Book Preview - Credo's Bones

Chapter One

Today, I can honestly say, is the first time I've wondered what the hell I was thinking when I decided to become a cop. At the moment, my partner, Casey Bowman, and I were on our knees in a sweltering, dilapidated old camper that had been abandoned on a property that bisected the line between the City of Tucson and Pima County.

Not only did the property bisect the line, but the camper did as well. To our great misfortune, the part that contained the toilet with the human femur sticking out of it just happened to be located in the city. So, since it was a very old bone and the homicide detectives were supposedly too busy to come take a look, our sergeant, Kate Brannigan, agreed to have Casey and me dig around to see what else we could find under the toilet, beneath the rat droppings and around the cholla cactus some packrat had dragged in.

My name is Alexandra Wolfe. I'm a detective with the Tucson Police Department assigned to the Special Crimes Unit. I'm twenty-nine and stand about five-foot-seven. My eyes are brown, as is my hair, which is short and usually a mess since I never learned how to properly use a blow dryer.

I adjusted the facemask covering my nose and mouth to allow a tiny bit of air to circulate around my face. Major mistake. The smell of packrat urine and decades-old decay overwhelmed my senses. My eyes even began to water, which surprised me. In the desert, it's generally so dry in the summer any liquid my body might produce usually evaporates into the sweltering 115-degree heat. My hands, however, were drenched and chafing. The rubber gloves were fulfilling their purpose: no fluids in or out.

"Here, hold this." Casey had managed to dislodge the remainder of the bone from the depths of the holding tank. She handed it back to me with the proper care and dignity she felt any dead body part deserved. This was hardly textbook evidence collection. But then, getting one of our departments to actually claim the crime scene demanded we pull out the bone to see what we had.

I, who hate dead bodies, looked at the white scepter she was passing with undisguised disgust. "Explain to me again why we can't just put the whole camper on a tow truck and take it to the station so the people in the crime lab can dismantle the thing piece-by-piece in the cool air-conditioned garage?" I gingerly took the bone between thumb and forefinger and set it down on a clean sheet.

Kate stuck her head in the door. She'd been outside arguing with the supervisor from the Sheriff's Department over whose jurisdiction the camper fell under. "Believe me, Alex, if I could get just one commander from either department to lay claim to the crime scene, then we could move the damn thing. As it is, both departments want to know what we have before either of them will take it."

She carefully picked up the bone and began to examine the shaft. "That's why the three of us are sitting out here in the middle of this Godforsaken field rummaging through years of garbage and filth."

Casey reached into the toilet again. I leaned over and watched as she gingerly poked the disposal flap open with one finger. She clicked on her mini-mag flashlight and pointed it into the hole, trying to see if there was anything else of interest down there.

When we'd first arrived, we took a cursory walk around the camper. Sometime after the camper was abandoned, some rocket scientist removed the pipes leading to the black water waste valve and shoved a large, galvanized livestock watering tank directly under the toilet hole. They'd screwed the top flanges around the edge of the tank directly to the bottom of the camper, so the only way to empty the damn thing was to unscrew it and tip it to the side, letting all the effluent run down the nearby hill. Little holes had been poked in the sides of the stock tank, probably in an effort to vent the methane gas that would otherwise seep back up into the camper with such a harebrained invention.

Casey sat back on her heels and absently rubbed her forehead with the upper part of her sleeve. "Whoa."

Kate and I spoke at the same time. "Whoa?"

Casey's jaw tightened over the edge of her mask. "Lots of desiccated poop with what looks to be chunks of bones embedded in it." She glanced back at Kate. "And I think I could make out parts of three orbital sockets."

Kate stepped up onto the rusted step we'd managed to tug out from under the door and pulled herself inside. "Let me take a look."

Casey stood and made a beeline for the door. "It's all yours. It may be 115 outside, but that's still cooler than in here."

I got up to leave as well, but Kate had other ideas. "Hold it, Alex. I want you to take a look after I do so we can all compare notes on what's down there."

Sighing, I dutifully waited for her to look down the hole. When she'd finished, I took the proffered flashlight and slowly lowered my free hand down into the toilet, feeling the morning's chorizo and eggs making their way back up from where they'd only just recently gone down.

