“You guys work here?” Ogden asked.
“I do,” the shorter of the two said. He looked at Ogden’s uniform, seemed to know he was from another county.
“Did a guy come through here with only one hand? White guy, brown hair, my size.”
“You see a guy with one hand?” he asked his friend.
The friend shook his head.
“I have to say,” the man said, “I don’t really look at hands.”
“You should,” Ogden said. “That’s where people usually hold their guns.”
The men laughed.
“I’m going in to look around,” Ogden said.
“Look all you want.”
Inside, the harsh lights did nothing but highlight the sagging spirit of the place, the human drainage, as his father had called it. He wandered through the aisles of slot machines, the cigarette smoke, the sour smell of alcohol wafting from half-empty plastic cups and stale clothing, out of pores. Ogden looked at hands. He had never really looked at hands before either. They were all so different and everyone had two of them, except for two Indian Korean War vets; one had one hook, the other had two. He stopped by the security office and knocked. A round woman opened the door.
“Do you have cameras at the entrances?”
“Yes.”
“You think I can take a look at the last four hours of tape?”
The woman laughed. “We only keep two hours of tape before we loop it through again.”
“Okay, can I see that?” he asked.
“If the cameras worked, I’d let you take the tapes home and watch in your living room.”
“Oh.”
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“This is security?”
“Yeah. What are you looking for?”
“A man with one hand,” Ogden said.
“About your size?” the woman said.
“Yes,” Ogden said, incredulously.
She looked at the clock. “He came in about two hours ago.”
“Is he still here?”
“He might be,” she said.
“Might be?”
“Well, I’m the only one that stares at those damn monitors and since I’m standing over here having this little conversation with you, I ain’t exactly watching the monitors, am I? So, who knows who walked out that door?”
“I see. Where was he the last place you saw him and when?” Ogden looked back at the gallery.
“I watch them enter, I watch them exit.”
“No one watches the tables?”
“This ain’t Las Vegas.”
“I’m going to look around, thanks.”
The woman disappeared and left Ogden staring at the door. He turned and walked back through the aisles of slot machines to the restrooms. The man was in the building or had just left it or had left it awhile ago; Ogden trusted the security woman’s eyes. He was on edge now. His fingers were twitching. He went into the men’s room and washed his face. He waited long enough to count an even number of hands and then left. He went back to the entrance and looked out at the parking lot. The guard was still there.
“I’ve got twenty dollars for you if you help me search this place for a guy with one hand.”
“Okay.”
The twitching fingers were short-lived as two turns through the casino yielded nothing. The man had slipped out. Ogden had no idea which way to go. Had he boarded a bus, hitched a ride, gotten into a car with someone he knew? None of his guesses really mattered; all that mattered was that the man was good and gone and Ogden didn’t know where to search.
He walked back to the blue Honda. It was now an involved crime scene. The whole gas station was taped off and cops were everywhere. Ogden told the lead investigator all he knew while he watched the coroner pull out Caitlin’s body. The photographers recorded every angle of the scene. No one had seen the car abandoned; it had merely been sitting there too long. Ogden told the Santa Fe County deputy about the man with one hand and she wrote it down and said thanks. Ogden climbed back into his rig and drove north toward home.
The lab techs from the State Police had done their jobs at both scenes. The Santa Fe Sheriff’s Department shared all they had with Ogden. Nothing usually comes to not much of anything and so it was. There were some hairs found at both scenes, a few were not from the victims, but there was not enough for a DNA match even if they had had a sample from a suspect. As usual, fingerprints offered no help. All the blood in the cabin was from the first woman and all the blood in the car, backseat, and trunk was from the second. Ogden took this hollow news along with his hollow belly upstream, driving slowly through the pass. He stopped at an overlook and stared at the gorge as it snaked north through the dark. It was nine and he still hadn’t slept.
“So, what now?” Eva Walker asked. She put a bowl of green chili and some tortillas in front of him.
“I don’t know. I keep telling all of you that I’m not cut out for this work.”
“Pshaw.”
He looked up from the food he hadn’t touched. “Pshaw? You haven’t said that for a long time.”
“Trying it out again. Shame about that young woman.”
“I guess,” Ogden said. “I’m thinking she was no Girl Scout.”
“Still,” his mother said.
“Still.”
“So, what now?” she repeated.
He looked at her. “I think that whatever reason brought those people here is still here. I don’t think they found what they were looking for. They didn’t find Fiona McDonough — rather, Carla Reynolds.”
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
The old woman nodded. “You need a nap.”
“I need a nap.”
Ogden walked into what had been his bedroom growing up and stretched out across the single bed. He looked over at the table where he had tied flies when he was a boy, remembered how he’s struggled with the feathers and hair when he was learning. As difficult as it all was, he knew it would come, that he would get it. But none of this business with the bodies and the one-handed man and the missing cousin would ever come to make sense. This, he believed. He did believe, however, that whatever Caitlin, dead or not, and the man with one hand had come to find was somewhere up that mountain road. If it was important enough to kill for, it was important enough to return for. He shut his eyes and drifted off quickly.
Ogden walked into the station the next morning.
“You look like shit,” Felton said.
“I feel like shit,” Ogden said.
Bucky Paz stepped into view. “Ogden, come in here.”
Ogden followed the fat man into his office.
“Sit down. Santa Fe got an ID on the woman in the car. Her name was Carol Barelli.”
“I take it she wasn’t Irish.”
“Nope. She was Denverish. She was picked up for prostitution up there once. Still no ID on the woman in the cabin.”
“Anything on Carla Reynolds?”
“Last known address was in Chicago. The cops there checked out the address. No one there by that name.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“Caitlin was a hooker, eh?”
“One of those on the Craig’s List.”
“Craig’s List. Guess I’m going on Craig’s List.”
Ogden sat down in front of the computer on his desk.
Felton looked over. “You on the computer? Who died?”
“A bunch of people,” Ogden said.
Ogden stared at the computer screen. “What is Craig’s List?” he asked. “I typed it in and nothing came up.”
“It’s one word,” Felton said. “No apostrophe. Haven’t you ever bought anything online?”