Faces. That was all the pictures showed. Faces, and maybe a little of the shoulders. Mostly taken at night, which caused the flash to wash out the skin tone. Close-ups of men and women alike, lying on their backs on dirt and rocks, their faces speckled and spattered and smeared with blood. Expressions of surprise and terror and pain were forever memorialized on their faces. Most were young, yet some were old enough to be gray. Some mouths were open. Others closed. Some were handsome or beautiful, others plain or downright homely. Some were fat, others gaunt. There was no one physical trait common to all of them, no pattern other than the fact that every one of these people had walked out into the open desert in search of the American Dream and found only a demon waiting for them. And now they would be forever linked together, thanks to this wall where they all now shared a single common trait. Mexicans and Guatemalans and El Salvadorans and Hondurans and Dominicans and Lord only knew how many others.

They were all dead.

I couldn’t bear to look at the wall anymore. I felt tainted by its mere proximity. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder if we as a species wouldn’t be better off if a good pandemic swept through and purged our inherent darkness from the face of the planet.

I had to move the flashlight away. It momentarily illuminated one picture that had been offset from the others. It was larger; a full sheet of photo paper. Printed so recently that the insane amounts of ink required still made the page curl.

Even though I could think of nothing I wanted to do less, I again raised the flashlight—

I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could, but the damage was already done. I bit my lip to hold back the explosion of anguish that threatened to wrench loose from my chest. My grip tightened to the point I nearly fired an errant shot into the wall. I was certain I could feel my blood boiling in my veins. It took time to compose myself enough to open my eyes again and view the image with the kind of clinical dispassion I needed to properly do my job.

I recognized the face immediately. Despite the rivulets of blood that had dribbled down the picture from the oblong clump of scalp pinned to it. Despite the fact that the pin had been pressed straight through his face with such force that it had torn the paper. Despite the fresh sheen of crimson glistening on his cheek. Despite it all, I recognized Antone and felt a profound sense of sorrow that in no time at all blossomed into anger. The Coyote was going to pay for what he’d done. I was going to avenge Antone, avenge all of them. This was the kind of evil that could not under any circumstances be allowed to walk the earth for a single second longer.

I turned to my right and saw another display, which, in retrospect, I really should have expected, but wasn’t even remotely prepared to encounter.

If I’d thought the collection of pictures my paternal grandmother had collected and displayed in her bedroom was a shrine, this was the freaking Louvre. There had to be more than fifty pictures and images and newspaper clippings pinned to another sheet of plywood, cobbled together from a dozen scraps. Some were so old they had the texture of parchment. Others were much newer. They’d been fitted together like pieces of a puzzle so that there was no space between them, nor any logical order that I could see, not even chronological.

My heart was beating so hard and fast that the edges of my vision pulsated.

There were photographs of me, color copies of old class and yearbook photos, enlarged and highlighted, going all the way back to my early teens, not long after I first came to live with my grandparents, when I first put down roots. Me with braces. Me in my various hockey jerseys. Me at homecoming, the prom. Me at graduations and parties and on vacations and doing the normal things that people do every day, entirely oblivious to the world around me, to the fact that I was being hunted. They had been drawn on with marker and scraped with pins to create horns growing from my forehead in some, threads sewn through my lips in others. Forked tongues. Black teeth. Various bleeding wounds. But there was one trait that each and every one of them had in common.

My eyes had been scratched out.

Every bit as disturbing were the newspaper articles chronicling my career. My involvement with the task forces that had tracked down the Boxcar Killer, the Delivery Man, and the Drifter. Pictures with me in the background in the field and on the front steps of courthouses. Articles with brief quotes and topical mentions. Printed stills captured from news feeds. All of them plucked out of the ether via the internet by a stalker who never even left the reservation.

I needed to get out of there. It felt like the cave was closing in and the weight of the mountain was about to collapse on me. There wasn’t enough oxygen. The stale air was filled with carbon dioxide; the final breaths of the dead. The ground started to tilt from side to side as I staggered back to the hole in the wall and somehow managed to shimmy through into the main cave. The thudding of my pulse in my temples sounded like laughter in my ears. I wanted to vomit, if only to purge myself of the sensation that true evil was seeping through my pores. Ghostly faces flashed across my vision as I stumbled through the cave and hauled myself up the ledges. Faces I never knew, would never know. The faces of the dead. Faces that may have fit over the bleached skulls sinking into the desert sands or heaped in a hole under a trailer home or in some other pitiful resting place we had yet to find, and, in reality, might never find.

I crawled out into the blinding light, grateful for the sun and the heat, which cleansed me of the dankness and the darkness of that horrible cave. I rolled over onto my rear end, dangled my legs over the edge of the escarpment, and stared off across the seamless Sonoran.

I don’t know how long I sat there with sweat covering every inch of my body. The shadow of the mountain behind me eventually started to creep down through the foothills below me. Finally, I stood and picked my way down the cliff and turned to stand before it. The design in Antone’s blood looked like a K without the upper of the two diagonal lines, but that wasn’t what it was, was it? I turned my head one way, then the other. I felt inadequate, enraged, but mostly I simply felt exhausted. Deflated.

Defeated.

There was something I was missing. Something I was too blind to see. Something staring me right in the face.

The eyes.

There was something oddly familiar about him, but I couldn’t quite place it.

He had scratched out my eyes.

You have your father’s eyes.

Scratched out my eyes in every single one of the pictures.

It’s the eyes. You guys have the exact same eyes.

Just my eyes, not those of his victims.

I couldn’t help but see the physical similarities between us, the parallels between our lives.

It wasn’t just the eyes. It was my eyes.

His eyes.

I started to run.

THIRTY-THREE

It was full-on dark by the time I slewed from the gravel road and rocketed down Roman’s driveway. His house grew larger and larger in my headlights until I stomped the brakes, skidded sideways to a halt, and leapt from the car. I beat the cloud of dust to the porch, lowered my shoulder just as the front door opened a crack, and barreled right through. Roman hit the floor with a loud thump. The door ricocheted from his feet. I swatted it aside and grabbed him by the shirt before his mind caught up with the situation. I hauled him to his feet, whirled, and slammed him against the wall. Framed pictures fell from the walls down the hallway to my right, shattering on the floor with the impact. I didn’t give a damn. This entire godforsaken house could burn to the ground for all I cared.