BOOK FIVE INTO THE STINKING MOUTH OF JUSTICE

AT DAWN ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, Lorena Saenz stepped off the shoulder of Route 66 and left civilization behind. Her exact point of departure was a barren stretch of road just past the town of Siberia and on the way to Bagdad. More precisely, it was 12.38 miles due north of the spot on the map where, by her reckoning, Marcus Stallworth had camped some two weeks earlier.

Lorena walked south all morning, through prairies of caked powder and scrub, with a compass in one hand, a pedometer in the other, and a steel-framed backpack borrowed from Lisa Catalis, her eighth-grade science teacher. She had just crossed an access road when she encountered a barbed-wire fence, affixed with a sign that promised trespassers will be prosecuted.

She tore through the barbs and aimed for the distant crags of the Bullion Mountains. No more than a hundred steps later, a siren yelped from the access road behind her. She figured she’d been caught trespassing. Then a gravelly voice was booming in the air around her. “Come on back, Lorena.”

She turned to find a cop standing next to a Fresno Police squad car. He had a radio pressed to his mouth and his voice was being amplified by speakers on the roof of the vehicle. It was just the two of them, faced off under the blue dome of morning. The cop was fat, with a thick mustache and an oddly jovial expression. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, muchacha. You see any other Lorenas around here?”

ON A TYPICAL Tuesday, at this hour, Lorena would have been dragging herself into third period, taking a seat near the back of the room and watching Mrs. Bunn slash algebraic formulas onto the blackboard. At some point, a boy would fart or burp or stick a spit-moistened fingertip into the ear of a girl he liked and therefore bullied, and Mrs. Bunn would turn for a moment and cast a withering glance in the general direction of the culprit and do nothing, because this sort of behavior was expected of boys in ninth grade. But Lorena had not seen a typical morning for weeks.

Miss Roy, the public defender, had called their home three days earlier to inform them that Tony had signed a confession. Her mother tried to visit him but was told he was “in transit.” When he did finally call, Tony told his mother that he didn’t remember committing the crimes of which he was accused, that it was possible he had done so under the influence of drugs, but he didn’t think so. He said he was being set up and also that he was trying to protect her. His speech was jumbled and halting. Graciela instructed him to pray to Jesus to clear his mind and lead him to the truth. She told him she loved him no matter what and that she should have been kinder to him when he was a boy and wept in silence. She knew Tony would not abide the sound of her crying.

Lorena didn’t believe the confession. The FBI had preyed upon the weakness of his mind. Tony had been right: it was the fancy ones who fucked you up. The police helped them do so. Her mind flashed to Officer Guerrero, his ratty face and fake kindness. It was on her now, to save Tony, to make the cops pay. What she needed was a plan, and a little bit of help.

LORENA RETURNED TO Sutter Junior High and stationed herself outside Miss Catalis’s classroom just before the end of seventh period and waited for the bell that would send her students tumbling into their heedless afternoons of Little League and Atari. She hid behind a book as they clamored past.

Miss Catalis sat at her desk, while a bespectacled girl assailed her about mitochondria. Lorena knew that she might have been this girl last year, had she made different choices, the goody- goody lingering after class, wringing a little extra kindness from an earnest teacher. The girl blathered on, shifting from one foot to the other and picking at her forehead, until Miss Catalis noticed Lorena in the doorway and gasped.

“I can come back,” Lorena murmured.

“No. Please. We were just finishing up.” She paddled her hands in an antic gesture of beckoning.

The girl stared at Lorena blankly, a bit resentfully, and attempted to show Miss Catalis her diagram of a mitochondrion. “It’s terrific, Rachel. Let’s talk more tomorrow.”

On her way out, Rachel looked at Lorena again, squinting this time until her eyes went wide and she scooted into the hallway, eager to find someone, anyone, to whom she could brag that she had spotted the sister of the Death Valley Killer, that she was talking to Miss Catalis right now.

Everyone knew Lorena Saenz and Jenny Stallworth had met in Miss Catalis’s class, and that this meeting had led to the murder of Marcus Stallworth, because the girls had been mortal enemies. Lorena had been jealous of Jenny’s wealth and beauty and popularity. Miss Catalis had forced them to work together anyway.

“Sorry about that,” Miss Catalis called out. “Come in.” She marched over and hugged Lorena, then shut the door. “I heard about your brother. Oh, Lorena. How are you? How’s your mother?”

“She’s okay. I’ve just been trying to focus on my schoolwork, you know.”

“Of course.”

“That’s why I came. I need a little help on an assignment. I thought of you because of our navigation unit from last year. If you have the coordinates of a place, like, would it be possible to find it?”

Miss Catalis leaned back. “What class is this for?”

“Geography.”

“Wouldn’t you be taking biology as a freshman?”

“This is a special project. For Western Civ.”

“You’re doing a section on cartography or something?”

“Right.”

Miss Catalis cocked her head. “How detailed are the coordinates? How many decimal points?”

“Three,” Lorena said.

Miss Catalis whistled. “And this place you want to find, is it a village or something?”

“No, a campsite.”

“A campsite?” Miss Catalis frowned. “This is for a cartography unit?”

“It’s more like an ancient settlement.”

“I’m a bit confused, Lorena.”

“We’re supposed to find this encampment used by the Pima Indians,” Lorena said quickly. “It’s for extra credit. But it’s way out in the desert, so there’s no roads or anything.”

“Are there any changes in elevation, at least?”

“I don’t think so.”

Miss Catalis produced a soft popping noise, the one she made when you got an answer wrong in class. “It’s possible,” she said reluctantly. “But you’d need the right equipment. And you’d have to get pretty lucky.”

Lorena could feel her chin quivering at this blunt appraisal.

Suddenly, Miss Catalis was studying her in a manner that made Lorena want to flee the room. “Wait a second,” she said slowly. “This isn’t really about an assignment, is it? This is about your brother.”

LORENA KNEW HER best shot at getting help was to avoid any mention of her true intention. Miss Catalis was a teacher, part of the official world, and, as her mother had often reminded her, when you tell one official, you’re telling every official. But Miss Catalis had deduced the truth—a portion of it, anyway.

So Lorena came up with a story. She told Miss Catalis that Tony had an alibi, that he had gone camping on the weekend of Mr. Stallworth’s disappearance, had even left behind a baseball cap, but the police didn’t believe him.

“Didn’t believe him?”

“They said they had all the evidence they needed.”

From the hallway came the squeak of a custodial cart. “Let’s continue this conversation somewhere else,” Miss Catalis said.

Her apartment was a garden-level studio shared with two nervy parakeets. The bookshelves were crammed with used textbooks and science-fiction novels. Hanging on the wall above her kitchen table was a framed quote—COURAGE IS FOUND IN UNLIKELY PLACES—by someone named J. R. R. Tolkien. Miss Catalis set out a plate of vanilla cookies, the stale kind Lorena associated with church functions.

“I know you want to help your brother. I get it. But the public defender’s office has investigators. This is their job.”

“They told me the case is over. He did a plea bargain.”

“And you still think he’s innocent.” Miss Catalis nodded to herself, then stared directly at the young woman across from her. “I want you to listen to me, Lorena. Tony is in jail because of his actions, not yours. You don’t have to take this on. It’s not your job to save your brother.”

Lorena’s face fell into her hands. “I thought you were the one person who would understand.”

“I do understand,” Miss Catalis said. “Let me think.”

“I’m just asking for a little help with navigation. It’d be, like, a hike in the desert. I won’t even tell anyone we talked.”

THEY STRUCK A deal. Miss Catalis would help Lorena, as long as she promised to wait for the weekend, when they could travel together. In the meantime, she laid out the steps they would have to take. This was years before GPS existed, back when the best a hiker could do was to get ahold of a compass with adjustable declination, to correct for difference between true north and magnetic north.

First, they would need to head to the map room of the central library to get detailed topographical maps of San Bernardino County. They would need to mark a spot due north of Tony’s campsite and walk due south, checking the compass every dozen steps, to stay on the same longitude. “There’s no guarantee,” Miss Catalis warned. “But we can give it a shot.”

Before she departed, Lorena confessed that she’d never gone on a serious hike before, and asked, shyly, if she could borrow the high-tech compass and the pedometer and backpack, so she could practice during the week.

Catalis agreed. “I know you’re eager. Just wait till Saturday.”

Lorena met her eye and nodded.

The moment she got home, Lorena Saenz marched into her mother’s room and grabbed $300 cash from the emergency fund stashed in a shoebox at the back of the closet. She bought supplies at an army surplus store and left a note for her mother, explaining that she was staying over at a friend’s house so they could study for a big test. She suffered no hesitation in buying a bus ticket, or traveling alone. Her mother had put her on Greyhounds before, to visit her cousins in San Jose. She knew how to take care of herself, how to deflect adults who might ask questions. From Fresno, she traveled on to Barstow. At first light, she hired a taxi to drive her out to Siberia, which was little more than a service station and convenience store called Last Chance Gas. “This ain’t exactly Grand Central,” the cabbie said. “You sure you want to get out here?” She told him she was meeting her dad.

LISA CATALIS WAS no dope. She had been teaching middle school long enough to recognize when a kid became a bad bet. It didn’t matter how smart they were. The brain of a fourteen- year-old had the impulse control of a fourteen-year-old. This is why she dropped by the Saenz apartment the next morning, before school. Her next call was to the police. She was eventually patched through to officer Pedro Guerrero.

Miss Catalis introduced herself and explained the bizarre request her former student had made of her. “Her story didn’t make any sense. She had these specific coordinates, supposedly from her brother.”

Guerrero was incensed and quietly impressed at Lorena’s audacity. “Where are you located, Miss Catalis? I’d like to get a little more information.”

They met at a Sambo’s near the middle school. Catalis recognized him, vaguely, though she couldn’t say how. In fact, she had seen him among the officers lined up behind the chief of police, when he announced the arrest of Antonio Saenz.

He wrote down everything Lisa Catalis could tell him: what Lorena was wearing, the color of the backpack she had borrowed, the spot along Route 66 that she was most likely to have taken off from, which Miss Catalis had calculated herself, the moment she discovered that Lorena had gone missing.

“I should have called last night,” she said. “I could see how upset she was.” Lisa Catalis poked at her tea bag miserably. “I know this sounds silly, but I was the one who paired them up, her and Jenny Stallworth. For the science fair. I thought it would do them both some good. Shows what I know.”

“I wouldn’t take all that on, ma’am,” Guerrero said. “You’re just a teacher trying to do right by your students. That’s what I see.”

“Thank you.” Catalis had begun to cry a little.

“It’s okay,” Guerrero said. “You go ahead and let it out. The world’s a crazy place. It deserves more tears than it gets.” He handed her a few napkins.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, ma’am.”

“Lisa.”

“Okay. Lisa.”

“It just eats at me.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I see all these kids come in to my classroom every year. And you know some of them are going to be fine. They’ve got parents to help them with their homework, money for tutors, a trust fund for college. And then you’ve got the other ones, where you know the support isn’t there. When you get a girl like Lorena, where you can see they’ve got a real mind, you just want to make sure you do your part to help them.”

Guerrero thought of Lorena as he had first encountered her, hunched behind the stack of books on her kitchen table. At the same time, annoyingly, he found that he was staring at Miss Catalis, deciding she was pretty.

“What?” she said.

“I don’t know. I just wish they had teachers like you when I went to Sutter.”

“You were a Sutter Miner?”

“About a million years ago.”

“And what kind of student were you?”

Guerrero summoned his Sutter days. Petty theft, cut classes, flailing fights. “More like Antonio Saenz than Lorena, let’s put it that way.”

“But you did alright for yourself.”

“Yeah, I got lucky. Point is, a good teacher can make all the difference.” Against his inclinations, and with a terrified lurching of the heart, Guerrero set his hand lightly on the forearm of Lisa Catalis. “Try not to beat yourself up for seeing Lorena.”

IT WAS GUERRERO who called Nando, and Nando who drove out to the access road that offered the best chance to intercept Lorena. He didn’t hold out much hope. But he clambered onto the hood of his squad car anyway and surveyed with his binoculars, until he spotted an animal ripping its way through the barbed- wire fence to his east. Upon closer inspection, the animal was wearing jeans and tennis shoes.

Nando clicked on his bullhorn, hollered her name, watched Lorena go stiff. He limped down to the fence with his wire cutters, letting out little grunts and chattering all the while. “You’re not in any trouble. It’s just we can’t have minors wandering around alone out here.”

Lorena could feel sweat soaking her shirt; it stuck to her back. She had to struggle to steady her voice. “Am I under arrest?”

The cop smiled. “Heck no. You are a runaway under California state law, though. Why don’t we have a little talk in my car? It’s nice and cool.”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

“Not really.”

“How do you know my name?” she said suddenly. But then she understood: Miss Catalis had narked to the cops.

“You’re pretty famous in some circles. Pedro Guerrero is a big fan. Doesn’t look like the feeling is mutual.”

“He arrested my brother.”

“I warned him not to, if that counts for anything. Seriously, let’s go sit in my car. I got pastries and everything.”

They sat in the front seat of the squad car, with its cigarillo stink.

“What now?”

“We sit tight and stuff our faces.” Nando reached into the cooler between them, and removed a waxed paper bag. “Usually, I’d eat all of these myself, which is how I keep such a lovely figure. I got conchas, orejas, cuernos. Those are the best. Come on, now. You been walking all morning. I know you’re hungry.” He held out the pastry, its custard shining like a giant yolk. “Okay, you change your mind, you know where these are.” Nando ate two conchas, tearing them into chunks, which he dunked into a thermos of coffee.

Lorena observed him out of the corner of her eye. She could hear Tony’s voice in her head: a pig eating like a pig. Something about his appetite, the shamelessness of it maybe, revolted her. “Why’d you say that thing?” she asked.

“What thing?”

“About telling Guerrero not to arrest my brother?”

Nando squinted through the windshield, then put his pointer finger to his lips. “That one was off the record, muchacha. You know what that means?”

“I’m not dumb.”

“Claro que sî,” Nando muttered amiably.

“Mr. Stallworth is still alive,” Lorena said. “He ran away. I can prove it.”

“That’s our job, no?”

“Then you should do your job.”

Nando let out a gale of laughter. “Walked right into that one. Pow. I’m gonna need a smoke to restore my dignity.”

Lorena stared into the nothingness of the Mojave, while Nando turtled his way out of the squad car and shambled around, puffing at his rancid cigarillo.

“What happened to your leg anyway?” Lorena said, when he had settled back into the driver’s seat.

“Broke it attempting a triple axel. Olympic trials. 1976.”

Silence.

“Tough crowd,” Nando said.

“I just mean—they still let you be a police officer.”

“What do you think they do to old cops, take us out and shoot us?”

“What if you have to chase a suspect?”

“You planning on making a getaway?”

“He’s not dead,” Lorena repeated. “I can prove it.”

PEDRO GUERRERO HAD every intention of driving Lorena Saenz back to Sacramento. She was (just for starters) a minor who had fled into the desert alone. She was also the sister of the Death Valley Killer, and a material witness in his case, which remained at the center of a media frenzy.

But there was a reason he had instructed Nando to stay put rather than transporting the girl back to Barstow or Fresno. And that reason, though he couldn’t quite admit it to himself, was that he knew Lorena might be right, that Marcus Stallworth was out there, somewhere. It was a long shot, but he could no longer ignore his misgivings. Lorena deserved the chance to test her theory of the case, though this would involve venturing into a desert he had no idea how to navigate, which meant relying on the dubious expertise of a fourteen-year-old girl. None of these thoughts was particularly welcome. He pulled up to Nando’s squad car in a state of irritability.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Nando called through his window.

“Hi, Lorena,” Guerrero said.

Lorena glared straight ahead.

“Looks like you two are hitting it off, so I’m going to use the restroom, such as it is. You can thank me later for driving all the way out here.”

“Thank you,” Guerrero whispered. “I owe you.”

He poked his head through car window. “You know I got to bring you home, right?”

Her black hair was pulled back in a ponytail; her jeans looked as if they’d been run through a cheese grater.

“Gather up everything you brought. I’ll give you a minute.”

She gave no indication of having heard him.

“It’s nothing personal, Lorena. I’m just trying to do my job here.”

“Stop lying to me,” Lorena said quietly. It was an audacious thing to say to a police officer, but she was past caring what Guerrero thought.

“What do you want from me?”

“You know what I want.”

“No, I don’t.”

“We’re 5.7 miles from the spot Mr. Stallworth marked on his map. That’s two hours. We could make it back before dark.”

“We’ll have an officer check it out.”

Lorena closed her eyes. An afterimage of the sun pulsed red. “You must really think I’m an idiot,” she said slowly. “Every single thing I’ve told you—you ignored all of it. Because you wanted to bust my brother.”

“I can’t ignore evidence.”

“That’s what you’re doing right now.”

“Something you think might be true isn’t evidence. It’s conjecture.”

Lorena flung open the passenger-side door and grabbed her backpack from the back seat. For a second, it looked as if she might make a run for it. She lugged the pack over to Guerrero’s car. “You can take me home, but I’m gonna come back here. And when I find what I know I’m going to find, I’m going to go to every newspaper and TV station in California and tell them what you did.”

“I can see things are going well here,” observed Nando, who had just returned.

“Miss Saenz believes we’re engaged in a massive cover-up,” Guerrero said. “She thinks we’re trying to bury evidence that could compromise the case.”

Nando looked away.

“Can I remind you of the situation?” Guerrero said. “We got a minor wandering around alone in the desert—”

“I’m not wandering,” Lorena said.

“—her mother already has one kid in custody.”

Nando held up a finger. “Lorena, would you mind returning to my car? Just for a minute, honey. Thank you.” When she had closed the door, he led Guerrero away from the vehicle. “Whatever you want to do here, primo, that’s what I want to do.”

“We gotta get her back to her mother, right?”

“Of course.”

“But. There’s a but in your voice.”

“Let’s put it this way: if you were charged with murder and I thought there was some way to clear you and the cops were blowing me off, I’d probably do what she did.”

“Blowing her off? Who drove back to the Stallworth residence and tested for blood in the basement? Who interviewed the maid? That shit could get me fired.” Guerrero was shouting at his cousin now.

“Okay. No one’s accusing you, primo. But look at the pattern here. You been confirming her leads, one by one.” Nando licked an errant pastry flake from his mustache. “Tell me this: Have you told Hooks about any of this? How about the interview notes I sent? Does he know where you are right now?”

“What’s your point?”

“We’re already off the reservation. That’s my point.”

“You want me to go out there with her, don’t you?”

“Would you rather she comes down here alone next week?”

“She wouldn’t be alone. One of her teachers helped her plan this little escapade.”

“Oh shit. Now you got a teacher mixed up in it. If something bad happens, his career goes down the tubes.”

“Her career.”

“I’d take her myself if I weren’t such a fucking cripple. Then again, my career ain’t riding on it.”

“What’s that mean?”

Nando held up his hands, like it was a stickup. “You wanna walk away, I ain’t gonna judge you.”

Guerrero felt a pressure building in his chest. He recalled the sensation from his criminal days. Every available choice struck him as a betrayal.

“There’s nothing out there anyway,” he said, half to himself.

“Probably not.”

“And we tell her mother what?”

Nando made his hand into a phone. “This is officer Fernando Reyes, ma’am. Your daughter has joined the Major Crimes Unit. Turns out she’s got a real nose for police work. But don’t worry. She’ll be home before The Waltons starts.”

“What if we find something?” Guerrero said glumly.

“Then you made the right call.”

GUERRERO INSISTED ON carrying the backpack. He was trying to be chivalrous, but Jesus it was heavy. Nando had lent him a pair of sneakers, which were better than his loafers but too large. He did a lot of stumbling, which Lorena enjoyed. They made a strange couple: a thin, balding man in a button-down shirt and rayon pants, with a gun tucked in the leather holster looped around his waist, walking beside a teenage girl in torn clothing, who bent to inspect a compass every five steps.

Guerrero had his shoulder unit radio switched on, but a mile into their hike, Nando’s chatter turned to static and they were alone. They did not speak, aside from necessary communications. Guerrero questioned Lorena’s compulsive inspection of the compass. Lorena replied that any deviation in direction would render their mission pointless. She did this in the proprietary manner that Guerrero recalled from his own school years. It was the way smart girls always talked, their hedge against what really mattered, which was being pretty.

At one point, Lorena confessed that she needed to go to the bathroom. Guerrero stood with his eyes closed, cursing silently, while the girl dashed behind a distant creosote bush. She had brought toilet paper, naturally. All the while, the sun inched across the sky and the northern edge of the Bullion Mountains loomed larger, until they stood in the shadow of a wrinkled ridge. Lorena consulted her pedometer. “We should start looking.”

The goal was to detect any sign of human disruption, meaning footprints, trash, a campfire. They walked outward in concentric circles, marking their progress with little yellow flags that Lorena had purchased from the army surplus store. Lorena suggested they split up, to cover more ground.

“No can do,” Guerrero said. “I’m responsible for you.”

“What do you think is going to happen to me?”

“You could get lost, for one thing.”

“That’s why I bought the flares.”

LORENA WAS OUT of flags by four. They had covered what felt to Guerrero like a square mile, venturing up into the craggy foothills, walking east and west, tracing ridges and plunging down into arroyos. “We have to go,” he said, gently. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to find my car in the dark.”

“Go ahead,” Lorena said.

“You know I can’t do that.”

“I got everything I need.” She reached into her backpack and began pulling out packages of dried fruit and beef jerky, canteens, a tarp for ground cover.

“Put that stuff back, Lorena. Come on now. It’s time. Your mother needs you.”

“Don’t talk about my mother.”

“Okay. Calm down.”

But Lorena couldn’t calm down. There was something about Guerrero speaking about her mother, thinking he had the right, as if it were his intention now to protect her, this man who had ruined her brother’s life and sent her into the desert to chase a ghost. She kept getting angrier and angrier, until she was throwing camping supplies directly at Guerrero. Flashlight. Snakebite kit. Water bottle. “I have what I need,” she shrieked. “I don’t need you. I don’t need you.” The louder her voice became, the more violent her sense of assurance. She didn’t need Guerrero or Tony or Mr. Stallworth or her own goddamn father, wherever that asshole was. She needed to get away from all of them. Suddenly she was running into the Bullion Mountains, leaving behind the stupid yellow flags they had planted, racing past giant boulders and outcroppings of the same hopeless hue.

Guerrero stood aghast, watching her recede. He told himself she would return. Then he realized he had no basis for making this judgment, aside from the vague intuition that human beings tended to cluster in the wilderness.

It took him ten minutes to catch up to her. They were soaked through and panting by then. Every time Guerrero came within fifty yards, Lorena would zig, or zag, or duck behind a boulder, and Guerrero would quietly consider pulling out his gun and shooting her in the leg. Sunset painted an auburn glaze on the horizon.

“Please,” Guerrero said. “I don’t want to have to arrest you.”

He could see that Lorena was out of gas, but one final burst of adrenaline drove her forward. Then she was on the ground, her shoulder throbbing. She was sure he had tackled her. But Guerrero was ten yards behind her. She glanced back and saw a ring of stones; the one she had tripped over kicked loose, the rest forming a perfect circle around the remains of a fire.

“Officer Guerrero,” she croaked.

