One

Pima County Forensic Science Center
Tucson, Arizona
January 7

The zipper on the body bag caught, and the technician gave it a hard, practiced yank. The stenches of death and the attendant chemicals roiled out of the cavity and, in the moment before Detective Tony Sonterra remembered my presence and eased me back with a slight motion of one elbow, the image of Jimmy's youthful, ravaged face imprinted itself, hologram style, on every cell in my brain.

Bile scalded the roof of my mouth.

My name is Clare Westbrook, and I've seen more than my share of corpses. I seemed to attract them on my own, and my association with Sonterra, who was a homicide cop at the time, merely compounded the problem.

I turned away, doing my best not to retch.

Jorge "Jimmy" Ruiz was sixteen years old. His dreams were heartbreakingly modest—he'd wanted a car, cheap housing, and a dog that would come when he called it.

Sonterra had befriended the boy eight months before, when he'd turned up in Phoenix, hungry and ingenuous, and wangled a job with Sonterra's family's landscaping business. Customs and Immigration snagged the kid a few weeks after he arrived, during a routine green-card check, and promptly sent him home to Mexico. Sonterra stayed in touch with Jimmy after that, got him a room in Nogales, on the Sonoran side, then pushed up his sleeves and waded into the red-tape matrix. Probably because of his own Hispanic heritage, he'd been determined to make a difference, if only for this one boy.

I loved that about Sonterra, the way he would lock on to an idea if he thought it was right, and never let go. Our relationship was intense, and by no means simple. I'd moved into his house, with my niece, Emma, and our two dogs, Waldo and Bernice, but I still had one foot in my old life. I'd worked hard to get through law school, schlepping drinks at a Tucson bar called Nipples, and later put in my time at Kredd and Associates, where ambulance chasing was a specialty. It had been Emma and me against the world ever since my sister Tracy's sudden disappearance, when Emma was only seven, and when it turned out that my sister had been murdered by someone close to her, my streetwise, foster-kid wariness went into overdrive.

Trusting Sonterra, trusting anyone, was a challenge. Hell, I wasn't even sure I could trust myself.

Now, in the stark reality of cold storage, Sonterra's voice seemed to come through a long, hollow pipe, even though we were within touching distance. "His name was Jorge Ruiz," he told the attendant grimly. "No next of kin."

The tech nodded, blandly accustomed to the unclaimed and unmourned, handed Sonterra a clipboard, watched in silence as he signed off on the attached form. Another body identified. A complex life, reduced to words and numbers. A few check marks, a couple of official signatures, and that's it. Add one more statistic to the column.

I hadn't been well acquainted with Jimmy, but I ached for him, remembering his shy smile, his ragged jeans and T-shirt, his amazing capacity for hard work. I knew he'd slept on a cot on Sonterra's dad's sunporch during his brief stay in the USA, and been pathetically grateful for a place at the kitchen table. He'd loved bologna sandwiches and lime Kool-Aid.

I swayed, gripped the edge of a nearby steel table for balance, and instantly recoiled. The slab was bare, even sterile, but I had a sudden, swift sense of all the bodies that had rested there, for a brief and grisly interval, with only a toe tag to differentiate them from the other vacant shells of humanity that had passed through that place. I'm not exactly squeamish, but I was in a morgue, and four months pregnant.

Kay Scarpetta, I'm not.

Sonterra pressed a hand to the small of my back and steered me toward the exit. Once outside in the corridor, I sank onto a bench and dropped my head between my knees.

"I asked you to wait in the car," Sonterra said with a familiar note of resignation. He waited until I straightened, then handed me a paper cup with a slosh of lukewarm water inside. None of this was new to him—he'd stood by many times, while a family member identified a victim, and even witnessed autopsies—but he was clearly shaken.

I gulped down the water, waited to see if my stomach would send it hurtling back up or simply convulse around it with a couple of good clenches. I kept down the first dose, and threw back the rest.

This would cinch it, I thought. Just the day before, Sonterra had fessed up that he'd been offered a job with a federal task force. He'd been closemouthed about the details, but I knew it had something to do with the stream of illegal immigrants flooding in from Mexico. Now, because of Jimmy, he'd accept for sure. Turn his whole life upside down, and mine with it.

"Coyotes," he said. He wasn't referring to the four-legged variety. In cop speak, coyotes are the sleazeball flesh-smugglers who run Mexican nationals across the border, into the land of milk and honey—for a price. They lock their "clients" up in the trunks of cars, in airless vans, and in "safe houses," sometimes ten to thirty to a room, with little or no food, water, or sunlight. If things go sour in transit, they often shoot them in the head and leave them in the desert for the buzzards. And that's the merciful method. The most common one is dropping them off miles from any road, without their shoes, if they had any in the first place, without water or food or any means to defend themselves. Duct tape and dehydration save on the high cost of bullets. Coyotes are in business to make money, and they do, hand over fist.

Sonterra and I left the building in silence, started across the parking lot toward his slick SUV, gleaming black in the winter sun. That's the reason we Arizonans put up with summer temperatures in the 120-degree range—for the mellow months between October and April. The door locks popped audibly when he pressed the button on his key fob.

We'd discussed the new job, of course, but it was a source of conflict. It meant leaving the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, where I had friends and a pro bono practice I loved, for a wide spot in the road well off the beaten path. I was familiar with Dry Creek, a dust bunny under the bed of life, because of its proximity with Tucson, my hometown. I'd gone there a lot, as a teenager, admittedly to party with other wild kids, and had always come away with one clear thought: Thank God, I don't live there.

Copyright © 2006 by Linda Lael Miller.