"Kate," I cleared my throat in an effort not to sound so pathetic. "You know I hate dead bodies. In fact, didn't I tell you that if you ever wanted to get rid of me, all you have to do is transfer me into homicide? Dead bodies are so… dead. They stink, the old ones look really slimy and—"

"Everything's dried up. There's no odor of decaying flesh and no slime. Now, are you going to look down there? Because if you're not, I happen to know they need a new patrol officer out at the landfill."

I knew it was an empty threat. But I also knew Kate had some very creative ways of handling discipline, and I'd never particularly cared for any of them. "Fine." I wedged myself back into the tiny bathroom, pushed open the flapper at the bottom of the bowl, and shined my light down the hole.

I'll dispense with describing the piles of desiccated filth, but I could definitely see the three pieces of orbital bone Casey had mentioned. I couldn't tell if they were three pieces of two eye sockets, thus possibly belonging to only one person, or three separate sockets from two, or maybe three, distinct skulls. I say three pieces of two sockets because I could clearly make out the outside curve of the orbital bone on two of the pieces, but I couldn't tell if the third circular piece was from an eye socket or something else entirely. The forensic people would have to figure that out.

The little I could see had grabbed my interest, though, and I completely forgot that my head was down inside a fifty-year-old, much-used, and little-cleaned toilet bowl. Sharp fragments of bone lay interspersed among the dried and flaking contents of the tank.

Someone had gone to great effort to reduce the various skeletal parts to sizes that would fit through the three-inch opening. My guess was it would take the lab quite a while to piece together the human puzzle those fragments represented.

As I was about to pull my head out and close the flap, my light glinted off a shiny object almost completely buried in the debris off to the right side of the tank. I studied it a minute, then sat back and blinked, trying to reconcile what I thought I'd seen with where we were and what we were doing.

Kate squatted down next to me. "What?"

I glanced over my shoulder at the county deputy and sergeant, who were both poking their heads into the camper through the tight doorway. I looked back at Kate and shrugged. “Nothin’.” I wasn't sure I wanted to say what I thought I'd seen in front of the deputies, so I stood up and motioned to the two men. "Excuse me. I need to get out for some fresh air."

Before I stepped down from the camper, Kate stopped me. "Alex." She held out her hand, indicating the flashlight with a waggle of her fingers. I handed it to her and watched as she squatted down and pushed open the flange.

I hadn't realized just how hot I'd gotten until I descended the rickety step into the fresh air, tore off my facemask, and took a deep breath of cool, 115-degree desert air.

Casey walked over with two bottles of water. She handed me one, then poured part of the other over the top of my head. "Here, your face has gone past red. Cool yourself down before you end up with heat stroke." She pulled a third bottle out of her back pocket and handed it to Kate when she joined us.

Kate's far-off expression told me she'd seen what I thought I'd seen. She held my gaze for a second, very clearly telling me to keep my mouth shut, then turned to the sheriff's deputies. "I'm going to make an executive decision on this one, Mike, and cut out the command staff completely. We'll take the case, but you guys owe us one." She flashed him a winning smile while pulling off her rubber gloves and holding out her hand as a gesture of goodwill.

The sergeant, a rather portly man whose belly completely covered most of his duty belt, shook her hand genially. He wasn't wearing a bulletproof vest, but his tan uniform shirt was soaked through, and rivulets of sweat were pouring down his face and dripping onto the dirt at his feet. I guess the evaporation theory doesn't hold true for truly obese people. Whatever was happening, he didn't look like he should be out here in this heat much longer.

Kate graciously pulled back her hand, which was now covered with a slick sheen of sweat that had transferred from his meaty palm to hers. 

Obviously relieved that we'd taken the scene, Sergeant Mike chuckled and started walking toward his air-conditioned car. In answer to my question, he turned and called over his shoulder. "Who knows why these grungies do what they do? Probably using the place as a hotbox or something." Grungies was the term most cops used for the dirty, mostly young street people who wouldn't take a job or a shower if it were handed to them on a silver platter. A hotbox is a sealed, airtight room, or in this case, a camper, where pot smokers go to smoke their joints. The exhaled smoke stays in the air so they can breathe it in again in order to get full use of their joint.

Casey pulled a travel package of hand wipes from her pocket and handed one to Kate, who took it with a nod and motioned to a nearby palo verde tree. "Let's get into the shade where we can talk without passing out from the heat."

We followed her to what little shade the branches provided. The tree was aptly named, as palo verde literally means "green stick" in Spanish. The canopy consisted of hundreds of intertwined sticks that grudgingly offered a pittance of shade to the truly desperate.

