bought her drinks, fidgeted, laughed too long, and looked away from one another and scowled.
    The day after that, Carr spent some dollars with the hotel staff to learn that her name was Carrie Lyle and that she was from L.A. The three men were from Milpitas, California, and they’d each given the same address on McCarthy Boulevard when they’d registered. Online, in the hotel’s business center, he found that the Milpitas address was the headquarters of Null Space Integrated, a manufacturer of specialized graphics chips, and that the men were NSI’s three most senior design engineers. Of Carrie Lyle he could find no trace at all.
    A pro then, trolling for technical intel, or maybe for talent. It didn’t surprise Carr, but the knowledge left him feeling somehow disappointed, as if such mundane loot wasn’t deserving of her performance. Because it really was an exceptional performance—maybe the best he’d seen—subtle, unhurried, and finely calibrated to each member of her small audience. He saw it in her body language—the way she arranged herself at their sides—and he heard it in the snippets of conversation he’d managed to steal. She was tentative, almost shy, with the tall man; coltish, nearly awkward, with the bald one; and with the blond Buddhist she was ethereal and dreamy. Three women, beckoning.
    It didn’t seem much work for her to reconcile her various selves when she entertained the three men at once. It was a matter of small adjustments as far as Carr could tell from his corner of the patio—something in her laugh, her posture, the way she touched her hair. A matter of little intimacies bestowed like candies: a fingertip on the back of a hand, a tanned thigh pressed for a moment against a pale one, a tanned foot sliding on a pale ankle, a hand on a nervous hip. The skinny men were like cats under a full moon, and at his shaded table Carr himself felt a lunar itch and an urge to howl.
    So, mystery solved. Carr sighed heavily at the squandering of talent and hoisted himself from his seat. He headed toward his room and wondered what he and Declan might not get up to with someone like her on their crew. They’d been talking about recruiting someone with that kindof knack—a roper, a honeypot—but neither of them could come up with a likely prospect. Carr slid