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“Anybody notice anything else?”

“The size of the shoes,” Romero said.

They looked at him.

“Mine are tens. These look to be sevens or eights. My guess is, the victim was female.”

The same police officers who had left the pile of old shoes in front of Romero’s locker now praised his instincts. Although he had long since discarded the various shoes that he had collected in the trunk of the police car and of his private vehicle, no one blamed him. After all, so much time had gone by, who could have predicted that the shoes would be important? Still, he remembered what kind they had been, just as he remembered that he had started noticing them almost exactly a year ago, around the fifteenth of May.

But there was no guarantee that the person who had dropped the shoes a year ago was the person who had left the severed feet. All the investigating team could do was deal with the little evidence they had. As Romero suspected, the medical examiner eventually determined that the victim had indeed been a woman. Was the person responsible a tourist, someone who came back to Santa Fe each May? If so, would that person have committed similar crimes somewhere else? Inquiries to the FBI revealed that over the years numerous murders by amputation had been committed throughout the United States, but none matched the profile that the team was dealing with. What about missing persons reports? Those in New Mexico were eliminated, but as the search spread, it became clear that so many thousands of people disappeared in the United States each month that the investigation team would need more staff than it could ever hope to have.

Meanwhile, Romero was part of the team staking out that area of Old Pecos Trail. Each night, he used a night-vision telescope to watch from the roof of the Baptist church. After all, if the killer stayed to his pattern, other shoes would be dropped, and perhaps—God help us, Romero thought—they too would contain severed feet. If he saw anything suspicious, all he needed to do was focus on the car’s license plate and then use his two-way radio to alert police cars hidden along Old Pecos Trail. But night after night, there was nothing to report.

A week later, a current model red Saturn with New Hampshire plates was found abandoned in an arroyo southeast of Albuquerque. The car was registered to a thirty-year-old woman named Susan Crowell, who had set out with her fiancé on a cross-country car tour three weeks earlier. Neither she nor her fiancé had contacted their friends and relatives in the past eight days.

* * *

May became June, then July. The Fourth of July pancake breakfast in the historic plaza was its usual success. Three weeks later, Spanish Market occupied the same space, local Hispanic artisans displaying their paintings, icons, and woodwork. Tourist attendance was down, the sensationalist publicity about the severed feet having discouraged some visitors from coming. But a month after that, the similar but larger Indian Market occurred, and memories were evidently short, for now the usual thirty thousand tourists thronged the plaza to admire Native American jewelry and pottery.

Romero was on duty for all of these events, making sure that everything proceeded in an orderly fashion. Still, no matter the tasks assigned to him, his mind was always back on Old Pecos Trail. Some nights, he couldn’t stay away. He drove over to East Lupita, watched the passing headlights on Old Pecos Trail, and brooded. He didn’t expect anything to happen, not as fall approached, but being there made him feel on top of things, helped focus his thoughts, and in an odd way gave him a sense of being close to his son. Sometimes, the presence of the church across the street made him pray.

One night, a familiar pickup truck filled with moss rocks drove by. Romero remembered it from the night his son had been killed and from so many summer Saturdays when he’d watched baskets of vegetables being carried from it to a stand at the Farmers’ Market. He had never