Kate pulled a small notepad out of her back pocket, along with a pen, and looked at Casey and me. "All right, let's see what we have. Casey, what did you see down there?"

Casey stared off into the distance, apparently trying to picture what she'd seen. "Fragments of bones in among the filth. I'm no expert, but it looked as though someone had tried to break them up enough to be able to stuff them down the toilet. I saw what I think were the bones that go around the eye sockets, and—" She glanced at Kate. "I think I saw three of them, which means—maybe there was more than one skeleton?"

Kate was jotting something on her notepad. She spoke as she scribbled one last thought. "I don't mind you making guesses at this point. I want your first impressions, not ideas that have been filtered through your logical mind." She looked up from the paper. "Anything else?"

Nodding, Casey pulled off her sunglasses and began wiping sweat off the lenses as she tried to remember every detail. "The femur I pulled out was stuck about three-quarters of the way in. I had to twist it a little to get it out, and I'm not sure if I scraped it up or not. Really, the forensic folks should have come taken it out, or the department should have had it towed in. I think it sucks that they'd have us do it just so they or the S.O. can decide if it's worth claiming the scene or if it might be a political hot potato."

I raised my brows in surprise. That was one of the longest speeches I've ever heard Casey give. I glanced at Kate, who was studying Casey with a similar expression. Her lips twitched as she tried to hide her amusement.

Kate nodded, "I agree, except the way that tank was screwed on under the camper and the way they dumped the excrement over the hill means someone is going to have to disassemble it and sort through the refuse before calling a tow truck to take it to the station anyway." She held her pen poised over her notes. "Okay, what else?"

"That's about all I saw." Now, that was more like the Casey I knew. Short, succinct, and to the point.

Kate thought for a second, tapping her pen on her notepad a couple of times before motioning for me to take up the narrative.

"Well, I think I saw a T.P.D. badge."

Casey's head jerked up, and she squinted at me for a second before replacing the sunglasses on her nose. "A badge?"

"Yeah. I only saw it for a second, but it looked like it might have been an older style, you know, the kind with the numbers on the front?"

I glanced over at Kate, who seemed reluctant to add her two cents. It wasn't my place to get her to talk, so I held my tongue and waited. It was close to four o'clock, and the sun was still beating down on us pretty hard. I lifted the water bottle to my lips while I watched Kate over its length.

Something happens to a person's eyes when their mind takes a journey. It doesn't matter if they're thinking about the vagaries of the past or the possibilities of the future. It's different than what happens the moment people die. When someone's soul, or whatever you want to call it, leaves their body, their eyes just kind of go empty—the light goes out. Conversely, when a person becomes lost in memories, they're gone, but the light's still on. Kate had disappeared somewhere deep inside herself.

I glanced over at Casey, who raised her eyebrows. This was definitely not normal Kate-like behavior.

When she came back, Kate shook her head. For just an instant, she seemed surprised to see Casey and me standing with her under the tree. She absently tapped her pant leg several times, smiling at something only she could appreciate. Collecting herself, she shook her head again and glanced over at the camper. "Sorry, just some very old memories resurfacing. I can't be one hundred percent certain because a lot of the badge was covered, and it was obviously corroded, but it looked to me like the number could have been 68."

She looked first at me and then at Casey to see if that pronouncement meant anything to either of us. It didn't, so both of us shrugged. She flipped her notebook closed and slid it into the back pocket of her Dockers. "When I first hired on, there were only a few women officers in the department.

"A lot of the male officers resented us and tried to make our work lives miserable. But I discovered a whole other group of men who believed women could be just as good and, at times, better than their male counterparts. Micah Maloney was one of them. Badge number 68 belonged to his father, Seamus, who died in the line of duty. When Micah joined the department a year later, he was given permission to use his father's badge."

She took out her cell phone and began searching through her contact list.

I knew there had to be more to the story. "And?"

But she just looked up at me and put the phone to her ear.

When someone answered, her brows came down low, and she quickly checked the number she'd dialed. Satisfied that she hadn't hit the wrong person in her contact list, she put the phone back to her ear. "Deputy Chief Pardo, please."

I shifted further into the shade and sighed, anxious to either get back to my much cooler car or, better yet, back to the overly air-conditioned office.

Kate pulled her sunglasses down slightly and peered over the top of them. "Something the matter, Alex?"

Shaking my head, I adjusted the holster of my Glock to a more comfortable position and listened to her side of the conversation.

