characters who surfaced suddenly, played a role, and then disappeared. I decided to go see Bruce Jones's lawyer, Joe Frank Zuñiga. He had brokered the meeting between Jones and the journalist Mar Supnad, and at the time of Jones's death he reportedly had been negotiating police protection in exchange for Jones telling his story. I wondered if he might recall anything else Jones had said about his dealings with Le Roux. But when I went online to find his address, the first Google result was a headline from a Philippine news site proclaiming that Zuñiga himself had gone missing. According to the article, from July 2012, one morning that June Zuñiga left home for a meeting with "a client" in Subic Bay and hadn't been seen since.

Wondering who else connected to the M/V Ufuk had turned up dead, I headed to the Manila office of the National Bureau of Investigation to meet with Peter Lugay, the chief of the NBI special task force investigating the Zuñiga case. The details were relatively sparse, he told me: At 11:45 on the morning of June 20, Zuñiga was seen in the Subic Bay area after a meeting with two men. One of them was Timothy Desmond, CEO of the company that operated Ocean Adventure, the aquatic animal park. Desmond, an American animal behaviorist, had made his name training the killer whale in the movie Free Willy. The other man was the head of security for Ocean Adventure: John Nash. Nash and Zuñiga were "close," Lugay told me. "They called each other 'compadre.'" Around the time of the meeting, a witness reported seeing a man near Zuñiga's car being dragged into a white van.

"Unfortunately," Lugay said, "I think we can safely assume that he is dead."

A colleague of Lugay's told me that since taking on the Zuñiga case they had been trying to understand the connections between the disappearances and the M/V Ufuk. "Have you encountered the name Herbert Tan Tiu?" he asked me. I hadn't, so he filled me in: Acting on a tip in early October 2010, two months after the Jones murder, the Philippine National Police raided Tiu's house and dis-