“One of his e-mails a year or so ago mentioned a cantina in a town called-”

“Sasabe,” Helms finished. “Man, what a strange deal that was. With all the operations we did along the border, he got to like those little border cantinas. Sasabe is really remote. It’s the most desolate port of entry along the entire Mexican border. But Sean liked to go to that place anytime we were in the area. I went with him once and had a couple of beers.” He shook his head. “Not my kind of place. You felt like someone was going to jump you at any minute and if you didn’t have a weapon of some sort you might not make it out of there. But Sean never had any trouble there.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Look, Faith, you don’t want to go there. I’m sorry, but with all due respect, the only women who go in those kinds of cantinas are women who are offering their services, if you know what I mean. You could get into real trouble.”

“No offense taken. But you don’t know me very well, either.”

“So I don’t.” He took a pen from his pocket and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser on the table. He drew a detailed map.

Faith stood to go and thanked Helms.

“Sure,” Helms said. “If you find him, tell him he’s welcome to crash on my couch anytime. Tell him AJ’s concerned about him.”

“I will.”

“Oh, and Faith?”

Faith had already taken a couple of long steps, and had to turn back to face Helms.

“Good luck with the whole Department Thirty thing. Senator McDermott’s a grade-A jerk, and his daughter was really screwed up. Most people in Arizona aren’t surprised she wound up getting herself killed. But watch your back. The senator doesn’t do anything if he doesn’t think it’ll benefit him politically.”

“You knew, the whole time we sat here and talked.”

Helms smiled. “You take care, now.”

“I will,” Faith said.

Clutching the napkin with the directions to Sasabe, she went back to the Suburban.

Sean didn’t kill Scott, she thought.

The thought gave her something to hold on to, something she could grasp. Her brother hadn’t killed her lover.

But Hendler was still dead. A gaping hole had still been seared into her life.

But now she knew who had done it-or at least who had seen that it was done-and she knew why. There were still puzzle pieces-mostly about Daryn McDermott-that didn’t fit, things about the girl that didn’t add up. There was no reason for her to have been a part of it. She shouldn’t have had to die.

But I’ll find out soon enough.

Directions in hand, Faith drove toward Sasabe and the Mexican border.

FAITH HAD NEVER REALLY SPENT TIME ALONG THE Mexican border, and certainly not in such a remote part of the world as Sasabe, Arizona.

It seemed an unforgiving landscape, cactus and sage and hard-baked desert ground. But there were always mountains on the horizon, seemingly unreachable, frowning down at the desert below. In some ways, Faith could see her brother in a place like this. Change would come slowly here, if at all. The desert and the distant mountains would always stand their ground, harsh and inscrutable. Sean would always know what to expect here, at least on the surface.

The cantina was hard to miss. As far as Faith could tell, it was the only place of business in the town of Sasabe. Her Miata, covered in dust, was parked squarely in front of it.

She parked the big Suburban away from the cantina’s door so that it couldn’t be seen from inside. She strapped her extra-large fanny pack, the one she used when she ran, around her waist. Her gun went inside it. She stepped out of the SUV, the stiff boots crunching gravel.

The cantina’s door was propped open with a trash barrel. Faith walked through it and stood for a moment, adjusting to the dim light. She saw the bar, two old men at the far end of it, smoking foul-smelling homemade cigarettes. There was the bartender with the droopy mustache, just drawing a beer.

One table was occupied by two Latino men in their twenties, each with a name across the left breast of his uniform shirt. They wore dark work pants and boots.

Everyone looked at her.

Sean had always been better at languages than she, and Faith suspected that seven years on the border had improved his Spanish, while her own was stuck somewhere in high school.

“Buenos días,” she said.

No one spoke.

“Hablo Inglés?”

One of the old smokers snorted out a laugh, but otherwise the place was silent.

Faith walked slowly to the bar, feeling the eyes on her. She’d left her purse in the van-she wasn’t that crazy, after all-but transferred some money and Kimberly Diamond’s driver’s license to the front pocket of her jeans. She reached into the pocket, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and laid it on the bar.

The bartender spread his hands apart.

Faith placed a second hundred beside the first.

The bartender stared at her, eyes lingering on her breasts. He finally shook his head.

“Don’t get greedy,” Faith said, “or you won’t even get the two hundred.”

The bartender looked at her impassively. A voice from the table said, in lightly accented English, “Don’t worry about Juan. We don’t get many six-foot-tall redheads in here.”

Faith turned to look at the table. “I’m only five ten. Where’s the man who drove that gold Miata?”

“I just got here,” the guy said. The patch on his shirt read Bobby in ornate cursive lettering.

“Me too,” said his partner, whose patch read Ramón.

“The guy’s a redhead, like me,” Faith said. “You wouldn’t have missed him. He’s tall, about six three, broad-shouldered. He was probably drinking like a fish.”

Ramón snorted.

“What are you, his sister?” Bobby said, and Ramon snickered.

“Yes,” Faith said.

Both men sobered. Bobby had clearly meant the remark as a joke and hadn’t expected Faith’s direct, matter-of-fact reply.

One of the old smokers said something to the other. Both kept staring at Faith. Faith sensed something there and stared back at them, green eyes digging into their brown ones.

The older of the two, who looked to be in his seventies, had a scraggly white beard and was wearing a brown leather vest over a faded denim shirt. He had a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap pushed back on his head.

“Dodgers need a new manager and a pitching staff,” she said. “They haven’t had shit since Lasorda left.” She looked over her shoulder at the table. “Would one of you please translate that for me? There’s a hundred in it for you if you do.”

Bobby looked at her like she’d lost her mind. “You’re crazy.”

“Yep,” Faith said. “Do it.”

Bobby shrugged and spoke rapidly in Spanish to the old man, who looked surprised and then spoke back.

“Señor Vargas says girls shouldn’t talk like that,” Bobby said. “And he says you don’t know baseball. Girls don’t know baseball.”

Faith smiled. “Tell Señor Vargas that the Dodgers haven’t had a real pitcher since Orel Hershiser. See what he thinks of that.”

Vargas’s eyes grew wide at the mention of the name Hershiser, and he looked at Bobby for the rest. After the translation, Bobby said, “He’s testing you. You really don’t want to get into this with him, lady. He wants you to tell him Hershiser’s record in 1988.”

Faith shook her head. “Ask me something hard. Twenty-three and eight. But the postseason was what was amazing. Two complete games in the World Series, one shutout, ERA for the series of one. Uno. One point zero zero. Same series where Kirk Gibson hit that famous home run against the A’s, coming off the bench when he was injured. That was real baseball.” She shrugged. “I was ten years old. That was the first year I watched the whole World Series on TV. I’m a Cubs fan, so I always have to cheer for someone else in October. I watched that series with my brother. He was so wrapped up in it that he actually cried when Gibson hit that home run. I’ll never forget it.”