"X? Why do you have your cell phone forwarded to the secretaries?"

I glanced over at Casey, who shrugged. "X" was Xavier Pardo, the second-highest-ranking officer in the department. Kate had not only called him by a nickname only a very small minority ever dared use, but she was questioning his phone practices as well. "I know, hey listen. I'm at a camper that has several very old bone fragments and— Oh, you've heard about it? Well, I think you need to get down here."

She listened for a second. "Yeah, I know, but I don't think you'll melt." She glanced up at us and rolled her eyes. "Okay, we'll wait for you here."

"Wait for him? I'm waitin' in my car then. It's too friggin' hot out here." The words spilled from my mouth before I had a chance to stop them.

Shaking her head, Kate pulled out her notebook again. "Actually, Alex, you're in luck. I need you to check out that house on the other side of the property and find out who owns this land and the camper."

I looked to where she was pointing and could just barely make out the outlines of a few buildings across the cactus-strewn desert. My guess was they were about a hundred and fifty yards away, and they appeared to warp in and out of alignment as the heat waves rising off the ground made the buildings dance beneath the sweltering summer sun. I nodded and headed toward my car.

Kate stopped me before I'd taken more than a few steps. "Actually, I need you to walk there and keep your eyes open for any other bones or signs of criminal activity along the way. Head there in a fairly straight line, though. I'm going to call out one of the cadaver dogs to see what he can come up with."

I turned and glared at her, certain I shouldn't say what was going through my little pea brain right about then.

Casey went to her car and pulled out three more bottles of cold water from her cooler. She came back and handed one to both Kate and me. She kept the other for herself, grinning with half her mouth, as she often did when something I did amused her. "C'mon. I'll go with you. Ya gotta love workin' in Arizona in the middle of the summer."

She started out across the desert, and I threw one last irritated glance at Kate before joining her. As per instructions, we walked straight toward the buildings without deviating to the left or right. I concentrated on looking for anything out of the ordinary—like a human skeleton hanging from an arm of a saguaro cactus, for instance.

As we approached the buildings, I began to make out one main house with two large sheds angled so that they formed a semi-circle around the house and one stand-alone three-car garage to the rear. The buzz of an electric sander reverberated off the walls of the nearest building, so I walked up to the open garage door and stuck my head inside to take a look. A man in his early to mid-sixties stood holding a sander against the side of a really old camper similar to the one we'd just left.

There were actually four old trailers in various stages of restoration: aluminum completely off, aluminum still on with the original cracked and peeling paint still visible (this was the one the man was sanding), and two where the aluminum had already been sprayed with a coat of glossy new paint. I stepped inside the relatively cool interior and called out a greeting. "Hello."

There wasn't any real chance of him hearing me since the noise from the sander reverberated off the metal, and he was wearing a pair of acoustic earmuffs to muffle the sound. On top of that, a radio was blasting Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers singing Islands in the Stream. To make matters worse, a rotating fan, obviously set on the highest setting possible, rotated back and forth on its base.

 I walked over and flipped off the radio, which finally got the man's attention.

He whipped the muffs from his head, spun around, and was in the process of drawing a pistol from the front of his pants.

 Casey yelled, "Gun!" and we both pulled our weapons as we hit the ground.

I rolled behind the tires of a faded red camper and peeked under the chassis to get my bearings.

The man knelt on one knee with his pistol pointed at the ground. He was looking squarely in my direction. I was lying on my belly, gun held straight out in front of me. I brought the front site up until it was level with his chest.

Casey yelled from where she'd taken cover behind a pile of discarded portable air-conditioners. "Tucson Police. Drop the gun! Now!"

The guy's shoulders drooped as he let out a disgusted sigh. "Police? Don't tell me, that toothless old bugger who's started sleeping in my camper out there—uninvited, I might add—called the cops?" He lifted his shirt and shoved the .22 back down into the front of his faded, well-patched blue jeans. I pushed to my feet and edged around the side of the camper, my Glock at the ready, just in case.

The slightly amused curl of his lip as he followed my progress made me wonder if my zipper was down or something. I discretely felt the front of my Dockers, thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that I didn't want to get shot with my pants undone.

Shaking his head, he made a shooing motion with his hands, palms down, fingers brushing the air, before turning to pick up and switch off the still-running sander. He set it carefully on a rickety card table, which was piled with various discarded items.

