Dinah thought she discerned a flash of suspicion in her eyes. "That's right. Guns that the American CIA supplied to the junta are being smuggled north from Samos. Did Phaedon ever talk to you about a lost or missing shipment?"

"Phaedon would never breach his duty by revealing military secrets."

Dinah pulled out her phone. "Give me the governor's number. I'll go through the hoops with his secretary or assistants and when he comes on, you can speak with him directly."

"Governor Rigas is on Malta. I will call him when he returns."

There seemed nothing left to say or do. Defeated, Dinah picked up K.D.'s tea and took a sip. She choked and began to wheeze and cough. It was eighty proof.

The toilet flushed. She was just recovering her breath when K.D. sashayed back into the room. She saw Dinah holding her "iced tea," rolled her eyes, and crossed the room to turn on a lamp.

Dark had fallen and Dinah dreaded the helpless, unavailing hours until morning. She could phone Stavros to see if any of his connections had come through with information. She could phone Papas and pester him to follow up on all the places where Thor had been the previous day. Or she could go home and ransack the house to see if Thor had left any clue to the name of his ally on Samos. She said, "We're going now, Zenia. I would appreciate anything you can do or suggest to help." She scribbled her phone number on a piece of paper and set it on the table. "And if you need help, or if you want to talk about anything at all, call me. Day or night."

The front door banged open. Everyone started, but it was only Egan.

"What an enchanting scene, Zenia, dear. I see that all is forgiven."

"I had a bout of dizziness. Dinah and her young friend have been playing nurse."

"Shall I call for the doctor? You didn't forget to take your pills, did you?" Egan adopted a custodial tone.

"No. I feel quite well." She sat up ramrod straight. Damp tendrils of hair stood out on her head like pilled wool and she primped and tried to smooth them down. "Hand me my drink."

Dinah handed her the glass and wondered if she had more than a friendly interest in Egan.

"I'm Katarina Dobbs from Atlanta, Georgia," said K.D. "Dinah's niece." She held out her hand to Egan as if she expected him to kiss it.

"I'm Egan Vercuni." He appeared vaguely taken aback and shook her hand somewhat brusquely. "What is that you're drinking, Zenia?"

"Metaxa. These girls are on their way out. You must come and have a drink with me. I've had a new idea for the film."

"Which of the muses has whispered in your ear?"

"Mnemosyne," said Zenia. "The goddess of memory. I've remembered something interesting about Marilita."

"And what is that?" he asked.

"She had an absurd love of gypsy music. Decadent, as you'd expect, but we may weave in a few tunes to the musical score."

"Brilliant." He took a sip of Metaxa from her glass, moved the quilt aside, and sat down beside her.

Dinah picked up the note with her phone number and placed it in Zenia's hand. "Take care of yourself, Zenia. Watch out for wolves in sheep's clothing."

Egan shot her a look. "Is there some innuendo in that warning?"

"Not really. The wolf seems to be a popular figure of speech in Greece." She pushed K.D. ahead of her and started for the door. Hand on the knob, she turned back. "Egan, do you know the name Galen Stavros?"

"Doesn't ring a bell. Is he in the theater or the film industry?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Then I've probably never met the fellow."

Dinah lofted a last look over her shoulder at Zenia. For all of her meanness and perversity, she looked small and frail and defenseless.

Chapter Twenty-one.

As the Picanto spiraled down the mountain toward the coast road, Dinah searched for the moon, but Artemis was a truant. A haze dimmed the stars and the lineless road was black as widow's weeds. Her eyes felt sandy and irritated from too many unprotected hours in the sun and the dark of night brought no relief. "Did you copy it down exactly?" she asked K.D.

"I think so. The handwriting would have been hard to make out even if it weren't in Greek, but I have mad skills. I copied the Desiderata in Arabic script in my calligraphy class."

"And you put the original letter back in the book?"

"Page ninety-six, just like you said."

Dinah didn't like to admit that she was finding K.D.'s mad skills useful. "You were in the bathroom an awfully long time."

"What? You think I do Robitussin or something? That sucks."

"That drink you concocted from Zenia's liquor cabinet is what sucks. It tasted a lot worse than cough syrup and your sneakiness about the alcohol doesn't inspire confidence."

"Well, you can relax about the pharma-fun in Zenia's medicine chest. All that's there is a bottle of mouthwash and a bottle of pills. Probably for her blood pressure."

