usual three months had passed, but her mom didn’t start complaining about the way the meds made her feel. Jason was moved to rehab, and her mother stayed with him, going in daily to help him with physical therapy. Eventually the rehab facility offered her a nursing job. Her mom had lost so many nursing jobs over the years, and Lucy knew it was only a matter of time until this one fizzled or exploded . . . but it didn’t.

When winter rolled around, they didn’t move to a new house, either. They stayed where they were. It took Lucy another two years to believe that her mother might stay on her medication. By then, though, Jason was starting to hear the voices, and it began again, only this time with a different main character. Her mother became a supporting actor where she had once been the star. It might seem ironic that a sick patient—now better—would be forced to care for another patient with the same disease, but it never seemed that way to Lucy. All she could think was that they would never be free.

She turned around near the Turquoise Trail volunteer fire department and headed back toward town. This time she was so caught up in her thoughts, she saw little of the scenery.

She thought of Alex Stevens. She knew nothing about him, but she hated him just the same. She hated him for preying on someone because the person was mentally ill. For lying and not caring that he had just ruined another person’s life. And he did lie. Of that Lucy was sure. She just couldn’t understand why. She didn’t know the ins and outs of the Brianna case well enough to make an educated guess, but she was happy to make an uneducated one—Alex Stevens was lying because he’d killed Brianna. This was his crude way of pointing the finger at someone who had no way to defend himself.

Lucy had no problem with this assumption, because the police had assumed much the same way that a mentally ill person must be the killer. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she was mad at Gil. In fact, she was furious. She had thought better of him. She had thought he wouldn’t assume that just because someone was insane the person was guilty. She wasn’t sure why she had granted Gil such lofty characteristics in her own mind. Maybe it was because in the past—their past—he had been so impeccably honest. And good. And kind. And cute. Lucy sighed. She knew how she sounded—like an infatuated girl. Now she was an infatuated girl who had just discovered her handsome prince was only human.

She got onto the interstate and took the exit toward downtown. She kept to the back roads to save time. She took Paseo de Peralta around downtown and headed toward Fort Marcy Park.

She pulled into the parking lot where Zozobra had stood two nights earlier. The ash from the fire had been cleaned up, as had the field that the hill overlooked. It had been carefully turned back into the baseball diamond that it was. Lucy walked over to the concrete slab holding the metal pole that served as Zozobra’s backbone, where a makeshift memorial had been erected overnight for the victim. There was a mass of candles on the ground, some still lit, others long gone out. A rainbow of plastic rosaries twined around the pole. Vases held flowers, some fake, some real, some handpicked from the roadside. There was a large poster that read HEAVEN HAS A NEW ANGEL and a fair number of stuffed animals—unicorns, teddy bears, and dolphins. Two women were at the memorial, standing off to the side. They prayed quietly on their rosary. This was typical of how New Mexicans reacted when a child was killed. A few years ago, when the body of an anonymous little boy was found buried in the sand of an Albuquerque playground, the neighbors of the park held daily rosary services and candlelight vigils. The playground was overtaken by a memorial much like this one. The neighbors said they prayed for the boy because his own family had left him unclaimed and abandoned.

Lucy thought again about Alex Stevens. Had he killed the little girl? Maybe. Probably. She had no proof, though, and she knew Gil would need proof and not just her word that Stevens was lying.

For that, Lucy would have to make use of some of her old-fashioned reporting tricks—and