When I finally reached the bottom, I was relieved to find nothing nasty already coiled and waiting to strike me. I stood in place for several minutes without moving, turning my beam and gun in unison from one side of the cave to the other. It reminded me a lot of Carlsbad Caverns just across the state line from here in New Mexico, only on a much smaller scale. The ground and the walls were smooth, seemingly polished by the great ocean as it receded millennia ago. Stalactites pointed down from the low ceiling like fangs, while stalagmites with the texture of melted wax rose against them. Petroglyphs had been carved into just about every available surface so long ago that minerals had accreted over them, preserving them behind a layer of semi-opaque limestone. I could hear condensation dripping from somewhere ahead of me beyond the light’s reach.

I advanced slowly, placing each footfall carefully and silently, listening for even the slightest sound that might betray whatever trap awaited me. My pulse thundered in my ears and I had to consciously regulate my breathing. The conical features cast long shadows that moved in the opposite direction, as though trying to sneak around behind me, toying with my peripheral vision. The cave terminated ahead of me and I was forced to pause to evaluate my situation. I turned in a complete circle. Nothing. The only sounds were my breathing and the occasional plinking sound of leached minerals dripping from the ceiling. I smelled damp earth and an almost electrical scent I associated with the aftermath of a rainstorm, but that was—

Wait.

I inhaled slowly through my nose. It was faint, sure, but once I latched onto it, there was no mistaking it.

Kerosene.

I switched off my flashlight and the darkness swarmed around me. It was so dense it was almost suffocating, all except for a wan glow coming from a circular hole in the wall to my right, near the ground. I approached cautiously and lowered myself to all fours in order to see through the opening. It was a chute, maybe a dozen feet long. At the far end I could see the hint of the floor and the far wall flickering in the lantern light.

I was getting accustomed to squeezing through tight places like this. I couldn’t help but make a Freudian connection to childbirth, which definitely seemed to fit with the whole scenario based on the way Roman reacted every time I asked about Ban’s mother. There was something of importance there that I would eventually have to figure out, if only for myself and after the fact. I was closing in on him now and we both knew it. This was the start of whatever endgame the Coyote had in store for me.

It was a game I would not lose.

I squirmed through the smooth chute and into the smaller adjoining cave. While the framework had been nature’s doing, the renovations had mankind written all over them. The stalactites and stalagmites had been shattered to jagged nubs by what I assumed to be a sledgehammer and swept somewhere outside of this chamber. A fine coating of the grainy residue glittered on the floor and prodded my hands and knees when I pushed myself up to my feet. I clicked on my flashlight to augment the kerosene lantern sitting on the ground to my right and used it to survey my surroundings.

I cleared the room down the barrel of my Beretta as fast as I possibly could.

There was a sleeping bag against the rounded wall to my left on top of what looked like a makeshift mattress made of a bed sheet stuffed with straw. Both were filthy. There was a small electric stove that had obviously seen better days beside a compact portable generator reminiscent of a lawn mower engine. Lights in little silver domes dangled from the ceiling by eye-hooks, their cords run around the stalactite nubs to an extension cord that trailed down the wall to the generator. There was an old HP inkjet printer behind it. I assumed that must have also been where he plugged in his laptop and police-band scanner and whatever else he used to monitor his tripwire beacons and the comings and goings of law enforcement agents and whatever various details I hadn’t even uncovered yet.

He actually lived somewhere else, though. Or at least he must have until recently. There was no way he could have maintained the charade of his daily life from here. There were no clothes. No shower or bath. He was maintaining a residence somewhere else and I simply hadn’t found it yet. This was just his den. His lair. I could only speculate as to why he had chosen to reveal it to me.

Until I turned around.

My mouth went dry and I had to remind myself to breathe.

Sociopaths tended to keep trophies or talismans they could return to again and again to remind them of the feeling they experienced in that penultimate moment of ecstasy, when they satiated the bloodthirsty demon inside of them. The kind of thing they could hold in their hands, stroke with their fingertips, caress with their lips. Something they could cling to when the demon started to rise from the depths, to drive it back down temporarily, until they were again in a position to give it what it craved.

This was where he kept his talismans, and judging by the looks of it, he’d been coming here for a long, long time. His was a demon as twisted as any I had encountered, but everything around me suggested that it had been tamed. The man was in control of the demon. There were no signs of dissociation, nothing to imply even a momentary loss of control. This was the lair of a man who had embraced his demon. No…

This was the lair of a man who had become his demon.

And it scared the living hell out of me.

I speak of endgames, but there’s nothing even remotely amusing about this to him. This wasn’t a game.

This was his life’s work.

THIRTY-TWO

There were pictures. Hundreds of them. Pinned to a patchwork wall of plywood sheets. Lined up in floor-to-ceiling rows that had to be a good six feet wide. The ones on the left were faded and yellowed Polaroid instant pictures, which metamorphosed into crisper shots with finer detail to digital photographs printed on photo paper and laminated to preserve them. I couldn’t see the subjects of the photographs. Not immediately, anyway. Not until I brushed aside the tufts of hair connected to the desiccated clumps of scalp that had been pinned to them. The majority of the strands were thick and black. Some still bore the luster of life, while others had dried to the brittle consistency of straw. Some were short, others several feet long. A couple dozen were blonde, mostly bottled, others brown or ginger. Others still were completely bald. The skin had shriveled, tightening the follicles and forcing some of the hairs to stand erect.

I really loathed the prospect of brushing the hair of the deceased away from the pictures in order to see them, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Hair itself is composed of dead skin cells and keratin. Even the most beautiful locks are essentially little different than the skin shed from an old man’s feet. They’re just ropes of dead cells clinging to our heads. Evolutionarily speaking, their function is to keep us warm. In the more practical sense, they’re styled to make us look good and attract the opposite sex. You don’t run your fingers through a woman’s hair and marvel at just how silky she managed to make her ropes of dead cells; you marvel at how it bounces with life when she moves, or how stunning she looks when it falls across her eye or sticks to the lipstick at the corner of her mouth. It is a part of her beauty. Her life. And yet these hairs somehow felt dead, as though whatever magic animated them had been rubbed off between the fingers of a killer who took them down from his trophy wall from time to time to stare into the faces of his victims while he caressed their hair and remembered how he felt while he was robbing the world of the promise of lives unfulfilled.