A hundredfold.

The suffering of the O’odham was used to railroad Congress into appropriating increased funding for the Department of Customs and Border Protection to the tune of roughly two billion dollars annually, none of which would actually be used to fortify the Arizona-Mexico border that cut right through the middle of the reservation, I’m sure. At least the Tohono O’odham Nation would be receiving an annual stipend in the low millions, which would undoubtedly get a few politicians reelected, but would also allow the tribe to build and staff an eight-bed hospital and outpatient clinic, a new casino in Sun City, closer to Scottsdale money, and rebuild its police force into something more reminiscent of an actual force. There would probably even be enough left over to buy the staff honest-to-God ceramic mugs with their names printed on them in some medium other than Sharpie.

Antone would have been proud. It may have cost him his life, but his plea had eventually reached the rest of the country. No longer was the misery of his people a political mess to be swept under the rug. The entire world was now aware of the sheer volume of drugs being funneled through his reservation and the Department of Justice, the only actual loser in the situation, had been forced to make shutting down its designated High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area its foremost goal. In doing so, it had to sacrifice even more of its power to the Department of Homeland Security. The liberal media had also latched onto the human interest angle by exposing just how many migrants died out in the Sonoran every year, a statistic that brought to light the nature of the coyote human smuggling network and its ties to the Mexican drug cartels.

I thought about Antone’s quote from the newspaper article on his bedroom wall, about how he would put an end to this situation, even if he had to do so himself. And maybe he hadn’t ended it, but his sacrifice certainly signaled the beginning of that end. I only wished I could have learned what it was about his facial expressions that had so totally mystified me before his passing.

My Uncle Roman quickly negotiated the sale of the rights to his story for a sum large enough to allow him to disappear. He was the reservation’s pariah, the man who had created the Monster, and there would never be anything he could do to change that. He was the one who would forever bear the brunt of its wrath. I felt badly for him. His initial mistake had been in loving a child who wasn’t biologically his and the boy’s mother, who had never stopped loving someone else. He had made mistakes along the way, but his only real crime—and it wasn’t an insignificant one—had been in looking the other way and allowing the murders to continue. If I were to be totally honest with myself, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently with my own son. I hoped to track him down one day and tell him I was sorry for the lot life had given him, if he would even listen to the nephew who had robbed him on his only child; the son of the man whose shoes had proved too big to fill.

Me? I had a straight shot into the hallowed halls of Behavioral and could have cut just about any deal I wanted, financial or political, if I decided to play the game. Instead, I used the capital I had earned to negotiate a year off, with pay. I had made a promise I intended to keep. Someone needed to speak for the dead, and that someone was going to be me. I had already made arrangements with both the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office and the various Mexican and Central American consulates to serve as a liaison of sorts in the effort to coordinate the identification of the victims and the notification of their families. It had all the makings of a sad and depressing year, but don’t let anyone ever tell you I’m not a man of my word. It also afforded me the opportunity to learn a little about my heritage, which delighted a certain librarian, who was more than happy to share her seemingly unlimited knowledge with me, even if I, like my father before me, had more than my share of coyotes nipping at my heels.

And I figured I owed it to the man whose death had brought about all of these changes to make sure his twelve year-old granddaughter, who fancied herself twenty-two, knew that her grandfather had loved her very much. And that he died a hero. Besides, I was starting to think I might not mind spending a little time with her mother, when things eventually settled down. Whoever would have thought I would potentially find what I was missing right where my father had left it for me.

There was just one little problem.

I couldn’t let the case go. There were too many inconsistencies, too many questions and too few answers. Too many coincidences. As far as the Bureau was concerned, this one had been tied up with a big bow, but there was still one glaring hole right at the heart of it.

The mixed metaphor.

Ban had thought of himself as the Coyote.

Coyote is the master of deception.

But it had been the legend of I’itoi that had been the theme of the endgame, which had captured the attention of the entire world.

Don’t be too quick to lay this at the feet of I’itoi. There are many gods of mischief out here in the desert.

Which was exactly what I feared.

And with each day that passed without the recovery of Antone’s body, I feared it even more.

FORTY

By the fourth day following the breaking of the story, I’d had enough of cameras to last me several lifetimes. I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual. I was too close to the story and it was in everybody’s best interests to let me fade into the background, lest they inadvertently humanize the Monster. The bogeyman was no longer frightening when you turned on the light to find that he looked just like anyone else. Everyone else. The world needed him to remain a monster for fear we might look at him and see a reflection of ourselves.

The victims, however, needed to be humanized. They needed to be seen as somebody’s children. As husbands and fathers or wives and mothers. The whole of mankind needed to be made aware that the world was poorer for their absence from it. At least, the ones we were able to identify.

The first victim, whose skin had nearly drained from his bones, was identified by a rather conspicuous tattoo of La Santa Muerte, the patron saint of sinners, which covered the entirety of his chest. His name was Juan Valarosa, and was a known member of the Mexican gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS, 13. He was currently wanted in Arizona for the trafficking of both controlled substances and human beings. His profile read like the resume of a coyote. The DEA was hopeful it would be able to use the news of his death to draw out known associates who could be coerced into leading it higher up the chain.

The young woman was portrayed as a good little Catholic girl searching for a fresh start in life. That the bruising on her shoulders suggested she’d been carrying an extraordinarily heavy load and her remains tested positive for tetrahydrocannabinol, THC, and methamphetamines had been withheld from the press. Even I would never have known about it had I not been working with the ME on the process of identification. Nor would I have otherwise been there when the fingerprints of the third victim matched prints found at the scene of an arms deal gone bad in Houston that had cost an undercover DEA agent his life. These facts would never see the light of day, though. John Q. Public couldn’t afford to think, even for a second, that the Monster might actually have been doing something that could be perceived as beneficial to society.

Despite his repeated attempts on my life, I was starting to have my own doubts.