Agent Brian Matthews broke the pattern. At least superficially. There would undoubtedly be books written about the heroism of the lone agent who struck off into the night to face the Monster. And while there was an element of truth to the story, a tiny element anyway, the papers weren’t privy to his personnel file, which I’m sure was now confetti at the bottom of a shredder in some back room. Agent Matthews did have an exemplary record, with one minor blemish. A blemish that, were I not an investigative agent, I would never have bothered to uncover. For, while the DHS had taken full responsibility for the incident and compensated the reservation with the new Tribal Council Building, the identity of the agent involved had been withheld, for obvious reasons. Withheld from the media, not from the other law enforcement agencies involved. Namely, the tribal police. It was, however, a blemish that had led to an extended leave of absence and the derailment of a career that appeared to be on track for bigger and better things. A blemish caused by an overzealous agent playing cowboy out in the desert while chasing down a bad guy like it was the Wild West all over again. He had run down a modern day Jesse James in the Jesus Malverde mold, in fact, and made a bust that had led to the confiscation of more than three-quarters of a million dollars in marijuana. Unfortunately, it had also led to the death of a school teacher whose vehicle just happened to be in the way when they launched across I-86. The teacher’s name?

Eloise Maria Antone.

Which brought me again to Chief Raymond Javier Antone, and the reason I was currently standing inside his house. The CSRT, under the oversight of Interim-Chief Louis Abispo, had performed a fairly cursory examination of the house. They’d confiscated Antone’s maps, opening whole new worlds of underground fun for the forensics agents to explore, once they recovered from the shock of Ban’s talisman cave, anyway. I’d been more than happy to absolve myself of every bit of knowledge I had about the underground warrens. After all, best they hear that I was down there from me. Besides, between all of the crime scenes and caves and the corpse pit under the trailer, they were going to have their hands full for the foreseeable future without having to run down all of my prints and tracks.

They’d left the tables in the middle of the room covered with fingerprint powder, but the place otherwise looked just as it had the last time I was here, which was one of the few facts I had kept to myself. The CSRT had undoubtedly found exactly what it was looking for in here, while I had broken in once more in hopes of finding something no one had thought to look for. And even then, I wasn’t quite certain what that could possibly be. All I knew was that something was really starting to eat at me and I was beginning to think that regardless of how long or how hard anyone searched, Antone’s remains would never be found.

I needed to know why I felt that way. My instincts had served me well so far; I’d be a fool to ignore them now.

It’s about time. We’ve been expecting you.

I remember thinking at the time that he hadn’t been referring to me as a federal agent, but to me specifically.

I wandered through his house. Leisurely. As though I were an out-of-town guest merely killing time while I waited for him to come home. Looking for signs of his life, for what he had been doing during the previous years. This wasn’t a home; it was a way station. This was where he satiated his biological functions and plotted his subterranean investigations. Little more.

And you’re here because of the report I faxed to the Phoenix office last month…

The same formal request for assistance that ended up lost in the shuffle.

If it had ever been sent at all.

I stared at the timeline of the pictures, at the conspicuous gap I could only attribute to the death of a wife and mother and the wedge it had somehow driven between a father and daughter. I couldn’t presume to know how either Antone or his daughter had chosen to grieve, but it was obvious they hadn’t done so together and little effort had been invested into reparations. I understood that. He had become a man on a mission, one that led him to look for hidden stockpiles of drugs in order to strike back at the cartels that had stolen his wife from him. Was it so farfetched to think he had also plotted revenge against the Border Patrol agent who had been in pursuit of the drug runner?

The Oscars function just like any other remote transmitter. They generate an RF signal that’s amplified by the cell towers and relayed to a receiving station. And I just jammed the signal with the push of a button.

He had given me the ability to move invisibly across the reservation. The jammer had granted me investigative freedom, but it had also effectively isolated me from all of the other agencies and cut me off from my backup.

That mountain over there. Kind of looks a little like a top hat? That’s Baboquivari. Waw Kiwulik in our native tongue. It is the most sacred of all places to our people.

He had pointed it out to me, hadn’t he? We’d been on our way to Fresnal Canyon. I hadn’t asked, nor had I cared. It was information volunteered out of the blue to serve a purpose I hadn’t recognized at the time.

And if he was spending his nights spelunking, what did he do with whatever he found? He hadn’t turned it in to the DEA or any other federal entity, nor had he delivered it to his own station. So where were the drugs?

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 never would have known about the legend had Antone not planted it in the back of my mind. I wouldn’t have learned of the significance of Elder Brother or been familiar enough with the concept of the Man in the Maze to piece together the smiley faces. Without that knowledge, I wouldn’t have been able to bring about the endgame.

Don’t be too quick to lay this at the feet of I’itoi. There are many gods of mischief out here in the desert.

And there was the root of the problem.

The mixed metaphor.

The coyote. I’itoi.

Two distinct mischievous entities. Two distinct MOs.

One was a killer who engaged me directly, who used coyote urine to obfuscate his trail, and who removed the bodies of his victims so he could replace their faces with those stolen from a family of coyotes. The other fancied himself a god. He used the most famous legend surrounding the most recognizable symbol on the entire reservation to bring the trials of the Tohono O’odham into the collective consciousness of a nation and orchestrated this entire affair from start to finish, but he never had complete control over his own puppet or his dark nature. He was a god who could have easily and willingly allowed a section of his head to be scalped and pretended to be dead for the picture that would serve as proof of his demise, who could have used the copiously bleeding wound to cover the inside of the cruiser he had driven across the reservation himself and abandoned a mere half-day’s walk from his house.

The cartels must be stopped and held accountable for their crimes, whatever the cost. Even if I have to do so by myself.

They might have been the words that propelled him into the chief’s office, but they were also a declaration of war.

I was searching for something easily overlooked, seemingly innocuous. I perused his bedroom, the shrine to his wife. The woman who revealed her upper gums when she smiled, who had taught her students about the history of the Hohokam and the O’odham. The woman who never aged past her early fifties, whose face revealed only the lines of laughter and smiles around her eyes and mouth.