His torso had been turned into a sieve. Thirty rounds from an AK-47 will do that. From his crotch to his throat, he was riddled with bullets. He’d been shot through each eye, and the duct tape affixed to his mouth.

She had a whole gallery of gruesome images inside her skull, but this was the worst.

Overkill.

No—

Overkill squared.

Tess had what her new partner, Danny, liked to call “The Supah Power.” Her memory, virtually photographic, was a parlor trick to the people she worked with, a topic of conversation but also something her fellow cops liked to have her utilize on their own cases.

She was the most popular girl in school.

But already there were too many suspects. This homicide, in the rickety old ghost town of Credo right on the border between the United States and Mexico, looked like a hit. It looked like a hit by an enforcer for one of the Mexican cartels—either Sinaloa, which owned this part of the world, or the Zetas, or the violent upstart group, Alacrán—Spanish for “scorpion.”

George Hanley had been riddled with bullets and then “silenced” by duct tape. All of this pointed to a message being sent.

But to whom?

“What d’ya think?” Danny Rojas said behind her.

“What do you think?”

“Looks like a cartel hit to me.”

“A sixty-eight-year-old white guy?”

“A sixty-eight-year-old white guy who used to be a homicide dick.” Danny held up his smartphone. “I looked him up. If it’s the same guy, and I think he is, he was shot up before.”

“He was?” Tess stepped carefully to peer over Danny’s shoulder. She had to squint. Jesus, those screens were small.

“See? He was on a reality show—The Ultimate Survivor.”

“Huh.”

“And this. You’re not going to believe this. This is why.” He pulled up the article for her.

She read the headline.

“Kind of weird, huh, guera?” Danny said.

Pronounced “Wetda.” He called her “guera,” which could mean anything from “blonde” to “Anglo” to “white,” ostensibly to get under her skin. But in the couple of months they’d worked together, it had become more of a pet name.

Danny said, “I mean, look. He won the lottery. A three-hundred-thousand-dollar payout. The guy sure was lucky.”

“Until he wasn’t.” Tess grabbed his phone and scrolled through the article. In 1991, Hanley, then a veteran homicide detective with Phoenix Metro PD, was shot multiple times in a gun battle with a street gang. He died twice on the operating table, but was resuscitated. He returned to work but had to take a desk job. Eventually, he worked his way up to lieutenant.

“The lottery, man,” Danny said. “Three hundred thousand dollars. He gave most of it away to the Humane Society.”

Tess was barely listening. She was reading the part where ten-year-old George Hanley had been home sick the day his mother drove his sister four blocks to the elementary school. The car had been T-boned on the passenger side, his sister was paralyzed.

“Lucky Lohrke,” Tess muttered.

“Who?”

“Somebody else who was lucky.”

CHAPTER 2

“So who was this Lucky Looky guy?” Danny asked as they drove back the way they’d come, bumping over the bone-jarring washboard road. They’d finished up at the crime scene late in the day, seen the techs to their cars, and closed up. They’d padlocked the gate to the ghost town, even though the border here was porous and anyone who could crawl through a four-strand fence could get in.

“Lohrke,” Tess said. “Not Looky.”

“Who is he? Somebody who was lucky, eh?”

“He was a baseball player,” Tess said.

“You like baseball?”

“Nope. I just saw his obit in a magazine.”

“Bet you don’t like soccer, either.”

“You’re batting a thousand today.”

“So let me guess. You remember every detail of this obit, am I right?”

“Yup.”

“Weren’t you, like diagnosed or something? What’s it called? Superautographical—”

“Superautobiographical memory.”

“Yeah, that. If I give you a date you can tell me what day it was and what you were doing.”

“True.”

On May 2, 2009, she’d picked up a Time magazine. It was a Monday in Albuquerque, sunny with a few high clouds. She’d stopped at the Coyote Springs Safeway to pick up a few things she’d run out of—milk, bread, toothpaste, and a packet of hairpins. She’d been working a particularly ugly homicide—Yolanda Ochs, beaten, and her throat slit—and was on the way home. As Tess waited in the checkout line, she flipped through the magazine, and that was when she saw it.

Jack “Lucky” Lohrke’s obituary.

“So what made this Lorhke so damn lucky?” Danny asked her.

“In World War II, the two guys on each side of him were shot and killed.”

“So? That doesn’t sound so unusual.”

“Okay. After the war, he was bumped from a transport flight home by a high-ranking officer at the last minute…”

“Just him, right?”

“I dunno. Probably.”

“So let me guess…the plane crashed.”

“Killed everyone aboard. But that wasn’t all.”

“Oh, do tell!” Danny using his Carmen Miranda voice. “Choo don’ mean there’s more, do you?”

“Your accent needs work.”

Danny pulled the sun visor down against the blinding sun—a fiery orange ball low in the sky. “My wife says I do gay perfectly.”

“That’s her problem. You want the rest of the story or not?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t stop now, chiltepin.”

Little chili pepper. Jeeze. “Let’s stick with guera, okay? Fast-forward to 1946,” Tess said. “Jack Lohrke played Triple A Baseball with the Spokane Indians. That’s good, right? Triple A?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s good. Which you’d know if you liked baseball.”

“So Lohrke got word on the road that he was just traded to the San Diego Padres. They stopped to eat at a diner. He decided right then and there he’d hitch a ride and join up with his new team. So he left them there.”

“This does not bode well.”

“Nope.”

“So what happened?”

“They were about to drive up into the Cascade Mountains. It was snowing up on the Snoqualmie Pass. The team bus went off the road, through a guardrail, and crashed down the mountain. Burst into flames. The manager and nine members of the team were killed. The survivors were in bad shape, too.”

“Holy shit. He really was lucky.”

“I’d say so.”

“Like George Hanley,” Danny added. “Except his luck ran out.”

The sun was low in the sky by the time they reached Rio Rico, where George Hanley’s daughter and her husband lived. They waited at the door of an older brick ranch in a nice neighborhood. You knew it was a nice neighborhood because there was open space between the houses, and because the houses were on top of a hill for a valley view.

Danny looked at Tess. “How are we gonna do this?”

“Very carefully.”

They’d both said it at once.

Danny said, “That gave me the creeps.”

“Me, too. Let’s not do that again.”

The outdoor light came on.

Tess cleared her throat.

They were both aware of the politics involved. The deceased was an ex-cop. The shooting looked like a cartel hit. Not to mention Hanley’s death could spur widespread fear among the retired people who populated this area.

As they waited, Tess said, “I don’t think we go into the extent of his injuries right now.”

“Yeah,” Dan replied. “Dead’s dead.”

So they played it that way.

The door opened.

The daughter, Pat—she was in her midfifties—took it hard. Her husband, not so much. He seemed more annoyed than anything.

Pat Scofield started weeping, saying she should never have asked her father to move here, it was all her fault, who would do something like that?

Bert Scofield had been watching a baseball game and his gaze kept straying to the TV set, which his wife had turned down.