As the pictures aged, so did the people in them. These were serious men and women from a more serious time. When more children died at birth than not. When starvation was a real threat. And when people still carried the memory of their land being sold by people who didn’t own it, and them right along with it.

“Your daddy and mine were too much alike. That was what it came down to in the end. Both of them treated responsibility like a religion. They swore an oath to it and lived and breathed its tenets. The only difference was they prayed at different altars. When Raffi came home from school one day and said he’d decided to join the ‘Forces, there was so much yelling you could have heard it all the way from the Rio Grande. I was going to the community college and working construction at the casino, but I was still living here. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting right over there by the hearth. Eating black beans. Strange the things you remember. Raffi walked right in with his head held high and told my father that he was getting married and signing on with the Air Force.”

That caught my attention. He didn’t meet my mother for at least another two years.

Roman glanced over his shoulder. I caught his expression as he caught mine. He looked like a man who’d tracked mud into someone else’s house. He hadn’t meant to let that slip. He recovered quickly and turned away once more.

“The very next day he disappeared for close to a week. Came back with his head shaved and news that he’d been in Colorado. He’d enlisted in the Air Force and would only be around until the end of the summer. Your grandfather told him there was no reason to wait that long. Your daddy agreed. Your grandfather disavowed his very existence and your father turned his back on his people. My parents were never the same after that. I don’t think my mother ever forgave my father for chasing Rafael away. I don’t think he was ever able to forgive himself either. Those were some dark days, and I was more than happy to find my own place right after that.”

I tried to position myself so that I could see the expression on Roman’s face when I asked the question that was eating at me, but he stared straight through me and into another time and place.

“What happened to the girl my father was going to marry?”

“She met someone else and moved on with her life. I think she was always haunted by his ghost, though. First love and all that. Hmph. We were all just kids back then.”

“He was your brother. Why didn’t you ever track him down?”

“I loved him, but I had nothing to say to him. He turned his back on me too, you know. Don’t make him out to be some kind of saint.”

There was an edge to Roman’s voice. The same edge I had heard the night before in his bedroom. The edge that told me it was time for me to leave.

He continued to stare off into memory as I stood there in front of him, caught between the present and the past.

SIXTEEN

After I left Roman sitting in his chair, I made the eighty-minute drive into Tucson to buy a small refrigerated unit that plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car and a full case of Arrowhead water. I was hoping to expense it, but at this point I didn’t care in the slightest. It was odd…two days ago I looked at bottled water as a scam perpetrated by greedy corporations hoping to make money off of a product that was essentially free to them and refused to contribute any of my money to their coffers. On principle. Today, I viewed it as emergency medical intervention, the potential difference between life and death. I also got myself a big, greasy, sloppy burger. That was a luxury I simply couldn’t pass up. Nor was the two hour nap I took in the back seat. I was hoping not to have to use the signal jammer I picked up at Radio Shack, but better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. By the time I headed back out into the open desert, I felt like a new man. I was refreshed, mind and body, and I had gained something of a new perspective.

I was approaching this case from the wrong angle. I was following the unsub, allowing him to lead me to his ultimate message. Instead, I needed to be proactive. If I was correct in my assumption that his goal—at least his first goal—was to complete the smiley face design, then I already knew his figurative destination. Rather than waiting for him to get there, I needed to head him off at the pass. There was something we had obviously overlooked at the crime scenes. The Coyote had used urine to obfuscate his trail for one simple reason: if we’d been able to follow it, it would have led us directly to him. It was often the most simplistic logic, the kind employed by children, which led to the greatest discoveries. I needed to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

Something my grandfather used to say kept playing over and over in my mind.

Show’em the left and bring the right.

It was a fighting metaphor. Distract your opponent with some left-handed jabs so he doesn’t see the knockout blow you’re about to deliver with your right coming.

I couldn’t help but think that this was exactly what the Coyote was doing with the smiley faces; distracting us with a grand design to prevent us from uncovering his true goal. I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that whatever it was had to be far worse than I could imagine.

I ended up driving through Sells on my way to the crime scene Agent Randall had shown me yesterday morning, the second chronologically. It was a different place in the heat of the day. School must have just let out. There were children kicking a soccer ball in a dirt field, others playing in the parking lot of a nameless restaurant serving what smelled like spiced beef, beans, and tortillas from buckets on folding tables. There were families eating and laughing together, sitting in the beds of their pickups or on the hoods of their cars or at the picnic tables I could barely see through the condensation on the inside of the front window behind the servers. I smiled as I drove past. They were so busy enjoying themselves that no one even looked in my direction.

That wasn’t entirely true.

There was one person toward the side of the lot. His eyes were locked on my car the entire time. The T-shirt under his flannel was brown with dirt and grime. As were his jeans, which had bloody handprints smeared across the thighs. Rattlesnake skins hung from what looked like an artist’s easel beside him, over which they’d been stretched to dry. The innards of the snakes were laid out before him like long sausages or already chopped up in the bucket next to his cutting block.

I nodded to him despite the tinted glass and watched in my rearview mirror as he stared at my car until he vanished from sight.

I had a hunch my newfound cousin Ban wasn’t quite as happy to see me as my uncle was. And based on the way I had left him, I didn’t imagine I would be getting an invitation to the Walker family reunion this year. Or any other.

I sensed overt hostility there that I couldn’t quite rationalize. I won’t pretend I understand anything about reservation life. I get the fact that my father violated some unwritten code. I know that his decision to leave was a betrayal on many levels, but there was something else that no one was telling me. I could see it in their eyes. They were keeping something from me, something that still bothered them, even so many years after my father’s passing. Considering I was a stranger and I couldn’t imagine any of them gave a rat’s ass about my feelings for them or anyone else, I couldn’t think of a single good reason not to just hit me squarely in the face with it. It didn’t help that I was a federal agent either. I must have embodied pretty much everything they hated in a single package that looked just like any of them.