I automatically cataloged each one in case any of them could be used as a weapon. There were several orange teardrop-shaped running lights, a cardboard box full of round, red taillights, a battery-powered drill, several screwdrivers, and a huge assortment of rusty screws scattered about.

I walked over and motioned for him to move his hands away from his body. "I'm just gonna take your gun while we talk. I'll give it back when we're done."

"Aw, for crap's sake." A dramatic sigh accompanied his grudging assent as he held his arms out to his side. He had a short, compact body, and what little neck he had was solid and covered with a healthy spread of neck hair to match the grey, three-day stubble adorning his cheeks and chin. I slipped the revolver out of his waistband and stepped back a few paces.

Casey holstered her weapon and walked over to join me. "In answer to your question, the call to 911 was made anonymously from a public phone, so I'm not sure exactly who called us. Why do you think it was the man you described?"

"Because I've run him off my property more times than I care to count. I figure he thinks calling the cops is some kind of revenge." He shrugged and pointed to his pistol, which I'd unloaded and set on the table behind us. "Sorry about that. Mostly, the people who come around unannounced are the troublemaking types who think stealing what they consider junk isn't really stealing at all." He squinted, his gaze moving from Casey to me and back to her again. "So, what'd he say? That I threatened him? I did. That I threw him off my property? Guilty."

The air from the fan felt good, and each time it turned my way I discretely held my arms away from my body to try to cool myself.

Casey rested her forearm on the handle of a moving dolly and propped her other hand on her hip. "No, we're here because of the bone sticking out of the toilet in that camper over there." She halfway turned and pointed toward the other side of the property.

"Oh, that." He waved dismissively. "Been there almost fifteen years. That bone was part of an old bull of mine that died some years ago. He got caught in some barbed wire fencing. Dumb thing strangled himself before I found him."

He gestured to the southwest corner of the pasture with a lift of his chin. "I just left the carcass out there for the coyotes, and some smartass stuffed one of the legs down inside her hole." He shrugged, "Haven't given much thought to it since."

Neither Casey nor I corrected him on the error of his skeletal identification.

Casey tilted her head just a fraction. "Her?"

"Yeah, the camper. She was my first. At least the first one I bought on my own. My wife, Ella, and I traveled all over the country in her. After Ella passed, I never could bring myself to take another trip in that particular camper, so I parked her." He lifted one shoulder as he spoke. "I guess I should've fixed her up instead of just letting her rot over there. I let some bum live in it for a while, but I haven't been over to see her in God knows how long."

He looked wistfully across to his first love, then moved his head forward and squinted. He'd apparently just noticed the attention the little trailer was getting, and his voice rose several octaves. "Who the hell is muckin' around in my camper?" He threw down a rag he'd been using to wipe his hands and strode out of the shed with a determined gait.

Casey caught up to him, and I grudgingly followed, reluctant to exchange the relatively cooler interior of the shed for the baking oven of the desert landscape. Casey was trying to explain Kate's presence. I missed his growling reply.

When a K9 S.U.V. pulled onto the property, the man pulled back his shoulders and began waving his hands back and forth in wide, exaggerated motions. His pace quickened to as fast as his short legs would carry him. "Oh no. Hell no! You are not making a circus out of my place." He grabbed his sagging, slightly oversized jeans as he yelled across the last twenty yards to Kate. "Hey, lady! Keep your grubby mitts off my camper! You have no cause to be messin' around in her! Get away from there!"

He strode angrily up to Kate and began poking at her chest with a crooked finger, never quite touching but getting his point across just the same. "This is my property. You can't just drive in here slick as you please and start messin' with stuff. You can't!"

Kate took a defensive step backward. "Unfortunately, Mr…?" She waited for him to fill in the blank.

"Never you mind that. Just pack your stuff and go." He made a beeline for the crime scene tape Kate had put up.

I've never understood how Kate can growl loud enough to make the words sound like a barked command, but she did. "That's far enough!"

As anyone who's ever been the recipient of that particular tone does, he obeyed, but the glare he turned her way said he wasn't happy about it. The green flecks in his eyes flashed as his lips curled into an angry snarl. "She's mine, and you're trespassing."

Kate rested her fists on her hips and leaned forward slightly. "She's a crime scene now unless the 'she' you're talking about is the person whose femur was stuffed down the toilet, in which case we have a hell of a lot more to say to each other."

"I'm talkin' 'bout my camper, and unless you have a warrant, you can pack up and leave."

