There’s a cave below the peak. That’s where I’itoi lives. He’s our mischievous creator god. When the world was first born, he led the Hohokam, from whom we descended, up from the underworld and to the surface. His home is within that cave, deep in the heart of a maze. Visitors to the cave must bring him an offering to guarantee their safe return.

I watched the eastern horizon as the Baboquivari Mountains grew taller and taller. It wasn’t long before I identified the top hat of Mt. Baboquivari. I could see headlights far in the distance to both the north and the south, Border Patrol agents performing their nightly routines. Although judging by the fact that I could actually see them, there had to still be more of them out here than usual because of the death of Agent Matthews. Considering I didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention, I killed my lights and navigated the arrow-straight roads by starlight until the rising winds eventually filled the air with sand and I had no other choice but to turn them back on. At least I was comfortable in the knowledge that if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. And keeping the Blackhawks in the air during such a ferocious sandstorm was an unnecessary risk. The only problem was that I could no longer see the peak. Dead reckoning was going to have to suffice.

The radio chatter was filled with complaints about the storm and jokes about the poor mechanics who would get to service all of the vehicles in the morning. It sounded like storms like this one cropped up out of the blue from time to time, but rarely tended to last for more than a few hours. Most of the agents were content to hunker down and ride it out, confident that whatever illegals were out there would no doubt be doing the exact same thing. Dispatch continued to coordinate the agents to the west along the I-85 corridor where the sandstorm had yet to hit in earnest. I would have preferred a few hours of sleep in my back seat and a hot cup of coffee upon waking, but I had a job to do. A job that only I could do.

I’itoi. My own Elder Brother. Christ. Only now was I beginning to internalize that fact. Ban—the Coyote—was the genetic expression of half of my father. Half of me. My own mirror image, to some degree. Me. Not me. Bizarro me. Similar life paths, but different choices at some of the crucial forks along the way.

I was at a disadvantage. He knew me far better than I knew him. I thought about his overt hostility the night we first met. The expression on his face had been more than anger and distrust for a federal agent on his native land; it had been directed at me specifically. And he had mocked me without me even recognizing it.

Without a body, you can’t fix time of death. So there’s no way you can pinpoint a date, let alone a time for which an alibi would be necessary.

What do you know about the body? I had asked.

Only that there wasn’t one.

And what do you think might have happened to it?

A lot of things can happen out here in the desert. Could have been a coyote dragged it off…

I hadn’t even been able to recognize his cleverness, which must have made him absolutely furious. Like Roman said, maybe all of this could have been averted had I tracked Ban down and acknowledged him earlier in his life and become something resembling a brother rather than a rival for the affection of a long-deceased father and the cause of the death of a woman I never even knew existed. Maybe. I wasn’t willing to carry that cross, though. We all have to live with the choices we make. I couldn’t change mine, so there was no point in dwelling on them now. I still had one last chance to acknowledge Ban, if that was really what he wanted, and I had every intention of doing just that.

And then I would have the opportunity to mourn him, although I doubted he’d take much solace in that fact. Fortunately, I simply didn’t care. Not about him, anyway. Someone still had to speak for his victims since he’d robbed them of their voices.

I listened to agents running down UDAs in their cars and on foot and wondered if those immigrants understood just how lucky they were to still be alive out here in the desert with the heat and the Coyote. And I thought about the Tohono O’odham, living in the middle of a war zone where the battles were waged twenty-four hours a day and few people outside of their immediate vicinity were even aware of their struggles. Even I had scoffed at Agent Randall when he pointed it out. I remembered what Antone said in his quote from the newspaper on the wall in his bedroom. The entire country needed to be made aware of the plight of the people on this reservation. The public needed to know about all of the migrants dying out here under the blazing sun while simply searching for the dream we all took for granted. This corridor of death needed to be closed down before things got even more out of hand. Before more drugs could be funneled through here and into the hands of our children. Let the big corporations with their bottomless reserves and slick lobbyists find another way to supplement their largely illegal and woefully underpaid work forces. There were too many problems to make them go away by merely sweeping them under the rug that was my ancestral reservation.

The mountains offered some protection from the wind as I neared, but only a little. At least now I could occasionally see their silhouettes through the sand, which had to have been so high up into the atmosphere as to be visible from space. I tried not to dwell on the fact that asphyxiation was the primary cause of death during a sandstorm, as I’m sure I’ve pointed out, but it bears repeating now that I was preparing to climb out of my car to brave one. I had to focus on the positives. Of all the ways to die, I’d heard that drowning was probably one of the most peaceful, although I did question the validity of whatever survey gathered those results. Most people I knew who nearly drowned tended not to have too many good things to say about the experience.

I had to cut straight through the open desert to get from the drag I had thought would lead me there to an actual road that wended up through the foothills toward the peak. I crossed over a dry creek lined with what looked like massive ghostly cottonwoods through the dust and then through fields packed with so many palo verdes I couldn’t even see a lone patch of bare ground. When I eventually emerged into a stretch of spotted shrubs and cacti again, I found myself nearing the end of the road. It widened into a parking lot of sorts. I assumed the sign nailed to the split-rail fence marked a trailhead, but it had been peppered by so much buckshot that it was impossible to tell for sure.

I rolled to a stop and parked. The windshield wipers flapped back and forth, drawing dirty arcs through the dust. I released a long sigh as I stared uphill beyond the range of my headlights. Saguaros and ocotillos materialized from the blowing sand only to vanish again. Just when I thought I had a handle on the topography and the route I was going to take, the wind shifted and completely altered my perception of the terrain. I was just going to have to trust my instincts.

I grabbed my laptop, looked at the Man in the Maze pattern one last time, then opened the Landsat files I had downloaded from the campus library. With the way the wind and the sand obscured my view, the three-dimensional elevation map wasn’t going to do me a whole lot of good. Instead, I concentrated on the sonographic and magnetometric readouts. As with the majority of the mountains in the range, this one had several distinct subterranean features. One was larger than the others, but it was lower down and, if I was correct, the opening would be clearly visible from this lot under better conditions. If I were to interpret the myth literally, I was looking for something as close to within the peak itself as I could find. In my mind, that meant I needed to look higher. Unfortunately, that also meant greater exposure to someone coming and going and a higher probability of accidental discovery. I took that into consideration as I pondered the remaining two locations. Both were on the eastern slope, which meant that unless I wanted to backtrack to the highway and waste hours driving in from the other side, I had a decent hike ahead of me. One cave was significantly larger than the other, but that didn’t exclude the possibility that the smaller one could be modified like the ones at the crime scenes had been.