Anyone could build a fire, Guerrero said. But Lorena knew. He had been here. She ran her fingers through the ashes as Guerrero stood there, threatening her. She began to look around for a place where Mr. Stallworth would have stashed supplies; her eyes alighted on a crevice at the base of a ledge.

“Where’re you going?”

Lorena angled her body inside. She turned on her flashlight and swept the ground. There, at the very back of the burrow, lodged like a tonsil, was a freshly turned mound. She began digging with her fingers, scooping away the sandy soil, until her fingertips felt the soil give way to a rustling. She could hear Guerrero wheezing angrily behind her.

He stuck his head into the cave. “This is an animal’s den.”

Lorena aimed her flashlight at what she’d unearthed. There, stacked and crisply folded, wrapped in a clear plastic sheath, as if they had come straight from a laundry service, were the blood-stained garments in which Marcus Stallworth had disappeared nineteen days earlier.

ALTHOUGH PEDRO GUERRERO was raised in the church, he had never considered the hand of the divine particularly reliable, especially during investigations. And yet he could summon no earthly explanation for what had transpired, the manner in which his pursuit of Lorena led her directly to the campfire and from there to the clothes—a blue Brooks Brothers oxford, pleated chinos, a Hanes undershirt, all flecked with brown spots—which matched, at least in its basic elements, the outfit described by Stallworth’s wife and colleagues.

They spent the next hour scouring the area. Guerrero pulled on a pair of disposable gloves and dusted the stones around the fire pit for prints, then the plastic garment bag. He came up empty; whoever made camp had been wearing gloves, too. He sifted the ashes of the fire and recovered the charred remains of an MRE package. Lorena found what could have been the impression of a sleeping body on the floor of the cave and Guerrero tweezed two human hairs. Together, they managed to locate a dozen partial shoe prints, all the same waffle tread. It was nearly dark by the time they finished.

Lorena wanted to start back. But Guerrero knew they were too tired. They needed food and rest and daylight. He retrieved the backpack and they built a small fire, foraging twigs and dried branches, and guzzled from the canteens and gobbled dried fruit and jerky. They unfurled the tarp and stared up at the sky as it edged from violet into black and the stars one by one came lit.

“What’s going to happen now?” Lorena said.

In the movies, Guerrero would say just the right thing here. But they weren’t living in the movies. They were living in the world, with its human frailties and protocols, its bewildered pauses.

“I’m not sure,” Guerrero said.

“But Tony’s gonna go free though.”

“We have to do some tests.”

“Tests?”

“The blood spots, the hair. We have to see if they match with Mr. Stallworth.”

“What are you talking about?”

“To establish that the clothes belonged to Mr. Stallworth.”

“Who else would they belong to?”

“That’s the point. We don’t know yet.”

“But Mr. Stallworth—he was here. Just like it said on the maps. We found his clothes. He made a fire.”

“You saw those maps, Lorena. The police didn’t.”

The stars above her went blurry. She had been a fool to trust a cop.

“I’m sorry,” Guerrero said. “It’s going to take time.” He wanted to be straight with Lorena, to convey how difficult it would be to undo the process by which her brother had been deemed a murderer. “We need proof, Lorena. Like there’s proof against Tony.”

Lorena wiped her nose on her sleeve, so Guerrero wouldn’t know how upset she was. But he could hear her ragged hiccups over the crackling of their puny fire. It was down to embers.

“Your brother signed a plea deal. He confessed.”

“He didn’t mean it,” Lorena sobbed. “He told my mom.”

“He cut a deal—a good deal. He could be out in a decade.”

The girl began to shake; Guerrero considered touching her shoulder; his hand hovered in the thin air.

“He’s going to die in there,” she said softly. “You’re going to let him die.”

“Let me explain something. If I tell my captain, if I go to him and say, ‘Hey, I found these bloody clothes in the desert. The killer’s little sister led me to them. They belong to Marcus Stallworth.’ You know what he’s gonna do? He’s going to start asking how you knew the location of a dead man’s clothes—”

“He’s not dead—”

“I don’t want him asking that, Lorena. And you don’t, either. Then he’s going to send the Army Corps of Engineers out here and they’re going to dig around for months, until they find a body. And if they don’t, that just means the Death Valley Killer was extra careful.”

“Why’d you even let me come out here?”

Guerrero said nothing for a long time. “Because you may be right. But we’re going to have to find Marcus Stallworth to prove it. Which means I need to know where he might have gone.”

They lay in silence on opposite ends of the tarp, two warm- blooded creatures beneath a gathering assembly of stars. Guerrero collapsed, almost at once, into slumber. But Lorena was too angry to sleep. For a few joyous moments, she imagined bludgeoning Guerrero with one of the stones from the firepit. Bad rat. Dead rat. Then she remembered another one of Miss Catalis’s hokey sayings: Frustration is the fuel of science. She needed to find a way around the obstacle Guerrero had set in her path.

Her mind drifted back to the last time she stared into the ashy depths of the galaxy. She had stood beside Mr. Stallworth then, close enough to smell him. All around them, delicate bristled hunters ventured out from their burrows, traversing the floor of the desert, attuned to the vibrations of their pray. She had needed a special lamp to see them.

All at once, Lorena felt the adrenal surge that signaled an essential deduction. She nearly bolted upright. Lorena held almost no power in the world. She was a minor, the daughter of an undocumented worker and a man she could barely remember, the sister of an avowed killer. But she was in sole possession of the clues that might save her brother, and that gave her leverage over the cop who lay snuffling beside her. She was the only one who had seen the maps, who knew the coordinates. Find me, Mr. Stallworth had said. The lamp belonged to her.

IN THE MORNING, Guerrero discovered that he and the girl had curled into one another during the night, nestling against the chill of the desert. As he edged away, her arm reached out for him, for the animal warmth he provided. He laid his jacket over her and hurried into the dawn, bent like a crab, to gather kindling for a fire. There was a lancing pain behind his eyes that only caffeine would remedy.

He returned with an armful of nettled twigs and strafed forearms. Lorena was tending a small blaze in the shallow pit they’d dug. He assumed she was burning food wrappers, but as he drew closer he could see flames consuming the pale green topographical map she had consulted so faithfully during their hike out.

“What the hell are you doing? Jesus. How are we supposed to get back?”

“Head north. We’ll hit Route 66 eventually.”

“But why burn the goddamn—oh Jesus, they had the coordinates, didn’t they?” He stared at the curled wisps of charcoal. “Destroying evidence is a crime, Lorena.”

“They belonged to me.”

“This isn’t some kind of game.”

Lorena stared at him, almost indifferently. “I’m coming with you.”

Guerrero closed his eyes. A tiny anvil was being tossed, over and over, onto the soft tissue of his frontal lobe. “No, you’re going home to your mama, and me and Nando are going to process the evidence.”

“And if I don’t give the coordinates to you? What are you going to do? Throw me in jail with Tony? Have the FBI interrogate me?”

“You have to let us do our job.”

“We wouldn’t be out here if it weren’t for me,” Lorena replied. “You wanted to give up. But I’m not going to give up. Because Tony is my brother. And I know Mr. Stallworth.” She was speaking in a calm, methodical manner, bluffing at a kind of self-possession. And while Guerrero knew this, rationally, he also sensed that he was up against the indomitable will of an adolescent, that she would not give up, that it was not within her power to yield or surrender or trust.

“Do me a favor: shut up for a second.” He reached down for his holster and strapped it around his waist for no good reason, pistol and all, and turned away from the little fire she had made and walked in little circles behind a clump of creosote muttering fuck fuck fuck, almost tenderly, and thinking, once again, about shooting Lorena in the leg, grazing the fleshy part of her thigh this time, though as he imagined this scene, he envisioned Lorena looking down at the wound and saying “missed me” in her quiet, unperturbed way, then taking his gun and calmly aiming it at his head and firing. That’s how much his head hurt.

When he returned, she looked up grimly and handed him a collapsible tin cup full of instant oatmeal. “Face it, Officer Guerrero,” she said. “We need each other.”

IN THE DAYS after her arrival in Philadelphia, Rosemary Stallworth received two noteworthy phone calls. The first came from Royce Van Dyke. He had been a comfort during the early days of the investigation, a bit extravagant in his attention to wardrobe and grooming, but a steadying presence amid the parade of police personnel. Rosemary was pleased to hear his voice.

After inquiring as to how she and the children were settling in, Van Dyke announced that he had good news. Antonio Saenz had confessed to the FBI and entered into a plea agreement, which meant there would be no trial. “Even in our vulgar world,” he intoned, “justice has a way of prevailing.”

Rosemary felt her stomach unclench. “What a relief,” she whispered. “To have that part of it all over, I mean.”

Van Dyke hummed in accord. Beneath his veneer of professional calm, though, he was in a state. Over the past forty-eight hours, the status of the Stallworth case had swung from delicate to precarious. First, Ammon Taylor had contacted his office, demanding an additional $5,000—$3,000 more than remained in the escrow account. Then Officer Guerrero had called to grill him. Van Dyke enjoyed a certain latitude in his role as protector, owing to his influence over Captain Maurice Hooks, whom he had come to know from various erotic excursions. But the investigator was acutely aware of his legal vulnerability, should the precise nature of his relationship to Marcus Stallworth come to light. Guerrero had rattled him.

Thus, he was now in the unenviable position of having to request hush money from Rosemary, with a plausible explanation that did not involve disclosing that her husband was still alive. “There is one matter I wanted to mention before I let you go. In a case such as this there can be … aftershocks.”

“Aftershocks?”

“Yes. Well.” Van Dyke cleared his throat. “Because no body has been found, you see. At some point, there may be a need to identify.”

It took a moment for Rosemary to divine his meaning. She let out a noise of distress.

“I’m sorry to bring this up, obviously.”

A vision came upon her, of Marcus as he had been in the first days of their courtship, in the morning light of his dismal grad student flat. He was often in a state of arousal before he woke up, and sometimes she would reach down and take hold of him—or even pleasure him with her mouth—astonished at her own carnal daring. His body reacted with what she took to be assent, like a boy thrashing amid an ecstatic dream. For a few precious moments afterwards he lay limp and unguarded, and she could inspect his shy muscled body, the fine dark hairs that matted his chest and limbs, and the odd, filamentary scars scattered about his pelvis. Then he would curl away, violently, and they would both pretend not to hear his weeping. This was the part of his life she could never know, a fierce and terrible wound that was somehow always there between them, rattling like a loose secret.

Van Dyke was speaking to her again. “Of course, there are scenarios in which this is entirely unnecessary.”

“You mean if his body is never recovered.”

“I’m sorry to dwell on any of this, Rosemary. I am only observing that the full truth of what happened here remains unclear. Sometimes loose ends arise.”

“Loose ends?” Rosemary sounded flustered.

“There are certain members of the law enforcement community,” Van Dyke said carefully, “who seem to believe this case is more complicated than it is. I fear they may intend to dig into your past, and that of your husband.”

Rosemary nearly dropped the phone. Her breathing seized up. She thought of the homely Mexican officer who had forced himself into her home, his cheap suit and impudent questions, his rank smell. Her mind flashed to the scene she had witnessed weeks before the disappearance: Marcus on his hands and knees, Lorena looming over him like some pubescent Circe. The girl had even returned, prowling about like a common criminal, casting brazen accusations into the air between them.

“Mrs. Stallworth?”

Rosemary knew she was meant to respond, but the pressure in her chest forbid it. She felt as if her ribs would crack if she so much as whispered.

“I fear I have alarmed you. That was not my intention. It’s just that the police have a habit of frisking for secrets. And once one gets out, others are sure to follow. That’s been my experience.”

The pause lengthened. Van Dyke had been a vice detective in Tucson for a decade before his own desires forced him into another line of work. He now recognized the situation: Mrs. Stallworth was aware of her husband’s illicit tendencies. He wondered, a bit more than idly, what else she knew.

“It is my job to protect you from such invasions. To insure that you—and your children, and your parents—are able to move on from this tragedy. That will require a bit more work than I anticipated, and thus additional expenses, but I will do so. I promise you that. Do you trust me?”

He could just make out her assent.

“Now listen to me,” Van Dyke said, in his most reassuring tone. “I don’t want you worrying about any of this, Rosemary. I want you to breathe easy.”

Downstairs, her mother was pacing from room to room, berating her grandchildren with bright chatter. How delighted she had been to welcome her only daughter home, wreathed in the disgrace she had long predicted.

“Are we in agreement?” Van Dyke purred.

“Do what you have to do,” she replied faintly. “Leave me out of it.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Rosemary was prodded awake by a finger to her kidney. She had downed a Bloody Mary after the call with Van Dyke, and a Valium before bed, her second of the day. These were the general means by which she was managing reentry into the orbit of her parents.

“Get up, dear. You have a call from the White House.”

Rosemary squinted at her mother, whose frown lines had been surgically ironed into a grimace.

“The White House.” Her mother held up the portable phone and stared at it reverently, as if the person from the White House might be nestled inside. “I promised them I would get you up. You’ve been sleeping long enough.”

The woman on the phone—Denise was her name—explained that the First Lady remembered Rosemary fondly from their previous meetings and wished to offer moral support to “her favorite realtor” in precisely thirty-seven minutes.

Rosemary wanted to ask this Denise how she had secured the number to her parents’ home, which was unlisted. Then she realized who she was speaking with. “I’d be honored. Of course.” She took the call in the basement, which her father had converted into a faux British pub. “Stand by,” a baronial voice said, then, a minute later, “Please hold for the First Lady.”

The instant she heard Nancy’s voice, she broke down. She watched her tears stain the felt of the lonesome snookers table. “I’m sorry.”

“Nonsense,” Nancy said. “You let it out.”

“It’s all been so awful.”

“Of course it has.”

“I don’t know what to believe. Until they find … I mean—Marcus goes camping in the desert for days at a time. I’m sure I sound silly.”

The First Lady had seen photos of the crime scene, the infamous blotches of commingled blood. She had read the killer’s confession, the ghastly plea agreement to which he had affixed his childish signature. And yet she understood Rosemary. She had not accepted the truth until she saw her husband’s wounds.

“It’s not silly at all,” the First Lady said. “We’re praying for a miracle. Me and Ronnie both.”

Rosemary paused to gather herself, while Nancy spoke to her in a low, soothing tone about the resilience of children. She could hear her mother, on the extension in the master bedroom, trying not to breathe, something she had been doing for most of her life. She knew her mother would dine on this conversation till the day she died—they spoke for nearly an hour, just like old friends; the thought exhausted her.

“You were wise to remove yourself from a toxic situation,” the First Lady said.

“The police tromp around and ask question after question but they don’t tell you anything. It’s like they’re just going through the motions. Half the time, I felt like I was the criminal.” She shook loose a Virginia Slim and staggered to the window.

“It sickens me how victims of crime are treated in this country,” the First Lady declared with a sudden bitterness. “It should sicken all of us. I promise you one thing: that animal will rot in his cell, plea bargain or no.”

It took Rosemary a moment to decipher what the First Lady meant. She closed her eyes and saw her basement roiling with scorpions. How many times had she tried to banish those disgusting creatures from her home? Her cigarette had somehow come lit and she pulled smoke deep into her lungs, placing a hand over the receiver so her mother wouldn’t hear her smoking. For a piercing moment, Rosemary Stallworth was fourteen again. She could see the glittering rebellion of her youth, could taste the sweet promise of each heedless decision.

“All I ever wanted was a happy family,” she whispered.

“That’s why I had to call,” the First Lady whispered back. The two of them were bound together. They both understood the burdens of motherhood, the imposition of grace on a graceless world. Now they shared something even more elemental: evil had stalked their husbands. Nancy picked up a photo of the Stallworth family that had been sent along by FBI—such fine-looking children—and her voice caught. “I won’t rest until justice is done here, Rosemary. You have my word.”

IT WAS AFTER ten when Nando heard his cousin’s voice break through the static on his shoulder. “What the fuck, primo?”

“We got caught out there in the dark.”

“Is the girl okay?”

“Fine.”

“You find anything?”

“Yeah,” Guerrero said, after a pause. “Blast your damn siren already.”

They emerged from the desert half an hour later. At a distance, the girl looked to be tugging Guerrero along, for he returned as he had departed, bent under the weight of the pack and sullen as a mule, his rayon shirt sopping. Only now he was bearing something in front of him, like a royal pillow.

THERE WERE THE obvious forensic tasks: blood, hair samples, the tread found around the fire. Checking in with those who had seen Marcus Stallworth on the morning of his disappearance. Beyond these, the decisions became thornier. The first was whether to inform Hooks of what they’d found. Guerrero felt they had no choice.

Nando shook his head. “You’re thinking like an Indian, man. You gotta think like a chief. They held a fucking press conference. You were there. Remember all those cameras? That’s the story now.”

“Let me just see what he says.”

“Remind me again who tricked you into arresting Tony Saenz?”

“It wasn’t a trick.”

They were in the front seat of his Buick. Guerrero had his cheek pressed against the A/C vent. Lorena was stashed in the squad car, supposedly eating the remains of Nando’s pastries, though she was instead staring at them through the back window.

“If it was me,” Nando said.

“It’s not you—”

“But if it was, I’d see what I could document first. Better to seek forgiveness than permission. For now, let’s get the girl home.”

“About her,” Guerrero said.

“What?”

He described Lorena’s demand.

The more indignant his cousin got, the harder Nando had to work to keep from laughing. “She’s just as hardheaded as you.”

Guerrero wanted them both dead. He would have been fine with that.

After a minute, they heard a sharp rap from the direction of the squad car. Lorena was scowling at them through the back window. She certainly didn’t see what was so funny. Nando tipped an imaginary cap in her direction. “What a fucking junkyard dog you turned out to be.”

ON THE DRIVE back to Sacramento, Nando explained to Lorena that she would be charged with obstruction of justice if she withheld information from the police. Her mother would then have two children in custody, and her brother would be no closer to freedom. He presented these facts in the tone of cheery consolation he had perfected as a neighborhood cop, overseeing domestic disturbances. Like it or not, his manner said, we’re allies in this unhappy business.

If she chose to cooperate, he would keep her updated on their progress. That was a promise. If she chose not to cooperate, he would book her into a holding cell and send a police car to her mother’s place of employment. That was also a promise. Child Protective Services would need to initiate an investigation of parental negligence, which would naturally take account of her legal status.

Lorena’s mother burst from their apartment upon her return. She wept to the point of choking, as the neighbors hung from their doorways. Lorena tried to wrestle free, but Graciela Saenz had no intention of letting go. She hadn’t entirely believed her daughter would return at all. It was possible she would simply disappear, as Tony had, into a maze of police stations and prison cells. She thanked Jesus Christ. She thanked Nando, who explained that Lorena had hoped to visit her cousins in San Jose, but wound up on the wrong bus. “It happens more than you think, Señora.”

When they went inside, Graciela insisted on making breakfast for Lorena. Nando followed them inside. He just needed to run a quick property inventory before he took off. While Graciela busied herself in the kitchen, he followed Lorena to her room and took possession of the maps she’d stashed under her bed.

One featured a dotted line that traced the route she believed Mr. Stallworth had taken: south through the Bullions to the Salton Sea, then south again and east toward Yuma. Nando stared at the final X on the map, a few miles north of the border. An American with enough cash could turn south right there and stroll into Mexico and vanish off the face of the earth.

BECAUSE HE HAD no interest in encountering the detectives who worked the day shift, especially Captain Hooks, Guerrero waited until after dark to wander back to the Homicide section. Jolley had left the Stallworth file on his desk, all of it, including the FBI’s serology report. The lab was in Davis. The technician whose signature appeared at the bottom of the report was Kathleen Blunt.

He drove out there the next morning. Blunt wasn’t hard to find. She was the only woman in the lab and the oldest tech by at least a decade. Her work station was dominated by racks of test tubes, filled with dark blood and sickly yellow plasma. “Special Agent Blunt?”

“Kathy will do just fine.” She was peering intently into her microscope. “Who wants to know?”

“Officer Pedro Guerrero. Sacramento PD.”

Blunt grunted.

“You wrote the serology report on the Marcus Stallworth case, correct?”

Blunt looked up and squinted at Guerrero’s ID. The eye-guard of her device had left a pink welt across her forehead and flattened her wiry gray hair into a wedge. “If you say so.”

Guerrero, taken aback by her brusqueness, said, “You did compile that report for the FBI, correct?”

Blunt cast a glance in either direction. “If you want to talk work product, let’s go someplace quieter.” She got up and walked to the back of the lab and turned down a long corridor, then ducked out a side door, to a little alcove littered with cigarette butts. “I’m going to smoke.”

“Sure.”

Blunt was wearing blue rubber gloves, which she saw no need to remove. “Some people throw a shit fit is why I mention it.”

“I was hoping to get a little help with something,” Guerrero said.

Blunt took a deep drag. “Help? Are you for real?” It was impossible to escape the impression that Blunt was mad about something.

“Yeah. I have a blood specimen that might be related to the investigation.”

Blunt shook her head. “You can leave me out of it—”

“Guerrero. Pedro Guerrero.”

“If you want to get Tilson to order me to run more tests, be my guest. But I’m in no mood to do the Sac PD any more favors.” Blunt began shaking her head.

“Did I say something to offend you?”

“Don’t take this wrong way. I know you’re trying to get the bad guys. But I’m a scientist. And the way you all used my report—it doesn’t sit right with me.”

“Ma’am?”

“Do you even know what a PGM marker is? Are you aware that there are three such biochemical markers derived from the protein enzymes found on the red cell membrane? That while these markers can aid in the identification of forensic blood samples, their efficacy is limited, both by the condition of the samples in question and the inherent degradation of phosphoglucomutase when exposed to air and sun and sodium hypochlorite, which is the chemical agent in most cleaning products. Do you even have any idea of what I’m talking about, Officer Guerrero?”

“I think—I think you’re telling me the results in this case weren’t definitive.”

Blunt set down her cigarette and did a slow clap. “Very good, detective. PGMs are a new tool. In conjunction with ABO typing, they enhance our ability to interpret the blood evidence. But PGMs are not like fingerprints. There’s statistical overlap from one sample to another. You can get to 70 percent accuracy, maybe, but you can’t get 99 percent. To do that, we’d have to get inside the DNA, and we can’t do that yet. PGMs aren’t a microscope. They’re spectacles. If you read my draft report, you’d know all this. But you couldn’t do that. Because the boys in the Bureau did a little touch-up.”

Guerrero closed his eyes. His head was spinning a little. “The report I read—it has your name at the bottom. Are you saying it’s bogus?”

Blunt took a last drag of her cigarette and stomped on it. “Subject to misrepresentation. That would be more accurate. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. If the suspect says he did it, he did it. You guys lucked out.”

“Wait a second,” Guerrero said.

“I did my part for the team. I’m through with that case.” Blunt shook another cigarette from the pack. Her cheeks had flushed. Guerrero could see that she wasn’t just angry; she was ashamed.

“Why’d you sign off on it?”

“Oh, please. Like you’ve never done something because the boss leaned on you. Spare me the saint routine. And what happens if I raise a stink? Do you think Tilson is going to come down here and say, ‘Oh, Kathleen, thank you for your nuanced work! Thank you for showing such scientific integrity!’ No, he’s gonna find someone else to do what he needs done. That’s how it works with you cops.”

“But you’re a cop, too, aren’t you? A special agent?”