Kate shook her head. "This camper is abandoned on public property. I don't need a warrant."

"This is my property, and I'm tellin' you to leave!" He angrily poked his finger about an inch from her chest, his raised eyebrows and pinched lips a sure sign that he was expecting some type of reaction. When Kate silently turned her back to him to study the camper, he jerked his hand back down to his side.

I wasn't too worried about Kate's safety. What I was most concerned about was the bulging vein in the man's temple that had begun pulsing dangerously fast.

The way Kate stared at the little camper made me wonder if she'd been bluffing about the land the camper was parked on. After a short time, she turned back to him, pulling herself up a little straighter and giving him "the look" that I'm all too familiar with—chin down, eyes locked on his.

She spoke quietly, putting more meaning into her words than if she'd been yelling at him. "I'm not one to play games, Mr.…" She paused, searching around for a name she'd never been given. "What is your name, anyway?"

"None of your business." He turned and spat to the side to emphasize his point.

"Fine." Kate reached behind her back and pulled out a set of handcuffs.

He'd obviously been acquainted with them on previous occasions because he immediately put his hands up and backed away. "Okay, okay, no need for that. I’m Jepson, Tom Jepson.” He nervously eyed the cuffs.

Kate nodded. "Okay, Mr. Jepson. We both know your property ends just to the right of that power line. If you care to continue to dispute that fact, you can do so from the back of a patrol car as you're on your way to the jail for obstructing a police investigation."

Casey and I glanced at the power line. Since the jurisdiction of the camper had come into question, I was sure Kate had the dispatchers studying the boundary lines of the area and, therefore, knew exactly what she was talking about.

His whining response, combined with his nasal intonation, wasn't a pleasant combination. "But the camper's mine."

Kate relaxed slightly. "And we'll try to return it to you in one piece. In the meantime, you need to go with Detective Bowman and tell her what you know about the contents of this trailer." Fully expecting to be obeyed, Kate turned away and addressed the K9 officer, who stood a few yards off, patiently awaiting his orders.

"Sam, take Alex and see what Lido turns up. She'll fill you in on the way."

Lido, a loveable, sad-eyed bloodhound, was the department's part-time cadaver dog and full-time ambassador of goodwill.

His handler, Samuel Yazzie, had spent the last twenty of his thirty-five years in the department in the K9 unit. Everyone knew he was more or less retired on duty, but he was one of the best trackers in the country, and I'm sure the chief's chest swelled more than a few inches whenever various law enforcement agencies from around the world called requesting Sam's assistance.

Sam waved me over to his vehicle, where he opened one of the rear doors and snapped a leash onto Lido's collar. As soon as he hooked up the big dog, the happy tail wagging stopped, and Lido morphed into the professional cadaver dog who'd found more dead bodies than any other dog in the State of Arizona. Sam's shelf life may have expired as far as chasing bad guys was concerned, but he was still an exceptional K9 trainer and tracker.

We began crisscrossing the desert between the camper and the house, pausing every now and again to inspect some white object that may or may not have been a bone.

Sam pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket. He shook it open and wiped his sun-browned forehead. His big, barrel chest tugged at the buttons on his shirt, but it still didn't rival his ever-expanding girth falling down over his utility belt. He spoke with a slow, guttural drawl common to many Native Americans. I swear there are times when I could hear a touch of a Scottish Brogue as well. "So, what's the story? Obviously, we're looking for a body. What's the rest of it?"

I kicked at a three-inch seedpod that had dropped from the branches of a sprawling mesquite tree. "There was a human femur, just the white bone, no muscle or skin, sticking out of the toilet in the camper, and some bone fragments in the holding tank."

He grunted as though that was an everyday occurrence, which, to him, I suppose it was. "So I'm looking for old bones instead of a fresh body?"

I nodded, thankful that the sun was on its way toward the horizon. "Yeah."

The desert here was mostly made up of mesquite, ironwood, and palo verde trees, with the occasional cholla or barrel cactus thrown in. We wound around them, and every now and then, we stopped in the shade for a break.

Sam wasn't much of a talker, and I was too hot to make small talk, so our conversation was minimal.

After one particularly short shade break, Sam and I started out again, but Lido continued to sit where he was. Sam commanded the dog to search and Lido turned his head away and ignored him.

The big man watched his partner for a few seconds.

I glanced back and forth between the two of them and couldn't help but notice how Sam's droopy jowls had an uncanny resemblance to Lido's.

