“Was that her in your bedroom? The pictures on the dresser?”

His lips whitened as he tightened them against his teeth. I didn’t have to see his hands to know they were balled into fists.

“There are some things that aren’t any of your business. Things that were never meant to be your business. You can run all over this reservation, saying and doing whatever you want, but this subject is off limits. Especially to you.” I slowed the car as we neared the turnoff for his driveway. The tactic was transparent. “Just let me out anywhere through here.”

“Was it another man? Did she run off and leave you with the kid?”

“Stop the car. Let me out.”

“Did she recognize the fact that her own son was a monster, is that it?”

“I’m warning you. I don’t care what kind of badge you carry.”

“Did she sense the evil in him and decide she’d sooner—”

I didn’t see the punch coming. I heard the crack, tasted copper on the back of my tongue, and the next thing I knew we were barreling through the desert, tearing up creosote and cacti and heading straight toward his house in a cloud of dust. I stomped the brake and the car skidded sideways to a halt. Before we were even fully stopped, Roman was climbing out the door.

“She died,” he shouted through the closing door. I watched him walking away until he turned and pointed at me. I could barely hear him through the car door, but his expression alone would have sufficed. “Don’t you come back here again! Ever!”

And with that, he vanished into the settling cloud of dust.

I stretched my jaw and rubbed at the spot where he had belted me. His fist had connected with the curvature of my mandible, just beneath my right earlobe. I might have seen it coming in time if he’d swung with his right. It didn’t matter. I was man enough to admit that I’d had it coming. I knew I was pushing too hard and I’m sure my words had been barbed, but I was angry and I needed to take it out on someone. I know he wasn’t responsible for murdering those people, nor was he directly to blame for the actions of his son. I wanted to hurt him because he could have stopped Ban. He could have intervened before it ever reached this point. Maybe Ban could have even received help. As it stood now, if he wasn’t killed out here in the desert, he would end up riding a needle. Of course, after murdering a federal agent, he wouldn’t survive his first night in prison.

I sat there a while longer, watching the dust settle like snow onto my windshield and hood. It turned the blazing sun an orangish color while the sky appeared to fill with ash. Finally, I reversed the car and backed toward to road, dragging branches and whole uprooted bushes with me. The scraping sounds that came from under the car made me grateful this was a pool car and not my personal vehicle. I backed right out onto the main road and stared at the trail of destruction I had left in my wake. The branches under the hood had nearly erased the tire tracks. There was a thought on the edge of my consciousness, like a tip-of-the-tongue kind of thing, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. Something about the way the brush marks obscured my trail struck a chord.

It would come to me eventually. When I was ready.

I put the car into drive and headed back toward town. The last shrub had just shaken loose from my undercarriage when the first Crown Vic blew past me in the opposite direction at close to ninety. Two more whipped past right behind it, so fast that the wind from their passage nearly buffeted my car onto the shoulder. The ME’s office must have called the Bureau first. I watched for brake lights in the rearview mirror, but none of them so much as slowed. I guess I should have been thankful for the desert camouflage that now disguised my vehicle.

There was that elusive thought again, but I still couldn’t catch it.

I focused again on the road. I had enjoyed spending time with my uncle so very much that I figured now would be a wonderful time to have a little chat with Chief Antone. Why waste a perfectly rotten mood on myself when I could share it with someone as deserving as the chief? I understood the hypocrisy of being angered by the fact that he was keeping information from me, but, damn it, I was a federal agent. It was in my job description.

The police station looked pretty much the same as it had earlier, although things seemed to have calmed down in the interim. The aura of panic had faded to the more manageable bedlam I associated with most rural station houses. And still the chief’s cruiser was nowhere to be found. Maybe his absence was nothing out of the ordinary. Could have even been his day off for all I knew. Besides, tracking him down might not be such a terrible thing. It gave me the opportunity to see him in his element, or at least his element, whether he was in it at the time or not. There was something about him that still didn’t sit right with me.

Who was I kidding? It was downright maddening.

It took all of about thirty seconds to pull his home address from my computer. I was there in ten minutes flat. He lived in an old adobe home not unlike the one in which my father had been raised. It was the same color as the dust that trailed my car and apparently utilized the same repairman as the police station. The cracks in the adobe showed through the discolored patches from a hundred feet away as I turned down his dirt driveway. Brown juniper shrubs lined the rutted drive. A nopales cactus sagged to my right, the pads black and eroded. Generations of tumbleweeds had aggregated against a ramshackle picket fence enclosing what I assumed passed for a front yard, although it was little more than a rectangular slice of the same desert that stretched away from me to the distant horizon.

I parked beside the fence and watched the curtains through the front windows while I waited for the dust to settle. I climbed out and walked toward the gate, which was ordinarily held closed by a frayed length of rope, but now clapped open and closed on the gentle breeze that had arisen from the southwest. The rusted hinges squealed when I opened it and passed through. The front porch was a faded wooden number that had been built over a crumbling concrete pad. The planter boxes on it contained potting soil that had dried to a pale gray and spilled through the cracks in the pottery. There was a cholla carcass beneath the window to my right, over which hung the bleached skull of a bull, and a dead row of sage along the fence line. Considering the cacti and shrubs grew naturally around here, it must have taken some doing to kill them off. The entire house gave the same impression of carefully tended decrepitude as the police station.

All except for the upper rim of the satellite dish I could barely see over the corner of the roof.

I understood why the chief cultivated such an image for a police station servicing a largely impoverished tribe, especially when it came to dealing with external agencies, but I couldn’t come up with a single good reason why he would go to such lengths when it came to his personal domain, unless there was something inside that he was trying to hide.

I knocked on the front door, which was about the most solid feature of the entire façade. I didn’t expect anyone to answer and wasn’t surprised when no one did. I peeked through the gaps between the curtains, which revealed nothing but the horizontal blinds behind them.

I knocked again and waited.

Antone had mentioned a twelve year-old granddaughter, but this house showed no indication that she lived here. He hadn’t said a word about a spouse or the child that had spawned the granddaughter or even if he or she had any siblings. I hadn’t thought to ask, primarily because I flat-out hadn’t cared at the time, but that knowledge would have served me well right about now.

I knocked again, harder this time.

It didn’t look like anyone was home; however, the last thing I wanted to do was surprise a terrified housewife or latchkey kid and take a shotgun blast to the gut. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time to screw around. I didn’t know where Antone was and I really didn’t want to be inside his house when he returned.