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.
The lines around her eyes and mouth.
I stood perfectly still and repeated the words in my head.
The lines around her eyes and mouth…
What was it about them? I looked at her picture again, at the wrinkles around—
I ran to the bathroom and threw open the medicine cabinet with enough force to crack the mirror. Damn it. I should have recognized it earlier. I was stupid and arrogant and allowed myself to be manipulated. I knocked the entire row of prescription bottles from the shelf and had to crawl around on the floor until I found the one I was looking for. I grabbed the box of OnabotulinumtoxinA and held it up before me. One hundred units of purified neurotoxin complex. OnabotulinumtoxinA was the generic name for Botox, a purified form of the neurotoxin responsible for botulism. It was used to treat chronic migraines and neck pain, not to mention cosmetic applications like reducing wrinkles and erasing the signs of aging. It worked by blocking the nerve impulses between the brain and the muscles at the site of the injection, essentially paralyzing the muscles.
Paralyzing the muscles.
I remembered the nicks and cuts on Antone’s face that I had mistaken for sloppy shaving or a butcher job from a dull razor. He had hidden the sites where he had injected the Botox perfectly among the real cuts he must have deliberately inflicted upon himself. That was why I had never been able to read him. He’d paralyzed certain groups of facial muscles to mask his expressions.
He’d known the Bureau would send me in from the start and he’d known about my skills. He’d been manipulating me since I first set foot on the reservation. He’d been in league with my brother, who he must have discovered was out there killing people in the desert, and had decided to put Ban’s skills to use for his own ends. That’s why Antone hadn’t appeared threatened by him when we found Ban waiting with Roman near the first crime scene, the one they had discovered.
Master and puppet.
I’itoi and Coyote.
I bellowed in frustration and spiked the bottle against the wall. The plastic cracked and the top snapped off and I felt fluid spatter my cheek, but I was already in motion.
Out of the bathroom and down the hall. Through the main room and the kitchen. Out the back door and onto the porch. Past the lone chair in which I assumed Antone sat to watch the setting sun, where I had sat only days before and noticed the nearly invisible tracks in the sand leading toward the distant ridge, beyond which I had seen the roofline of an aluminum outbuilding. The seat where Antone had sat not to keep an eye on the majestic desert sunset, but rather the outbuilding itself, so as not to make the tracks any more visible than absolutely necessary, because he really only needed to drive back there when he had a full trunk. A full trunk brimming with packages he didn’t want anyone to see him unloading.
It took me twenty minutes to walk there. The building reminded me of a small airplane hangar with a low, flat roof. The kind of thing someone could find on an abandoned Air Force bombing range, disassemble under the cover of darkness, and reassemble on his own land where no one else knew of its existence. It was situated in a narrow stone cul-de-sac formed by the convergence of the hills on the opposite side of the ridge from his house. It had been painted a reddish-brown to match the surrounding sand, but the wind had scoured it back to the bare metal in spots. There was a garage door on the face of the building. I gave the handle a solid tug. It didn’t budge in the slightest. Locked from the inside. Or maybe rusted shut. I walked around the side. There were no windows. I found the main entrance on the rear of the building, abutting an escarpment that kept the front door in perpetual shadow. I used the same lock rake that granted me entrance to Antone’s house to make short work of the main knob. The series of deadbolts running nearly all the way up the height of the door above it took a bit more finagling.