A wife who wasn’t around anymore. A daughter who no longer sent pictures, even of her child. A man for whom their absence was a palpable entity within his home, a man with a secret that involved the hidden geological world beneath the desert. A man who appeared to be singlehandedly trying to keep Folgers in business.

There was something here. I could feel it. Something that played a role in the chief’s involvement in this case.

I nodded to myself and resumed my search.

The bathroom off the hallway smelled of ammonia and the shower curtain was opaque with mildew. I drew it aside to reveal a freestanding tub with a ring of grime and rust. There was a shaving kit and a lone towel that looked like it had already been subjected to several uses. I opened the medicine cabinet and glanced at the contents. A crumpled tube of toothpaste and a flattened brush. Deodorant and cologne. A shelf full of bottles and prescriptions: acetaminophen, ibuprofen, amoxicillin, terbinafine, sertraline, onabotulinumtoxinA, lorazepam, ondansetron, loperamide. There was even a bottle of Anacin, which I didn’t even realize was still on the market. The top shelf was reserved for another toothbrush, a hairbrush, a bottle of perfume, and an ornamental jar of what appeared to be potpourri. It had to be Antone’s wife’s shelf, although a woman utilizing a shelf she would need a ladder to reach seemed more than a little impractical. I closed the cabinet and moved on down the hallway.

I opened the door to the smaller of the two bedrooms, which was a dusty homage of sorts to the daughter. It looked as though she had just walked out of it one day and never returned, but her parents had left it in precisely the same condition in case she decided to return and resume the life she had abandoned. There was a sadness to it that suggested an element of guilt and a desperate kind of hope to which it was almost hard to bear witness. I closed the door again and followed my flashlight beam into the final bedroom.

The master was another shrine, this one to the woman I recognized as Antone’s wife from the pictures in the hallway. Her portrait was framed with dark wood that had been hand-carved into an intricate flowered pattern, which must have taken countless hours to complete, and draped with red velvet sashes. It rested on a small table in the corner in a half-circle of white candles in glass holders. Dried flowers adorned the walls surrounding it, beside which several newspaper articles had been tacked. They were a part of the display, and yet ultimately apart from it. The kind of discordant arrangement one could only associate with a law enforcement officer, and one who bore the weight of the words. The clippings were crumpled and yellowed and at odds with the elegance of the shrine.

I rounded a bed that didn’t appear to have been slept in for quite some time and stepped over a mess of dirty clothes on my way across the room. My light illuminated the face of a woman who hadn’t aged beyond her early fifties. Her eyes were bright and carefree, her smile completely lacking any kind of self-consciousness. The lines on her face suggested that the expression hadn’t been feigned for the camera. That was just who she was. A woman who envisioned a future beyond the horizon, one with a husband with whom she had been in love since she was just a child. Not one that could be summarized in a handful of paragraphs by a woman who had never even known her.

Desert pursuit turns deadly

Sandra Talbot, Arizona Daily Star

TUCSON — A local woman was involved in a collision with a truck being pursued by a Border Patrol vehicle after allegedly running a checkpoint on I-86. Eyewitness accounts suggest the truck, a newer-model Ford F-250, was traveling at great speeds across the open desert when it launched from the shoulder and struck a Nissan Sentra traveling westbound on the interstate. The driver of the Sentra, Eloise Maria Antone, was airlifted to the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

The driver of the truck, Ignacio Mendez, a Mexican national wanted on trafficking charges in Texas, was also admitted to the UMC with various injuries, purportedly of a non-critical nature.

Following his treatment and release, he will be remanded into the custody of agents from the Department of Homeland Security and transported to the Central Arizona Correctional Facility, where he will await the filing of formal charges and subsequent hearings.

According to a press release issued by the DHS, the truck driven by Mr. Mendez contained more than thirty bricks of marijuana with an estimated street value of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. The bricks had been welded inside the frame of the vehicle beneath the rear seats of the extended cab.

“This marks another small victory in the war against the cartels,” said Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Neil Rivera of Ajo Station. “Although I think we can all agree that the price we paid in this instance was too high. No loss of American life is acceptable.”

Mrs. Antone, 52, a former tribal councilwoman and professor at the Tohono O’odham Community College, is already the twelfth civilian casualty in the war on drugs this year in Arizona alone. She was a lifelong resident of the former Papago Indian Reservation, a two-term Vice-Chairwoman of the Sells District, and author of scholarly works about the history of the Tohono O’odham and the Hohokam peoples. She is survived by her husband Raymond Antone, an officer with the tribal police, and a daughter and granddaughter.

The other articles were the standard follow-ups. Human interest pieces featuring Antone’s wife, the agent—whose name was withheld, for obvious reasons, at the request of the DHS— who had been chasing the truck that took her life, the impact on the reservation as a whole, and one article with a quote from Antone himself, then a mere officer yet to assume the mantle of chief.

“This is our daily reality down here. The rest of the country needs to be made aware of the war being fought on American soil. The cartels must be stopped and held accountable for their crimes, whatever the cost. Even if I have to do so by myself.”

They were the words of a man obsessed, or maybe possessed was a better word. Antone had taken on a mission, a crusade against an enemy that washed across his native homeland on a tide of humanity. I knew a thing or two about obsessions. They were the kind of all-consuming passions that could ultimately lead to a downward spiral of self-destruction. A man could become so consumed that he forgets about the things in his life that matter most. He forgets about the grieving daughter in his pursuit of the forces that robbed them both of her mother. He forsakes sleep for caffeine in order to extend the hours of productivity in the day. He allows his property to become a shambles for there’s no time to tend to it, if he even notices its deterioration. He decides to strike at the enemy by searching the underground caves the traffickers use to store their caches of drugs and firearms, which places him in the mountains at night…

Smack-dab in the middle of the Coyote’s hunting grounds.

TWENTY-NINE

I sprinted back into the main room and shined my light on the maps. I needed to figure out where Antone had gone last night. The topographical map appeared to be the central focus of the arrangement. The markings on it were clustered in wavy lines running from north to south, following the course of the mountains. It didn’t take long to figure out Antone’s system. He utilized the various Landsat sonographic maps to find the underground caves, compared them to the three-dimensional elevation models, then charted them on the topographical map. The locations of the caves were marked with black circles. Those he had apparently already investigated were crossed out with large Xs. Some were red, others black. Beside the red ones were numbers and abbreviations scribbled in a hand I couldn’t easily read and didn’t have the time to waste trying. Right now I was of singular purpose.