Once his secretary had brought coffee for both of us, Sudakis settled back in his chair. It creaked. He said, "What can I do for you, Dave? I gather this is an unofficial visit: you haven't shown me a warrant, you haven't served a subpoena, you don't have a priest or an exorcist or even a lawyer with you. So what's up?"

"You're right - this is unofficial." I sipped my coffee. It was delicious, nothing like the reconstituted stuff that makes a liar of the law of similarity. "I'd like to talk about your containment scheme here, if you don't mind."

His air of affability turned to stone as abruptly as if he'd gazed on a cockatrice. By his expression, he'd sooner have had me ask him about a social disease. "We're tight," he said.

"Absolutely no question we're tight. Maybe we'd both better have priests and lawyers here. I don't like 'unofficial' visits that hit me where I live, Inspector Fisher." I wasn't Dave any more.

"You may not be as tight as you think," I told him. "That's what I'm here to talk about" "Talk is cheap." He was hard-nosed as a linebacker, too. "I don't want talk. I want evidence if you try and come here to say things like that to me."

"Elf-shot around the dump is up a lot from ten years ago till now," I said.

"Yes, I've seen those numbers. We've got a lot of new immigrants in the area, too, and they bring their troubles with them when they come to this country. We have a case of jaguaranthropy, if that's a word, a couple of years ago. Try telling me that would have happened when all the neighbors sprang from northwest Europe."

He was right about the neighborhood changing. I'd gone past a couple of houses that had signs saying Curandero tacked out front. If you ask me, curanderos are frauds who prey on the ignorant, but nobody asked me. A basic principle of magic is that if you believe in something, it'll be true - for you.