The fourth was the crown jewel on my resume, the feather in my professional cap. I had initially started investigating the case on a hunch. Five housewives had been reported missing from the southern suburbs of Denver over a six month span. Wives leaving their husbands wasn’t uncommon. Nor was leaving without taking any of their belongings with them. Women walked away from their lives and started from scratch with their lovers every day. None of the women had left behind children. A history of infidelity was essentially impossible to prove. And if the police tried to track down every wife who left her husband, they wouldn’t have any time left to give speeding tickets. What first caught my eye was that in each case the husband had filed the formal missing persons report immediately following the end of the twenty-four hour waiting period. All of the reports had been filed on Saturday evening, which meant that all of the women had left them late in the afternoon on a Friday. Records indicated that all five husbands had called the police and pretty much every emergency assistance agency and nearby hospital multiple times. In each case, the wife had left behind her car, everything she owned, including her purse, and a husband who, upon interview, failed to set off my facial BS detector. Each of the husbands, to a man, was convinced that his marriage was in excellent shape, there were no problems with fidelity, and he would be willing to do anything within his power to bring her back.

Without any proof of foul play, my only option was to talk to the neighbors, who pretty much corroborated what the husbands had said. One in particular, a busybody I was confident I’d caught about a half a bottle of wine into her evening, suggested that the woman across the street might have run off with the UPS man. She said she sure as hell would have. Apparently, he’d had some pretty muscular arms, over which she had drooled while he was leaving the house carrying a large box back to his truck. A call to the main UPS hub had confirmed that no delivery or pickup had been scheduled for that address, nor were they missing any trucks from their fleet. The man on the phone had chuckled about the muscular arms comment. It turned out that was a trait fairly common to men who delivered heavy packages for a living, believe it or not, but he did invite me down to interview the drivers who worked the southern routes. One of them, a ruggedly handsome guy named Rich Meyers, had proffered his hand and looked me in the eye and I had known right then and there that he was my man. It had been written all over his face. Not guilt or fear or regret, but a smug kind of pride. Not arrogance, per se, more like the expression of a cat that knew for a fact there were no canary feathers around its mouth and it had hidden the bones where no one would ever find them.

We did, though.

A search warrant served with a battering ram later and we found the remains of all five women, each in a different meat freezer in his garage. He’d been so proud of himself that he told us all of the details, about how he had been delivering to these women for months; how they had looked at him like he was a piece of meat; how he had rushed through his earlier deliveries and hurried back to their houses as his final stop of the day; how he had smiled and offered to carry the big, seemingly heavy package inside for them; how he had knocked them unconscious with a blow to the head and carried them back out to his truck in that big, formerly empty box; how he had dropped them off in his garage, locked them inside their new homes, and rushed back to work to punch out right on time. The bloody smears and claw marks on the undersides of the lids validated his story. The other things he told us he did to them upon his return are buried in the back of my mind, for those are words I choose never to relive, the expressions I never want to see again, the fates I wouldn’t have wished upon my worst enemies.

That was just over a year ago now. The case that had made me, that had helped carry Nielsen into the SAC’s office, that had brought me out here now.

This was now case number five. This was no longer a scenario where having a good looking native man—one still riding a modicum of celebrity in the press—to trot out in front of the cameras when they showed the bloody smiley faces was the main point of my continued presence. This was now officially the third murder perpetrated by the same person with the same MO. There had been a cooling-off period between the first two, followed by a period of acceleration.

I had no choice but to declare it official.

I was up against a serial killer.

He had identified me as his adversary.

And with this victim, he had declared war upon me.

A war I was no longer entirely certain I could win.

THIRTEEN

The sun was already rising by the time I reached my car. It was a good thing it had been dark when I arrived at the scene. If I’d had a better look at the maze of cacti, there’s no way on this earth I would have attempted that route, let alone at a sideways run with only my penlight to guide me. It was a miracle I wasn’t slowly bleeding to death from a million puncture wounds. A brighter man than I was would have taken one of the paths that wound around the cactus field on the way back. That brighter man would have been repeatedly struck by the thousands of diamondbacks I could hear shaking their rattles as they emerged from their dens to bask on the flat red rocks. That brighter man had probably at least figured out where the nearest emergency medical assistance could be found, though. I bumped that task to the top of my list, right below having a little chat with Chief Antone.

His words still troubled me. As did that fact that he was left-handed and in each instance the killing stroke had been delivered from behind, right to left. That in itself wasn’t proof that the killer was left-handed, but it was somewhat damning evidence. The problem was that we’d already established that the evidence couldn’t be trusted. If our unsub fancied himself the mythical trickster of lore, then nothing could be taken at face value, especially now that he’d demonstrated how meticulously every detail had been plotted.

The red desert shimmered under the red sun as it crested the red mountains behind me. The dust that rose from my tires glittered red in my rearview mirror. Even with the AC going strong, I could feel the heat starting to take hold of the world without through the window. I didn’t need to glance at my in-dash thermometer to know that the sun wasn’t even all the way up and it was already pushing a hundred degrees. Today promised to be even worse than yesterday. Between the deadly heat, the brutal landscape, and the venomous creatures, I couldn’t fathom how anyone would actually choose to live here. The thought of starting my day in a pool of sweat, shoving my feet into slippers the scorpions had claimed during the night, and stepping out onto my porch to find a rattlesnake coiled around my morning paper was about as much as I could bear. It was no wonder my father had left this miserable place at the first opportunity. You couldn’t possibly get any farther away than the Air Force could take you. And this was about the only place on the planet where they could never send you back, at least not now that the Cold War was over and the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range was decommissioned, leaving behind craters and bunkers and the husks of tanks and live munitions to collect dust for future generations of our vaguely hominid mutant descendants to unearth and study.

Don’t let anyone tell you I can’t be every bit as nostalgic as the next guy.