The voices became excited and I heard a shout and the clamor of footsteps.
I broke into a sprint and nearly barreled into a CBP agent as I rounded the bend. Had he been faster on the draw, he would have put a peephole in my chest before I shoved my badge into his face. He was jumpy and wired and his eyes stood out from his pale face like there was something pushing on them from behind.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Dogs caught a scent.”
More staccato barking. A crackle of static from the radio on the agent’s hip.
“Just a group of wets.”
I recognized Sykora’s voice.
“Someone else call it in,” a different voice replied. “You keep those dogs moving, Brant.”
“If there’s anything out here, we’ll find it. We just have to start over again.”
I inwardly cursed and blew out a long breath.
“You were the first on the scene?” I said.
The agent nodded.
“Walk me through it, Agent…” I held my light on his name patch. “…Reynolds.”
“I was cruising the Venganza Drag when Oscar seventy-four went off.”
“Oscar seventy-four?”
“Oscars are the buried sensors we plant in the desert. When they detect motion, they send a signal back to the station and dispatch relays the call to the nearest unit. They’re numbered sequentially. I was the closest patrol. Roughly Oscar sixty-seven or so. Since I couldn’t have been the one who set it off, we knew it had to be a bunch of wets.” He glanced up at me. “Undocumenteds, I mean.” A nervous smile. “So I drove out to the Oscar and found their tracks crossing the drag. We call them drags because we drag a grate along them to wipe out all of the tracks.”
“I know what a drag is.”
“Okay, okay. So I found their tracks. They crossed the drag walking backward. I mean, like that would fool anyone. Who in his right mind would leave the ‘States and risk his life crossing the desert to get into Mexico, you know? It didn’t take a genius to know they were going to try to cut across the mountains to get to the Amnesty Trail and I-86—”
“Amnesty Trail?”
“That’s what they call it. They even print maps of it down there. The idea is that if you follow the landmarks all the way up the trail to the highway, there’ll be a lookout posted in the hills to radio one of the drivers who cruise up and down the highway all day to pick them up and take them to a safehouse in Tucson or Phoenix.”
“And you know where this trail is?”
“Everybody does.”
“And you don’t just close it off?”
“We patrol it. We don’t have the manpower to just sit on it. Besides, most of the trail’s on the res and those guys like us on their land even less than the UDAs.”
He totally missed my point, but I didn’t have the time to debate it.
“So you drove up to the lot here to cut them off.”
“Right. They were moving up the eastern side of the mountains, so they wouldn’t be able to see my headlights if I stayed on the western slope. We’ve all used this canyon as a shortcut before. I was just cutting through when I heard something up ahead. Sounded kind of like someone chewing really loud. Kind of anyway. So I got out my light, drew my gun, came around the bend, and bang! Right there in front of me is a mangy old coyote. Just sitting there licking the rocks, totally oblivious to the fact that I’m standing there with a light and a gun pointed right at him. I didn’t want to shout and spook the UDAs. I mean, Lord knows if they’re packing AK-47s. So I kicked a rock at the thing and it turned to face me like I wasn’t even a threat. Its eyes flashed in the light and I saw that its muzzle was red. I took another step and it finally bolted off into the night. Another couple of steps and I turned my light onto these rocks over here…” He led me another five paces and lighted up the canyon wall with his flashlight. “…and this is what he was enjoying the hell out of licking.”
I was right. This smiley face appeared to be slightly more complete than the last. The only real difference I immediately noticed was the shape of the nose and the fact that it pointed in the opposite direction.
The blood still glistened where the coyote had been lapping at it. The remainder had dried, but not to the point of flaking. My best estimate placed the time of death at roughly twenty-four hours ago. Two nights following the Border Patrol’s discovery of the previous scene. The night before my arrival. The timing couldn’t be coincidental. Not after such a long gap between the previous two, assuming there weren’t more out there we hadn’t found yet, which at this point, felt like a fairly large assumption. It was possible the unsub was dissociating and the murders were going to start coming faster and faster until we stopped him, but I was inclined to think not. The painting was meticulous, the strokes perfectly controlled, emotionless. Even less blood had been spilled on the path. It was the exact same modus operandi. Clean slice across the neck from behind, right to left, an arterial arc on the opposite wall. Two puddles where the victim had bled out, one from the neck and the other from the abdomen. It was almost surgical in its precision. Minimal suffering. An almost compassionate execution. He painted on the wall, then dragged the body off into the mountains once more on a travois improvised from branches that obliterated his tracks behind him. There was nothing to follow beyond the strokes of the leaves and the thin stripes of the hook-like thorns. He was still in control. At least of himself.
The most pressing problem now was that he’d identified his adversary—the FBI in general, and me specifically—and had decided to raise the stakes and aggressively take me on, head-to-head. This wasn’t a case that was going to drag on indefinitely. He had directly challenged me to stop him. I knew exactly how this would end if I was able to, but the part that scared me was I had no clue what the consequences might be if I didn’t.
I shivered despite the warmth of the night and stared out over the valley to the east. The Amnesty Trail. An endless stream of victims. Infinite places to hide. The American Dream. The Valley of Death.
The killer had announced his presence and declared his intentions. If word traveled as fast as Chief Antone thought, by now the killer already knew I had declared mine.
The blood would flow again.
Soon.
My first order of business had to be figuring out who was the weak link in the chain of information. Who at the CBP had let it slip that the FBI was being called in? Was the killer an agent or just someone who monitored their communications? At this point, it was my only real lead, assuming the unsub hadn’t gotten sloppy and left something for the crime scene unit to discover, and the sooner I started chasing it—
A chaos of barking. Down the wash and to the right.
The crackle of static from Reynolds’s hip.
“They’ve got something,” Sykora said, his words barely decipherable over his frantic dogs. “It’s a clean scent. Go on guys! Get…”
I was at a dead sprint before the communication trailed off behind me, streaking straight toward the source of the barking.
ELEVEN
I passed the group of UDAs the dogs had first found. They seemed content just sitting there, passing around a water bottle one of the agents must have given them, waiting for their eventual arrest and deportation. After several days in the miserable desert heat, I’d imagine I’d be looking forward to an extended stretch in an air conditioned detention center with some warm food, too. Especially if I was about to get a free bus ride back to my family.