“I’m a serologist, Guerrero. The FBI rents my expertise. Senior tech. That’s my official title. I’ve been running samples longer than most of the boys in there have been shaving their upper lips. That’s why I’m the one who gets to teach them how to operate a centrifuge and clean up their work stations. It’s loads of fun. The senior part was my little anniversary present three years ago, along with a 2 percent raise. You may have noticed that the Bureau doesn’t have too many agents that look like me.”

“What if I told you that the alleged victim in the Saenz case might still be alive?”

Blunt cocked her head. “I’d want to know your basis for such a claim.”

Guerrero set down the paper bag he had with him and drew out the plastic sheath with its neatly folded contents. “I believe these may be the clothes in which Marcus Stallworth disappeared.” He pointed to a dark spot on the cuff of the blue oxford. “That’s his blood.”

“Are you for real?”

“I don’t know for sure. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’d say you should tell your boss before you do anything else, Officer.”

“What if I told you that I’m not sure I can trust my boss on this case?” Guerrero looked at Blunt. “Would that make a difference?”

GUERRERO DIDN’T WANT to contact Rosemary Stallworth until he learned more. It would be unfair to lead her on in any way. But he did call on Joseph Tennyson, the professor who had been Stallworth’s supervisor and friend. The old man looked at photos of the clothes retrieved from the desert and nodded his head. “I suppose this means you’ve found a body,” Tennyson said.

“I can’t say, actually.”

“I shouldn’t have been surprised when I saw the stories in the paper. But I must confess I was. Years ago, I served in the merchant marines. We wound up in the Battle of Wake Island. This was early in the war. I was a mechanic, thank God, so I got to stay aboard the ship. But I saw what happened to those who went ashore. I’m under no illusions as to what men are capable of doing to one another. I suppose I’d forgotten.” Tennyson’s head had begun to droop. He looked as if he had aged a decade since the last time they had spoken.

“Do you know if Professor Stallworth ever camped near the Salton Sea?”

Tennyson lifted his chin and his glaucous eyes widened. “Odd that you should ask. You see, I took a peek at the paper Marcus was drafting at the time of his … It wasn’t entirely ethical, but I didn’t want his contributions forgotten. He had become preoccupied of late by mechanisms of autofluorescence, as I mentioned. But for years, his central area of study was parasitic mating, which he believed to be most prevalent in habitats with high saline content.”

Guerrero stared at the old man, a bit helplessly.

“The Salton Basin was one such locale,” Tennyson clarified. “I should imagine he traveled there often.”

GUERRERO PICKED UP Nando in Fresno the next morning. They drove down through Palm Desert on 111, along the flanks of the Salton. Guerrero spent four hours searching, fruitlessly, for the site where Marcus Stallworth might have stashed his supplies.

Nando checked in at the police substation on the east side of the sea, an unmarked shack that sat between the Lost Horizon Mobile Park and the Buckshot Deli. A hand-drawn sign on the door read IMPERIAL COUNTY SHERIFF and below that OUT TO LUNCH.

Nando stopped in at the Buckshot and asked the waitress where he might find the sheriff. She nodded to the last of the establishment’s three booths, where a man, enormously fat and pink and bald, sat studying the photos in a firearms catalogue. He gestured to Nando without looking up. “Take a load off. You like corned beef hash? They do it good here.”

Nando wedged himself into the booth. “I’m good for now.”

“You change your mind, let me know.” The man held out a hulking hand, the fingers stiff and gnarled, like petrified wood. “Jimbo Lugar.”

“Fernando Reyes.”

“Look at you, Ray. I thought I was a blimp. Shit.”

He read Lugar instantly; his life had peaked as a high school football star—a lineman, to judge by his fingers—who had never adjusted himself to a world beyond the gridiron, and found in law enforcement a venue for easeful dominance. Most rural deputies had lived some version of this drama. They were blunt tyrants, pain machines. The world just kept handing them guns.

“That was a joke, hombre.” Lugar grinned wide. “Us big boys gotta stick together. What can I do you for?”

“Got a missing person might have camped around here a couple of weeks back. End of October, maybe.”

“A runaway?”

“Sort of.”

“How old was she?”

“He, actually. Caucasian. Early forties.” Nando slid a photo of Marcus Stallworth across the table.

“Handsome devil.” Lugar squinted his eyes into fleshy slits. “Wait. I seen this guy before.”

“Might have been on TV,” Nando said.

“That’s it. Something about that Death Valley case. But the killer turned out to be a little Mexican fella, am I right? One of those gangbangers. FBI got him.”

“Right. This is Marcus Stallworth. He was the alleged victim.”

“Holy shit. You think the Death Valley Killer’s been skulking around here?”

“Doubt it. Just crossing names off my list. You had any reports of transients, guys who might have been camping on the edge of town?”

“It’s all edge around here, hombre.”

“Maybe I could take a look at your blotter.”

“You’re looking at the blotter. All we get is domestics. Petty theft. Burnouts doing burnout crime.”

“No drifters?”

“Not unless you want to count the Ghost Ranger.”

“The what?”

Lugar snickered. “There was a rumor going around about some boogey man who attacked a girl on Halloween, down at the boat ramp. Wore a ranger’s outfit, supposedly.”

“You interviewed the victim?”

“Angel Weems is not the sort to seek out officers of the law, if you catch my drift. Huffs paint. That’s the budget dope in these parts. Couple of arrests for solicitation, too, up in Palm Desert. State shipped her down here a year ago to stay with her auntie, I guess it is.”

“You didn’t interview her, then?”

Lugar set his catalogue down and stared at Nando. “I did speak to Ms. Weems. She’d been wrung around the collar, alright. I’d lay odds her boyfriend did it. But he’s already got a couple of priors. So they cooked up a story. The Ghost Ranger did it! Got the whole trailer park talking about it, like the monster in a fairy tale.” Lugar yawned extravagantly. “You know how these young junkies are. Always setting fire to their dreams and having to blow them out.”

“Okay,” Nando said. “I got it now. And Weems lives in the trailer park over here, the Lost Horizon?”

“Naw, she’s in the Oasis,” Lugar said. “Couple miles north. The Oasis and the Lost Horizon. Jesus H. Christ. Welcome to the first seating of the apocalypse.”

“Least you got plenty of guns for the End Times.”

Lugar showed Nando his incisors. “Sorry not to be more helpful. We don’t get drifters down here, Rays. The stink keeps ’em clear. Every now and again, some dumb wetback winds up staggering into town half dead. The coyotes get ’em up to Calexico and dump ’em in the desert and they head north. It’s in the blood if you’re a Mexican, I guess. No offense, obviously.”

Nando laughed, a big hearty one. “None taken. Heck, I made it all the way to Fresno, right?” He picked up the photo of Marcus Stallworth and eased himself out of the booth. He took a few steps, then stopped and turned to look at Lugar, an island of mean in a kingdom of sand. “Thanks for the tip on the corned beef hash,” he said, friendly as can be. “I was worried you’d be a stupid bigot, like everyone told me. But you’re a real pro. This community is lucky to have you.”

ANGEL WEEMS SAT in the dim light of her aunt’s trailer, quietly relating her encounter with the Ghost Ranger. She wasn’t exactly happy to have a uniformed officer on her property. But she looked appreciative that someone in an official capacity was listening to her, recording her words in a notebook.

She and some friends were having a Halloween party near the boat ramp. She left the group to go pee when she heard someone in the darkness. She thought it was her boyfriend Royal trying to scare her. “Then this dude step from the shadows, all messed up. I told him he shouldn’t be creeping on girls, and he just starts choking me out.” The girl’s voice was soft and scratchy; slender bruises ringed her throat.

“What does ‘all messed up’ mean?”

“Tangled. Mangy beard. He had that desert burn white people get, where all the wrinkles look lit up because the rest of them is, like, red.”

“Can you remember how tall he was?”

“Taller than Royal. Maybe six feet. Six-two. He was strong as shit, I know that.”

“What about his hair and eyes?”

“Dark hair. Like practically black. His eyes looked, I don’t know, spooky. And he had this giant backpack that was like a hundred pounds.”

“He was wearing a backpack?”

“It was on the ground beside him.” Angel glanced down at the peeling vinyl panels of the trailer floor. “I kept thinking this crazy thing. As he was choking me, I mean. You gonna think I’m crazy, Mr. Nando.”

“What were you thinking?”

Angel cradled her belly with a dainty palm. “He’s got a girl in there. A girl’s body. I was trying to get his hands off me, you know? Trying to breathe. That was all I could think: ‘I’m gonna end up in that fucking backpack.’” The girl’s lips started quivering. “Everyone round here thinks I’m crazy. But I ain’t crazy.”

“I believe you,” Nando said. “You’re doing good.”

Before he could say anything else, a scrawny boy burst through the door. The girl’s younger brother, Nando figured.

“You been telling him?”

Angel nodded. “This Royal. My boyfriend. He was there, too.”

“He just about kilt her! She couldn’t barely breathe by the time I got to her.”

“I told him.”

“I was fixing to chase him, too. But he was out of there. Scurried away like one of those damn Scorpios.”

“Scorpions.”

Royal shook his head. “Did you tell him about the bill?”

“I was getting to that.” Angel turned to Nando. “After he let me go, you know, he dropped me on the ground and he gave me a hundred, pulled it from his pocket like it was nothing. One of them real crisp ones, too, like, fresh from the bank.”

“A $100 bill?”

“Mr. Ben Franklin,” Royal said.

“Said we had a misunderstanding. What he called it. He was paying me off. Like, I choked you out, but here’s some cash so we square now.”

“Do you still have it?” Nando said.

“That was two weeks ago,” Royal said.

“Hush up,” Angel snapped. “You ain’t done shit since you got here but run your yap.” She turned back to Nando. “You can ask Mr. Wade at the Mini-Mart. He checked it for counterfeit. You believe that shit? I just got choked half to death and he thinks I’m fixing to pass a bill. People got no trust around here.”

“Could you take me to the place where this happened?” Nando said.

“Why you so interested, anyway?” Royal said. “This motherfucker attack someone else?”

Nando looked at the boy. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His clothes were bright and flimsy and three sizes too large. In a properly governed country he would have been in school at this hour, studying the periodic chart, learning how to solve for X. In a few months, he was going to be a father. “Lugar told me you’ve had some trouble with the law.”

“Lugar. Shee-it.”

“Why don’t you wait outside for a minute, son. You can show me the way.”

For a moment, Royal looked ready to object. Then he went out.

“Just one more question, Ms. Weems. Could you take a look at this picture?”

He handed her the photo of Marcus Stallworth.

She set it atop her belly and held it by the edges, like it was something of great value: a smiling white man in a polo shirt.

“Naw. This guy too clean-cut.”

“Okay,” Nando said. He took the picture back and turned to the folder he had set down on the counter behind him and drew out a second photo. In this one, snapped during a camping trip, Stallworth wore a sweat-stained safari shirt and a scruffy beard, and his hair was matted. He handed the picture to Angel.

The color drained from her cheeks. Her hand rose up slowly and paused before the bruised stem of her throat.

“It’s okay,” Nando said. “He’s never coming back here. I promise.” He gently withdrew the photo from her fingers. “You did good, Angel. I’m sorry the police didn’t listen to you the first time around.” He wanted to offer her something more before he took off, the assurance that she would be safe, that it was all going to be okay. But the world had taught Angel Weems too much already. She wouldn’t wind up in a backpack. She would spend her life in rooms like this one, with particle board walls and cupboards sticky with flies.

THREE THOUSAND MILES from that trailer on the Salton Sea, in the salon of the East Wing of the White House, the First Lady of the United States was being fitted for the state dinner she had organized for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines. Oscar de la Renta and Bill Blass had flown in for the occasion. The designers—who carefully kept clear of each other—presented Mrs. Reagan with four different gowns, each featuring discreet variations on the butterfly sleeves Mrs. Marcos had made famous. Discreet was the key word. She had no intention of copying Imelda, whose shoulder joins were as big as dinner plates.

They were on the final option now, and she was on the point of collapsing. She had consumed 210 calories at breakfast, and even though she hadn’t eaten in the hours since, choosing instead to devour stick after stick of sugarless gum, she felt bloated. Oscar’s tailor, a young Spaniard named Garland, or Garçon, or something, had just cinched the gown at the waist and was now marveling at her figure. (“You’re like a lovely little wasp, aren’t you?”) His cologne dizzied her; every time she shifted her weight, she could feel the prick of the needles beneath her ribs.

They were still sore—her ribs. She had broken three of them the night after the assassination, having scaled the Bellini lounge chair in the Red Room, then pushed onto her tippy toes to reach a wedding photo she hoped to bring Ronnie in the hospital. Instead, she toppled over and landed on the carpet with a dull crack that sent arrows of agony through her torso. A stupid, clumsy accident.

Six months after the shooting that had nearly killed her husband, the First Lady remained unsteady on her feet. On July 4, she had stood on a dais, as fireworks bloomed over the mall. With each explosion came an image of Ronnie doubled over, blood at the corner of his mouth as he issued his immortal quip: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” Had he ducked, the bullet would have struck his face, and now she was thinking about that.

At night, as he slept peacefully, her mind circled back to the same peculiar moment from their past. Back in 1957, young, dumb, drunk on love, they agreed to make a movie together. Hellcats of the Navy it was called, a slapdash romance featuring a daring submarine mission and an implausible love triangle. She played a dewy nurse lieutenant, while Ronnie was the skipper of the USS Starfish. They filmed down in San Diego, aboard an actual submarine.

On the first day of filming, Ronnie appeared on deck as Commander Casey Abbott. Real sailors scrambled around him, rushing to maneuver the vessel out of port while the tide was running. But someone had forgotten to untie one of the dock lines. The officer in charge noticed that the nylon rope was stretched thin as a pencil. If it snapped it would rip through anything in its path, including Commander Abbott. The officer began screaming: “All stop, goddamnit! ALL STOP!” The entire cast and crew of the film froze. Many took cover as the engines roared into reverse. The only person who remained oblivious to the commotion was Ronnie himself. He continued to run his lines—Ahead one third, starboard back full!—rocking back and forth in his gleaming gumboots, with his hands clasped behind his back.

She was haunted by this vision of her husband in his crisp uniform and artful makeup, barking out scripted commands. It was part of his charm, the fact that he refused to heed the dangers around him, the ropes ready to snap, the maniacs with guns. It fell to her to guard the glorious dream housed within his perishable body.

Her only reliable ally, amid the aides who orbited her husband like greedy moons, was her astrologer, Joan. She, too, recognized that Ronnie needed protection. This was why she had recommended the state dinners; they allowed him to perform his presidential duties from within the sanctum of the White House.

But now, as the First Lady stood in a fussy, hand-beaded evening dress, with sleeves that bulged around her shoulders like giant bells, the undertaking felt frivolous. We’re just going through the motions here, she thought.

“Madame?” The little tailor was staring at her.

Apparently, she had spoken these words aloud. They had stayed with her from the moment Rosemary Stallworth uttered them.

She could sense a growing concern amid her staffers and the others involved in the fitting. But she ignored the biddings of decorum, for a grand notion was taking shape within her, one she had been groping toward for months: Ronnie needed to launch a new initiative, aimed at reforming a criminal justice system that coddled killers and neglected their victims.

All at once, she declared the fitting over—All stop, goddammit!—and ordered everyone out of her sight. Then she instructed Denise to call her astrologer.

Joan Quigley had a phone line dedicated exclusively to the First Lady. When it rang, in her Nob Hill aerie, the servants were under orders to summon her. She listened intently as the First Lady described the idea that had come to her in the midst of her fitting. A long silence ensued.

“How strange,” Quigley said at last. She spoke in the crisp, well-bred manner of a headmistress. “I just drew a chart on this very subject. Your husband’s dominant planet, as you know, is Mars. His ascendant is in Sagittarius, and the ruler of that ascendant is Jupiter. He fights fire with fire, Nancy. It’s in his nature.”

“That’s right,” Nancy said.

“He needs to address the nation about this.”

“When?”

Quigley was precise in her declarations. “November 30 would be the ideal date. That’s a Monday.”

The First Lady glanced down at the calendar on her desk: it was November 17.

“And he should come here, to California, where the killing took place.”

IT TOOK GUERRERO two days to secure a meeting with Captain Hooks. He arrived in Homicide bearing a cardboard evidence box.

“There he is,” Jolley called out from the coffee machine, where he was yapping with two burly colleagues. “The man who shot Liberty Valance! Come say hello. You’re gonna be working with these assholes soon enough.”

Guerrero shrugged an apology. “Gotta go see the captain.”

Jolley ambled over anyway and laid a meaty hand on Guerrero’s shoulder and regarded him with an awful congratulatory kindness. “You deserve it.” He thumped the lid of the box. “What’s this, anyway? You know my birthday isn’t till February.”

“I like to think ahead,” Guerrero said.

“Good work, Chico. I mean it.”

“Thanks, Doug.”

The captain grunted when Guerrero came in. “Ten minutes,” he said. For the past two weeks, Hooks had been dealing with fallout from the Death Valley Killer.

“Can I close the door, sir?”

“Suit yourself.”

Guerrero set the box down and removed the plastic package with the filthy, blood-stained garments he’d recovered, which he set gingerly on the edge of the desk. “These are the clothes Marcus Stallworth was wearing when he disappeared.”

Hooks stared at Guerrero. “What?”

“Recovered from a campsite outside Barstow. Blood matches the samples from inside his vehicle.” He handed Hooks the serology report.

“Outstanding work.” Hooks smiled in earnest, a rare event. “We’ll get the corps out there.” He meant the Army Corps. He meant to search for the remains.

“You should have a look at a few other things first, Captain.” Guerrero handed Hooks a folder labeled Supplemental Material: the first draft of the original serology report, written by Kathleen Blunt, with an affidavit clarifying her verdict on the sample, a write-up on the blood detected in the basement bathroom of the Stallworth residence, excerpts from the interviews conducted with Lorena Saenz, and the interviews conducted over the past week, with Winnie Thoms, Lucia Sanchez, and Angel Weems.

Hooks knew Guerrero had been up to something; he’d taken a few calls and made a few. But he hadn’t anticipated anything like this. It was a record of his perseverance and his mistrust, a kind of dossier; Hooks felt the rebuke of it, the threat. He scanned the Blunt affidavit, then picked up his phone. “Tell Gary I need to push our four o’clock. No. No. Just tell him.” He hung up and looked at Guerrero.

Then he began to flip through the reports, page after page. Outside the office, the day shift guys were grabbing their coats, shaking smokes loose, bickering about where to grab beers. A knock on the window startled Guerrero: Jolley’s pasty face, his sweet idiotic salute.

Hooks kept reading. He ignored the rank aroma seeping from the garments on the edge of his desk. When he was finished, he closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose for a long time.

“I ever tell you about Jimmy Grinnell?” he said at last.

“Sir?”

“We worked down in Meadowview together, ’71 to ’74, couple of house Negroes working the Negro beat.” Hooks’s eyes were still closed, the thin purple lids pulsing. “Call comes across the scanner one day, dispute at a corner store near Scott Homes. By the time we arrive, there’s a kid on the ground holding his guts. The first officer to respond is leaning against his unit, looking green as a Christmas tree. Jimmy knows the kid, played ball with his older brother. He’s telling the kid to calm down, trying to stop the bleeding. EMS finally get there, cart him off to Mercy, but he’s lost too much blood.”

Guerrero had never heard Hooks utter more than a few words at a time. He spoke softly, deliberately, like a father who regards storytelling as a grim duty.

“So now it’s an officer-involved fatality. The officer in question happens to be a rising star. Handsome white boy, real connected downtown. He interrupted an armed robbery in progress, suspect flashed a weapon, he shot first. Boom: self- defense. That’s the official story. Internal affairs backs him up. The kid has a couple of priors, too. Problem is there’s no weapon at the scene, okay? Kid didn’t have a piece. Jimmy starts asking around on his own. Turns out the armed robbery was a shoplifting dispute. The kid stole a U-NO candy bar. You ever seen a U-NO wrapper, Guerrero? Silver foil. Real shiny. Kid got popped for flashing a loaded chocolate bar.”

Guerrero waited for Hooks to finish the story.

“What happened?” he said at last.

“You know what happened, Guerrero.”

“I don’t.”

“Jimmy wrote up his interviews. Drove downtown. Maybe it went upstairs. Maybe it didn’t. A year later, he was off the force.”

“Fired?”

“Quit. Drove down to LA, got into private security. The kid was still dead. The officer who shot him, Bobby Ellis, got kicked up to lieutenant.”

“Chief Ellis?”

Hooks sighed, his wrinkled throat swelling.

“What did you do?”

Hooks opened his eyes and surveyed the office it had taken him three decades to earn. “You’re a good cop, Guerrero. The force is better off with you on it.”

“You’re going to bury this, aren’t you?” Guerrero said, almost in wonder. Like all cynics, he was an idealist at heart.

“The defendant confessed,” Hooks replied calmly. “Charged and pled. You cuffed him yourself.”

“But Marcus Stallworth is alive.” He jabbed his finger into the package he’d retrieved from the desert; must swirled between them, like the miasma from which some malignant genie might appear. “There’s a good chance, a decent chance, which means—he has a wife, children.”

“Man disappears down a trail of his own blood. You want to be around for that family reunion?”

“You’re trying to confuse me,” Guerrero said.

“No, I’m trying to get you straight.”

“This is about evidence, Captain, exculpatory evidence. With all due respect—”

“Under whose jurisdiction are you operating?”

“Jurisdiction?”

“You entered the home of a homicide victim and his survivors. Did you have a warrant to do so, Guerrero? Did you have permission to visit an FBI lab? To secure an affidavit from a senior scientist at that lab? Under whose aegis did you travel to Fresno and Imperial to conduct interviews? Pursuant to what open investigation?”

“You’re trying to put me on trial. This is about Saenz. He could be innocent.”

“That’s not what he says. It’s not what a jury would say. He’s a felon. Parties with crackheads. Drives stolen cars. Runs guns out of basements. Where you think his life is headed, Guerrero? You think he’s going to straighten himself out, like you did? He’s lucky he’s not on death row.”

“Lucky?”

Hooks looked down at his lap and began emitting raspy little barks of laughter. “Ninety percent of life is luck. Justice is a luxury item.”

Hooks was working him. Guerrero knew that. But his chest had been gripped by a flailing sensation, one he associated with childhood, the years when he had come running to his mother, betrayed by some offense, eager to display for her some wound he might trade for love. His mother would usually offer him a hug. But if he went on too long, she would shake him loose and mutter, Soñar no lo hace así.

Dreaming doesn’t make it so.

“What’d you think was going to happen here?” Hooks asked. “The FBI was going to take one look at all this and send a search party down to Mexico? Does that accord with your understanding of how justice operates?”

“You’re making excuses,” Guerrero stammered.

“And you’re making it personal. Don’t. Show some humility. It’s bigger than you, son. Before you were a cop, you were just an invisible number. But you made something of yourself. You chose to protect and serve.” Hooks had closed his eyes again. He was speaking slowly now, almost tenderly. “I see you, Guerrero. The world’s a better place with you doing this work.”

Guerrero glanced at the clothes Marcus Stallworth had stripped off his body and, inexplicably, folded. “What are you going to do with this evidence, Captain?”

Hooks smiled, though his sorrow was evident. “You want to believe we’re on opposite sides of this thing. But there’s only the one side.”

