Don’t let anyone tell you I’m not hopelessly sentimental.

I leaned over the edge and shined my light under the house once more. Only a few scorpions had crawled back out into the open, where I had hit them with my beam before, and they scuttled out of sight pretty much immediately. The desiccated carcasses of their brethren were scattered everywhere.

I was really not looking forward to this.

I sat on the precipice and let my legs dangle. The heat and humidity wrapped around my ankles and feet like a wet blanket. It had been a while since anyone had opened this hatch to let it breathe, which definitely worked against me. The smell could have at least had the opportunity to dissipate a little. I pointed the beam directly beneath me, waited to make sure that nothing was going to come crawling or slithering out, then dropped down onto the dirt in a crouch. I shined the light in a circle around me as fast as I could to prevent being overrun. I could hear clicking and grinding sounds all around me in the darkness. Fortunately, whatever was making them seemed content enough to leave me be. That didn’t necessarily mean that I was comfortable crawling deeper under the house and away from the lone egress, but there was no other way I could examine what I had seen at the edge of the flashlight’s reach from above without actual physical proximity.

Flies buzzed at the periphery of the beam above a dark hole in the ground. There were only a few of them. After all, there wasn’t much left for them to eat. The scorpions appeared to have consumed all of the flesh before turning on each other. The bones protruding from the pit were old. They’d been absolved of flesh long ago. All that remained now was a rust-colored discoloration and the black knots where the tendons had rotted from the inside out. If I were to wager a guess, those at the very top had to be at least six months old. Maybe more. I didn’t have any desire to dig down there through the remains to see how many there were or how old the ones at the bottom were. It was enough for me to know that there were so many, the majority still mostly articulated. By all appearances, the bodies seemed to have just been hauled down here in one piece and hurled into the hole. I saw no obvious signs of either acute or prolonged violence, no fractures that had yet to begin the process of healing. Nor did I see any rumpled plastic like I had in the bedroom above me. Only a sheet of warped plywood he must have used as a cover until the deep pit, which must have once seemed ambitious, started to overflow.

I tried to picture the Coyote living a single floorboard away, while scorpions and snakes feasted on the decomposing flesh, while generations of flies lived and bred and died, only to be replaced by the maggots that picked up where they left off. Falling asleep on that stained mattress listening to the buzzing and clicking. Plotting how to get his next victim to hurl down into the stinking pit with the others. Why even bring them back here when he could simply leave them in the desert for the carrion birds? It was the only part of the act that felt even remotely intimate. There almost seemed to be a disconnect between Ban and his victims that I couldn’t quite explain, as though he hadn’t known them in life and had no desire to make the effort in death. Their bodies were refuse. He lived exclusively for the hunt. That was the only thing that mattered. So why was he now trying to send a message? What could he possibly have to say that would justify so much senseless killing?

If he had kept trophies, he had obviously taken them with him to wherever he was now. There was nothing here; no mementos of any sort. This was now just an abandoned trailer in the middle of nowhere he had once used for the disposal of bodies. And he had obviously found a new home now, someplace where there were now the bodies of at least four victims to keep him company.

All I had accomplished here was proving what I already suspected. He had been killing people out here for a long time and no one had been the wiser. How many other pits like this were out there? How many smiley faces had we already missed? For all I knew, the desert could be painted with them and the Coyote could be sitting around a pit the size of the Grand Canyon already nearly filled with corpses.

I looked down at the tangled mass of bones, at the lives stripped of their humanity. Somewhere out there mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters were lighting candles and saying prayers for the safe return of these poor souls, hoping that wherever they were they were happy and alive. Soon enough the truth would set in, if it hadn’t already. These were the lost and never-to-be-found. These were the forever unidentified. Even after this discovery was turned over to the locals, these remains would just be shuttled off to the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office/Forensics Science Center to wait for eternity with the hundreds of others that were found in this very desert every year. Maybe a few of them would be identified from photographs loved ones sent to their various consulates, pictures of missing persons smiling their biggest smiles in hopes that such precious captured moments would suffice in lieu of dental records. This was the closing of the circle of life, down here in the darkness, where their ribcages now provided shelter for the very animals that had consumed their hearts.

These people meant something to someone, whether or not they did to their killer. They had mattered. They still mattered.

If only to me.

I was the one upon whom they counted to bring their murderer to justice, or, failing at that, to avenge them.

There was nothing more to be learned down here. I crawled toward the hole in the bedroom closet and climbed back up into the trailer. The front door was still standing open as I had left it. I stepped out under the blazing sun, for once grateful for the dryness of the heat.

I stood on the decrepit porch and used my cell phone to anonymously report the trailer to the ME’s office directly to keep the call from being traced back to me too quickly. Between the Border Patrol and the FBI, there would be agents crawling all over this desert like ants at a picnic, but I still couldn’t fathom why that would be a positive development for the Coyote.

I watched my father’s elder brother through the windshield of my car as I spoke. He had his face buried in his hands. I had to admit there was a part of me that wanted him to look up so I could see an expression of shame or remorse, maybe even regret, something to let me know that he recognized the evil he had brought into the world. Something other than the emotional distance he had already shown me, the same emotional distance I felt toward his son and him.

My blood.

My family.

It frightened me how very much alike we were.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Where’s his mother?”

Neither of us had spoken since we left the trailer. I’d imagine both of us wanted to burn it down, but for different reasons.

“None of your business.”

I recognized his tone. It was the one he used to end a conversation. I truthfully didn’t care whether he wanted to talk or not, nor did I care if I pissed him off in the process. He wasn’t the only one who was in a vile mood.

“She leave you? Is that it?”

“You’re walking a thin line. Blood or not, you’re still an outsider here.”

His cheeks flushed with anger, but he kept his eyes straight ahead, on the road. He was trying his best to keep his expression studiously neutral. I’d been doing this for so long that I could see the cracks forming before he even realized there was the possibility that they might. And the more he protested, the more I started to think that whatever happened to her had some bearing on what was happening here now.