He beamed and switched the red light off.

The response was immediate.

“Oscar Nineteen? Oscar Nineteen?” the dispatcher’s voice crackled from the static.

“Unit three-two-six responding,” another voice cut in. “I’m maybe ten miles out.”

“Might want to straighten your tie, Special Agent Walker,” Antone said. “We’re about to have company.”

He started back down the hill toward my car.

I looked past him at the horizon, where I could already see the cloud of dust rising from the road once more.

FIFTEEN

I dropped the chief back off at the station and drove out of town. I needed time to think. The portable signal jammer changed everything. The Coyote, as I had come to think of him, could travel through the desert with relative impunity, as long as he was able to prevent the Oscars from radioing in his location, but that still left two glaring problems.

First…his tracks.

If he was traveling by car, he would still leave tire tracks. And he couldn’t cover any significant distance on foot, least of all with a corpse in tow, without leaving at least one recognizable print. Even if he was avoiding the main roads and driving through the open desert, someone would have noticed something. With so many CBP vehicles routinely patrolling all of these drags and the almost superhuman tracking skills the agents possessed, I found it hard to believe there was a single one among them who would miss tire tracks like the ones I had left when I drove off the road with Antone. You could probably see my trail from orbit. Throw in the fact that the air space was closely monitored by radar due to all of the drug trafficking and there was no possible way he could have flown in. Not to mention the predator drones with their thermal sensors flying sorties over the desert. How could one man possibly beat them all?

And second…where were the bodies of his victims? Or maybe a better question would be what exactly was he doing with them? I got that he was leaving a message. What further use could he have for the remains after leaving his cryptic design? Deep down, a part of me suspected there was more to the message than what I’d seen so far. More than the eventual completion of the smiley face. I couldn’t help but think that the victims themselves had a role to play in the killer’s endgame, but, for the life on me, I couldn’t imagine what.

I wished I could run a few thoughts past Nielsen and through the guys at Behavioral. I still hadn’t determined where the information was leaking yet, so I couldn’t trust anyone, especially since I was dealing with someone who not only knew how the specialized law enforcement protocols worked, but someone who was technologically adept enough to circumvent every countermeasure we had in place. For all I knew, someone with that kind of skill could pluck all of our communications out of the ether and break our encryptions in his head.

I had thought I was driving aimlessly until I found myself parked across the street from the house where my father had grown up. Maybe subconsciously this had always been my destination. Like I really needed a distraction. Or perhaps that’s exactly what I needed. Who knew? I was just about to drive off again when the front door opened and Roman stepped out onto the porch. It was a long driveway and I was about two hundred feet away, but the Crown Victoria wasn’t the invisible, anonymous vehicle the federal government must have envisioned when it signed the contract with Ford. I might as well have had a siren mounted on the roof.

Roman cupped his hand over his brow to better see my car with the glare on the hood and roof, then raised his arm in greeting.

Nothing I could do now. I turned down the driveway and drove right up to him. He stepped back inside and closed the door before the dust could enter the house. I sat in my car until the dust settled. He emerged onto the porch at the same time I climbed out of the driver’s seat.

“I had a hunch you’d be back,” he said.

“That makes one of us.”

He grinned and ushered me inside with a sweep of his hand. I guess there was a part of me that hoped something of an echo of my father might still reside here, something through which I could feel closer to him, if only for a short time, but nothing like that existed here. This was a stranger’s house. This man was a stranger to me. There was nothing to bind me to this place, nothing to link me to my past or foretell of my future. And yet I found myself inexorably drawn to it. A behavioral geneticist would argue that blood seeks blood, that I inherently recognized a “sameness” in my uncle and that my senses identified a biological similarity in hormones or pheromones or the smell of his sweat or any number of invisible traces. A psychologist might say I felt orphaned and isolated and was attempting to create a sense of wholeness to fill the void left by the deaths of my parents when I was so young. I just knew that I needed to be here right now, whether I was led here by my brain or my instincts. There was some deep-seated answer I needed to find for a question I didn’t even know how to pose.

Roman stood back while I walked a circuit of the room, again studying the contradictions in furnishings. The collision of modern and traditional was a train wreck that made me uncomfortable on a primal level, as though there were a war being waged just out of sight.

“You want to know why your father left,” he said.

I nodded. Maybe it was as simple as that.

Roman sighed and sat down in the La-Z-Boy while I continued to pace the small house, perhaps feeling like a tiger in a cage as my father once must have. A wistful smile settled onto his face.

“Rafael and I were inseparable, you know. We did absolutely everything together from the time we could crawl nearly until his eighteenth birthday. That was when things started to change. We went from playing football and going hunting every day to barely speaking. I’m a big enough man to admit my role in our falling out. Not a whole lot of good that does me now. I think Raffi knows that, wherever he rides the wind now.”

I stepped into the hallway and looked at the boys. They had been happy as only children can be. They knew nothing of pain or suffering and each new dawn brought the promise of excitement and adventure. Perhaps a part of me was envious, maybe even a little jealous, for by the time I reached the age of the boys when they started to braid their hair, I had been forced to confront the worst thing in any child’s life, regardless of his age. I lost both of my parents, the threads that tethered me to the world. As far as I was concerned, they died on the same day; I just had the opportunity to say a long goodbye to my mother as she wasted away.

“You have to understand…this was a different time. This was the early eighties and the threat of nuclear war was real. Especially out here. The ground shook nonstop from the bombing range. Day and night. Boom-boom-boom. Dust filling the air. It felt like the end of the world. As far as we knew out here, it was just a matter of time before we went to war with the Commies. There were all sorts of people moving down here and digging up the desert building bomb shelters. Survival camps. Pseudo-military groups. Propaganda out the wazoo. And your daddy got it in his head that he needed to be the one to do something about it.”

I moved on to the pictures of my grandparents: one whose face was alight with life and the other who desperately wanted to join her but felt the pressure of his responsibilities and traditions. I wished I had known them.

“Look at this from our perspective. The O’odham are a proud people. We’ve been here since before there was a United States, since before the first white man ever set sail on the ocean, since before anyone started keeping track of time. We might be citizens of your country, but we are first and foremost members of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Our responsibility is to our families and our people. To our way of life. To the perpetuation of our sacred traditions. My father and those of his generation viewed the Cold War as someone else’s problem. The white man’s problem. We all knew the Commies wouldn’t launch their nukes because we would launch ours. Mutually assured destruction. It was all political posturing, a stalemate. So why did we need to throw our hat into the ring? Rafael felt differently. He said we all have a responsibility to freedom, without which the O’odham Nation would be absorbed and our way of live destroyed forever.”