GUERRERO STORMED OUT of the office and found his way to a pay phone. Nando’s voice was in his ear, murmuring, “Tranquilo. Respira hondo.”

“I am calm,” Guerrero seethed. “I am breathing.”

“I warned you about Hooks. He’s part of the machine. That’s how he learned the gears.”

“Didn’t matter what I showed him, he was going to find a way to ignore it.”

“Now you’re sounding like our little friend, Lorena.”

“Do me a favor,” Guerrero barked. “Shut the fuck up for once.”

“Okay. Just don’t do anything stupid, primo.”

“This isn’t over.”

“El diablo nos tienta a pecar,” Nando murmured. The devil tempts us to sin.

“I’m not gonna do anything stupid.”

Why was everyone talking to him like he was a child?

HOOKS TOOK NO pleasure in admonishing Guerrero; his police work had been exemplary. But Hooks knew how the department worked, and he knew how far beyond the department this case had gone. He knew the president of the United States would be traveling to Sacramento in twelve days to deliver a speech to law enforcement officials in which he would outline a sweeping anticrime initiative.

This speech would, in turn, help define the Reagan Revolution, an era dedicated to the promotion of private enterprise and the defamation of the needy. Reagan’s optimism was genuine—who but an optimist would crack wise with a bullet lodged an inch from his heart? But behind his bright smile lay the conviction that the poor were destined to enact the violence housed within their souls. The state’s essential task was to protect the law-abiding, their boulevards and bright mansions. Even if the Stallworths no longer lived there, the eternal dream of America did.

Captain Hooks could not have known about the First Lady’s role in conceiving this plan. But he had good reason to believe that the president would cite the Stallworth murder, as an example of the moral chaos unleashed by career criminals and crack cocaine, as well as the outrageous lenience of the criminal justice system. He was basing this hunch on one indisputable fact: the First Lady—who was taking the unusual step of attending this speech—had demanded that she be seated beside the brave officer who had arrested the Death Valley Killer.

THE TEARFUL RELIEF Graciela Saenz had expressed at the return of her daughter was real enough. But her behavior in the presence of Nando Reyes, the ways in which she had made herself small and abject, were part of the larger performance she staged each day, as an undocumented person. She peered through the shades as Nando drove away, then turned and addressed her daughter. “I assume he took the maps under your bed.”

Lorena looked up from her plate of eggs.

“Don’t treat me like a simpleton, Lorena. Just because I pray doesn’t mean I can’t think.”

Lorena had underestimated her mother’s guile. It was what teenagers did, what allowed them to perpetrate betrayals and to react with indignation when they got caught.

“I got on the wrong—”

“Cállate,” Graciela said. “Don’t tell me about some bus you missed. You went down there looking for something to help your brother. You wanted to play the hero. And what’s the result? My daughter in police custody. What do you think happens to this family if he files a report? Think, Lorena.”

Graciela came and stood behind Lorena’s chair. It was something she did when she didn’t want her daughter to see her face. She took hold of Lorena’s shoulders. As she spoke, her grip tightened steadily until Lorena let out a whimper; Graciela paid her no mind. She was a tired woman with powerful hands. Her life was a small box of disappointments lit by the blood of Jesus. When she allowed herself to daydream, it was of her daughter graduating from college and becoming a nurse.

“No more lies. Your father gave me enough for one lifetime. Then came your brother. Enough. If something had happened to you—” Her voice broke off. “I want you to listen now. Tony was weak. He gave in to temptation, to vice. You can’t save him. You’re fourteen, Lorena. You have a mind for studies. It’s a gift God gave you. You’re a citizen of the United States. That’s the gift we gave you, your father and me. You are not to throw away these gifts. Do you understand? I won’t let it happen.”

They spent the next few days in an uneasy silence. Graciela had arranged time off from work. Each morning, they took a bus to the federal lockup, where they joined a line of glum relatives that stretched around the building. They wore baseball caps and kept their heads down to avoid being identified as kin of the Death Valley Killer. Inside the dingy, smoke-filled lobby, a guard behind bulletproof glass scanned his clipboard and denied their request. Lorena asked him what this meant. He shrugged. “I’m just a guy with a list, sweetie.”

They arrived earlier each day, but the response was the same. Antonio Saenz was not taking visitors. Lorena spoke to a secretary in the public defender’s office who said that prisoners often behaved this way during the initial phase of their incarceration. They were ashamed. Visits were one thing they could control. He would soften up as his sentencing hearing drew closer.

“Could I meet with his lawyer?”

“I’ll pass along the message,” she said.

Lorena was no longer allowed to make calls at home. Graciela took the phone with her into the bathroom and snatched up any incoming calls. Most of the time, it was a friend from church, to whom she whispered for hours, while Lorena sat at the kitchen table, staring at the take-home packets sent by her teachers, affixed with desperately cheerful little notes—Do your best! I’m here if you have any Qs!—that somehow made everything worse. There were other calls, too, which her mother took in the halting, petrified English she used with officials. Officer Reyes, perhaps, or even Guerrero.

Lorena was forbidden to leave the house unaccompanied. Graciela took her to Bible Study in the evenings, where Pastor Jorge exhorted the group to direct the power of their prayers to uplift the Saenz family.

Lorena had watched this process play out with Tony before he enlisted: the improvised house arrest, the trips to church; the glowering meant to disguise Graciela’s distress. She wanted Tony to understand how fragile his destiny was; the INS didn’t care how long he’d lived in the United States, how gringo he believed himself to be. They had a list and he was on it. They both were.

It never ended well. After a few days, Graciela would return to work and her son would slip outside to the cracked avenues, ready to take foolish risks for the older boys he mistook for friends. Lorena would hear them out there, gathered under the addled streetlights, spitting, cracking knuckles, calling Tony maricón, pendejo, mockery that filled him with the pride of being seen.

Lorena was thinking about all this on the night her mother crept into her room, dressed in her work uniform. “You don’t have to pretend to be asleep,” Graciela said. Lorena understood the situation at once: her mother had taken the midnight shift. She came and sat on the edge of the bed and told Lorena that she would be back in the morning. In the meantime, she had arranged for neighbors to check in, to make sure she didn’t run away again.

“I didn’t run away,” Lorena murmured.

Graciela stared down at the daughter who had somehow, in her absence—while she was at work or worrying about Tony or praying for deliverance—become a young woman. She wanted to touch Lorena’s cheek, to anoint her with forgiveness. She thought of what awaited her in the hospital rooms she was paid to clean, the new mothers, rosy with exhaustion, clinging to their precious cargo. “Don’t do anything foolish, my daughter. We need to stick together now.” She wanted to sound commanding, but she couldn’t squeeze the fear out of her voice.

Lorena lay still below her, inhaling the scent she had come to know as her mother’s, industrial detergent, cooking oil, hair spray, the sweet loam of her skin. Later, she would think back on this moment: I should have hugged her.

It was still dark when the knock came. Lorena shook herself awake. She sat up in the dark and cursed her mother and whomever she had enlisted for this humiliating bed-check, probably the widow Gomez, who reveled in such tasks. But the figure in the doorway was a man. It took her a second to recognize him. He was dressed in sweatpants and new hiking boots and looked genuinely astonished to see her. Lorena knew at once why he had come. She could feel the sting of her betrayal.

“Where are we going?”

Guerrero dipped his chin. “To find him.”

LORENA AND HER mother had been left with the impression that Tony had turned them away. This was not the case. Within hours of their first and only visit—an encounter videotaped and reviewed by federal investigators—the inmate was transferred to a Special Management Unit, which was the formal name for solitary. According to Corrections officials, his gang affiliation, along with his notoriety, placed him at risk in the general prison population. The transfer had in fact come at the request of the FBI, acting on the recommendation of Special Agent Joel Salcido. Solitary softened the mind and weakened the will. Prisoners became more likely to provide additional information about, for instance, the location of a victim’s body.

The solitary unit consisted of six cells, each measuring seven by twelve feet. They had been staggered so that it was impossible to see the other inmates. Tony could hear them but had trouble making out their words. The concrete reverberated with muddy shrieks. Once a day, a guard ordered him to slip his hands through the food slot and cuffed him and he was led to an “exercise room” that was the size of three cells set end to end. Inside was an old tennis ball. After an hour, he was cuffed and returned to his cell. Both guards walked behind him. He couldn’t see their faces. That’s what solitary was: a place without faces.

He was allowed a pencil and a yellow legal pad. His lawyer directed him to write what she called a “biographical sketch” that could be used for the Pre-Sentencing Report. It was essential that the judge come to see him as a person. Tony picked up the pencil and stared at the yellow paper. He saw some old man in a white wig and black gown peering down at his story through bifocals. He was being ordered to perform his misery, to beg for mercy.

At night, he lay on his bunk, stabbed by memory, as if in retaliation for his silence. He remembered the night of the beating, the stony weight of his father’s head resting on his lap in a darkened desert. He remembered staggering through a cold dawn toward a mythical place called Needles and then being there, in Needles, and his father cursing him for shitting his pants. He remembered begging his mother for a treat from the vending machines in some industrial basement, and not telling her what he wanted most, which was for her to come home. He remembered the whore who called herself Trina, the scorpion tattoo that rode the loose skin of her belly, the gleeful panic of his blood, which he had confused with love.

He obsessed over all the people who had played him for a fool, the guys who had put him up to shit in Fruitridge. The recruiter who promised him that the navy was his best bet for a green card. (“We might have to finesse a few things on your contract, Antonio, but Uncle Sam always takes care of his own.”) He was supposed to learn sea-to-air missile systems. But he’d wound up marooned at China Lake, poking at a computer keyboard in a basement with an A/C unit that coughed cold air on him all day.

He thought about Lorena, with her straight As and her white- girl dreams. He’d tried to protect her but she’d ratted him out. His own blood had done that. He punched the walls until his knuckles swelled. He joined the howling chorus of men trapped in a loop of grievance.

But at night, precisely an hour after lights out, the hollering stopped and mysterious whooshing sounds prevailed. Tony thought he might be imagining it. He peeked under the crack of his door just in time to spot a magazine sliding across the unit. It vanished, miraculously, under the threshold of the cell beside him. The recipient tapped three times on his meal slot and a small rectangle came rifling back across the floor—a pack of playing cards. This was how the unit conducted trade.

The next night, a small white triangle flashed beneath his door, a tightly wrapped sheet of paper with a hole in one corner that had been strung with dental floss. He untied the floss and held it between his thumb and forefinger and his heart fluttered as he felt the tug of the human being at the other end. Then the floss was gone, plucked back by its rightful owner. Tony unfolded the paper, which contained several yards of dental floss, then crouched in the corner where a little pool of light from the common area seeped in. The note was composed in a tight, controlled script, in pencil, with multiple erasures and corrections, as if in accordance with a penmanship workbook.

I hear we got royalty among us. Soak the ground and rejoice, brother. The TRUE REVOLUTION of the LKN is at hand.

This called fishing.

2 knocks = sending. 3 knocks = returning. Practice. DO NOT attempt till you learned for real. CO will confiscate everybody shit if U get caught. Fishing hours: 7:45-8 AM & 10-10:30 (shift switches)

Get a ROUTINE. Don’t watch the clock. Your head will play tricks on you. Don’t listen to that shit.

Is it true you popped some rich motherfucker?

Darius X., LKN (Stockton, CA)

Darius X included a diagram of the unit, showing the location of his cell, catty-corner from Tony. The diagram included a dotted line showing the path the note had traveled. At the bottom of the note, Darius had drawn an intricate portrait of the Sacred Crown, the Latin Kings’ logo. The three tips of the crown were emblazoned with the letters M, Y, and D; a miniature lion curled in the middle. Tony read the note a dozen times.

He spent the following day composing his response, working through a dozen drafts in search of the words and phrases that would make him sound assured. He edited himself down to a paragraph, offering thanks and respect to the Almighty LKN, describing how he’d been framed up, how he wanted to change his plea but couldn’t reach his lawyer. He signed the note: Antonio S. (Sac, CA)

He folded the note razor sharp and affixed the dental floss and perfected the flick along its hypotenuse, a technique he recalled from the games of paper football he’d played in detention. That night, at 10:00, he tapped twice on his meal slot. Two sharp raps sounded across the unit, and a magazine came rifling out from somewhere. There was a protocol to this, an order. It made sense. He was new to the unit. It was 10:25 before his turn came. Tony flicked his note out, heard it skitter along the floor, the faint thud as it hit something on the other side. He tugged the note back, tried again. The floss kept tangling. His fingers went slick with sweat. Then time was up and the others started hissing at him. He needed to respond to Darius, but he couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t manage it, and he was taken with a terrible humiliation. As he lay on the floor of his cell, silently convulsing, something pricked at his cheek—a note, approximately the size of a cockroach.

You’ll get it, brother. Try again tmw. D

It took him six tries the next night before he felt a tug from the other side, which connected him to Darius. It was almost like touch, as close as he could get, and so he held on for a few seconds, letting the floss cut into the pad of his thumb, until he heard three knocks and released his grip and by then joy had wet his cheeks.

Thus began a brief and volatile correspondence, one that would eventually be sealed from public view, within an FBI file. The two men exchanged a dozen notes over the next week, 2,813 words in all.

Darius wrote about his life as a banger, dealing weed, flashing his piece, playing the big man on a little corner. He described this period as his “primitive stage.” He had been unwittingly enlisted into an army of poor boys who turned their rage on one another. It was all part of the larger scheme: to keep brown people imprisoned in poverty. Joining the Kings had taught him that. He’d absorbed a few beatings, which he now appreciated. The LKN had rules, consequences. He retired from the streets. Then a friend from those days turned on him and he caught an old charge, aggravated assault on a cop. He wound up in solitary for defending himself from a pair of skinheads who jumped him. He missed his queen and his son. But he knew he was an instrument of the True Revolution; this phase of his life was a necessary step. MYD. Make Your Destiny.

His notes were full of such abbreviations, aphorisms, icons, all of which fit into a larger system of thought, a kind of fervent mysticism that Tony associated with the storefront preachers his mother revered. With Darius, though, the gospel wasn’t about some skinny blond God bleeding out for your sins. It was about facing the truth of your circumstance, where you came from, what you were up against. Make the mind strong and the body will follow.

Darius understood Tony’s life. He, too, had been raised by a single mom, part of the larger system he called the Immigration Slave Trade. It was like on the plantations: tearing families apart was how you turned proud men into angry drunks and queens into servants. It was how white people programmed brown people to pick fruit and dig ditches and clean toilets. The undocumented had no voice. Sometimes, they even got tricked into becoming soldiers, dying on behalf of regimes that treated them as subhuman. That recruiter chumped you, Darius wrote. He was just making his quota. They pulled the same shit on my little bro.

Tony had never thought about his life in such sweeping terms. He felt honored to be the recipient of such wisdom, and he studied each letter closely. He began to hear the words in his ears, a gruff and knowing whisper, like Peña, but without the bluster. It was Darius he was hearing. His friend Darius.

For the first time since his arrest, Antonio Saenz began to feel that there might be a life on the other side of this ordeal. Because Darius wasn’t just offering friendship. He offered a kind of enlightenment, a path from the ruin of his past. To get there, Tony would have to endure the present, to absorb injustice without losing hope. He needed a belief system to do that, and someone to believe in him. He had that now.

It was precisely at this point that the tone of the notes from Darius began to shift, from benevolence to gentle confrontation. I was just like you when I first got here, Darius wrote. Everything was someone else fault. But there’s a reason you’re here. You got to own what you done.

Tony acknowledged his sins: the drugs and fights and lies. He knew he needed to atone and he could see now that prison afforded him the chance to do so. He sent this letter off but received no response.

He began to fear that Darius had fallen ill, or been moved off the unit. He lay with his cheek pressed to the floor and stared out at the common area. On his march to the exercise room, he called to Darius. Kissing noises and shouts of faggot rang out around him. Tony sent a second note, then a third. You still there? We cool? Tony never made the conscious connection, but the terror that coursed through him was the same as in the months before his father left for good, the urge to say just the right thing, to keep an idol from slipping away.

AFTER THREE DAYS, Darius replied:

Live by the Manifesto. Come clean or you stay dirty. You got a body on your record now. A man buried somewhere. A True King carries that. A True King takes care of his people on the outside. You know what I’m saying, T. MYD.

Tony stared at the note for a long time. He knew what it meant, what he was being told to do. For a few hours, he found refuge in the cleansing rage of the boy who’d been played again. Then came the tender ache of bewilderment. He couldn’t understand why Darius didn’t believe him. He felt he must have done something wrong, something that made him unworthy of faith, and justified his abandonment. Long ago, his father had disappeared and his mother had stopped believing in him. He did not understand these events as losses that might be mourned. They had become a part of who he was, a merciless doubt that attached itself to everything he touched. Tony could not forgive. The want of it took him under.

He sat on the floor of his cell and the silence pummeled him. After a time, he heard a dull bellowing for silence; with a start, he realized that he had been producing a low keening noise.

Corrections officers gathered his untouched meals and led him to the exercise box. In the logbook filled out for the next shift, they described Tony as withdrawn, sluggish, disoriented. These words elicited no great sense of alarm. They were common on the solitary unit, where inmates, dulled by sensory deprivation, often retreated into private torment.

It was at this point—a week into his solitary confinement, five weeks from his sentencing hearing, three days from his twentieth birthday—that Antonio Saenz began to experience auditory hallucinations. The voice came at night mostly, when the drone of complaint dimmed and the unit settled into fitful slumber.

What, you thought I was just going to ghost on you? Come on, T. You ain’t shaking me that easy. We kings for life. We gotta get each other straight.

Tony knew he was going sort of crazy. He had heard other inmates, in the throes of something like madness, pleading for their meds. It never occurred to him to alert the guards. He worried what Darius would think.

YOU STILL UP, T?

No.

We gotta talk through this shit.

What shit?

The feds gonna put something on your mom. They done it a thousand times before.

You don’t know that.

She got no papers. Look at it.

You’re not real.

I know. I’m just saying shit you already know. Don’t hate the prophet for telling the truth. Darius laughed. He sounded a little drunk. She carried you. Brought you into this world. Down there in some dusty-ass village. Think on that. Your dad never did shit but drink and fuck his whores and beat on her every now and then. You gonna hurt her, too?

Tony rolled off his bunk and did push-ups till his shoulders burned and lay there panting while a rough hand took hold of his piddling biceps and squeezed until the muscles yelped. He let his head thump on the floor.

Andale, Pollito. This was what his dad called him, Little Chicken. He could smell the yeasty fumes of beer, rising from a tongue browned by cheap Mexican cigarettes. Faros, they were called. Lighthouse. At night, as they sought passage through the desert, Little Chicken staggered after the glowing orange tip.

How do you know about my dad?

I know about everything, T. I know you fucked two girls your whole-ass life. I know you’re no King. That raggedy-ass homemade tattoo—that don’t make you LK. I know what you did to that fucking chester who messed with your little sister.

You don’t know shit.

I know what’s gonna happen if you don’t tell them where you hid that body. That’s the whole problem here.

I don’t have a problem.

Darius laughed his tremolo laugh.

There is no body.

But that wasn’t true. Tony could feel the cutting wind of the desert, could hear his father’s moans, the meaty thud of boots kicking the life out of him. He got them to relent and took his father’s head onto his lap and promised to keep him alive. His father grinned and blood dripped down his mustache and chin so that his face looked like a tribal mask. “Me vas a proteger, pollito?” You going to protect me, Little Chicken?

Then he went limp and Tony was sure he had died. He wanted to go find someone who could help him, an adult, but his father had pinned him to the earth and he could only stare at the stars smeared across the distant night, while scorpions tiptoed around them. He couldn’t remember what happened next. It occurred to him, obscurely, that perhaps nothing had happened, that the rest of his life, as he knew it, was simply the long nightmare of a boy trapped beneath his father.

You thinking about him again, huh? That fucking borracho. Remember what he used to say about your mom?

Sangre campesina.

That’s it. Fucking peasant blood. Like he was some kind of royalty. With that stupid mustache of his. She made the same journey he did, T, with a baby inside her. You chose the wrong God to worship.

I don’t worship him.

You wanna be a True King, save your queen. Show them where the body is.

There is no fucking body. I told you.

Then give them another one.

The night pressed down like a stone.

What are you talking about?

Darius sighed, abruptly bored of the whole topic. Do the math, Little Chicken.

TONY BEGAN TO notice the more obscure aspects of his cell. He had conducted a basic inventory when he arrived: the wooden bed frame with its wilted mattress, the conjoined stainless-steel toilet and sink, the concrete slab that was supposed to serve as a desk. Now he looked farther up the walls, his gaze snagging on a fire sprinkler head some ten feet off the ground and bolted into the cinderblock. It was housed in a steel mesh cage.

He began toying with the idea of prying off the mesh cage. He didn’t think about why he wanted to do so. It was just a problem to solve, a distraction from the empty hours and the voice. He had no tools, aside from two pencils and a few yards of dental floss. But he could see that it might be possible to weight the floss with the pencil and use it as a kind of lasso. He used a noose knot to attach the pencil and a lariat knot for the floss itself and swung it in wild little circles, aiming for the bent prongs at the top of the mesh cage, as if he were a tiny vaquero in a tiny rodeo. It took a dozen tries, but he finally figured the optimal wrist action and release angle and the lasso sailed up and caught on a prong and Tony let out a yelp of triumph.

So what if the floss snapped at the first sharp tug? The basic method worked. He doubled up the floss, then braided the strands into a slender rope, and this time he tore the mesh cage from one of its hinges before the floss shredded.

An hour later, he sat with the mesh cage in his hands, holding it like the delicate bird nests he had lifted from the crooks of trees as a child. He hated school back then, being small and clumsy and unable to decipher the words flying out of the mouths around him. The classroom was a place of solitude and shame. But there were moments in science lessons when he felt the spark of competence, even a shy sort of wonder.

That was what had led him to the navy, the promise of what the brochures called “applied science,” calculating launch thrust and trajectory, the silent music of physics applied to missiles sent hurtling through the atmosphere. That plan had turned to shit, like everything else. But at least he’d learned his knots. For the first time since he’d arrived in solitary, Tony ate every bite of his meal. He sat at his desk, scooping powdered eggs into his mouth, glancing from time to time at the sprinkler protruding from the wall, then at his bedsheet, which measured nine feet, two inches along its hypotenuse, rolled tight and properly knotted.

So long as he set his mind to the task, Darius didn’t say shit. But at night, he started up again.

Clever work, Little Chicken. But you still gotta find a way to get yourself off the ground.

I know.

The storage locker, right? You can do a jump kick, ninja style. Time it right or you’re fucked as a fish. I know one guy—

Shut up already.

I’m just saying, if the guards catch you, they put you on a special watch. Then we’re both fucked.

I don’t need a bedtime story.

Calm down. I’m just here to help.

THE NEXT MORNING, Tony slid the “locker” from beneath his bunk. It was a hard plastic bin, actually, the kind his mother had lingered over in Kmart, before deciding they were an indulgence. He took out the socks and underwear and stashed them under the bed, with the prison-issue Bible, and positioned the bin below the sprinkler. It would take some doing, to leap and kick at the same time, to make sure the head came forward just as the body was falling.

