"What's the scoop on this Torres?" Brass asked. "Our colleague Ray Langston mentioned him."

"Meoqui is one of the most obnoxious guys in the whole tribe," Aguirre said. "Real political, always bitching about something or other."

"Like the blood-quantum standards?" Nick asked.

"Sure, that. Or whatever. When the new casino hotel renovation was announced, he was the guy complaining about environmental issues, demanding an impact report. When we were negotiating with an energy company about putting in a coal plant, he was the one who ended up getting it killed. Plus, he makes movies about it all, so just in case you didn't get tired of listening to him the first time around, you can watch him on DVD. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like the guy. And he's smart as hell. It's just… you know, sometimes even someone who means well can get tiresome. You just don't want to hear about what's bad about everything all the time."

"I know what you mean," Brass said. "Some people just aren't happy unless they're throwing dirt on someone's campfire."

"Sometimes you've gotta have those people," Nick put in. "They can be annoying, but they can keep everybody else honest."

"We're a better tribe with him in it than we would be without," Aguirre agreed. "He's kind of holier-than-thou – like he always knows what's best, and everybody else should just listen to him. And like I said, he just gets old. But I don't wish him any harm."

The Jeep whipped through open desert and past more homes of various sizes but mostly small. Almost all of the people watching them race by had dark hair and dark skin, Nick noted – not surprising on the reservation, but every now and then, he was surprised to see a blond or a redhead with pale skin outside one of the houses, and the contrast always reminded him of how overwhelmingly homogeneous the population there was.

A few minutes later, Aguirre made a screeching left turn onto a smaller paved road. The tires spat gravel for a quarter-mile, and then they reached a yellow ranch house with an open porch across the front. The windows behind it were shattered, and bullet holes pocked the walls. A young Native American man holding a rag over a bleeding wound on his left biceps released his arm when he saw the Jeep and waved the bloodstained rag over his head. He was tall, his head shaved and polished, and in spite of the warmth of the day, he had on a plaid flannel shirt, open to reveal the chest and abs of a guy who took his weight lifting seriously. The sleeve of his shirt was dark with blood.

"This is the place," Aguirre said.

"So it seems," Brass said.

As they ground to a stop in the front yard, Nick saw more people, mostly men but one woman, sitting in chairs or sprawled out on the balcony floor. Blood pooled on the floorboards like spilled paint.

Nick, Brass, and Aguirre were all out of the Jeep before the roostertail of dust they'd kicked up had settled, rushing across the din yard toward the porch.

"The shooters still around?" Aguirre asked urgently. He went into the back of the Jeep and brought out a battered first-aid kit.

"Gone," the guy with the rag said. "Bastards didn't stay long."

"There's an ambulance coming," Aguirre told him.

"It better hurry."

This was the worst-case scenario for a crime-scene investigator, Nick knew. People had been shot. They were bleeding, possibly dying. Finding out who had shot them might depend on keeping the crime scene clear and uncompromised. But saving lives definitely depended on getting to them as quickly as possible, offering first aid, and making sure the wounded were transported to someplace they could get real medical care. Preserving the scene had to give way to the other priorities, Nick understood, even when it made the CSI in him cringe.

"START triage!" Brass called.

"Right," Nick said. He was already sprinting toward the porch. He had a crime-scene kit with him, but he wished he had brought the first-aid kit from his vehicle as well. He beat Brass to the porch by a couple of steps. Aguirre, slowed by having to go for his first-aid kit, brought up the rear.

START meant Simple Triage And Rapid Treatment and had been developed for just this sort of event, when people without a lot of emergency medical training arrived at a disaster before those who did have the training and proper equipment. Nick ignored the guy who had waved them in, since he was upright and, although wounded, not critically so, and went to the closest one on his left, who was down on the ground. Brass went right.

The man Nick reached first was lying facedown, blood spreading from beneath him. Nick put a hand on his back, to let him know he was there and comfort him but also to find out if he was breathing. "You okay, buddy?"

But he didn't feel any motion beneath his hand. He moved it up to the guy's neck, feeling for a pulse. Nothing. He turned back to Aguirre, kneeling beside another victim. "You got any tape, Richie? To mark these guys?"

Aguirre fished around inside the first-aid kit and found four rolls of tape: red, black, yellow, and green. He tossed them to Nick, who tore off a long strip of black and adhered it to the dead man. Black didn't necessarily mean the person was dead, but he wasn't expected to live long enough to reach medical care, so he should be skipped over until the more urgent cases were dealt with. The highest-priority victims would be tagged with red, then yellow, and finally, those whose needs were least urgent got green.

In this way, Nick worked from victim to victim, while Brass and Aguirre did the same. Most of those he came across were alive, with wounds of varying degrees of seriousness. One had been hit in the scalp, the bullet digging a furrow just beneath the skin from forehead to crown. Another had taken two rounds to the abdomen and was bleeding like mad. He was told to put pressure on the wound and got a red tag. Another had a through-and-through that had been hit in his popliteal artery. He got a wide-cuffed tourniquet and a yellow tag.

The eleven victims were all Native Americans, most in their twenties or early thirties, Nick judged, although a couple were significantly older. They wore jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers or cowboy boots. For the most part, they wore their hair long and loose. From the glimpses Nick had of the house's interior, it was a combination home and studio – he saw a lot of lighting equipment, a good-quality video camera on a tripod, and gear boxes in what would ordinarily be a living room with bare floors and plain white walls.

"What happened here?" Brass asked as he wrapped his own belt around a man's leg as a tourniquet.

The guy with the bloody rag was the most coherent one. He dropped down into a wicker chair, its cushion already sopping with blood, not that he seemed to care at that point. "We were just sitting out here, you know, slinging the shit. These dudes pull up in a truck, slow down, and then all of a sudden they got guns out and they're blasting away at us. Couple of us were strapped, we shot back, and they rolled out."

"Can you identify them?" Brass asked.

"Never saw them before."

"What about anybody else?" Brass asked loudly. Nick recognized the commanding tone Brass could take when he wanted cooperation, and in a hurry. "Anyone able to ID the shooters?"

No one answered in the affirmative. Nick didn't believe that no one had recognized the shooters, but, as in the city, there were occasions where no one wanted to identify their assailants, preferring to mete out their own brand of justice.

"Hey," Aguirre said, "where's Meoqui?"

"Over there," someone replied, pointing to an unconscious man, crumpled on the floor, whom Nick had bandaged as best he could and tagged with red. He had been hit in the left thigh by a large-caliber round that had exploded a big chunk of his upper leg. Apparently spinning around from that wound, he took a second shot through the right trapezius, back to front, and then fell and hit the back of his head on the windowsill. He'd been bleeding badly when Nick found him. There was still hair and tissue on the corner of the sill, which Nick had observed with professional detachment. That was the sort of thing he would ordinarily be looking for, except in this case, he was more concerned with patching and tagging. This isn't your turf, he kept reminding himself. Even if you could work the scene, you don't have the authority.