Shadowfires

in from the sun-scorched day to find him weeping blood from his hand as if from stigmata-and his baby brother dead.
    Reese Hagerstrom-having been partners with Julio long enough to
know about his dread of rats, but too considerate ever to mention
that fear directly or even indirectly-put one of his enormous hands
on
Julio's slender shoulder and said, by way of distraction, “I think I'll
give Percy five bucks and tell him to get lost. He had nothing to do
with this, and
we're not going to get anything more out of him, and I'm sick of the
stink of him.”
    “Go ahead,” Julio said.
“I'm in for two-fifty of it.” While Reese dealt with the wino, Julio watched the dead woman being hauled out of the dumpster. He tried to distance himself from the victim. He tried to tell himself she didn't
look real, looked more like a big rag doll, and maybe even was a
doll, or a mannequin, just a mannequin. But it was a lie. She looked
real enough. Hell, she looked too real. They deposited her on
a tarp that had been spread on the pavement for that purpose.
    In the glare of the portable lights, the photographer took a few
more pictures, and Julio moved in for a closer look. The dead woman
was young, in her early twenties, a black-haired and brown-eyed
Latino. In spite of what the killer had done to her, and in spite of
the garbage and the industrious rats, there was reason to believe
that she had been at least attractive and perhaps beautiful. She had
gone to her death in a summery cream-colored dress with blue piping
on the collar and sleeves, a blue belt, and blue high-heeled
shoes.
    She was only wearing one shoe. No doubt the other was in the
dumpster.
    There was something unbearably sad about her gay dress and her one
bare foot with its meticulously painted toenails.
    At Julio's direction, two uniformed men donned rubber boots, put on scented surgical masks, and climbed into the dumpster to go through every piece of rubbish. They were searching for the other shoe, the murder weapon, and anything else that might pertain to the case.
    They found the dead
woman's purse. She had not been robbed, for her wallet contained forty-three dollars. According to her driver's
license, she was Ernestina Hernandez, twenty-four, of Santa Ana.
    Ernestina.
    Julio shivered. The similarity between her name and that of his
long-dead little brother, Ernesto, gave him a chill. Both the child
and the woman had been left for the rats, and though Julio had not
known Ernestina, he felt an instant, profound, and only partially
explicable obligation to her the moment he learned her name.
    I will find your killer, he promised her silently. You were so
lovely, and you died before your time, and if there is any justice in
the world, any hope of making sense out of life, then your murderer
cannot go unpunished. I swear to you, even if I have to go to the
ends of the earth, I will find your killer.
    Two minutes later, they found a blood-spattered lab coat of the
kind doctors wore. Four words were stitched on the breast pocket:
santa ana city morgue.
    “What the hell?” Reese Hagerstrom said. “You think someone from
the morgue cut her throat?”
    Frowning at the lab coat, Julio Verdad said nothing.
    A lab man carefully folded the coat, trying not to shake loose any
hairs or fibers that might be clinging to it. He put it into a
plastic bag, which he sealed tightly.
    Ten minutes later, the officers in the dumpster found a sharp
scalpel with traces of blood on the blade. An expensive, finely
crafted instrument of surgical quality. Similar to those used in
hospital operating rooms. Or in a medical examiner's pathology lab.
    The scalpel, too, was put in a plastic bag, then laid beside the
lab coat, which lay beside the now-draped body.
    By midnight, they had not found the dead woman's other blue shoe. But there was still about sixteen inches of garbage in the dumpster, and the missing item was almost certain to turn up in that last layer of refuse.

----
9 SUDDEN
DEATH
    Bulleting through the hot June night, from
the Riverside Freeway to I-15 East, then east on I-10, past Beaumont
and Banning, skirting the Morongo Indian Reservation, to Cabazon and
beyond, Rachael had plenty of time to think. Mile by mile, the
metropolitan sprawl of southern California fell behind; the lights of
civilization grew sparser, dimmer. They headed deeper into the
desert, where vast stretches of empty darkness opened on all sides,
and where often