Darius was right. A botched job would mean hours of writhing, a trip to the looney bin, doctors watching over him like a specimen. He had one shot to get it right. Back to science: mass, force, trajectory. He practiced all day. Leap. Kick. The syncopated skitter of the little plastic bin.

There were no cameras to capture this macabre ballet. But the staff had been keeping a close eye on Antonio Saenz. In fact, they had taken the remarkable step of enlisting an inmate to send Saenz notes under the alias Darius X—notes that had been composed by Special Agent Joel Salcido. This plan was approved by the Bureau of Prisons, at the direction of the Department of Justice.

The goal of this correspondence was to extract information regarding the location of his victim’s body. In Salcido’s professional assessment, Saenz had been broken, psychologically, and was prepared to provide the necessary details.

Salcido was unaware that his operation had been commissioned by the attorney general of the United States. Nor that the president himself was scheduled to deliver a major speech just a few miles away, in which he intended to cite the grisly slaughter of Marcus Stallworth as evidence of the need for a crackdown on violent crime. It was the president who needed a body.

Salcido knew only that there was “pressure from above”—his superiors had made that abundantly clear. And so he planned to visit solitary the very next morning, to interview Antonio in person, to see if, together, they could resurrect the dead.

LORENA SAENZ HAD no reason to expect that Officer Guerrero would appear at her door. And yet some part of her had been anticipating his arrival. For years, she had pledged allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stood, while a portrait of the governor (who had been a movie star and was somehow now the president) watched over her. His smile was a sunny thing, full of eternal promise. There were moments when it reassured Lorena, as she imagined a kind father would.

She had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment with pipes that smelled of sulfur and carpenter ants that no amount of scrubbing could defeat. But like Guerrero—unlike her mother and brother—she had been born into certain innocence. Deep down, she believed that a man proved innocent in America would be a man set free.

THEY STOPPED AT Denny’s on the way out of town. Guerrero unfolded a copy of the map Nando had taken from her and laid it across the table. His version had a blizzard of indecipherable notes, recording his contacts with police in the little towns around Yuma. Now he was explaining the plan to Lorena. They would locate the final supply drop—that was where she came in—to gather additional evidence and any clues as to the whereabouts of Mr. Stallworth. Guerrero had traced out a route that would bring them within five miles of the drop, provided the roads were passable.

The waitress came by with their food and Guerrero pulled the map onto his lap, where it sat like a giant, dirty napkin.

“Big plans, huh?” The waitress smiled down at Lorena. “Where are you and your dad headed off to this morning?”

Lorena glanced at Guerrero, then down at her pancakes. “It’s just, like, this thing for school. A science fair.”

“How exciting! You must be excited, too, Dad!”

“I am,” Guerrero replied.

“What’s your project about, sweetie?”

“Navigation,” Lorena murmured. “Like, using the stars to navigate.”

“Cool. The only thing I know about the stars is my horoscope! And half the time, even that turns out to be wrong.” The waitress aimed a giggle at Guerrero. “Freshen up your coffee?”

“We’re actually running kind of late. Any chance we could get the check?”

“No problema,” the waitress chirped. “Good luck today!”

“We’ll need it,” Guerrero said.

The waitress looked at him curiously, then smiled. “Well, I just think it’s real nice to see a dad who’s so involved.”

The two of them sat in uneasy silence and waited for her to tally the bill. A puffiness showed under Guerrero’s eyes. Lorena realized, in some vague manner, that he was no longer acting in an official capacity. “Eat your pancakes already,” he snapped. “We’re going to need energy. Don’t worry about your mom. Nando will keep her calm.” This was an absurd thing to say; they both knew it.

Then they were back on the highway, whizzing down the Central Valley with its neat rows of withering crops. The signs read Fresno 27, Barstow 265.

Lorena sat in confusion. She was young and shy, a girl conscripted into action by a cop. It took her some time to pose the question on her mind.

“Why are you doing this?”

The dawn sun sliced through the windshield. “New facts have come to light,” Guerrero said stiffly.

“I guess the blood on those clothes wasn’t Tony’s.”

“Good guess.”

“But if we’re doing this, I mean, isn’t that reasonable doubt?”

“That’s a standard that applies at trial, Lorena.”

“Couldn’t his lawyer—have you told her?”

“Tony pled guilty. That’s how the system sees him.”

“The system?” Lorena spoke the word with more force than she intended. It was the word her mother had invoked a thousand times, the reason she couldn’t get days off for birthdays, the reason she couldn’t complain to the landlord or make parent/ teacher conferences. Her mother spoke of the system as if it were some vast machine, in which the human beings were merely parts, twirling gears, dizzy cranks, soft valves. “Aren’t you the system?”

“I don’t have some magic wand, Lorena. That’s not how it works.”

“How does it work?”

Guerrero saw Hooks in his office, the benevolent mask he had worn as he took possession of the evidence laid before him. He thought of the corrupt thrill he’d felt wheeling Antonio around and latching cuffs onto his delicate wrists.

Lorena could sense that Guerrero was off-balance, and because she hated him at least as much she trusted him, she pushed harder: “You can lock my brother up but you can’t set him free?”

Guerrero had been gunning the Buick, but now he mashed the brake and swerved onto the shoulder so that the seat belt cut into Lorena’s belly. “What did you just say?”

Lorena stared out the windshield. They were into orchard country now, the endless rows of trees, frisked of their fruits by seasonal workers who came north each spring and vanished by Thanksgiving.

“You want to make me into the bad guy in all this? Take a look at your brother. You think he’s some kind of saint?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Where did you think Tony was going to end up, with his stolen cars and his pistoleros and his coke parties? Come on now. You’re a smart girl, Lorena. Do the math. You think he was going to clean himself up? Become a real success story? Dreaming don’t make it so.”

Guerrero was staring at Lorena, at the spot on the lower lid of her eye where a tear balanced. Its trembling enraged him. He wanted her to stop sniveling. He wanted to ask her what the hell she had been doing in that house in the first place, flirting with a rich white dad three times her age. He wanted to stop yelling at her. “I’m the one who listened to you! I’m the one running around trying to save his ass! I could have left him to rot in prison! Do you have any idea how much trouble I could get into here? Hell, if it wasn’t for me …”

Amid this shouting, Lorena had assumed a watchful stillness, which Guerrero recognized from the years he had spent overseeing domestic disputes. It was the posture certain children learned to adopt, to keep themselves safe from the bad weather of a drunken father or boyfriend. He had been one of those children.

Pedro Guerrero was not the sort of person who held on to the past, at least not that he could tell. Police work suited him because it kept him facing forward, toward the next call, the next clue; he had a procedural path to follow. He had needed the uniform at first, and the gun, and the power that came with them. But that power was hollow, or worse, indecent, without the impulse to protect the innocent.

His hand slowly reached out toward Lorena; the girl flinched. He had no right to comfort her. But at least he had stopped yelling. The sun drilled into his eyes, so that he had to wipe at them furiously. “I’m sorry, Lorena. Okay? I don’t know your brother. I’ve got no right to speak about him like that. Okay?”

Lorena knew what she was supposed to say to this cop, the absolution he was demanding. Her father had pulled the same maneuver. She couldn’t remember the words he had used. She was too young for that. But she recognized the tone—the menace lurking within its imploration—and her mother’s sighs, each one cast into the small, bottomless wishing well of her life.

“You want me to say it’s alright?” Lorena said. “It’s not alright. None of it is alright.”

“I know.”

Guerrero dipped his chin, an effort at humility that came off as a sulk.

Lorena closed her eyes and saw Tony, the sullen brother who had held her in photos. He was the one who needed to be held, the little boy who had been dragged away from his life, across deserts and borders, unable to protect himself, and later, his mother, and her. He loved weapons, but he didn’t have the guts to kill. He would sooner harm himself.

“If something happens to him, it’s on your head,” Lorena said.

“I know.”

IN FRESNO, THEY ditched Guerrero’s Buick for a Jeep, borrowed from a friend of Nando’s who worked for the National Park Service, a rather morbid loaner, given the make and model of the vehicle found a month earlier, splashed with blood. But they needed four-wheel drive, and it would help to have an official vehicle, with an insignia and a radio.

They sped south, through Bakersfield and Vasalia and Indio, onto Route 111, then east on 78, which carried them into the blasted wasteland north of Yuma. He had entrusted Lorena with the map, and from time to time she offered directives, but otherwise said nothing, only stared out the window. She had the inscrutable manner of a child accustomed to being alone, at home in the company of her own thoughts. With every mile marker, Guerrero felt his ambivalence giving way to inevitability: he had taken them too far to turn back.

They passed the old Tumco Mine, where men in search of gold had carved the earth into tiers that resembled Mayan temples. Wild burros clustered in the stingy shade of verde trees, nibbling at the brittle blossoms of Mormon tea. Higher up, the slopes turned to cobbles of rusty orange and brown.

Guerrero stopped short at a turnout. A thick chain stretched across the fine yellow dust of the road, affixed with two signs, one in English, the other in Spanish:

DANGER | KEEP OUT | WARNING

U.S.N.R. MILITARY RESERVATION

NO CIVILIAN ACCESS BY ORDER OF THE INSTALLATION COMMANDER, CHINA LAKE

Beneath were a series of criminal codes.

“What the hell?” Guerrero grabbed a pair of binoculars and examined the road, which looked sturdy and flat as it winded up into the Picacho Wilderness. He called back to Lorena. “How far away are we?”

“Seven miles; seven point four.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“There’s no military reservation here. Not according to the map.”

“Of course not. It’s bullshit.” Some turf battle, bureaucrats squabbling over barren land. Or maybe they’d found treasure beneath the earth—oil or gold or water. Lorena watched him grab a pair of bolt cutters from the trunk. It wasn’t a graceful operation, but he got through the chain.

“I’m deputized as Park Police, but you should stay here.”

Lorena shook her head. “You said it yourself. It’s bullshit.”

“Don’t curse.”

Up and up they went, into the ripping breeze. After a few miles, strange features began to appear in the landscape: cobbles that had been blown apart, churned earth, pale circles blasted onto the slopes and rimmed in ferrous rubble. The farther they went, the worse it got. Trees tossed sideways and charred to ember, the bleached bones of animals like ivory sculptures. A great desert tortoise lay overturned by the side of the road; they got out to inspect this stinking curiosity. It was as if they had entered some province of biblical ruin. Lorena thought of the phrase Pastor Jorge used in church, el Apocalipsis, uttered always with relish, as if God’s damnation would be his final dividend as well.

Guerrero could see that the area had been used for bombing runs, and recently.

“We’re three miles away,” Lorena said. “Not even. Two point eight.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“You’re just going to give up?”

“I’m not giving up,” Guerrero said. “I’m keeping us from getting blown up. Or maybe you want to end up like our friend here?” He nodded at the tortoise’s cracked shell, picked clean by vultures.

Lorena stood clutching her compass and pedometer, studying the road.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said quietly. “Get in the car. Now.”

“Look,” he said, a few minutes later, “I’m responsible for you.” In fact, he had abducted her, for the second time if one wanted to get technical, which a prosecutor might. “This is how police work goes, Lorena. There are setbacks.”

“What do we do now?”

“We drive home and hope your mom isn’t too freaked out.” He was disappointed but also secretly relieved. He had done what he could to honor his promise. In time, she would see that.

“But he’s down here. You saw the map.”

“He could be in Mexico City by now, Lorena. He could be in Tahiti.”

They drove out of the wilderness, retracing their route in silence, passing through Bard and Ross Corner. It was late afternoon. The folly of what he’d done was dawning. It would take ten hours to get Lorena home, at which point the questions would start. They stopped at a Circle K for food and gas, and while Lorena was in the bathroom, Guerrero tried Nando from the pay phone and got nothing.

He knew his chief duty at this point was to see Lorena safely home—that had been his duty all along, actually—though he took a last idle look through his notes, where he came across the name Ricky Stark, an old friend of Jolley’s from their days in the Border Patrol, who handled missing persons down in Yuma.

HE FIGURED STARK would be white, but he was one of those Hispanic dudes who had reinvented himself as a good old boy: aviator shades perched atop a crew cut, Tony Lamas hoisted onto his desk, a lump of Skoal bloating his bottom lip. The photo on his desk showed a couple of little blond princesses holding him hostage with toy rifles. “Doug Jolley. Well shit. That lazy sumbitch called me, what, a month ago. You guys had that bruhaha up there, the Death Valley thing. What brings you to God’s little furnace?”

“A missing person,” Guerrero said, carefully. “We got a report that he may have been camping up in the Picacho Wilderness.”

“Not recently, I hope. They started bombing that place a few weeks back, no warning or nothing; you could hear the jets screaming.”

Guerrero grinned stupidly.

“Don’t tell me you drove up there.” Stark spit into his coffee cup. “Shit.”

“Isn’t that federal wilderness?”

“Supposed to be.”

“Are they done with the bombing?”

“Good luck getting a straight answer. Who’s this guy you’re looking for?”

“Stallworth. Marcus. But he’d be traveling under an assumed name.”

“The good old gringo runaway.”

Guerrero handed him a Xeroxed photo and recited the rough particulars: white, early forties, from the Sacramento area.

Stark cocked his head and spit again. For a moment, Guerrero felt sure that Stark had recognized the name, or the face. Instead, he swung his boots off the desk and reached for a notepad behind him. “Doubt this does you any good, but I got a call last night. A woman from a ranch just across the border. Said there’s some Americano who wandered down there, after getting robbed in the desert. She put him at forty, thereabouts. But this guy is from Tempe, supposedly.”

“What’s the name?”

Starks checked his notes. “Tennyson. David Tennyson.”

Guerrero felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle. Tennyson. Professor Tennyson.

“And this is on a ranch?”

“Taylor Ranch, they call it. More of a compound, really. They do plural wives down there. Mexican Mormons. What’ll they think of next, right?”

“Where is it?”

“South of the Yuma Reservation, mile marker four or thereabouts. But you can’t go down there. You know that, right? It’s a federal jurisdiction situation.”

“Who would I contact? Border Patrol?”

Starks shook his head. “That’s sovereign territory, friend. You gotta establish a diplomatic channel. Try the FBI. They’ve got a relationship with the federales. But these Mormons—they don’t trust outsiders, especially guys with a badge.”

“You ever been there? Doug told me you worked Border Patrol together.”

“We stuck to this side of the river.”

“Did she say anything else about this guy, Tennyson?”

“Not really.”

“Why did she call you?”

“Sounded like she wanted him off the property. Who knows, really. They got their little dramas down there, like the rest of us.”

Stark neglected to mention one detail to Guerrero: the caller had sounded scared to death.

HER NAME WAS Sariah Taylor. She was the first wife of Ammon Taylor, the guardian of his legacy. Her own son had gone astray up north. She knew God would call him back to take his place as inheritor of his father’s prerogatives and property. But she worried about the girl who had been married into their family to sire a second son.

Alma was a Romney, among the most ambitious of the Mormon clans to settle northern Mexico in the nineteenth century. She had been steadfast, even arduous, in her procreative efforts. Yet eighteen months passed with no result. Then the stranger had appeared in their midst.

They all tended to him. But it was Alma who had volunteered to take extra shifts, who snuck glances at the stranger when he appeared for the Sabbath meal shaved and formally dressed, like a younger, more virile, version of Father Ammon. Sariah began to ponder the unthinkable: Alma hoped to conceive by adulterous means. She concealed these suspicions within a public attitude of sisterly amity. But a few nights after that Sabbath, she paid a visit to the cabin where her sister wife slept and found it empty.

Sariah was hunched in the dark when she heard footsteps. Alma appeared in her traveling cape, hurrying from the main house. Sariah felt her pulse ease: the girl was guilty of nothing more than laying with her husband. Rather than returning to her cabin, though, Alma hurried on toward the stables.

Sariah considered pursuing the girl. But the cold bit at her joints, and she couldn’t bear the thought of what she might witness. She knew the proper course would be to alert Father. But this, too, felt untenable—a humiliation too intimate to disclose. The problem was Tennyson himself. He had come from a kingdom of heathens and brought iniquity with him. In the end, Sariah stole into Father Ammon’s office and quietly dialed the Yuma police.

GUERRERO WAS DESPERATE to reach Nando, but he didn’t want to use a police dispatcher, didn’t trust where that might lead, so he left word with a secretary in the Fresno substation and skulked around a pay phone. It didn’t ring until nearly five. “Where the fuck you been all day?” He growled these words while smiling broadly at Lorena, who sat in the Jeep eyeballing him.

“That’s what I was going to ask you, primo.”

“I’m in Yuma, okay?”

“I’m still in Sacramento, looking for Graciela Saenz.”

“What?”

“She never came home. Neighbors haven’t seen her, either.”

“You check with her church people?”

“Next on my list.”

“Should I ask Lorena?”

“Just get her back here.”

“That’s the thing.”

“What’s the thing?”

Nando listened to his cousin relate the strange events of their day. “Tell me you’re not considering what I think you’re considering.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you.”

“I’m serious, Pedro.”

“It’s five miles away.”

“In Mexico! You’re talking about entering Mexico. No,” Nando said. “You’re driving back here. With the girl. Now. Then we figure out what to do next.”

Guerrero turned away from Lorena and closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept properly in a month. He wanted to curse Nando for turning him into a cop, for convincing him that men could be policed when their hearts ran wild with temptation. The voice of his cousin was still in his ear, like a tiny metallic drill.

“Don’t go gangster on me, primo. You’ll wind up in jail. I’m serious. I’ll turn you in myself if you fuck around.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. But I can’t drive back tonight, Nando. I’m too wiped.”

“Find a room, then. Call me from there. I’ll give you an hour. And get back here quick as you can. I don’t like this situation with Graciela Saenz. I got a bad feeling about it.” Nando hung up the phone and looked at Captain Maurice Hooks, who’d been listening in on the extension in his office.

“You did the right thing, Reyes.”

“Fuck you, Captain.”

HOOKS HAD PUT a tail on Guerrero as soon as he turned up with his evidence. Tapped his calls, too, which is how they got wise to Nando. The moment Guerrero took off with Lorena, he’d committed a felony, and the department had the leverage they needed. Nando didn’t argue. He could see it at once.

“Let him have his little goose chase,” Nando counseled. “When he gets back, I’ll talk him down. Nobody wants this to become a scandal, right?”

Hooks sneered his accord. He’d always liked Reyes, the smart mouth aside, was sorry to see him ship off to Fresno. He liked Guerrero, for that matter. It was disappointing, the way things had turned out. He was trying, in his own way, to help Guerrero. Cops didn’t do well in prison, especially skinny little rats.

The situation had gotten beyond him, beyond all of them. It was another Jimmy Grinnell, only this time the FBI was involved, and the media, and the goddamn White House from what he could tell. The Death Valley Killer had arrived in their midst, a kind of modern folklore. The monster had been apprehended, arrested, imprisoned. That was the story. And it needed to stay the story.

LORENA SAENZ KNEW none of this. But she understood that something was afoot. Officer Guerrero had emerged from his meeting with Ricky Stark looking damp and jittery. When she asked what he’d learned, he frowned unconvincingly and made his thumb and pointer finger into a zero. Then he stopped at the first phone booth he found. He knew she was staring at him, so he pretended to be having some kind of breezy chat, leaning against the glass, slipping a hand into his pocket, with an idiot grin pasted on his face like a catalogue model.

She recognized this particular form of deceit from her mother, who had exuded the same fraudulent, slightly frenzied calm every time she lost a job, or they were evicted, or, later, when Tony got busted.

Guerrero hung up and ambled back to the Jeep and announced that they would be driving back to Sacramento the next morning. She merely nodded.

They took a room in an Econo Lodge west of the city, and ate at the McDonald’s across the parking lot, receiving their meal from servers in desperately bright pastel uniforms. In a couple of years, Lorena knew, she would be one of them, grateful for the chance to get out of the kitchen at the old age home, to make food rather than scraping it off plastic plates. They prepared for bed awkwardly, each of them taking turns in the bathroom. There were two queens in the room. By nine the lights were out and they lay listening to the dull roar of eighteen-wheelers zooming past on the interstate.

“It was always going to be a long shot,” Guerrero said.

“I know,” Lorena said quietly.

“I’m not giving up.”

“I know.” She didn’t trust him exactly, but she could see he was trying.

“Did your cousin say anything about my mom?”

“We talked about the case.” He sounded tired.

Guerrero was silent for long enough that Lorena thought maybe he’d fallen asleep. Then he asked a question that neither of them quite expected.

“What happened to your dad?”

The truth is, she didn’t know her father, not like Tony did. He was just a jumble of sensations, a restless lap she was continually climbing into and being pushed from, the smell of cigarettes and beer, a crooked nose and dark eyes, a mood of violent dispute. As much as she remembered him, she remembered her mother in relation to him, the cursing and crying, the throwing of shoes. Her mother had exhausted her capacity to fight ridding herself of her husband, only to find that Tony had inherited his habits. They weren’t criminals so much as delinquents, vandals of calm.

“He took off when I was little,” Lorena said.

“How little?”

“Five, I guess. He drank.”

“Where’s he from?”

“El Salvador. He came to Honduras for work. It was his idea to come to America.”

“But you were born here?”

“My mom came over while she was pregnant with me.”

Guerrero whistled softly. “Tony was here already?”

“My dad brought him up six months before I was born.”

“How old was he?”

“Four.”

“Any other family here?”

“Some cousins in San Jose.”

This was what cops did. They asked questions. But there was something unsettling in it, as if Guerrero were making a record, taking possession of her history.

“What about you?” she said. “Where’s your family from?”

“Morelia. Michoacán state, to the west of Mexico City.”

“Are your parents legal?”

“They were. My abuelo made sure of that. He came over back in the fifties. Worked in the pecan orchards. Made enough to move the family to Fruitridge.”

“Sounds like a good guy.”

“Not really. He was an abuser. Where my dad learned it, I guess. Any other questions?”

“Did you always want to be a cop?”

“No. I was headed the other way, if you want to know the truth.”

“What happened?”

“Nando saved me. I got lucky.”

Lorena wanted to ask if Guerrero was married, or had a girlfriend. She hadn’t learned yet about checking for rings. She tried to imagine this rat-faced little man holding hands with a woman, escorting her into a movie theater, presenting her with a bouquet of flowers. She couldn’t do it.

“Lucky how?” she said.

A silence ensued. It became clear after a time that Guerrero had fallen asleep.

Lorena waited until his breathing had grown deep and measured. Then she got up and tiptoed to the far side of his bed, where he had set down his holster. It was empty. He had slipped his gun beneath his pillow. Because of how he’d shifted onto his side, she could see the blunt outlines of the weapon. She saw herself taking hold of the butt, the object sliding along the sheets, its weight in her hand. She imagined Officer Guerrero waking to the eye of the barrel staring down at him.

Lucky how, she whispered.

His mouth was slightly open, as if he were on the brink of answering.

She reached out and touched the gun, ever so lightly, with her fingertips. It was cold and dense and her heart pumped wildly.

Lucky how?

AT 4:00 A.M., Guerrero got up and took a shower and dressed quietly. The girl was dead asleep, burrowed beneath the covers. He wrote her a note, just in case—Getting breakfast. Back soon. Wait here—then hopped into the Jeep and headed for the Yuma Reservation.

