“It was a needle. How did you know?”

“Because he used the same stuff on me,” Gabe said. “It’s like you’re paralyzed or passed out or something.”

“Yes, all of a sudden it was like I couldn’t move. He picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, carried me outside, and threw me into the back of his Border Patrol SUV. Paul was already there. He wasn’t moving, either. And just like that, I was out.”

“What happened next?”

“I woke up when we turned off the highway onto Coleman Road. By then he had put tie wraps around my wrists and around Paul’s, too. I could see that Paul was already awake. Henry stopped the car in the road by a charco.”

“Rattlesnake Skull,” Gabe supplied. The knife cut through the last of the tape on Gabe’s right wrist. It was a huge relief to finally be able to move his arm. “Close the knife and give it to me,” he said. “I’ll cut my left hand loose and then work on your right. But first I need your phone.”

It took some maneuvering for Gabe to wrestle the phone out Tim’s pocket. When he did, it wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead. Hiding his disappointment, he got back to the task at hand.

“Go on,” he urged as he went back to working on the tape. “Tell me what happened.”

“When Henry got out of the SUV,” Tim continued, “he went around to the tailgate and came up with something that looked like an automatic weapon. While he was out of the car Paul whispered that I should run. I was scared. I didn’t know how I’d be able to do that. I didn’t even know if my legs would work. When Henry opened the door and pulled Paul out, Paul pretended like he was still asleep, but as soon as he was on the ground, he started to struggle and managed to knock the gun out of Henry’s hands.

“The door was still open. I got out and ran as fast as I could, but running in the dark with my hands tied was hard. Then I remembered that YouTube video we watched, the one about that girl getting loose from a tie wrap by bringing her arms down from over her head. That’s what I did, and it worked.”

“But he caught you anyway.”

“He had night-­vision goggles. He followed me from the highway and nailed me later when I showed up on Kitt Peak Road. I knew Carlos and Paul were dead by then, and I thought he was going to shoot me, too. He fired one shot just to scare me. He asked about the peanut butter. I told him I left it in a bag on your porch, but by the time we got there, it was gone. You must have already taken it inside. He had to wait awhile before he could get it, and he told me that if it wasn’t there, I was dead. But I never thought he’d take you, Gabe. Never.”

Even in the dark, working with a freed right hand was incredibly easier than what he had done before. Soon Tim’s other hand was loose as well.

“Well, he did,” Gabe said. “And just because he has the diamonds doesn’t mean he won’t kill us anyway.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Henry never thought we’d be able to get loose from the tape, but we did. Now we need to find a way to keep him from killing us.”

“He has guns,” Tim objected. “All we have is a stupid little knife.”

“Then we’ll need to make that knife work for us.” When Gabe heard those determined words come out of his mouth, he wondered where they had come from. The person speaking them sounded brave, and if there was one thing Gabe Ortiz knew about himself, it was that he wasn’t brave.

AFTER I FINISHED GOING THROUGH Amanda Wasser’s digital files, I sat there for a while longer and thought about them. The first order of business, of course, would be to reinterview Calliope Horn. I still have the last phone book the telephone company sent out. It’s so out-of-date now that it’s close to being an antique. A check of that showed no listing for Calliope Horn. That was hardly surprising. The Kenneth Myers homicide was twenty-­five years earlier. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

Had I still been part of the S.H.I.T., I would have had access to any number of public and private databases and could have used those to track Calliope Horn down on my own. That door was now permanently closed—­officially that is. Unofficially, I still had a single ace up my sleeve: my old pal Todd Hatcher.

Todd is a smart guy, a forensic economist. They’re the kind of ­people who look into small things and spot coming trends. One of my first interactions with him had come about when he showed up on the attorney general’s doorstep with a dissertation in hand. The paper laid out the long-­term adverse financial implications an aging prison population would have on the state budget. I had it on good authority that Todd still had access to all those highly sensitive databases that were now closed to me. Todd is also your basic IT genius. In fact, he’s the one who had used off-­the-­books methods to locate a madman’s cell phone, thus allowing me to save Mel Soames’s life mere weeks earlier.

This wasn’t quite that pressing an issue, but with Mel still out of town, I hoped Todd could help me find Calliope Horn in a timely enough fashion that I could have my interview with her out of the way before Mel came home.

I called Todd and passed along my request. Next I dialed Brandon Walker. When he answered, I could hear the clatter of dishes and the sounds of ­people talking in the background. “Beaumont here,” I told him. “Is this a bad time?”

“No, I missed lunch, so I stopped off for an early dinner, but I’m done now. Did anything jump out at you?”

“At the time of the initial investigation here, detectives spoke to Kenneth Myers’s girlfriend, Calliope Horn. She indicated that when she last saw him, he was on his way to Arizona for some reason and that he expected to come home with a sum of money from an undisclosed source—­enough money to get them moved out of a homeless camp and back on their feet.”

“A score of some kind, maybe?” Brandon asked.

“A score with a woman involved.”

“What woman?”

“Not sure,” I said. “Calliope didn’t have a name, but she suspected it might have been an old girlfriend from Arizona. Kenneth apparently was seen in the company of an unidentified woman here in Seattle shortly before he disappeared. I’ve got someone looking for Calliope right now. If I can interview her tomorrow, I will.

“Since Lassiter was already in prison, he can’t be responsible for Ken’s death, but he might have some idea of who was.”

“Lassiter pointed me in the direction of someone named Ava,” Brandon said, “Ava Martin Hanover Richland. She was John’s girlfriend at the time of the homicide, and she also testified against Lassiter at both trials. I know she palled around with Ken, too.”

“That’s a time-­honored way to keep the cops from looking at you,” I told him. “You do everything you can to point the finger at somebody else.”

“So if you can manage to track down that old girlfriend . . .”

“Calliope,” I supplied.

“Ask her if she ever heard Kenneth Mangum Myers mention Ava Martin by name.”

“Will do,” I said. “I’ll have Todd, a friend of mine who’s a whiz at data mining, look into Ava’s history as well. Could you give me that string of names again?”

While Brandon was repeating them, there was an audible blip in the line. “Just a sec,” he said. “I have another call coming in. Can you hang on?”

“Sure.” While he was off the line, I made a note of the list of names. One of the things I’ve learned from Todd Hatcher is that the Internet is no respecter of state lines. Your name is your name. A hit can come from any corner of the country—­or of the world, for that matter.

After the better part of a minute, Walker came back on the line. “That was Warden Huffman from the state pen,” he said.

His voice was different. I could tell at once that something was wrong.

“What’s up?”

“There was a ‘disturbance’ at the prison a while ago. The guards controlled the situation eventually, and the prison is back under lockdown. Trouble is, two ­people are dead in the incident, and John Lassiter was severely wounded. He’s in critical condition and has been air-­lifted to a trauma center in Mesa.”