My beam caught up with the black flies, casting shadowy blobs across the rock wall where the tunnel appeared to terminate. They grew larger and larger as I neared. Their buzzing grew louder and louder. I’d been wrong to think the smell couldn’t get any worse. It somehow amplified itself with each wriggling movement I made until the ground vanished beneath my arms and I found myself staring down into a small cave roughly the size of a refrigerator box. At least I could rise to my hands and knees, which made locating the mouth of the tunnel opposite me even easier. I had to swat the bloated flies out of my face as I advanced deeper into the earth. Eventually, this second tunnel opened up into another cave where I found the source of the smell and the flies’ delight. There were broken mesquite branches in the corner, their withered leaves and thorns crusted with blood. Beside them were wadded balls of Saran Wrap that were a sickly shade of black and positively covered with flies.

He had dragged the body in here, removed it from its travois, wrapped it in cellophane to contain the smells of decomposition and putrefaction, and left it down here for some length of time—presumably the duration of the physical investigation—before coming back to retrieve it. That’s why we had lost his trail so easily and had been unable to pick it back up. There hadn’t been one to follow, at least not at that time. And he used the same urine trick to conceal the hidden hatch. For all I knew, he could have been sitting down here in the darkness with it that entire time. Hell, he could still be down here…right…now.

I rose to my feet and turned slowly around. I was in a natural formation roughly the size of a walk-in closet, with smooth stone walls that leaned inward toward each other and met about a foot above my head. Ancient petroglyphs had aged to nearly indistinguishable impressions. There was another tunnel up near where the rocks formed a pinnacled ceiling. I shined my light up into it to make sure the way was clear, and then hauled myself up into the confines. Again, I found myself nearly wedged in there as I squirmed farther into the mountain. I figured I had to be somewhere under the stone wall upon which the second smiley face, chronologically, had been painted.

I won’t pretend to be a geologist. I know nothing about the different kinds of rocks beyond the fact that sandstone crumbles, granite is hard and gray, and limestone is smooth and subject to the erosive forces of water. Whatever this was, it was red and smooth and had been channeled by forces far older and stronger than man.

The passage wound to my right and then started a steady ascent. I saw occasional smears of bodily dissolution. This was the path he had used to remove the remains.

My pulse thundered in my ears. My erratic breaths echoed back at me from the stone walls. I could barely see my gun ahead of me. I could be wiggling right into some kind of trap and I wouldn’t know it until my spirit was looking back down at my lifeless corpse.

And then, abruptly, the tunnel ended.

I managed to roll over onto my back and directed my penlight upward. A natural stone chute of sorts led straight up. It took some doing, but I worked my way to standing and shined my light over the walls. There were what almost looked like small recessed shelves leading up into the darkness. Perfectly designed for one hand and one foot to either side. I worked my way upward until I ran out of up and shoved another wooden slab out into the fresh air, which, even though it was superheated, felt absolutely divine as it washed over me, filled my lungs, and cleansed my sinuses of the smell of festering death.

I climbed out, blinking, into the blinding light and sat on the edge with my legs dangling back down into the shadows. The wooden slab had been adorned with a stone that made it almost invisible. You would have to know what it was to distinguish it from the surrounding rocks, from the cracks between which all sorts of blossoming cacti grew. Massive red rock formations rose all around me. From where I sat, I could no more see the surrounding desert than anyone out there could see me. I was about to start climbing up the rocks to figure out exactly where I was when I caught the reflection of the sun from something metallic beside me. A thin, coiled wire poked out of the ground at the edge of the hole. I pinched it between my fingers and pulled on it, exposing its length all the way to the base of a prickly pear, where a small radio transmitter had been fitted into a crevice near its roots.

A tiny red light blinked on the face of the black box.

The Coyote knew I was here.

EIGHTEEN

There was no time to pat myself on the back. The moment I triggered that transmitter, I had accelerated my adversary’s timetable. He wouldn’t have equipped a beacon like that unless by finding that cave I was closing in on him. While that in itself was an encouraging thought, I still didn’t have any idea who the Coyote was. The only new knowledge I had added to my woefully sad stockpile were the facts that he knew things about this desert that few, if any, other people did; he’d been planning this for what had to have been years; and his shoulders couldn’t have been much broader than mine. And he was strong. Dragging a body was more difficult than one might think. We were talking about a minimum of a hundred pounds of dead weight, no pun intended. Probably more. And somehow pulling it behind him while he squirmed on his belly, then hauling it up and out of the earthen tube.

I debated calling in a crime scene response team from the Phoenix office to scour the cave and the egresses from it, but I knew they wouldn’t find anything useful. The Coyote had planned this too meticulously to be careless when it mattered most. He had anticipated someone finding his hidey-hole at some point and surely took all of the proper precautions to keep from leaving prints or shedding trace evidence. They wouldn’t have found anything beyond the victim’s unmatchable DNA in the tunnel he had used to exit the warren either. If I was correct and he had dragged the remains down the western face of the rocks, there was nothing in which to leave a footprint and the wind was blowing right across the mountainside, scouring it of even the dust that coated damn near everything else on the reservation. And there wasn’t a track of any kind in the surrounding desert as far as I could see.

I wouldn’t be able to sit on these findings for very long, though. If I didn’t make some significant headway on my own—and soon—I was risking charges of my own for withholding evidence. I refused to let this go out over the open airwaves where the Coyote would be able to track all of our movements as we negotiated every little investigative step with all of the overlapping law enforcement agencies on the reservation. Not yet, anyway.

The Coyote had considered every variable I could think of, at least at the first scene. I was hoping I would have better luck at the others. I couldn’t afford to give him any more time to go back over the crime scenes. After all, if he followed the same pattern, it was a distinct possibility that the third body was still on site, which was why I was streaking across the desert as fast as I could, racing a rooster tail of dust and the Border Patrol agents who would undoubtedly be converging on the site once they found my tracks. The radio frequency jammer was only going to buy me enough of a head start to have a little quality alone time, so I was going to have to make it count. The last thing I wanted was for someone who could be the leak, or even the killer himself, to intrude upon the scene and spoil whatever slim chance I had of discovering something new.