From her spot in the backseat of the vehicle, tucked beneath the camping tarp they hadn’t needed this time around, Lorena listened to the door whine open and felt the weight of the driver settling in. He hadn’t thought to check for stowaways in the bleary darkness. Why would he? Lorena had carefully arranged her bedding, using extra pillows to create a life-like lump—the way Tony had taught her years ago—then slipped outside while Guerrero was in the shower. She felt the Jeep pitch into motion, the grinding of the clutch, a few choice profanities. Wherever he was sneaking off to, he was in a hurry. And she was coming, too.

Guerrero drove to the border crossing that abutted the Yuma Reservation and went inside to chat up the INS agents. He emerged a few minutes later, blowing on a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The parking lot afforded a view of the Colorado River. It was the commuting hour for the day maids coming over from Morelos. They emerged from buses in gales of drowsy laughter and massed on the river’s far edge, where they haggled with the burly men who waited to ferry them across the river on flimsy rafts. The women balanced plastic bags on their heads and scampered up the embankment on the other side and peeled back the chain-link fence and invaded America. They stood in the low desert scrub and stripped down to their underwear and pulled on the carefully folded clothes stashed in those plastic bags, shivering, balancing on one foot, performing this wardrobe change as briskly as possible, to avoid the possibility of being chased down by the green migra vans that occasionally roared out of the parking lot where he stood. Guerrero watched all this, with a peculiar sadness, as he waited for dawn.

He knew his grandmother had been one of these young women once. Back in the fifties, you could simply walk across the bridge. She bragged about it: the size of the houses she cleaned, the miracle of electric fans, the appliances she scrubbed in hope and wonder—el refrigerador! las lavadoras!—which reminded her how far she had traveled in life already. She had been ambitious, eager to earn money, to learn the language and habits of the great country in which her destiny lay cradled. Guerrero, half raised by this staunch woman, had been subject to the gravity of her aspirations; perhaps that, too, was why he had become a cop. They were believers.

He drove east to mile marker four. Here, beyond the city limits, the demarcations of the border fell away. No one saw him cross into Mexico, except Lorena. She waited a full minute after he’d locked the vehicle, then climbed out of the Jeep and tracked him on foot. Like Guerrero, she was traveling with ghosts. Fifteen years ago, in the half dark of another dawn, her father and brother had made their way north, crossing a mile to the west, sprinting headlong into a promised land that would doom them both. Lorena came later, a kind of secret cargo, floating untroubled inside her terrified mother.

AFTER TEN MINUTES, the beam of Guerrero’s flashlight found a barbed-wire fence held up by weathered wooden posts. He got out his binoculars and scanned in each direction, then headed west along the fence, toward the rising sun, Lorena a hundred yards behind him. It made her think of the night, nearly a year ago now, when she had walked out into the desert with Mr. Stallworth and he had revealed to her the hidden world of scorpions.

Perhaps it was the narcotic sway of this memory that led her to step on a twig. Guerrero wheeled around and peered through the mottled dawn. Her first impulse had been to throw herself onto the ground. But there was nowhere to hide, so she just stood regarding him.

“Goddamnit,” he murmured. “You want to tell me what you’re doing out here?”

“If you tell me first.”

“That’s not how this works.”

Lorena stopped five feet away from him; she wouldn’t come any closer.

“I’m pursuing a lead, okay. It’s probably nothing. But it could be dangerous, so you’re going to need to walk yourself back to the car. Now. This isn’t some game.” Guerrero reached for his handcuffs. “If you won’t do it yourself, I’ll escort you.”

Lorena’s eyes drifted to the gun strapped to his hip.

Guerrero stepped forward and reached for her arm and she twisted away from him. “You don’t get to order me around anymore. We’re not in America.”

“Calm down,” he said. “I’m trying to protect you.”

“I never asked for your protection.”

The edge of dawn was burning off, revealing them bit by bit. He didn’t want to wrestle her into custody. His job was probably dust. And yet, retracing his steps, Guerrero couldn’t see what he might have done differently. He took hold of Lorena’s wrist. “Honest to God,” he muttered, “you should have just shot me last night, when you had the chance.”

Into the stunned silence that greeted this comment—before Lorena could respond, before Guerrero could slip the cuffs onto her—came the strange tinny sound of music emanating from a radio. For a brief moment, Lorena saw an image of herself at age seven or eight, standing silently in the doorway to her room, watching her mother sway to the music of that cheesy norteño band she loved, dancing, quite beautifully, and alone. Then she snapped back to the present.

Both of them turned. On the other side of the fence, perhaps twenty feet away, was a young caballero perched atop a bony mule. He clicked off his transistor radio and looked down at them in sweet befuddlement.

AS THE COWBOY approached, Guerrero stepped away from Lorena and smiled and dipped his chin and called out a greeting in Spanish and scanned the man for weapons. His dress was oddly antiquated, a leather-tooled vest and chaps, a holster beneath the rope coiled around his shoulder and a bowie knife looped through his belt. Guerrero angled his body to hide the weapon on his far hip. “Praise God!” he said. “I was hoping he would send us a sign. And here you are. My name is Pedro Guerrero. This is Lorena, my daughter. What’s your name?”

The young man frowned. “Josiah,” he said timidly. He glanced at the daughter. She looked Mexican, or maybe something like it, but wore gringa clothing, a cotton sweater and jeans and white sneakers. Guerrero was dressed in a windbreaker with a strange insignia. “What are you doing here?” he said, in rather formal Spanish.

“We’re on a mission of mercy, you could say. My brother-in-law got lost around here.”

“Your brother-in-law?”

“His name is David Tennyson.”

Josiah’s eyes, partially obscured by a scruffy Stetson, darted away. “I don’t know anything about that. I’m sorry.”

“Please. Mr. Tennyson has a family, a wife, two children. This is his niece.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Josiah replied, in consternation. “This is private property, you see. If you have questions, you can go to the front gate. It’s no problem. Down that way. A quarter mile, more or less.” He gestured. “Maybe someone there knows.” He began to turn his animal away. Guerrero knew the boy would alert whomever he worked for, and things would turn south from there. Before he could think better of it, he pulled out his service pistol and leveled it at Josiah, who froze. “I don’t know anything about that, sir. I swear to God. You have to ask Father Taylor.”

Lorena stepped backwards; her face had drained of color.

“It’s okay,” Guerrero said quietly, to both of them. “Everything is fine. Let’s just stay calm. Josiah, I need you to come off your animal. Nice and slow. Right, just like that. Now come over to the fence, to where I am. I’m sorry about this, okay? I’m trying to keep us all safe. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded.

Guerrero patted him down, took the knife and an antique six-shooter with no bullets. He set them on the ground, narrating his actions all the while in the way he had learned to over the years, quick and matter-of-fact, so that suspects would be able to assimilate what was happening to them. “I’m going to put these restraints on you, Josiah. But just for a little while, so I can see what’s in the saddle bag on your animal. It won’t hurt if you don’t struggle, okay? Nod to show me you understand. That’s good. Does he have a name, your animal?”

“Midnight,” Josiah croaked.

“Midnight? That’s a funny name for a gray mule.” He emptied the bag of its contents: the portable radio, pliers, a hammer, a cattle prod, a pack of Faros cigarettes, a flint lighter, a leather water bag, a ceramic bowl wrapped in a cotton towel with the kid’s breakfast inside: two homemade tortillas filled with beans and onions. He took the cattle prod and left everything else in the bag.

“I’m doing this because I know Mr. Taylor doesn’t like strangers on his property. I don’t blame him, by the way. I don’t like strangers on my property, either. But, you see, I promised I’d find my brother-in-law. Can you understand that, Josiah?”

The kid was struggling not to cry. He was maybe twenty; a wisp of beard clung to his chin like dried moss.

“Try not to be frightened, Josiah. All you have to do is lead us to where he is, to Mr. Tennyson.”

“You have to ask Father Taylor, sir. I just mend the fences.”

Guerrero didn’t want to do what he did next. He worried, curiously, that it would upset Lorena, though he knew also that her distress would be useful, so he raised his gun and aimed it at Josiah and she burst into tears. “Don’t shoot him!”

“I’m asking you, Josiah.”

“He’s in the room by the stables. I think it’s him. The American.”

“Good,” Guerrero said. “You’re going to lead us there now, quick as you can. It’s still early, you see? So we can get Mr. Tennyson and leave and no one will get hurt.”

The kid nodded. He had wet himself.

SARIAH TAYLOR KNEW that calling the police department in Yuma without her husband’s knowledge, let alone approval, was a betrayal—both of her marital bond and the laws that bound her community. She spent the night in tribulation. At first light, she slipped into Father Ammon’s bed chamber and confessed to him.

In previous years, Taylor might have beaten her with the strap prescribed for that purpose. But she was an old woman now, bent low by their decades together. He could only bring himself to glower at her, which might have been worse. At last, he called Sariah over and took her hand and assured her that Alma was incapable of such a subterfuge, that he had dispatched the girl himself to check on Tennyson. “The man has infected wounds,” Taylor explained.

This was technically true. Alma was obedient to her marital vows. But above all she was obedient to her husband.

From the moment Stallworth had appeared, Ammon Taylor had contemplated why God would dispatch this battered soul to his property. He pondered the clues: the heaven-sent injuries; the cash; the tiny, hidden phone number. The stranger, he deduced, was recompense for the injuries the United States had inflicted upon his bloodline. His call to Van Dyke had served as confirmation.

And yet there had to be something more than money at stake. As he pondered the matter, his mind kept returning to the strangest of the items found on Stallworth’s person: the photo of the naked girl, just a few years younger than Alma herself. The stranger’s lustful intentions must have been integral to God’s plan. He explained this to Alma, so that she came to understand: her body was the soil in which the Taylor bloodline would be replenished. She was to lay with Ammon on her fecund nights, then with the fugitive. Let heaven decide the matter.

Now, however, Sariah had alerted the American authorities, and no good could come of that. He needed Tennyson off his property as soon as possible. For a moment, Taylor’s fatigue did battle with his vigilance. Then he rose from bed and did his business and shaved his face and dressed. Sariah had set a kettle but he waved her off and slipped a small pistol in the pocket of his trousers and ventured out into the raw light of sunrise.

On his way to the stable, he passed by the cabin where, he assumed, his youngest bride had returned from her final assignation. It did not occur to him that Alma, exhausted from the exertions of her week, might fall asleep in the fugitive’s bed.

TO GET TO the stables, where Tennyson had been staying, Guerrero and Lorena would have to enter what Josiah called “Father Taylor’s Domain.” He struggled to explain what he meant, but Guerrero understood the moment he looked through his binoculars: a patchwork wall of cement and brick that rose twenty feet. It was topped with broken glass. The heart of the Taylor ranch was a fortress.

“It’s to keep evildoers out,” Josiah mumbled. “There’s another way, anyway. A tunnel. Not far from the stables.”

“Would anyone see us?” Guerrero said.

“Not if we hurry.”

Guerrero couldn’t leave Lorena unattended. But he didn’t want to bring her along. “We don’t want trouble,” Guerrero said again. “If there’s trouble, I have to use this.” He lifted his gun. “I don’t want to do that, Josiah.”

“It’s safe,” Josiah said. “Nobody is up yet.”

“You sure?”

“It’s the Sabbath, sir.”

They left the mule tethered to a fence post and moved swiftly across the prairie, toward the northern edge of the wall. “Stay behind me and stay close,” Guerrero whispered to Lorena, in English. “You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“Stay close,” she mumbled. “Stay behind you.”

The tunnel was more of a trough, but it got them inside. Josiah led them to a small courtyard, ringed by cottonwoods. He pointed to a low-slung building that had been divided into stalls. “He’s staying in that one, with the window.”

“Lead us there.”

Before Josiah could advance another step, they heard the creak of a wheel. A horse and buggy emerged from behind the far side of the building and began to traverse the courtyard. For a few seconds, Ammon Taylor rode into the ruddy dawn without taking notice of them, bouncing along like a liveryman from the last century. He clicked his tongue and the horse came to a halt not twenty yards away. Guerrero pushed Lorena behind him and raised his pistol. “Put your hands up, please,” he shouted.

Taylor sat up and turned slowly to face Guerrero.

“Your hands,” Guerrero said.

Taylor shook his head, as if he had been awaiting an ambush of this sort. “You may speak English, if you prefer,” he said politely.

“Please step down from the carriage, sir. Nice and slow.”

“That is an unnecessary directive at my age.” The old man clambered down from his seat, moving gingerly. His strange beard and formal dress made Lorena think of the illustrations in her history books. She found the man’s genteel manner oddly soothing. For the past half hour she had been on the point of throwing up.

“Are you Father Taylor?” Guerrero said.

“I am. May I ask you to identify yourself?”

“My name is Pedro Guerrero, sir. I’m a police officer.”

“That may be so, but you are threatening me with a deadly weapon on my property, which is a religious sanctuary within the sovereign nation of Mexico.”

“I’m looking for a man who identifies himself as David Tennyson.”

Taylor stared in puzzlement at Josiah, whose hands remained cuffed, then at the girl behind Guerrero, who looked oddly familiar. “Who is the young lady with you? She looks rather alarmed.”

“I’m going to ask the questions, Mr. Taylor. Are you armed?”

“It’s the Sabbath, sir.”

“Your employee tells me Mr. Tennyson has been staying here for some time.”

Taylor glanced at Josiah. “He is my tenant, not my employee. Please give him leave. He has no part in this.”

“I’d like to see Tennyson. Now.”

“Certainly,” Taylor said. “As I say, there is no need to threaten me, or my tenant, Mr. Guerrero.”

“I am sorry to go about it like this,” Guerrero said. “I was told you can be wary of strangers.”

Taylor smiled ruefully, as if encountering a familiar bigotry. “On the contrary. Mr. Tennyson showed up here some weeks ago, grievously injured. We offered him care and shelter. This is a place of God. If he is in some sort of trouble in the United States, I am happy to see him gone. Are you from the Yuma police?”

“Please, Mr. Taylor.”

“Very well.” As he drew closer, Ammon Taylor spotted the insignia on Guerrero’s windbreaker. He was from the Sacramento police. For a moment, he wished to dispense with all the subterfuge, to speak honestly about the desperation of men in exile. But he knew this would only complicate matters, so he led the little officer toward the room where the fugitive slept. “We’ll need light,” he whispered. “There’s no electric.”

Guerrero nodded and Taylor dipped down and lit the kerosene lantern placed outside the room. It did not escape his notice that the lock on the outside of the door had been released. But he stepped inside anyway. It was too late to do otherwise.

AS AMMON TAYLOR entered the room, his lantern illuminated the scene. Stallworth at the head of the bed, his back against the wall, Alma, curled below him, the sheets wound around her like a sheath. Taylor stood stunned before the scene he had engineered. The rank aroma of what they had done hung in the air.

For a moment, no one moved. Then Stallworth reached for something on the table next to the bed. He rose up and lunged at Ammon Taylor. Taylor saw a flash of silver. He reared back and drew the pistol from his pocket, as if he were shooting a venomous snake in his own barn. Because he was a man of God, and thus averse to murder, Taylor closed his eyes as he fired. The gun jerked in his hand. He did not see the bullet strike the man before him. Nor did he consider the man behind him, the little police officer who had trespassed upon his land. He heard the lamentation of two young women and felt, in the mystifying fraction of a second before he lost consciousness, the bolt of God’s fingertip laid upon his ear.

PEDRO GUERRERO PROCESSED the events in question as his training required. His job was to secure a positive ID, then to usher Lorena safely off the Taylor property. For this reason, he had holstered his gun and taken up the cattle prod. If necessary, the authorities could return to the ranch to retrieve Marcus Stallworth. Had he a bit more time to consider his dilemma, he might have recognized the irony: in pursuit of a fugitive, he had become a fugitive.

But he clung to the present, a step behind Ammon Taylor. Through the dim light, he spotted two figures on the bed, a white male and a young Hispanic female, both quite naked. Then a flurry of movement. The man appeared to leap at Taylor. Guerrero stepped forward to intercede; a shot rang out. The muzzle flash cast the figures into sharp relief: Taylor staggered by the discharge, the girl cowering in a nest of sheets, and, at the center of the tableau, at long last illuminated, Marcus Stallworth, his naked torso mottled with bruises, his jaw fringed in neat whiskers. The force of the bullet knocked him back onto the bed.

Guerrero swung the cattle prod, watched the old man go down, then kicked his tiny gun away. He advanced through the smoke and shrieking to the victim. Stallworth was gurgling, coughing out a bright pink froth; dark liquid surged onto the floor, as if his chest were nothing more than a lake of blood.

For a long minute, Guerrero tried to stanch the bleeding. He reached for a pulse but the wrist kept slipping away. The victim’s eyes turned filmy and vacant and the limbs began to stiffen, until it seemed the only machinery still in operation was his ruptured heart. He could feel Stallworth passing to the other side, the rasp of his breath relenting, faint, then gone. Guerrero lifted the bedsheets away, shocked at the delicate dimensions of the entry wound. It looked as if Stallworth had been stung.

Guerrero struggled to assess the situation. The naked girl had crawled off the bed. She lay clinging to Ammon Taylor, cradling his head and imploring him to wake up. Padre, she whimpered. Mi padre. Josiah was gone. Guerrero located Lorena; she was stooped in the hallway with her hands over her eyes. He kneeled before her and softly raised her chin, so that her eyes would meet his and she would know the truth of what he was telling her, that it was okay, it was all over, that she was safe, but that he needed her to take his hand, right now, and not let go. Did she understand?

He led her outside and they sprinted together, back the way they had come. He heard the anguished honking of a mule behind him. There was a distinct possibility they would be pursued, perhaps on horseback. There was nothing he could do about that but run and hope and run.

Guerrero was a police officer, a good one, and because of this training, he felt he had some understanding of what had transpired. It was obvious to him, for instance, that Marcus Stallworth had sexually assaulted the young girl in his bed, who was Ammon Taylor’s granddaughter, or perhaps his daughter, and that Taylor, upon encountering this defilement, and despite being under armed guard himself, had flown into a rage and shot the assailant dead. That was what the facts suggested, and the version he carried with him for the rest of his life.

There were aspects of the story he didn’t understand—how Stallworth had reached the Taylor ranch, for instance, or how the girl had wound up in his room—but these mysteries did not obscure the basic facts, which allowed him to offer some solace to Lorena Saenz, once they had reached American soil. “Mr. Stallworth was a predator,” he said gently. “That’s his nature. You were right, Lorena. You saved Tony.”

LORENA SAENZ WAS the last person Marcus Stallworth saw before he slipped away. The empirical part of him recognized that she was just a vision, fed to him by his perishing soul. God knew what he was: a scientist desecrated by lust, a father who destroyed his family, a man who preyed upon children. Still, he felt a surge of awe. Lorena had found him. By some miracle of mind and will. He wanted to show her the strange specimen he had discovered, a creature with the courage to kill itself rather than live in captivity. He wondered, in his final moment, what she would make of it.

LORENA HERSELF PERCEIVED almost nothing of the fatal encounter. From the moment Guerrero produced a gun and took Josiah captive, she had been a state of shock, following his directives, but dissociated, as if she were watching herself in a movie. She watched herself watch Guerrero enter the room behind the old man called Taylor. She saw the naked man inside, though it had taken her a moment to recognize Mr. Stallworth beneath his strange new beard. She did not know who fired the gun or why but the shot sent her reeling to the ground. She heard a body drop, smelled gun smoke. Then a girl’s voice was crying father, my father, and she considered, briefly, whether she herself was the one uttering those words. Then Guerrero was squatting before her. His fingers were sticky and smelled of iron and she didn’t want him to touch her face but he was doing it anyway. Run, he kept saying. We need to run.

HAVING REVEALED MARCUS Stallworth to be alive, only to witness his homicide less than a second after this revelation, Pedro Guerrero was determined to alert the Stallworth family, and his superiors. But he was even more worried about Lorena Saenz, who was clearly disoriented.

He found the Jeep and drove toward the Yuma police station, then pulled into a gas station to get Lorena food and water, and to determine whether she required medical attention. It would not have occurred to him that he might need medical attention because, like most police officers, he did not understand the impact of traumatic events on the mind and body. These were to be absorbed in the line of duty, and only later disgorged onto those around them, cloaked in drink and violence.

He knew enough, though, to call the number Nando had left him. The first words out of his mouth were these: “He’s alive. Marcus Stallworth. I saw him get shot.”

“You saw Stallworth get shot?”

“It just happened. You need to call FBI, the regional guys down here.”

“Slow down,” Nando said. “Take a deep breath. Where the hell are you?”

“Yuma.”

“Jesus. Where’s Lorena?”

“Here. With me.”

“You got to get her back here,” Nando said.

“Did you hear me? Antonio Saenz didn’t kill him. Stallworth was down in Mexico. On a ranch. We have to get Antonio out of prison.”

For several unnerving seconds, Nando didn’t say anything. “Okay, calm down. Just tell me what happened, the whole story.”

Guerrero did as he was told, confiding even to Lorena’s presence, and glancing every now and then across the parking lot, to where she sat in the front seat of the Jeep, staring blankly at a package of frosted donuts.

When he was done, Nando sighed deeply. “I need you to listen careful, primo. You have to drive back here immediately.”

“But I’m a witness—”

“You’re not listening—”

“I can get transport from the Yuma—”

A third voice suddenly cut in.

“Get the girl back here,” Captain Hooks snarled. “Or I’ll lock you up myself.”

“What the hell?” Guerrero said. “Why is Hooks—”

“We fucked up,” Nando said softly. “Big time, primo.”

FOR THE FIRST few minutes of their drove north, Guerrero tried to comfort Lorena, however awkwardly. She didn’t respond. When he looked over, he found (to his considerable relief) that her eyes were closed, her head slumped against the window. But Lorena was not asleep. She had been remitted to the sudden senseless violence of her earliest years and responded in the only way she knew to keep safe: by making herself invisible.

Most of all, Lorena wanted to see her mother. She had a keen sense, no doubt also a vestige of those years, that her mother was in danger. She wanted to see Tony, too. She pictured them waiting for her in the doorway of the apartment where they had lived together for four years, before he shipped off to the navy. Her mother would prepare baleadas, the kind with crumbly cheese and scrambled eggs, and Tony would tease her for putting ketchup on her plantains. She knew it wouldn’t happen like that, but the scene soothed her.

She wanted to thank Guerrero, for believing her, for keeping her from harm. She also wanted to forget he existed, to travel back in time to the era before he had come into her life, when she had been happy to believe that a new hairstyle, or a pair of designer jeans, or the loss of ten pounds, would grant her access to the careless pleasures she found in the Stallworth home.

Guerrero had reminded her that Marcus was a predator, as if to mitigate the horror of what she had witnessed. But every time he spoke she felt dragged into the world of adulthood, with its rigid ideas of power and weakness and right and wrong. She wanted him to understand how it had felt at first, when Mr. Stallworth had reached across the Jeep to unlock her door and the hairs on the back of his forearm brushed the skin of her belly. He hadn’t seemed like a predator at all, but a shy man fighting, somewhat blindly, against desires stronger than his resolve.

She had desires, too. She had wanted him, inasmuch as she understood wanting. She wanted the obvious things: his strong arms, his soft lips. And she wanted the less obvious things: the quiet power of his regard, the precision of his mind, his reverence for the natural world. Above all, or beneath it, she wanted what he saw in her, the trust he seemed ready to tender in fleeting moments. She thought of him as a scorpion, not the kind trapped in amber, but the kind that had scampered across her skin, so dangerous and alive that she had wanted to capture it in her fist.

