like a million camera flashes. Lucy could feel the heat from the flames that licked their way down his body. Zozobra snapped and crackled as the terrorizing flames scorched his dress.

Zozobra kept growling, the crowd kept screaming, and Lucy closed her eyes in a prayer of sorts. She tried to let the anxiety she’d been holding on to for months flow out of her.

Zozobra was a monster, but first and foremost, he represented a new beginning. He was burned every year so the problems of the past would go up in flames with him. He was Old Man Gloom, and the people in the crowd were the victors, the conquistadores. They would triumph over their troubles by burning their past mistakes. Zozobra was one big cleansing fire.

Lucy hoped it was true. She hoped the memory of the last few months would be wiped away in the white-hot fire. She opened her eyes again. Zozobra was a metal skeleton now devoid of his paper flesh. He still hung on his stand, a small bonfire burning at his feet. Fireworks burst into the night; the crowd laughed around her. She heard one of the teenagers behind her say, “That was a good burn.” Lucy hoped it was.

Part of the Zozobra tradition was for people to write letters that were put in the base of Zozobra before he was burned. They threw in old photos, divorce papers, police reports—any worry they wanted to be rid of. She had written a note that had been burned in the fire, as so many other people had.

Her note had been simple: Release me.

CHAPTER TWO

Friday Morning

Detective Sergeant Gilbert Montoya of the Special Investigations Team stood on a hill, looking out over the baseball field littered with trash—plastic cups, paper plates, food wrappers. The sun was still coming up, yet he could make out almost everything in the navy blue morning, the faintest trace of crispness in the newly autumn air.

He glanced up at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to see if any of the aspen had started to turn yet, but there was no flash of yellow. The hillsides still had their swatches of green. Then again, it was only the second week of September. In another month, the color would be there. He turned his attention back to the hill he stood on, which last night had served as a stage.

He walked back over to the pile of ash that had been Zozobra only eight hours ago and looked up at the metal pole that was permanently cemented into the hilltop. It had served as Zozobra’s backbone during all the burnings. The fifty-foot-tall pole, scarred and pitted with years of fire, still held tightly to the chicken-wire mesh of Zozobra’s skeleton from the night before.

Gil looked down at the huge pile of ash, as did the four other people standing next to him.

The four men were all members of the Protectores de la Fiesta, a group whose job for almost three hundred years has been to guard the fiesta’s tradition and symbols. Gil’s grandfather and dad had both been members before they died. It was an elite group, allowing in only male descendents from one of the forty or so Spanish families that founded Santa Fe.

Growing up, Gil always knew it was fiesta weekend by two things: his mother making tray after tray of carne adovada and his dad and grandfather dressing in the uniform of the Protectores—black pants and a yellow satin shirt with a red sash. The colors of the New Mexico flag.

The four Protectores who had been watching the remains of Zozobra all night were there to make sure no sparks got free and nothing got rekindled. They had been the ones who had prompted Gil’s wake-up call. As the sky had started to lighten, something strange in the ashes had caught their attention. They had raked and pushed the cinders around until they finally figured out what they were looking at—a human skull.

Gil had been woken up from a sound sleep. He had gone to bed early—just after 10:00 P.M. He and his family hadn’t gone to Zozobra. In fact, they had never gone together. The year his daughter Therese was born, there had been a gang shooting on the Plaza just after Zozobra burned. Susan had refused to bring their daughters since. Gil had thought about insisting they go this year. The girls were old enough—Joy was twelve; Therese was ten. The girls themselves had pestered Susan every day for the