"Hmph." He walked back to where Lido sat and began slowly gazing around, obviously searching the ground around the big hound for bones.

I watched Lido, who had begun staring at Sam with an intense gaze, seemingly willing his partner to understand what he was trying to tell him.

I walked around the base of the tree, kicking apart anthills and poking aside bushes with the toe of my shoe. "I don't see anything. Maybe he's just hot and doesn't want to go any farther."

Shaking his head, Sam stepped out from under the tree's canopy, pulling gently on the leash. "Sook."

"That means track, right?"

"Yeah. Lido, sook." The bloodhound stubbornly refused to move.

Even though the temperature had dropped a few degrees, I still expected to see birds using potholders to pull the worms out of the ground. Out of frustration, I waved an arm in a wide arc, trying to get the dog to move. "Sook, for cripes sake. Sook!"

Sam walked back and knelt next to his hound. He gently gathered Lido's oversized ear in the palm of his hand and bent to look him in the eye. "What is it, buddy? What do you smell?"

Lido sat up a little straighter, turning his head slightly to pull his ear away from Sam's hand. He seemed a little affronted, as though reminding Sam that they were working a case and this was no time for a friendly caress.

Sam nodded and let his hand drop. "Okay, Buddy, you're right." He unhooked his keys from his duty belt and handed them to me. "Would you mind going back to my S.U.V. and getting my shovel out from behind the seat?"

I glanced at the vehicles parked some two hundred yards away, then sighed dramatically before taking his keys and starting the slow trek through the overheated air. Usually, I enjoy working with the K9 unit, but today was just too damn hot to be out traipsing around looking for old bones.

Kate, Casey, and Deputy Chief Pardo were standing in a semi-circle next to the camper, with Jepson facing them. His side was to me, and he was gesticulating wildly, his arms moving up and down and back and forth. I guessed he was once again ordering them off his property.

As I wiped the sweat from my brow, I heard a pop and the unmistakable sound of glass shattering.

From the left side of my vision, glass sprayed outwards from the windshield of Pardo's vehicle. Tiny flecks of sunlight glinted off the shards as they spread outward from the vehicle in a conical-shaped explosion.

Simultaneously, or so it seemed to me, blood burst from Jepson's chest, spraying Kate and Casey with bright, crimson spatters.

While the blood was still airborne, Deputy Chief Pardo staggered backward as though he'd been punched. He grabbed the right side of his chest, looking down at his fist as it crumpled his white commander's uniform. For the briefest second, his terrified gaze caught my own shocked expression before he too fell, first to his knees, then over onto his side in a modified fetal position, one leg pulled up to his chest, the other feebly kicking, trying to join its mate.

The bullet had come from my left, so I tore my gaze from the tableau in front of me and searched the desert in that direction.

Sam Yazzie yelled my name, and I spun around to see him lumbering our way with Lido close at his side. Sam was pointing to an area farther left than I'd originally looked toward a cluster of green mesquite trees I'd missed on my first glance west.

A figure stood silhouetted against the sun, moving quickly to shoulder the sling of his rifle across his chest. I assumed it was a he because, from a hundred yards, I really couldn't tell since the sun had sunk lower in the sky directly behind him. The distance was too great to make out any real details.

Casey and Kate would help the chief, so I sprinted toward the shooter, drawing my weapon as I ran.

The silhouette quickly knelt to retrieve some type of pack, then turned and disappeared into the thicket of mesquites.

I caught occasional glimpses of him through the trees. I know the desert, and I'm fast, but I didn't seem able to close the gap between us. He already had a huge head start. The fact that he was outdistancing me with a rifle slung across his back and carrying some type of canvas bag tucked under his right arm told me I was going to have a heck of a time trying to catch him.

He reappeared for a brief second as he dodged around a towering saguaro and then suddenly dropped out of sight.

As I redoubled my effort, my TPD baseball hat caught on an overhead branch and flew off my head. I fervently hoped it hadn't fallen into the pile of cholla I'd just skirted.

The smell of creosote wafted through the air, and I saw several broken stalks hanging loosely from three or four tiny-leafed creosote bushes.

The man had run straight through them, crushing the plants in his rush to get away.

I dodged around each bush he'd barreled through, my feet slipping slightly on loose rocks scattered on the hard-packed dirt. When I came close to where he'd disappeared, I slowed, trying to silence the sound of my rasping breath as I moved about ten yards south of where I'd lost sight of him.