IT WAS DARK when they arrived at the Sacramento police station. Nando escorted them to the conference room on the second floor. Lorena spotted an older cousin of hers from San Jose, sitting at the table with two women she didn’t recognize. The cousin’s cheeks were streaked in black, where her mascara had run. Nando opened the door and nodded to Lorena and closed the door behind her.

Guerrero stared through the window as the cousin burst into tears. Then Lorena fell to the ground and began retching.

“What the hell?”

“Come on,” Nando said. “You’re late.”

“Late for what? Why is everybody staring?”

“You’ve got blood on your pants.” He hustled his cousin over to Homicide, where Hooks shut the door to his office and lowered the blinds.

Guerrero’s windbreaker was filthy and rumpled. He looked like someone who had been buried and dug up again. “Will somebody tell me what the fuck is happening?”

“Antonio Saenz died last night,” Nando said.

“What?”

“The feds put him in an iso unit. His body was found this morning.”

“His body?” Guerrero closed his eyes and saw Lorena, collapsing. He heard a ringing sound, then absolute silence, like the quiet after a plague. Nando’s hands were on his shoulders, sort of holding him up. He feared he might get sick.

“Take a few minutes if you need them, primo.”

“Cause of death unknown.” This was Hooks again. “Coroner just finished the autopsy.”

“He was innocent.”

“It’s a shit show alright—”

“We told you,” Guerrero shouted. “We brought you the evidence.”

“You brought me a pile of bloody clothes,” Hooks replied quietly.

Guerrero’s body began to rock. He could feel the savagery vibrating outward, ready to strike. For a moment, he saw himself leaping over the desk. Nando’s grip tightened on his shoulders. “Don’t make your situation worse, primo.”

“My situation? Tony Saenz is dead. That’s the situation. An innocent kid. Because this motherfucker sat on his hands.” Guerrero was trying to twist away from Nando, to get at the Captain. “We told you. We handed you everything on a fucking platter.”

“Lower your voice,” Hooks said.

“The chief must be mighty proud of you, Hooks. He really owes your ass now, doesn’t he? Or maybe you’ll go into business with Van Dyke, that scumbag. Earn a fortune making rich people’s mistakes go away.” Guerrero went on this way for a minute, while Hooks sat, vast and impassive, waiting for his adrenaline to run down. An eerie calm settled over the small office, which was filled with cheap plaques and commendations.

“Even if I believed you—” Hooks said.

“If you believed me? Where do you think this blood came from, Captain?” Guerrero thrust his hands out for inspection; tiny brown crescents rimed the skin under the nails. “This blood came from Marcus Stallworth’s body.”

“I heard the story,” Hooks said.

“I’ll bet you did.”

Nando and Hooks exchanged a glance and all at once the true dimensions of the situation came clear. Guerrero felt the sting of it. He turned slowly and stared at his cousin. “You let him listen in the whole time. You’re on their side now.”

“Tranquilo, primo.”

“Don’t tranquilo me, you fucking Judas.”

“He was trying to keep you out of jail,” Hooks snapped. “Still is. You acted in violation of direct orders, Guerrero, as well as about 150 state and federal statutes. You led a terrified teenage girl into a fortified compound in Mexico. Any idea how much legal exposure we’ve got here?”

Nando began to speak, but Hooks wagged a finger. “You’re a pit bull, Guerrero. And a pit bull can run and jump and bite your nose off. But you know what a pit bull can’t do? It can’t unlock a fucking gate. And the confession is that gate. Saenz is guilty because he told us he was guilty. The Mexican government isn’t going to approve a raid on a private ranch. Even if they do, that body is long gone.”

Guerrero was pressing his thumbs into his eyes. “I’ll go to the Bee.”

“And tell them what? That the Death Valley Killer was just an innocent victim who accidently confessed? That Marcus Stallworth staged his own death? Whatever happened down there, you can’t undo the past, Guerrero. All you’re going to do is ruin the future.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“You’re already fired.” Hooks sighed and stared directly into Guerrero’s eyes. “You no longer have any formal relationship with the Sacramento Police Department. So you can do what you damn well please. But you better think through the consequences. You better think about the Stallworth kids having to read the story you’re so eager to tell. Dead is dead, son.”

Guerrero could feel himself starting to panic. Hooks had this power over him. There was something monstrous and tranquilizing about the way he spoke. The more you struggled, the deeper the venom swirled in.

“And that poor thing downstairs—you want to make a public spectacle of what she just lived through? What you put her through? Who does that help, Guerrero?”

He could see her in the darkness of the dingy motel room they’d shared, reaching for the gun under his pillow, taking aim. He had been terrified that she might actually try to shoot him. But he could see now why he had given her the chance.

Hooks was still casting words into the air between them, strangling justice with the serenity of a monk. “Isn’t that why you got into this line of work,” he was asking now, “to help people?”

Guerrero tried to reignite his rage but it kept slipping away. He looked to Nando, that great pocked face of his, the one he had loved as a young man, and he remembered what it had felt like at first, how badly he had wanted to be like his cousin, a somebody, a cop, the hero of the story. Lorena should have murdered him. She had damned him by her mercy, left him adrift and desolate.

“Lorena needs her mother,” Guerrero said. “Someone better find her.”

“Easy now,” Nando said.

Apparently, he was weeping.

“Get some rest now. You’re all fucked-up from the adrenaline.”

When he got home, Guerrero drank seven beers, one after another, and wrote down every single detail he could remember in an official incident report, including his conversations with Captain Maurice Hooks. The account filled twenty-three pages. His hands were plagued by the shakes. It was like stabbing the paper.

At some point, he must have fallen asleep, because he woke to find his cousin standing over him. “You’re wasted,” Nando said softly. “We need to get you cleaned up.” He remembered Nando peeling off his clothes, easing him into a scalding bath.

The next day, Guerrero woke to a blaring behind his eyes. He stumbled into the closet he used as a home office and picked up the report he’d written. He couldn’t read a single word. With a growing sense of dread, he began to search for the clothes he’d worn on his trip south, the ones covered in the blood of Marcus Stallworth. What he found, instead, was a note from his cousin, taped to his front door.

You’ll thank me for this someday, primo.

GRACIELA LEFT HER graveyard shift early for the federal building, to see if the government would allow her to visit her son. Under normal circumstances, she would have returned home and enlisted Lorena to serve as a translator. But this was a special occasion, and she was determined to arrive at 7:00 a.m., an hour before the office for visitors opened. Being first in line, she believed, would compel the guards to look favorably upon her request. Lorena had explained that the system didn’t work like that. Tony was in a solitary place; he wasn’t allowed visitors. But Graciela had prayed on the matter. In her hands, she held a box of pastries from his favorite bakery.

She was waiting outside the office, on the sidewalk, when a tall white man in a three-piece suit approached her. He was so neatly groomed that she assumed him to be a lawyer. She would remember thinking to herself: this is the sort of gentleman who would convince the guards to let me visit Tony. She remembered thinking: how proud his mother must be! She didn’t quite recognize what was happening, even after he smiled pleasantly and asked, in impeccable Spanish, if she was Graciela Saenz.

She had known this moment was coming, had been waiting for it, in one way or another, all along. On the eve of her departure for the United States, her great aunt had read the entrails of a pullet and warned her not to go. The journey, she announced with solemn grandeur, would end in sorrow.

And here she was, fourteen years later, listening to this handsome stranger, as he explained that he was a special envoy from the Office of National Repatriation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and showed her a small golden badge and a laminated ID and asked if she would please come with him and that it would be a lot nicer if they could do this in a friendly way and trust one another because he certainly didn’t want to have to put restraints on such a lovely woman.

He escorted Graciela to an unmarked van parked just around the corner and helped her inside. It was an expensive model, with a crushed velvet interior, and she was the only passenger. She expected to be dropped at a detention facility, but the tall gentleman pulled onto the freeway heading in the opposite direction.

“Where are we going?” Graciela said.

“It’s all in your packet,” the driver said, matter-of-factly.

She examined the shiny red folder on the seat next to her. It was embossed with raised lettering, which read Office of National Repatriation in a dignified font. There was a letter personally addressed to her and written in formal Spanish, which stated that her presence in the United States was a violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, specifically the US criminal code, sections 1325 and 1324 (“improper entry by alien” and “harboring an alien” respectively). These federal crimes, compounded by the homicide charge brought against Antonio Saenz, “the harbored alien in question,” necessitated “an expedited repatriation process.” However, because of her outstanding conduct as an undocumented resident, the recipient qualified for assistance from the Office of National Repatriation (ONR), including transport and up to $1,000 in resettlement funds, and assistance in applying for legal residency.

“I don’t understand,” Graciela said. “Am I being deported?”

“Temporarily repatriated,” the man said.

“But where are we going now?”

“Did you read the letter, ma’am?”

“I have children,” Graciela said. “A daughter. She’s only fourteen.” She began to hyperventilate. “My daughter is waiting for me!”

“I understand,” the man said, in his unflappable manner. “But I need you to calm down, Mrs. Saenz. I realize you’re frightened. But you are in violation of federal law, as you have been for many years now. I don’t view you as a criminal, ma’am. And I don’t wish to treat you as one.”

Graciela began to weep.

“Your daughter will be looked after. I promise you. The ONR has made those arrangements. You have cousins in San Jose. The office has contacted them. They will stay with her for as long as necessary. The United States government is not going to allow a minor to be without familial support.”

The driver glided onto the off-ramp that led to the airport.

“Please,” Graciela sobbed. “Let me say goodbye to my daughter.”

“Believe me, ma’am, I have children, too. We’re on the same side here. You have to look at this as an opportunity. Wouldn’t it be better for you, for your children, if you applied for legal entry into the United States? Once you get to Honduras, you can do so. The ONR is prepared to help you with that.”

“The ONR,” Graciela said faintly.

“Yes, ma’am. The ONR will assist with all of it. But you need to sign the form in your packet, ma’am. If you don’t sign, we can’t help you.”

Graciela thumbed through the forms. She came to one, printed in English, that had been affixed with a transparent sticker in the shape of an arrow that pointed to the line she was required to sign. Although not marked as such, it was a voluntary consent decree, in which the undersigned granted the INS indemnity in the process of her deportation, voluntarily waiving her right to legal representation, a court hearing, and the provisions entailed by a writ of habeas corpus.

The driver glanced at Graciela in the rear-view mirror and smiled. “As recently as fifty years ago,” he noted, “the federal government subjected Central American nationals to kerosene baths at the border. To delouse them. Can you imagine? Those days are over, thankfully. We are all human beings. We all deserve dignity. That’s why the ONR was established.”

Graciela murmured something unintelligible.

“In time,” the tall man said, “you may come to see all this as a blessing.”

BY FOUR THAT afternoon, as her daughter was approaching the outskirts of Sacramento, in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by Officer Pedro Guerrero, Graciela Saenz was weaving through the damp customs hall of the Toncontín Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She had no luggage to declare, not even the packet provided by the ONR, which had been quietly procured from her in the moments before she boarded the plane. The sole item in her possession was a box of pastries, which she had clung to, inexplicably, during the flight. At the urging of an airport official, who took note of her disorientation, she handed the box to the customs agent, a woman roughly her age in a gray uniform that sagged around her.

“This is all you’re declaring?” She peeked inside the box. “Oh, pan de coco! Rosquillas!”

Graciela replied politely: “They’re for my son. From his favorite bakery.”

The customs agent nodded hesitantly. Had this little woman brought nothing but pastries from the United States? Was she that wealthy?

The agent handed the box back, but the traveler didn’t seem to understand that their interaction was over, that she needed to move on to the next checkpoint.

“It’s his birthday,” Graciela informed her brightly. “He’s turning twenty today.”

“Oh, how nice! He must be full of mischief.”

Graciela flinched, as if she had just been startled awake. “Why would you say such a thing?”

This question was posed with such a sudden and inexplicable vehemence that the agent took a step backwards. “It’s just his zodiac, Señora. He’s a Scorpio, after all.”

THE OFFICE OF National Repatriation was created by agents of the FBI’s Special Operations Unit, with the singular aim of removing Graciela Saenz from America as swiftly as possible. The execution of this plan required the coordinated efforts of agents from the FBI, INS, and Honduran Consulate. They were told that the target was a high-level foreign operative who had been instrumental in funding the efforts of a Honduran leftist group, which had recently hijacked a jet bound for New Orleans. All records of the operation were destroyed upon its completion. Officially, the ONR never existed.

ON NOVEMBER 30, Ronald Reagan traveled to Sacramento to deliver an address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He was expected to outline a narrow set of proposals arising from his Task Force on Victims of Crime. But the president, still riding a wave of public adoration that began with his shooting eight months earlier, offered instead a robust and sweeping vision of American law enforcement.

“There are two absolute truths of human nature,” he observed. “That men are basically good but prone to evil; and that society has a right to be protected from them.” The implication, though subtle, was profound: individuals turn to crime not in response to social conditions but because of personal defects. It was the government’s role to punish the wicked, not aid the poor. “There has been a breakdown in our criminal justice system,” he noted. “The people are sickened and outraged. They demand we put a stop to it.” The police chiefs met these declarations with thunderous applause.

Reagan’s broader agenda was to reduce the powers of the state through deregulation. When it came to law enforcement, though, deregulation meant just the opposite: casting aside the bureaucratic rules that shackled police and prosecutors. He wanted the rules of evidence seizure loosened. He wanted felons to compensate their victims. He wanted judges to deny violent offenders bail. Most of all, he wanted prosecutors to seek the death penalty.

It was here that the president (or more precisely, his speech writers) had hoped to invoke the story of Antonio Saenz and Marcus Stallworth. Early drafts of the speech described the assailant as “a savage who stalked his prey, dragged him from his family home, then slaughtered him in a drug-fueled rampage.” The passage continued, “Thanks to our so-called justice system, the Death Valley Killer was never tried, nor executed. Instead, he was given a plea deal that could usher him back onto our streets within a few short years.”

These lines, regarded as the heart of the speech, were struck from the final draft, after tense discussions with officials from the Department of Justice. The president was told the edit was made in deference to the family of the victim.

Faced with this unfortunate rhetorical elision, Reagan did as he was prone; he ad-libbed. He told the police chiefs that his central regret as governor was that he had not invoked the death penalty more often. His cowardice had allowed seven killers to return to the streets; they had killed thirty-four more people. Any reporter who bothered to ask for documentation of these claims would have found none. The president had made them up.

FOREMOST AMONG THOSE gathered for the president’s address was its chief instigator. Of course, Nancy Reagan had not ordered her husband to deliver this speech, or any other. That was not how they operated, despite what the vultures in the media were so fond of insinuating. Instead, at the end of each day, Nancy joined him in bed and they talked. She listened to his drowsy complaints, the dull cabinet meetings and feuding staff, and smiled at his corny jokes, occasionally interjecting a sympathetic comment or observation, assembling the elements he would need.

She mentioned the galling details of the Stallworth case only once, after he himself brought up the task force. She reminded him of how he had cracked down on criminals and hippies as governor, had restored order to a lawless state. She told him how much she looking forward to returning to California, and mused aloud as to whether they might prolong their vacation if he traveled there with some official purpose.

In the moments before slumber, Nancy cast these notions into the dark air above him—like stars he might connect into a constellation—and waited, with the loyal patience of a Cancer, as they took root in the world of his dreams. She saw her husband as he needed to be seen: the intrepid navy captain, standing tall in his crisp uniform, barking out commands while others dove for safety.

THE FIRST LADY of the United States entered the auditorium a minute before the address was to begin. She wore a Bill Blass original, in a shade he insisted on calling incarnadine, accented with a white sash and judicious epaulets. Although she was physically dwarfed by her escort, the Sacramento chief of police, she appeared—by some illusion of celebrity—to loom over him as she was led from the wings of the stage to her seat in the front row.

Before sitting down, she turned and offered a sly salute to the assembly of police chiefs. This gesture elicited a standing ovation. The First Lady set a hand upon her heart and smiled, a dab of red in the sea of blue.

Nancy was delighted to be back in California. The sun reminded her of their years in Hollywood. She recalled the buzz of delivering lines into the giant black eye of a movie camera, smoldering on command, coming to know Ronnie, the giddy intertwining of their lives. Their wedding had been glorious, even though it was just a private ceremony, hurriedly arranged, even with the nausea that salted her tongue. They stood in that chintzy little church in the Valley, the five of them, she and Ronnie, William Holden and his wife Brenda, and the secret guest floating inside her.

The move to Sacramento had been a comedown. But she had endured the tawdry holiday pageants and dismal boutiques, as part of the path that had led Ronnie to his fate. Even the shooting had served its purpose. The stars had revealed his mettle. Beneath the tinseled charm lay a cord of steel that bound him to his role in history.

Nancy had hoped Rosemary Stallworth would attend as her special guest, but this request was quietly vetoed by the US attorney, who wanted no further media attention paid to the case. The First Lady was informed that the widow Stallworth, though grateful, wished to move on with her life. That was fair enough. The speech had been a rousing success, even without any mention of the Stallworth murder. For the first time in months, she felt her husband was perfectly safe in a public space. All it had taken was an auditorium with three thousand law enforcement officials in full dress uniform.

Afterwards, the First Lady received the attentions of the police chief, who eventually introduced her to the burly officer seated on her other side. “This is detective Douglas Jolley, ma’am. He was the lead investigator on a case you might have read about, the so-called Death Valley Killer.”

“Oh yes.”

“Jolley arrested the suspect.”

She turned and looked up at Jolley. “Is that right?”

The officer nodded diffidently. He had a big frame and a wide Irish face she found reassuring. Behind him, Denise was approaching, eager to hustle her off to the next event. But Nancy was seized by a question and, more remotely, by the conviction that only Jolley could answer it definitively. She grasped his arm with unexpected force. “What would make him do such a thing?”

“Ma’am?”

“To torture and kill an innocent man, a husband and father?”

“It’s like the president said: sometimes the evil inside us wins out, I guess.” He knew it wasn’t a very good answer, that the First Lady of the United States deserved better. “The other thing, he was under the influence of crack.”

“Crack?”

“It’s a solid form of cocaine, ma’am. More potent than the powder. Cheaper, too. So what you’ve got is someone with a ghetto mentality, and the drugs send them over the edge. They kind of lose the human part of themselves.”

“I see,” Nancy said quietly.

All around them, thousands of men with guns and badges churned in a kind of rhetorical ecstasy while reporters flung questions at her from the press box. Denise was tugging her sleeve, gesturing at the Secret Service agents who had readied her exit route. But the First Lady lingered a moment. She felt comforted, almost to the point of tears, by the phrase Jolley had used. The human part of themselves. It was like a smooth white veil slipped between the mayhem of this world and the one she had dreamed into being.

OWING TO THE ambiguous and upsetting nature of his demise, along with the family’s relocation to Philadelphia, no memorial service was ever held for Marcus Stallworth. In keeping with what they understood to be their mother’s wishes, her children avoided mentioning his passing, even when they spoke to friends from Sacramento. When the subject came up with new friends, they would say only that he had been a shy man who died suddenly. In this way, he was erased from the record of the living.

His colleague, Joseph Tennyson, edited the paper he was working on at the time of his disappearance—Toward a Theory of Parasitic Mating in the Order Scorpiones—and donated the bound manuscript to the Zoological Archive housed in the library at Sacramento State. This tract represented his lone contribution to the field of scorpiology, aside from his anonymous authorship of Prince of the Desert Night.

None of his children followed in his footsteps. His son, Glen, went into financial services, taking a job arranged by his grandfather. For a decade, he denied what had been apparent to him from a young age. In his thirties, he moved to New York City and began dating men, though never for more than a few months.

After an uninspired college career at Temple, Jennifer settled down with a wealthy classmate and bought a house in the same neighborhood as her mother, where, with the help of several caretakers, she raised two children. She became involved in Republican politics and worked as a precinct coordinator for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Neither Stallworth child was ever made aware that they had a half-sister named Sariah Taylor who was, in fact, a distant cousin of Romney’s.

ONLY A HANDFUL of people on earth knew that Marcus Stallworth had died by the hand of Ammon Taylor, not Antonio Saenz. Pedro Guerrero often vowed to go public with the story, out of duty to the Saenz family. But he knew that it would be impossible to prove this claim, and he worried that Captain Hooks—who had been promoted to deputy chief, the first African American to reach such a rank—would bring the powers of the department down upon him.

His failure to speak out caused Guerrero to feel like a coward and a fraud. He racked up a series of DUIs, the last of which culminated in an accident that caused minor injuries to a family on their way home from a Sizzler restaurant. Nando picked him up from jail and drove him straight to an alcohol recovery program.

Guerrero didn’t like the meetings but accepted them as necessary. He declined to share his own story but sat in back, listening, quietly awed at the variety of ways human beings found to ruin their lives. It was like being a cop in some ways: absorbing the language of shame that led people into bondage.

One Wednesday night, he spotted a woman across the room who looked eerily familiar. Lisa Catalis had grown stout in the intervening decade; her hair was streaked with gray. She had drunk her way into and out of one marriage and a few teaching jobs. She spoke plainly about all of this, and Guerrero recognized the story she was telling, which wasn’t about sin or failure so much as the erosion of faith.

Guerrero was under no illusions. He was an ugly man with a friar’s fringe of hair, an ex-cop who worked security at a failing mall. It took him a month to screw up the courage to introduce himself, and for a long moment, after she had recognized him, they both stood in silence. “We have some catching up to do,” Lisa said, at last. “I guess grabbing a drink isn’t really an option.”

They took to sipping coffee and eating pie at a diner near their meetings. Guerrero didn’t like to talk about his life. It made him ache for beer. But Lisa was good at waiting him out. When she laughed, he felt less alone. A year later, they moved to Oakland together. It was nothing either of them expected, as much a reprieve as a romance. Lisa took a job teaching science at a private school in Alameda. With her encouragement, Guerrero earned a teaching certificate and taught social studies at a middle school in Fruitvale where the students were mostly the children of Central American immigrants.

OVER THE YEARS, Guerrero made efforts to track down Lorena Saenz. She proved more elusive, in the end, than Marcus Stallworth. For one thing, she formally changed her name to Maria Lopez, adopting the surname of the cousins into whose apartment she moved. This was not a decision borne of loyalty but an effort to elude her past.

She remained devoted to her mother, speaking with her twice a week and sending money to help her re-establish a life in Honduras. But the news of Tony’s death, which Lorena had had to convey in a chaotic phone call that took place a week after the deportation, transformed Graciela. She moved back to the village outside San Pedro Sula where she had grown up. Her thinking became scattered, irritable, riddled with non sequiturs.

She worried that the US authorities were targeting Lorena for some unnamed persecution and sometimes hung up abruptly, claiming to have heard suspicious clicking noises. Lorena dismissed such talk as delusional. In fact, her phone had been tapped for several months, at the direction of Special Agent Joel Salcido, who hoped the women would eventually reveal the location of Marcus Stallworth’s remains.

Although Lorena was an American citizen with a valid passport, it would take more than a year to convince Graciela that it was safe for her to travel to Honduras. She found her mother living amid the sort of filth she had never tolerated in their Sacramento apartment. Her white hair was knotted into a rope that swung wildly as she spoke. Her first words to Lorena were, “Where’s Tony?” It became apparent that Graciela was giving much of her money to a local herbalist whose ritual cleansings promised to restore good fortune to her family.

