I had no idea how long I had slept—been unconscious —but the silence seemed deeper somehow, the way it gets well past midnight. Mosquitoes crawled and fed on my face, and I had no strength to brush them away. The fever burned brightly inside me. Rhythmic pain pulsated in my temples, my right arm. What now, dead man? I thought. I had gotten away from Dinessen, and I had gotten away from Tiong and his men, and I was still free and still alive—if just barely. But where did I go from here? I was wrapped up, imprisoned, in a web of circumstance so neatly and so beautifully that there was no way out, no way to prove my innocence. Dinessen had killed Marla King, and Dinessen was dead; and I had been found with Marla King’s body to top it off. There was simply nothing I could do to convince Tiong of the truth—especially after the way I had run. He would put the whole bundle on my head, too; he would decide I had the figurine, and that I had killed La Croix, and if he was able to dig up a connection between Dinessen and Marla King, he would revise the toll upward to three murders once the Swede’s body was discovered.