"So you did look."

"I checked it out, okay? I checked out the bedrooms, too. But the really interesting thing I found was in the console in the living room."

"What?"

"Oh, it's probably nothing."

Dinah took her eyes off the road. K.D. was admiring her fingernails, smug as a cat.

"Don't act so pleased with yourself. What did you find?"

"I lied when I told Zenia I hadn't opened that scrapbook. I paged through it before she walked in on me with the gun."

"Did you see any other letters or anything from Nasos Lykos?"

"No. There were a few scraps of writing, but they were all in Greek."

"Did you copy down any of those?"

"I didn't have a chance."

"Were there photographs?"

"Tons. Most were glam shots of old movie stars that had been cut out of fan magazines. Well, I guess they weren't so old when the pictures were taken. There were a couple of Paul Newman and Marlon Brando when they were young and hot, and there were quite a few of Marilita. She looked bangable."

"Slutty, you mean?"

"That, but she was kind of like, I don't know. Like the pouty lips and the cleavage was an inside joke or something. Like she was looking past the camera and the droolers to somebody she really cared about. Maybe the lover who looked like the Spanish knight." K.D. might have an overly romantic sensibility, but even when she seemed not to be paying attention, she didn't miss much.

Dinah couldn't see Zenia poring over movie mags, much less scissoring out glam shots. "It seems way out of character for Zenia to have those kinds of magazines and mind-boggling that she would paste pictures of the sexpot sister she hates in a scrapbook."

"I don't think it's Zenia's scrapbook," said K.D. "It seemed more like the pictures a kid would collect. There are photos of a girl, twelve or thirteen, playing with a camera like she's some kind of paparazzi."

"Alcina?"

"For sure, but she must have been way immature for her age. The heads and arms and legs had been cut off of some pictures and their outfits glued next to pictures of Marilita and Marilyn Monroe. Like paper dolls. I saw something else that was pret-ty amazing." K.D. twisted the rearview mirror around, turned on the overhead light, and tweaked her eyelashes.

"Can the suspense. Just tell me."

She twisted the mirror back into place. "In one of the photos, Alcina is pointing the camera at Marilita. In another, she's zeroing in on a woman with bird eyes and penciled eyebrows, Zenia for sure, and the dude in the bathing suit whose picture is by the front door. I'm thinking she took the picture of Marilita and her boyfriend on the beach the day of the murders."

"Dear God. If Alcina was an eyewitness, no wonder she's traumatized." Dinah's first impulse was to race back to the house and question her, but asking her to relive that day in memory could unhinge a woman who teetered permanently on the brink of hysteria. "Could you tell where they were taken? Indoors or out?"

"Out. There were trees and water in the background."

They reached the coast road and Dinah turned back toward Kanaris. The Aegean was black and foreboding tonight, or maybe her mood made everything appear that way. Across the strait, the lights of Kusadasi twinkled like fragments of crystal. She wished she had a crystal ball. Did the key to finding Thor lie in the past, or was she chasing figments? "Damn it, I wish Alcina weren't so emotionally combustible and I could ask her without sending her into conniptions."

"She'll talk to me," said K.D. "The two of us sort of bonded this morning over our off-the-chain parents."

"What did she say?"

"She was like, 'my mother was executed by a firing squad,' and I'm like, 'my father blew his brains out before they could take him to trial.' And she goes, 'my mother didn't do what they said she did.' And I'm like, 'how do you know that?'"

"And?"

"She said it was bandits."

"Bandits." Dinah let it simmer for a minute. "Bandits killed the other people?"

"That's what she said. They wore black ski masks and carried rifles."

"Why didn't you tell me this earlier? Before I talked with Stavros and Zenia?"

"I don't know. I guess I didn't believe her. I mean, she had a hissy fit when she saw one of my sandals lying sole-up on the floor. She went all over the room spitting and said I should touch this bat bone she carries around for good luck. Serious ick. I was like, no way and she got all fussed. She can sound pretty batty when she gets cranked up."