Lorena consulted her aunts, who lived in San Pedro Sula, and summoned a doctor from the city who concluded that Graciela was suffering from a “mental collapse” brought on by the hardships she had suffered. He recommended sedatives. Lorena could not connect the woman who stood haranguing this doctor, vowing to bring a curse upon him, with the quiet, indomitable mother she had known as a child.

She did not give Graciela sedatives. Nor did she scold her for squandering money on an herbalist. She offered patience and companionship: phone calls, letters, a visit each year. Her mother eventually emerged from the fugue of her grief. She found work at a local clinic, performing the basic nursing duties she had witnessed for many years. She began attending a Bible study group. She spoke with great pride about her daughter and showed her off during visits, hosting small fiestas in her honor, walking arm-in-arm through the market, across the plaza, announcing to anyone they might encounter, “This is my daughter, the one who studies in America.”

As Lorena’s visits drew to an end, however, her lucidity often gave way to troubling episodes. One year, on the eve of her return flight, Lorena was awoken by her mother’s voice outside her window. She found Graciela kneeling in the dirt near the wood pile, murmuring an incantation of some sort. The beam of Lorena’s flashlight revealed the creature she was addressing: a small rust-colored scorpion.

“These little ones speak to me,” her mother explained, in a haughty manner. “They tell me secrets.”

For a moment, Lorena could feel the weight of all that she had kept from her mother, like the ghost of a scorpion on her palm. She had been drawn to the Stallworths initially by their wealth and ease. But it was their secrets that ensnared her: secret cigarettes and secret drinks, secret lusts and transgressions, which they pressed upon her, sensing, perhaps, that she had arrived in their midst bearing her own ruinous secret. Perhaps that’s what family was, in the end: a unit bound by blood and torn asunder by secrets.

Her mother was now extending a dainty hand toward the creature, as if asking for a dance.

“Come away from there,” Lorena whispered.

Graciela stared at her daughter in bewilderment, then smiled knowingly. “They only hurt the ones who don’t listen. You know that.” She began to nod. “You loved them once, didn’t you? But it was your brother who got stung.”

Lorena staggered; the stars above her lurched.

“Switch off that light,” her mother commanded. “They prefer darkness.”

Lorena did as she was told. She fixed her eyes on the scorpion, which sat perfectly still, its pincers glistening in the moonlight.

“You hear that?” Graciela whispered patiently. “You have to listen, mija.”

ROSEMARY STALLWORTH SPENT the remainder of her life on the Main Line. She married again, moving into the home of a widower considerably older than herself, a gentle and tiresome man who had worked with her father. The days yawned before her and she filled them with remodeling projects, civic work, gossip. Her grandchildren visited, though never quite enough. They regarded her as a cloying presence, the fount of rambling, possibly drunken yarns, which they gradually learned to evade. Her children remained remote, Glen in particular. Although she was often lonesome, Rosemary took pride in having seen them into respectable lives.

As for her first marriage, and the catastrophic events surrounding its demise, she tucked these away, like a soiled linen folded into an attic trunk. Only in sleep did her powers of containment falter. She suffered a recurring dream in which scorpions had been unleashed in her home. Her mother was sometimes present, casting useless blandishments; once or twice Nancy Reagan appeared. She stood on the landing, immaculate and horror-stricken, surveying the bedlam from above.

In time, these night terrors became so disruptive that Rosemary upped her dose of sleeping pills, which left her listless and disoriented during daylight hours.

ANTONIO SAENZ MADE his final preparations in the dank hour that preceded morning bed check, working with an industry that might have struck the casual observer as exuberant. He rolled his bed sheet tight and tied ligatures into it, then tossed one end over the sprinkler mechanism, which was composed of a pipe stub crowned with a deflector plate shaped like a steel daisy. It caught immediately; the ease of it sent a ripple through him. He looped the rope around the pipe twice and yanked, to make sure it wouldn’t pry off the deflector plate. He was left with nearly five feet of rope, more than enough to construct a hangman’s knot. He knew that a greater number of coils would increase the mass of the knot, and thus the force of the upward snap. But he found that each new coil added friction to the knot, as well, a problem he solved by smearing ChapStick along the contact points.

Because he had lost track of the date, Tony had no idea that it was his twentieth birthday. He knew only that a guard would saunter by at 6:30, which gave him thirty-nine more minutes. He sat at the concrete desk and wrote a short note, in careful Spanish, which he left on his pillow:

Dear Ma,

It is hard for me to put into words, but it is better if I go. Please trust me. I know I caused you a lot of pain but I always loved you. You were a great mom. Tell Lorena to stay in school. She always had the brains. Please forgive me.

Your son,

Antonio

At the direction of the warden, the letter was passed along to the FBI. It never reached Graciela Saenz.

Tony emptied his bladder and bowels. He stepped up onto the plastic bin and practiced his leap half a dozen times, to make sure his head would come through the noose at the optimum pitch. He didn’t know how much force would be required to break his neck, but it struck him as terribly important that his final effort in life be dignified. He wanted to get death right. To that end, he tucked the Bible he’d been issued into the waistband of his jumpsuit and secured it there by pulling on two pairs of underwear over the jumpsuit. He did this because the Bible was the heaviest object in his cell, but also because he liked to imagine that his mother might eventually learn this detail and feel gladdened in her heart. As a final measure, he stuffed each hand into a pair of socks, then doubled up, so that even if he panicked and tried to grab at the rope he would be unable to work his fingers under the noose.

He needn’t have worried. When his autopsy was released, the coroner detailed the victim’s meticulous preparations in rhapsodic detail. In twenty-seven years of work for the Department of Corrections, he had never witnessed a self-suspension so ingeniously executed, particularly given the Spartan nature of isolation units. He made note of the complete ligature mark that ran below the thyroid cartilage in the shape of a sickle, and listed the cause of death as cerebral hypoxia.

That Antonio Saenz would leave behind such an impeccable crime scene was especially striking, given the grisly allegations that had led to his incarceration. As a result, the FBI declined to classify his death as a suicide. It was ruled an “unsolved death,” possibly an execution carried out by incarcerated members of the Latin Kings.

IT WOULD BE inaccurate to describe the final moments of Tony Saenz’s life as peaceful. His body, after all, began to convulse. But his mind did produce a rush of thoughts that nonetheless culminated in a state of wonder. He could feel the weight of his father’s head, cradled to his narrow chest. They were in the desert, traveling north though a wilderness without mercy, toward America. Tony needed to wake his father up. He tried digging his fingers into the soft flesh where whiskers gave way to skin. Then he realized that his father had slipped from his grasp and floated into the dark sky above so that he was choking himself now and had been for a long time and even though he wanted desperately to breathe he could see that he would have to surrender that pleasure if he wanted his father back. It was a kind of trade: in exchange for his mortal breath he would be allowed to ascend, to take his place amid the riot of dead souls and flickering stars that disappeared before dawn lit the world.

IN THE MONTHS following her brother’s death, Lorena devoted her energies to re-establishing her life as a high school student. She moved to San Jose, into her cousin’s basement, and took a job cleaning an office after school, so she could chip in for rent and groceries and pay for her visits to Honduras. There was no one to help her process what she had endured; even if there had been, she wouldn’t have confided in them. She saw it as her duty to transcend these misfortunes, not to wallow in them. So she stored them away inside her, each memory in a secret box, all of them blindly thumping at their lids.

It was mostly at night that the memories would break loose. She would see Tony shackled to a table, or hear his soft growl. You did something. I can hear it in your voice. She would recall the lies she had told Jenny Stallworth, or wake up panting, a phantom hand on her cheek, sticky with blood. She would feel the flesh of her hips grasped and the warmth of Mr. Stallworth’s breath upon her pubic bone.

The world was littered with invisible triggers, too: the bang of firecrackers, the scent of chlorine or wine coolers, even a casual mention of the zodiac. Any of these might send her body into a panic, which she would have to disguise by finding the nearest bathroom and setting her head against the tile until the ringing stopped.

She began to attend church services, not in deference to her guardian, but because she hoped a relationship with God might help her manage these attacks. She found that the rituals of worship made her feel closer to her mother and more patient in the face of her trials. She could not bring herself to believe that a divine father dwelled in heaven, awaiting her supplication. Nor did she view the stories in scripture as historical events. They read more like grotesque fairy tales crafted to mete out moral instruction.

At times, though, Lorena saw faith in a more expansive manner, as a means of locating forgiveness. Religion helped congregants accept the most vexing aspect of the human arrangement: that most people made terrible decisions, even when they acted with the best of intentions. Her parents had come to America seeking opportunity. Tony had sought to protect her from Marcus Stallworth. The list went on forever.

As a student, Lorena still possessed the inclinations of a scientific mind. She understood that a sustained application of empirical principle marked the surest path to truth. But her own experiences had revealed a world that operated in precisely the opposite manner; those in power bent logic and circumstance to serve their beliefs. She was not skeptical of science, but of the human ability to honor it.

HAD SHE ATTENDED high school in a more prosperous section of San Jose, Lorena might have been urged to apply to college as a senior. Even with the disruption of her freshman year, she ranked among the top one hundred students in a graduating class of seven hundred. She scored well on the standardized tests, though not as well as she might have, because of her work schedule. But her school employed only one college counselor, who catered to those at the very top of the class, students who felt entitled to a college education and knew how to advocate for themselves.

Lorena enjoyed learning, but she did not think of herself primarily as a student. She focused on money, the supervision of her mother, how to keep anxiety at bay. Later in life, she would come to understand that she had held herself back, perhaps as penance for the sins committed against her brother. At the time, it simply felt like survival.

After high school, she took a job as an administrator in an office that distributed medical devices, and was quickly promoted to shipping and receiving. Within a year, she was running the department. The woman officially in charge, her supervisor, Mrs. Stochansky, had been with the company for forty-one years, through three divorces and two cancers. She was battling a third tumor now. She smoked with a ferocious impunity and spent her days dozing in her office.

Late one afternoon, as she prepared to depart, Stochansky turned to Lorena, who was entering data into a computer she had programmed to cross-reference bills of lading with each product’s SKU.

“Can I ask you something, Lopez?”

“Of course.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Lorena had tried to explain the computer program to her supervisor already. “It’s just something to simplify the inventory process.”

Stochansky fixed Lorena with a look that was both impatient and frankly tender. “Do a dying woman a favor, okay? Quit playing dumb. God didn’t give you that brain so you could design inventory sheets.” Stochansky unleashed a violent cough and hid the blood in her palm. “The world loves to overlook girls like you. Don’t make it any easier.”

MRS. STOCHANSKY NEVER returned to the office. Lorena received a promotion and a small pay raise and enrolled in night classes at the local community college. She focused on subjects that would lead to a nursing degree. In her second year, she allowed herself a single elective: a course called Science of the Sky, taught by an eccentric amateur stargazer who enjoyed dressing up in the costumes of Renaissance astronomers. Of the seven students, Lorena was the only female. The professor loaned them his own personal telescopes and set up celestial scavenger hunts. He encouraged them to spend as much time as they could looking into the night sky with no particular agenda. “Let your mind wander around up there. See what shakes loose.”

One night, her professor announced that he had astounding news. Vera Rubin, one of the most famous astrophysicists in the world, would be delivering a lecture at Stanford. The name had a familiar ring to it. But Lorena found the prospect of visiting the Stanford campus daunting. She told her professor that the talk was during her work hours, which happened to be true. He doffed the floppy beret by which he transformed himself into Copernicus. “The cosmos has delivered Vera Rubin unto you, Ms. Lopez. Seize the opportunity. I implore you.”

Rubin was a petite woman with a crop of short white hair and oversized glasses. She looked like a librarian. Lorena assumed she would use highly technical language. But she spoke rather plainly about her area of study, which concerned the movement of stars on the outskirts of galaxies. “We assumed these bodies would be rotating slowly, like the planets at the edge of our own solar system. But they were spinning very quickly. So quickly that the entire galaxy, by the known laws of gravity, should have flown apart. Astronomers call this the galactic rotation problem.

“Now I happen to think—I am making a little editorial comment here, with your permission—I happen to think this is a terribly unfair name. Human beings tend to classify anything that doesn’t fit into our current version of reality as a problem. It would be much more precise, and productive I think, to use the word riddle. It was a great riddle to all of us. And that is what makes science so pleasurable, isn’t it? Solving the riddles!” Rubin smiled with an undisguised delight.

She went on to detail the theories her colleagues put forward in response to her data. Some believed that different physical dynamics obtained in the outer regions of galaxies. Others suggested that irregular patterns of light absorption had distorted her measurements. And still others claimed her data were flawed.

“One night I was out at the observatory and I remembered something that my favorite astronomer, Maria Mitchell, once said: The universe veils its secrets in darkness. The reason these galaxies were rotating so fast, I realized, was the presence of nonluminous matter. We now know that more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe is hidden in darkness. It is out there, keeping us from flying apart, though we will never see it. I find this idea quite elegant. It has a theological aspect, I suppose.”

Rubin took a sip of water and gazed fondly at the mostly empty seats. “I must pause here to say a few words about Maria Mitchell. Most of you know she was the first female to discover a comet. You will not find her name in many textbooks. But she is the reason I became an astronomer. She made it possible.”

Lorena suddenly recalled sitting in her eighth-grade science class as Miss Catalis rhapsodized about Maria Mitchell. She had no doubt mentioned Vera Rubin, too. That’s why her name had sounded familiar.

MOST OF THE questions came from male faculty members and grad students, who treated Rubin with a grudging respect. They involved the intricacies of spectrographs and velocity curves. But toward the end of the session, a middle-aged woman seated a few rows in front of Lorena asked Rubin if it was true that her first paper on galactic rotation had been rejected by the American Astronomical Society.

“Oh yes! Rejection is a vital part of the scientific process. We stand atop the summit of our failures, don’t we? I happened to be terribly pregnant at the time, too, which probably didn’t help my cause. I suspect the women in the audience—there are a few of you, I see—will understand what I am saying here.” Rubin winked at the men in the first few rows.

“There is another saying in astronomy that comes to mind. It’s not the size of the telescope that matters, but whether your aim is true.” This remark drew a few muffled laughs. “It gives me enormous pleasure to see things I’ve never seen before. But it requires the humility to admit that human attention is imperfect. We still fail to apprehend most of the known world.

“I see some of you are confused. Allow me to elaborate. Earlier, your department put on a little reception for me. It was a lovely party and the food was scrumptious. There were scallops wrapped in bacon. I must have eaten a hundred. And yet, at no time amid this gluttony did I think, even once, about where those scallops came from, the reef from which they were harvested, the fisherman who did so, the worker in the slaughterhouse who butchered the hog, any of the hundreds of people who helped deliver these little morsels to my tongue. I gave no thought to the catering staff either, beyond wishing they would bring out more scallops. Nor the janitor who would dispose of all the greasy napkins I produced. I didn’t think about whomever set up this lovely microphone for me, or the people who will clean this auditorium when we leave in a few minutes. I know that they exist, theoretically. But my inattention rendered them invisible.” Rubin paused and squinted into the crowd. For a moment, her eyes settled on the young woman seated in the last row of the auditorium.

Then a young man in the front row, unable to contain himself, asked if harnessing the energy of dark matter might ever play a role in the weapon systems that President Reagan had proposed building in space.

Rubin smiled at her inquisitor, somewhat somberly. “I appreciate your question, but I am ill-equipped to discuss technologies of aggression. As I have sought to convey, science is about the great pleasure of seeing new things. It is a torch. As such, it can illuminate our world or it can burn us down.”

She glanced at her watch and smiled again, this time warmly. “It has been an honor to spend time with you this evening. If you will allow me one final thought. I am not a medical doctor, or even a biologist. But it is my belief that the central challenge we face as a species arises from dark matter within us, the regions of ourselves that we cannot see or confront. I recommend that you look into the sky as much as you can. Perhaps the answers lie there.”

LORENA SAT IN her chair for a long time. She felt a damp buzzing beneath her ribs. Everything she looked at—the students clustered around Rubin at the front of the room, the green velvet curtains behind them, the swooping vault of the ceiling with its spiraling filigree—shimmered with an aura, like a photographic afterimage. She could smell the solvent of her pen, and the cherry Life Saver someone nearby was sucking. The clasp of her bra was digging into her back; she could feel the crimped welt it would leave. This was not the inward plunge of anxiety. It was more like the vivid sensations she had experienced with Mr. Stallworth.

At a certain point, she realized that someone was standing in front of her.

“Are you okay, my dear?” Her professor wore a robe of royal blue, meant to evoke the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, against which a prick of red stood out just below his earlobe, where he had nicked himself shaving.

Lorena nodded. Blood spun outward from her heart, into the galaxy beyond.

“Are you sure?”

“It was beautiful.”

“Oh, I see. Good. Let’s go say hello before Ms. Rubin gets swallowed up by these Stanford brats.”

“That’s alright,” Lorena said. “I should get back to work.”

The professor shook his head, as if she had missed the point. He touched her hand, very gently. “Don’t you understand, my dear? You must meet her. You’re my star student.”

IT TOOK LORENA five years to receive enough credits to earn her bachelor of science. She applied, and was accepted, to a graduate program in astronomy at New Mexico State University, in Las Cruces. A week before she was to depart, she found herself standing on the grand concourse of Great America, a garish amusement park off the 101, watching children from her church group hurtle through the air in brightly colored rocket ships and shriek with delight. Across the sea of asphalt and sunburned necks, she spotted a woman she knew holding hands with a little Hispanic guy in a baseball cap. For a moment, she felt again the elation of hearing her named called out, followed by that of the most popular girl in her entire eighth grade class, and grinned without realizing it. She wanted to tell her old teacher about her graduate work, perhaps even thank her. But before she could cross the concourse, Miss Catalis was gone, along with the man on her arm, Pedro Guerrero.

LORENA SPENT THE balance of her years in Las Cruces, devoting herself to the study of dark matter and gravitational fields, at the university’s observatory. The Blue Mesa Observatory sat atop Magdalena Peak in the Sierra de las Uvas, thirty miles northwest of town and a mile above it. The observatory’s dome housed a telescope lens two feet across, along with a spectrograph, spectrophotometer, and photoelectric photometer.

As much as she enjoyed capturing data, Lorena felt most alive outside. At around midnight, the generators shuddered to a halt and a profound silence descended. She would wrap a sleeping bag around her shoulders and hike through this silence to a nearby promontory, with a thermos of hot tea and a notebook.

For some, the night sky was a canvas on which to paint their national glory with fireworks, or the boundary of a fortress that could be made impregnable with magical missile systems. But Lorena saw a different sky. By training and inclination, she understood that the brightest bodies of the Milky Way—Sirius, Rigel, the sparkling Pleiades—were nothing more than specks of dust bound together by a pall of dark matter. Science could not proceed without faith in the unseen. And the unseen revealed itself only with patient observation.

It took a number of years, but she came to an understanding with the dark matter inside herself. She gazed upon the girl she had once been—the one who starved herself into designer jeans and basked in the radiance of the Stallworth family—and saw a child whose yearning to be seen left her vulnerable to exploitation. She saw in Mr. Stallworth a man desperate to conceal, and helpless to contain, his foulest urges. At the same time, he had been the first person to recognize her for who she really was, to set a scorpion upon her skin and aim her gaze at the heavens.

There were others to whom she owed a debt of gratitude: her mother, Miss Catalis, even, in his own irascible way, Officer Guerrero.

In moments of tranquility, she was able to discern that her brother had been dragged under, not by her misdeeds but by those of the police, and even before that, by humiliations heavier than his hopes. She would never be free of his death, or her mother’s anguish. These losses had become a part of her. They bound her together.

If the wind wasn’t too harsh, she would bundle up and sleep under the stars and wake to find dawn flaring off the geometry of the cliffsides, a hundred shades of red and brown, and later, the grays and greens of the desert floor stretching to a sharp blue horizon. Her life was not without these joys.

AS PART OF her duties as a research fellow, Lorena was required to teach Intro Astronomy once a year. She wasn’t much good in the classroom. It was hard for her to accept that she had the right to lecture anyone. She struggled to convey her passion for astronomy to a room full of yawning freshmen, most of whom had no sense of what might excite them.

But the class did include an overnight to Blue Mesa. And occasionally, on such trips, Lorena would discreetly invite a favorite student to stargaze with her. If she was feeling mischievous, she might even share her secret hobby with them, drawing out a purple light and revealing how scorpions fluoresced. Most students responded with polite disgust. But once in a great while, she would encounter the other sort, a young woman struck by enchantment.

The last time this had happened was shortly before the college tore down the Blue Mesa Observatory, to make room for a radar installation. The student in question, Gloria Calero, had a habit of slipping into class and taking a corner seat in back. No speaking, no eye contact. Lorena knew that she had grown up in a home where her guardians, or guardian, was undocumented. Only in her written work did Gloria’s formidable intelligence emerge.

Lorena hadn’t expected Gloria to come on the Blue Mesa overnight at all, and she was even more surprised to find the girl milling around after dinner, pretending to fiddle with the hot cocoa machine. Gloria had a question about astronomical scintillation—the atmospheric interference that makes stars appear to twinkle—and why it didn’t apply to planets. In fact, she had a whole slew of questions, which she had apparently been accumulating all term, about galactic curvature, gamma ray bursts, the Big Bang.

Lorena eventually set her mug down. “Did you bring any other clothes with you, Gloria? A warm coat, maybe?”

She led the girl to a rocky hillside where she knew stripe- tailed scorpions liked to hunt and clicked on her UV light. The girl let out a soft gasp. “They’re like little stars, aren’t they?”

“Actually, they don’t twinkle. So they must be planets.”

Gloria kneeled to get a closer look. “My abuela says they’re kind of like tricksters, that they carry secrets from one house to another in their tails. She lives down in Oaxaca, so she’s into superstitious stuff.”

“My grandma said the same thing. Scorpions have all the secrets. That’s why they only come out at night.” Lorena kneeled next to Gloria and together they watched the creature scurry under a rock.

“There he goes,” the girl said.

“Actually, that was a she.”

“Why do they glow like that, anyway?”

“Nobody knows for sure. My guess is that their exoskeletons are super sensitive to shifts in ambient light, which helps them find shelter from predators.”

“Like an alarm system.”

“Right. Scorpions know that it’s a dangerous thing to be seen.”

For a few seconds, neither of them said anything. Then Gloria turned away. Her shoulders began to shake, very gently. It dawned on Lorena that whatever burden the girl was carrying had been jarred loose. Maybe her father was in custody, or she had no father, or someone she loved had fallen ill, or she herself was ill with love.

“Can I tell you something, Gloria?”

The girl wouldn’t look directly at Lorena, but she gave a slight nod.

“You’ve got an incredible mind. Don’t be afraid to share it with the world.”

Gloria Calero smiled without meaning to. Down below, at the observatory, the generators chuffed and fell still and suddenly they could hear their own breathing.

Lorena clicked off her flashlight. “Let’s leave these little guys alone. They’re never going to spill the beans anyway.” Above them, a billion stars lay scattered across the cosmic mantle, each held in place by forces beyond their seeing. “How about this,” Lorena whispered. “Why don’t we go see what the stars will tell us tonight?”