I'd come to the edge of a ravine and understood why he'd suddenly vanished. I bent over and braced my hands on my knees, consciously expanding my lungs, all the while keeping my throat as open and relaxed as possible to minimize any sound.

There was more than an even chance he'd be kneeling in the wash with his finger on the trigger, waiting for me to stick my head over the edge.

Slowly and carefully, I lowered myself to my belly and peered down into the arroyo.

The sand-filled wash ran from north to south about five feet below the jagged, irregular lip I was lying on. Hard-packed dirt made up the walls of the ravine where years of flash floods had carved deep channels through the desert with torrents of rushing water and debris.

When I saw deep footprints heading across the ravine, I holstered my Glock and leapt down into the wash, nearly falling on my face as my feet sank into the soft sand and stayed there while my momentum carried me forward. I caught myself on my hands, pushed up, and began running, occasionally slipping to my knees whenever the sand shifted unexpectedly under my feet.

After about twenty-five yards, I saw where the shooter had climbed out by grabbing onto small plants that sporadically dotted the arroyo wall. He'd pulled several loose in his haste, and now they littered the area around where his tracks left the wash.

It was easy enough to clamber up after him, even though the walls were five or six feet high. I rolled up and over the lip in one swift movement, actually rolling onto the man's tracks, which continued south from where I lay. I glanced back the way I'd come, hoping and expecting to see Casey following, but the desert was empty.

I pushed to my feet and took off running again. After about a hundred yards, my calf muscles tightened painfully, and I worried they'd cramp before I caught the bastard. By the time I'd gone another hundred yards, my quadriceps were burning, and my breath had become ragged and loud.

The stern visage of my friend, Mr. Myung, flashed before me, quietly telling me to quiet my breathing before my enemy silenced it for me.

I stopped and once more braced my hands on my knees, taking a moment to catch my breath. As I practiced what Mr. Myung preached, I scanned the area ahead, looking for any movement that would give away the man's location.

Myung also taught me some tricks about concealment and positional awareness. Instead of looking for a person's whole body, he told me to look for something that doesn't belong. A hand, a foot, maybe a boot. He said if your brain is focused solely on seeing an entire body, you'll miss the only part of the person that isn't concealed.

Luck was with me on this one.

About seventy-five yards away, with his back to me and his lower body concealed behind a creosote bush, the man was down on one knee, chest heaving as he studied me over his left shoulder.

The rifle still hung on his back, secured by the leather strap slung across his chest. We stared at one another, both of us catching our breath before the final push. He was a fleeing felon who'd just murdered in cold blood, and I had every right to shoot him if he took off running again. I drew my Glock and aimed for his shoulder, the largest part of his body I could actually see. There was no way I'd be able to hit him at this distance, but I thought I'd try to bluff him into surrendering. I cupped my free hand to my mouth, hoping my words would carry from this distance. "Tucson Police! Stand up with your hands in the air."

I saw a quick flash of teeth as he grinned. He glanced down and I had the vague impression he was checking his watch.

I was too far away to make out any distinct facial features. Since my bluff had done nothing more than amuse him, I holstered my weapon, pulled in all my reserves, and began sprinting in his direction.

He'd apparently recovered more quickly than I had because he took off running at a steady, ground-pounding lope. I heard an engine off in the distance and hoped it was the cavalry coming to back me up.

Unfortunately, a green, newer model Toyota Land Cruiser came skidding down a dirt road, moving in an intercept course toward the shooter. Great plumes of dust followed in its wake, and when it neared him, it skidded in a semi-circle before coming to rest in the center of a self-induced dust storm.

The man disappeared into the brown cloud, and seconds later, the vehicle tore away from the area at a high rate of speed.

As I stood watching him go, a tangled knot formed in my stomach. I thought of the frightened look on Chief Pardo's face just before he fell, and I committed everything I'd just seen and heard to memory.

I'd forgotten about the heat during my adrenaline-fueled run across the desert, and as I stood watching the Land Cruiser speed away, my vision gradually blurred. I suddenly felt incredibly weak. I dropped to one knee, slightly confused as to where I was and what my next move should be. Bracing my arm on my knee, I looked around, hoping for a clue about where I should go to get under some shade and find a big bottle of water.

Off in the distance, I heard the braying bark of a hound on the hunt. As I turned to look, the world began spinning, and then turned black as I corkscrewed into the ground.