Dinah was on board with that assessment, although bandits made far more sense than an actress in a bikini running amok with the Colonel's gun. But what could bandits hope to steal from a party of picnickers? Their cooler of beer? Nasos was rich, but he wouldn't have much cash on him at the beach. Ditto, the ladies. That left the Colonel. What if he had access to, or knowledge about, the junta's weapons? The bandits' object could have been to force him to reveal their location and after he did, they killed him and Mrs. Lykos and, probably, Nasos. But why didn't they kill Marilita and Alcina? And why, if they had scored a load of valuable weapons, hadn't they sold them before now?

K.D. said, "With an evil old skank like Zenia in the family tree, it's not surprising that Alcina's freaky. Those posters in Zenia's bedroom grossed me out. The dagger dripping blood wasn't too griz, but the severed head? Ugh! How can she sleep at night?"

Dinah had missed the severed head. It must have been the head of Medusa or else Pentheus, the king of Thebes. She had read the story of Pentheus just recently. Dionysus sent him to spy on a ladies-only drinking party, but the ladies spotted him ogling them from behind a tree and his own mother lopped off his head, not realizing until she sobered up that she'd killed her son. It was the same with Oedipus. He didn't realize he had killed his father and married his mother. As in so many Greek tragedies, the characters' crimes derived not from any willful disobedience to the gods, but from a simple misunderstanding of the facts. What was it that she misunderstood?

K.D. steepled her fingers under her chin. "How's this for a plot? Alcina doesn't want her mother to marry Nasos because he's taking up all of her time and attention. So she's playing with her camera and shooting pictures, but then she puts down the camera and asks the Colonel to let her see what it's like to look through a gun sight. Maybe he's one of those men who likes to show off his expertise. Daddy was like that, if you remember. So anyway, the Colonel gives her the gun. Alcina turns it on him and shoots everyone but her mother and when the police come, Marilita does the noble thing and says she did it. Alcina didn't count on her being executed and ever since, she's been racked by guilt and collecting bat bones and evil eye charms and religious stuff she thinks will keep her from going to hell."

"A child would have had trouble holding a gun steady," said Dinah, "let alone hitting anyone. Almost any adult could have knocked it out of her hands before she did any harm. And what reason would she have had to kill Nasos' mother or the Colonel?"

"You never know. Maybe her father was a born killer like mine. Maybe she's got badness in her blood."

Dinah felt a tug of sympathy. Over the years, she had come to terms with her own father's bad acts. She'd like to help K.D. do the same, but there was no way to distill twenty years of attitudinal evolution into a pithy maxim. She said, "It's all right to love someone who's done bad things, K.D. I loved my father. You loved yours. That doesn't mean we replicate their moral failings. Our conscience is our own."

"Jeez, you don't have to preach."

I'll get back to her, thought Dinah. She said, "I don't think Alcina murdered anyone, although if she was there when it happened, she knows who did."

"Maybe we could find somebody to hypnotize her," suggested K.D.

"Not practical."

"I'll bet Mr. Stavros could persuade her to talk if you trusted him."

"But I don't."

"Then who will you get to translate the letter?"

"I don't know."

"We could bring up a Greek dictionary on the Net and do it ourselves."

"There could be hidden meanings. Nuances a dictionary might not give."

"You don't even trust the dictionary?"

"You've made your point, K.D. But all of the Greeks I've met have been metaphorical to a fault. I wouldn't want to miss some esoteric idiom a dictionary wouldn't show." She considered driving into Karlovassi and showing the letter to a young person, someone who'd never heard of Nasos Lykos or the Stephanadis sisters. But she had to trust somebody sometime. Maybe it was time she rolled the dice. She decided to park K.D. at the house and spend the rest of the evening at the Marc Antony listening to gypsy music. Until the morning, she was in limbo. All she could do was hitch her hopes to Thor's self-assayed strength. I know how to hang on one minute longer.

Chapter Twenty-two.

The courtyard tables at the taverna were filling up early tonight. The little votive candles glimmered pleasantly and a hum of conviviality belied the very idea of trouble. Dinah looked around for Mentor, but she didn't see him or recognize any of the other patrons. They seemed to recognize her. An awkward hush fell as she walked past the grape arbor. She supposed they'd heard about Thor and congregated at the local watering hole to gossip about it.

Brakus' wife hurried out the door carrying a tray loaded with mezes and Brakus filed out behind her with a carafe in each hand. He saw Dinah and his brow furrowed. He delivered the carafes to nearby tables, said something to the occupants in Greek, and stepped up to greet her. "I am sorry to learn about Inspector Ramberg. It is unbelievable."