I stepped down from the porch, crossed the yard, and wandered around the side of the house. There were more dead junipers and a couple of dead pines with bark ravaged by beetles. The back of the house looked marginally better than the front. A bent aluminum screen door, without an actual screen, opened onto a small deck that contained a single lawn chair and a half-dozen empty ceramic planters. The chair was the anomaly. The metal still shined and the cushions were in good shape. There was little more than a patina of dust on them, which was easily enough brushed off before I sat down in the chief’s chair. Like the coffee maker at the station and the satellite dish, this was the indulgence that shattered the illusion. I imagined Antone sitting just as I was now, staring off to the west across the rolling desert to where the sun would set behind the distant mountains. A stratified ridge rose from the sand and creosote a couple of miles away. Beyond it, I could see the roofline of an outbuilding. Or at least what looked like the roof of a manmade structure from this distance. Two faint parallel tracks wound around the shrubs and cacti toward it.

I stood again and rapped on the screen door. Thirty seconds later I had it propped against my back and was working the lock with my rakes. I knew what I was doing crossed a line. Anything I found inside—if there was anything to find—would technically be inadmissible in a court of law, but I wasn’t trying to make a case against the chief. Anything he might be doing that he shouldn’t be was surely small potatoes. He wasn’t the Coyote. I was certain of that, but I needed to know why he was investigating the natural underground formations at the same time the Coyote was using them to facilitate his killing spree. Like I said, I don’t believe in coincidence. The chief was definitely keeping something from me and hiding it behind the guise of helpfulness.

A rake pick is about the easiest tool to use when it comes to getting through any standard keyed lock in a hurry. It’s pretty much just a slim metal rod with a snake-shaped curvature at the end. The standard tumbler lock is composed of a series of spring-loaded mechanisms called pin stacks, each of which is made of two pins, one on top of the other, a key pin and a driver pin, respectively. When the properly cut key is inserted into the lock, the teeth create the right amount of tension on the key pins to force them upward until the bases of the driver pins align at what’s called the shear line. That’s the point where the lock disengages and the key can be turned to open the door. A rake essentially takes the place of the teeth of a key. All you have to do is run it back and forth inside the lock until you get all of the pins to “hang” at the shear line, apply a little tension, and…voila.

The back door popped open, just a crack.

I slid the sleeve of my windbreaker over my hand and used it to open the door. I went in fast and low, drawing my flashlight with one hand and my pistol with the other.

No shotguns roared or terrified women screamed. There was no sound at all, save for the metronomic ticking of a clock deeper in the house. I waited for nearly a full minute, listening to the tick…tock…tick…tock while beads of sweat trickled down my spine between my shoulder blades, then started into the house.

TWENTY-EIGHT

I entered via a kitchen that smelled of black beans and peppers. I backhanded my flashlight, aligned it with the sightline of my Beretta, and examined my surroundings. The dishes in the sink had been rinsed but not washed. The counters were cluttered with random cooking utensils. My flashlight beam reflected from a stainless steel industrial coffee maker that ground the beans, drew the water directly from a tap connected to the sink, and brewed whole pots at a time, on demand. It probably cost more than the bulky old microwave and the avocado-colored refrigerator and stove set combined. There was a table buried under newspapers. Three of the four chairs were heaped with boxes of files.

An arched doorway granted access to the great room. The curtains were not only drawn and blinded, but draped with heavy blankets so as not to admit a single ray of light, or, more likely, to prevent anyone outside from seeing what Antone was doing. The furniture had been shoved against the walls to clear space for a series of folding card tables in the middle of the room. They were plastered with maps. The very same maps I had viewed at the library, only these had been enlarged and laminated and were positively covered with markings from red and black grease pens and ringed with stains from the bottoms of mugs of coffee. There were circles and Xs and arrows and notes scribbled so hurriedly that I couldn’t decipher them. The television was an eighties model and the stereo had a record player. Both were buried under so much dust that I wondered if Antone even knew what they were. A Remington twelve gauge leaned in the corner behind the front door.

I followed the hallway back toward the bedrooms. The walls were lined with framed pictures, just like Roman’s. They featured a much younger, and much thinner, version of Antone. I hardly recognized him. His facial expressions were genuine and transparent, not guarded and indecipherable as they were now. He had been happy; the lines on his face reflected laughter, not worry. And it was readily apparent that he loved both of the women in the pictures with him. One was presumably his wife, the other the daughter who carried parts of both of them in her face. Her mother’s long black hair and slender nose. Her father’s large dark eyes and once-prominent jaw. Her mother’s wide, toothy smile that showcased the upper gums. I watched her age backward as I walked, regressing from a young woman to a teen to a toddler. There was another picture at the end of the row, arranged almost as an afterthought, or perhaps, instead, to be interpreted as separate from the others. It was of the daughter and a child with her eyes, but the smile on her face was forced. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen and her youth conflicted with the weight she carried in the bags beneath her eyes. From there, the pictures metamorphosed into the granddaughter alone, but none of them beyond the age of four or five. If she was now twelve as Antone had said, then there was a good chunk of time missing, a good chunk of her life.

The pictures on the opposite side ranged in age from pastel to manila and bronze to black and white. I recognized a little of Antone in some of the people, who were every bit as serious as my own lineage had been, although they didn’t seem to be featured with the same prominence. I didn’t know what to make of that. There was one picture in particular that caught my eye. It was offset from the others as though it bore some significance to whoever had hung it. There were two children, a boy and a girl, sitting astride a piebald horse on only a saddle blanket. I didn’t recognize Antone at first. He’d been a scrawny thing, even at what appeared to be eleven or twelve. The girl behind him was a few years younger and wore the kind of blissful smile only a young girl who had yet to be touched by the realities of life could wear. I recognized her immediately, even so far back through the prism of time. I had seen her before. With a much older Antone and in the face of her daughter. This was Antone’s wife. They’d been together in some form or fashion since before they were even teenagers. They’d perhaps even lived their entire lives together.

I felt a great sense of sadness at that realization. It was obvious that she didn’t live here, and yet a part of her still haunted this place. The aura of loss seemed to radiate from the house itself.