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Gordo’s favorite expression—in fact, he’d had it engraved on the wall in the Palm Garden at the Desert Oasis—was “denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” You’d think once in a while he’d read what he put on his own wall. He seemed to think that sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting “Lalalalala” would absolve him from responsibility for the people she intimidated, beat up, or killed.

Gordo’s younger brother, Jerry Gold (Jerry had officially changed his name from “Gould” to “Gold” because “Gold sounded richer”), was even more of a wuss. The two of them had zero qualms about killing someone if it helped their bottom line, but they treated the whole transaction like genteel ladies sipping tea.

They lived in a dreamworld.

Shaun looked at the doorway to the abandoned mining building. Jimmy was just inside, the sunlight spotting him against the deeper shadow. His clothing was streaked and clotted with blood. He was working on something, cutting away at the sun-pinked corpse.

Then he held his hand up and gave a rebel yell.

Riis’s scalp.

Shaun understood the rush, the feeling of triumph with your first kill. To know that you could cross that line—and easily—made you special. She had sensed that in Jimmy when she first met him. That knowledge had ripened in the weeks after Jimmy agreed to become her son. He was impatient, but he had to be schooled first.

Today she’d finally let him experience his first kill: she let him have Riis.

She smiled at the way her boy had listened to Riis’s pleas and appeared to consider them. He knew what was required, and deflected pity. Actually, Shaun suspected Jimmy didn’t have pity.

To his credit, he did not toy with Riis. He did not tease him. He listened, he considered, giving great weight to Riis’s pleas…and then he shot him twice, a clean shot through the eye and a follow-up shot to the chest.

Bang bang.

Look at him now, holding up the scalp!

This would be the first and last time Jimmy would be allowed to celebrate in the end zone. The whole point was to divorce yourself from emotion, good or bad. Do your job. Take pride in it, but carry out your assignment in a workmanlike, efficient manner. Don’t get too involved, because that is how even the good ones get tripped up. She’d learned all this, and she would teach Jimmy.

It made her proud to know she was not only a mom, but a teacher.

“OK,” she called out. “Time to get rid of them.”

Jimmy stared at her. He had the scalp on his head. Blood was dripping over his eyes and onto his nose.

“Don’t be such a clown,” she shouted.

He removed the scalp and bowed deeply, with a flourish of hair and blood. “Ta-daaaa!”

Like the magician they saw in San Francisco.

Cocky.

She could have debriefed Hogart and Riis and sent them on their way to screw up another day. But there had been pressure. Recently, Jimmy had begun to withhold his affection.

All he could think of was his first hit. Shaun had told him to wait, to be patient, hoping he would learn discipline, but now she wondered if her decision to let him kill Riis might have been too much, too soon. It worried her. Their bond could not be broken. Which might have been the reason she let him have his way today.

Was she an overindulgent mother?

She hoped her decision to let Jimmy kill Riis wouldn’t turn out to be a big lapse in judgment.

Chapter Nine

TESS WAS DRIVING back to the sheriff’s office when she saw the woman and the boy.

She’d answered a burglary call out in Two Points, a wildcat development of manufactured homes in the desert flats south of Paradox, and had come back by way of County Route 9, which turned into Third Street. When Tess rolled to a halt at the stop sign at Third and Yucca, she noticed the “For Sale” sign up at Joe’s Auto-Wash.

She constantly scanned her surroundings. That was part of her job: to look for trouble. Tess was always on the alert for any kind of anomaly, anything out of place.

She spotted a woman, a boy, and a new white truck in one of the bays at Joe’s.

The boy was using the spray gun to reach the top of the truck and the woman was scrubbing the wheel wells.

The woman, whose back was to Tess, stiffened. She straightened up slowly and turned to look in Tess’s direction. For a moment, Tess thought she’d been mistaken—was it a man? No, a woman.

The woman gave her a long look and then turned away—a casual move that was anything but—and went back to work. But Tess could sense the woman was aware that she hadn’t driven on. Tess could imagine the woman sending feelers out into the air. Silly, but she didn’t dismiss it because so much of police work depended on instinct. Instinct had saved her life on more than one occasion.

The strange thing was, the woman looked like a cop. She was clothed the way a male undercover cop would dress: she wore a knit polo shirt loose over the hips, jeans, and good athletic shoes. When the woman turned away, Tess saw the outline of a weapon on her hip, under the shirt.

The truck was brand new. Tess memorized the temporary Arizona license sticker in the back window of the truck, then drove on, circling the block. She came back up the other street—Yucca. Now she could see the inside of the car wash bay from the other side. Everything was silhouetted against the hot glare of the sun, but Tess could see that the woman was standing in front of the truck now, watching as she drove past.

Tess felt a jolt to her heart. Pure adrenaline, laced with fear.

Something about that woman, the way she watched Tess drive by. It made Tess feel as if she’d dodged a bullet. When she reached the next stop sign, she realized her legs were shaking.

BACK AT THE sheriff’s office, Tess ran the white truck’s temporary license number. The truck was new off the lot at Talbot’s Chevrolet in Clarkdale, Arizona. It had been sold to a Sedona company called “Sandstone Adventures.”

Tess spent the next twenty minutes trying to run down Sandstone Adventures, but after checking several business directories, she found no such company. She called a friend of hers who ran a jeep tour out of Sedona.

“Sandstone Adventures? Never heard of them.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know every company in this town. I have to—they’re the competition.”

“Thanks,” she said.

She called the dealership that sold the truck and asked to talk to the salesman. He was reluctant to divulge any information about a customer at first, but at last, he told her that the buyer wanted the truck for a company.

“What did he look like?” Tess asked.

“It was a she.”

“Did she look like a man?”

“Are you kidding? She was a real looker. Long blonde hair, pretty rich looking.”

Could that be the same woman? The one who clearly enjoyed looking like a man?

Tess knew what Pat would say: nothing there.

But he hadn’t seen her in the flesh.

“Anything else you can tell me about the woman?”

“She had a kid with her.”

Tess’s pulse quickened. “How old?”

“I dunno. Eleven, twelve, maybe? Kid had a yo-yo. About drove me nuts. A distraction, you know?”

It was her.

By now, the woman and boy were probably long gone. Why would they stay in Paradox? Tess would keep an eye out for them, sure, but she wouldn’t go looking. She’d have no reason to pull them over. They had not broken any law as far as she could tell.

Tess realized she was relieved.

Chapter Ten

Ten Minutes to Midnight

THE COYOTES ON the bajada were yipping again. No matter how often Sheriff Thaddeus “Bonny” Bonneville heard them, their manic, high-pitched shrieks set his teeth on edge. Been that way since he was a kid.