“Coyote?”
“Ban’s O’odham for coyote. Carmen chose that name because the night Raffi left, she sat alone in the desert crying while coyotes bayed at the moon all around her. She thought it was an omen. More of a self-fulfilling prophecy, I guess.”
“Why’d she do it?”
“Kill herself? Haven’t you figured it out yet? Aren’t you supposed to be the big shot investigator? She killed herself because of you.”
I sat stunned for a long moment.
“Everything changed between us when Carmen heard Raffi had another child. Another life with another woman. I never tried to be Raffi. I couldn’t replace him. I didn’t want to replace him. I wanted my own family…and for a while…I had it.” He released a long sigh. “Carmen was beautiful—the most beautiful woman in the world—but there was always a sadness to her. Something deep down. A hole she couldn’t quite seem to fill. I think she must have filled it with Raffi. Or at least thought she had. I guess I couldn’t fill it. Not for lack of trying. Hell, not even her own child could fill it. She was just one of those people always meant to burn really hot, but really fast.”
“Ban blames me for her death. You both blame me.”
“Can you fault him for that? Here he was, orphaned by his mother, raised by a father who wasn’t his father by nature, and forced to watch all of those pictures of your successes accumulate on his grandmother’s wall while he would never enjoy any of the same opportunities. He did the very best with what he was given. He breezed through school, earned his degree, and joined with Homeland Security to protect and patrol his ancestral land. It was noble and it was good, but many of our people viewed it as selling his soul to the enemy. He was shunned everywhere he went. And on top of it all, you had to go and one-up him every step of the way. He earned his associate’s; you got your bachelor’s. Mechanical engineering, if you can believe that. He had a mind for that kind of thing. But then nine-eleven happened and Gatekeeper closed down the established migrant routes and they started flooding across our land. All of them potential terrorists, you know? So he signed on with the Border Patrol. And you had to show him up again by joining the FBI. And to top it all off, the very same week he made one of the largest drug busts in history and was starting to catch the eye of the DEA, you go and get your face in every newspaper across the country by helping to take down the Delivery Man. I think that was what did it for him. In his mind, you guys were in a competition that not only could he never win, but one in which you would never even acknowledge the fact that he was competing against you.”
He looked down at his now-empty bottle for nearly a full minute before he continued. “So he just quit. His job. His life. Everything. One day, it was all over. I could see the change in him, but it was a long time before I started to understand what had happened, why he had changed so suddenly. He had always been like his mother. He had that hole inside of him, too. I think he thought he could fill it with all of his accomplishments, with the way he thought people in the community would look at him. I guess he ended up filling it with anger. Hatred. And you personified everything that was wrong with his life and his world. His biological father was dead by then. We all knew that. He couldn’t even track him down and try to get the answers he needed. And that left only you. Despite everything I had done for him. Despite the fact that I had assumed the role of father when no one else wanted to job. I chose him. But it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. Not for his mother. And not for him.”
His cheeks glistened with tears when he looked up at me. The expression on his face was one of unadulterated anger, though. I was in no mood to allow him his indulgences. I wasn’t about to let him brush the responsibility off on me. I refused. He was Ban’s father. By birth or by choice. It made no difference. He needed to accept that whether intentionally or not, he had helped create a monster.
“At what point did you learn he was killing people?”
“All you had to do was look us up. Come down here and show him that he wasn’t alone, that you didn’t think you were better than him, that you were—”
“Don’t try to pin this on me.”
“—brothers.”
“You knew he was killing people and did nothing to stop it. That makes you every bit as guilty in my eyes.”
“Your eyes…”
“This has to end, Roman. You have to—”
“I know,” he whispered.
“Tell me where he is.”
“I don’t know where he is.” He blinked away whatever thoughts had been distracting him, then looked up me with an expression that I easily interpreted as sincerity. “I don’t know where he is.”
“But you know where he’d go if he was out of options, don’t you? Not that old abandoned trailer. Someplace where nobody would think to look for him. Someplace no one else knows about.”
He nodded, closed his eyes, then hurled his bottle against the wall. Shards of brown glass shot in every direction. A gob of foam rolled down the wall.
“Where can I find him, Roman.”
“There’s another trailer.” His voice became progressively softer as he spoke. “At the back of the property. By the wash. Used to belong to my mother’s brother before he passed. Long time ago now. Long time ago…”
“The trailer, Roman. Where exactly…?”
But he was already gone, vanished inside of himself, or perhaps into another place and time altogether as I had seen him do before. A part of me wanted to hurt him even more, to vent my frustrations on him, but I realized that there was nothing I could do to hurt him more than I was already going to.
I was going to kill his son.
There was no other way I could see this playing out.
I was going to kill the Coyote.
I was going to kill my brother.
THIRTY-FOUR
My patience was spent. I was pissed off and frustrated and tired of being manipulated. I didn’t care about the desert and I most certainly didn’t care about the pool car as I drove away from the house across the open gravel and sand. If there was a road, I didn’t see it. Then again, I didn’t look too hard either. All of the deaths wore heavily on me. They always did. I think that was what allowed me to do what I did. Without that personal impetus, I can’t imagine what wells of motivation an investigator draws from in order to follow the trails of blood and suffering so many sociopaths leave in their wake. This one drove me harder than I’d ever been driven before, though. Antone’s death was weighing on my conscience. I don’t believe it was merely the fact that I had known and liked him that caused his death to trouble me so much. Maybe it was because after enduring so much loss and heartache, he’d been trying to combat the bad guys within the constraints of the system, by the rules, only to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. A freak stroke of bad luck. My old nemesis coincidence. Whatever the case, something was nagging at me like the sound of footsteps behind me, but every time I turned around, there was no one there.
I found the trailer pretty much right where Roman said it would be. It made the previous one look positively futuristic by comparison. Like he said, this one had been set up right beside the wash. So close, in fact, that the bank had eroded out from beneath it. Either that or someone had dug such a large hole beneath it they had nearly toppled the trailer, which was a line of thought I had no intention of pursuing at the moment. Even from a distance, I could tell the trailer was leaning away from me.