dug a little with her stick and revealed other small bones beneath the film of sand. The water runoff from the summer storms had probably tumbled and turned the bones many times, leaving them here to be buried by the desert.

The arroyo, which had been filled with nothing more than the sound of a meadowlark that morning, was now buzzing with activity.

Lucy had called Gerald Trujillo, who had been at the fire station, and asked him to look up the nearest dirt roads in their one-of-a-kind back-road map book. Gerald found an easy access road just a few yards down, and then people started to show up quickly.

The first had been Liz, who had been driving back up to Santa Fe to get a change of clothes and give her family a kiss. She got the call while she was on the interstate and was able to hit the right exit.

At the moment, Liz was bent over the bones with Tamara, saying, “The problem is that you didn’t account for the smaller bone size and density, which makes the weathering process happen more quickly. Bone weathering is all about the surface-to-volume ratio. The smaller the bone, the higher the surface-to-volume ratio and—”

“The quicker the weathering,” Tamara said, finishing her sentence. “I get it. Of course, I see where I made the mistake . . .”

Lucy sat in the shade of a cottonwood tree, just looking at the sky.

Joe came over to Gil, who was still watching Liz and Tamara. The two women had just shared a laugh about some concept of bone aging.

“So,” Joe said, in a low voice. “There never was any crazy person who was a serial killer pedophile with a mental illness and a guilty conscience.”

Gil said nothing. Their profile of the killer had been right, but they had created that profile based on an assumption—that the man who killed Brianna kept her bones in order to set up the elaborate displays. The problem had not been with the profile. The problem had been in that assumption. They never looked at the killing and the displays as separate events. David Geisler had suffered for it.

Gil looked down again at the map book in his hand. He had gotten it out of Liz’s car. It was the same book that all police and firefighters used to get around town. It had page after page of detailed maps. If you leafed through the pages fast enough, it was almost like a flipbook, showing the heart of the city, then the residential areas, and finally the rural lands. Where they were now. Gil had used that continuity to check a theory he had.

“I guess Ashley didn’t sell Brianna to a psychopath, either,” Joe said. “Now we just have to figure out how the body ended up here.”

When Gil had looked though the map book, he had been following a dotted line. One single line. From page to page, he used his finger to trace that dotted line. He followed that line from behind the Rodriguez house to right where they were standing now. In the map’s legend, a dotted line indicated an arroyo.

“The answer to that is easy,” Gil said. “Brianna did go into the arroyo behind the house the day she disappeared—but she didn’t fall in and drown. Someone stabbed her and threw her in. The water carried her here.”

Gil looked up at the sky as a crow flew overhead, then said, “We just narrowed our suspect list down to the four people who were in that house.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sunday Afternoon

Rose Rodriguez sat in the hospital waiting room trying to will her sponsor to arrive. She had called the woman in a panic.

Rose wanted a drink. Badly. Painfully. In her head, she had already gone to her car and driven to the gas station down the road to get the vodka she knew they had behind the counter.

She started to cry. She wasn’t sure if it was the pain of the wanting or because her daughter had just gone into emergency surgery. That was why she wanted the vodka. Because Ashley was having such a hard time in labor, they had to do an emergency C-section.

The doctors said that the baby’s heartbeat had started to fade. Then, as a nurse looked between Ashley’s legs and said something about the cord, it seemed that everyone was suddenly in such an angry hurry. Rose was told to leave. Ashley started crying. Alex was nowhere to be found, and Justin and Laura were