Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [0]
All rights reserved.
Mysterious Press
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56159-4
Contents
Copyright Page
Part One
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part Two
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
SHARON MCCONE MYSTERIES BY MARCIA MULLER
TILL THE BUTCHERS CUT HIM DOWN
WOLF IN THE SHADOWS
PENNIES ON A DEAD WOMAN’S EYES
WHERE ECHOES LIVE
TROPHIES AND DEAD THINGS
THE SHAPE OF DREAD
THERE’S SOMETHING IN A SUNDAY
EYE OF THE STORM
THERE’S NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF
DOUBLE (with Bill Pronzini)
LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR WILLIE
GAMES TO KEEP THE DARK AWAY
THE CHESHIRE CAT’S EYE
ASK THE CARDS A QUESTION
EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES
For Anne-Marie d’Hyevre and Michael Dowdall
Many thanks to Liz Alexander, Lewis Berger, Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Janice Hayes, Betty Lamb, DeEtte Turner, Collin Wilcox, and an anonymous officer of the U.S. Border Patrol. Your generous volunteering of your time, expertise, and insights is greatly appreciated.
And special thanks to my in-house editor and husband, Bill Pronzini.
Part One
Thursday, June 10
The mesa was the most desolate place I’d ever seen.
I climbed out of the Scout and followed my guide across rock-strewn ground where nothing but mesquite and spiny cholla cactus grew. The morning was overcast, the air saturated with salt-laden moisture—spitty weather, we used to call it. The wind blew sharp and icy off the flat gray sea.
Ahead of us where the ground dropped off to distant ranchland stood the tumbledown adobe hut. My guide, Andrés, stopped several yards from it and waited for me to join him. “There is where it happened,” he said in a hushed voice.
I looked at the hut, felt nothing. It was simply a relic of a bygone time, crumbling now into the earth that had formed it. I started toward it, then glanced back at my companion. He stood, arms folded, staring resolutely at the Pacific. Superstitious, I thought, and kept going.
The hut had no roof, and two of the walls leaned in on each other at abnormal angles. I stepped through an opening where a door once had been onto a packed dirt floor, Loose bricks were scattered underfoot, and trash drifted in the corners; fire had blackened the pale clay.
I still didn’t feel anything. No more loss or grief, no sense of horror—none of the emotional shock waves that surge through me at the scene of a violent death, even though the death that had happened here should have touched me more deeply than any.
What’s wrong with you? I asked myself. You can’t have used up all your tears in one night.
For a few minutes I stood still, looking for something—anything—and willing my emotions to come alive. But there was nothing here, so I turned and went back outside. I felt a tug at the leg of my jeans and glanced down: a little tree, dead now. Poor thing hadn’t stood a chance in this inhospitable ground. A few crumpled papers were caught in its brittle branches; I brushed them away. Rest in peace.
One of the scraps caught my eye, and I picked it up and smoothed it out: U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Notice and Request for Deposition. The form the border patrol issues to illegal aliens when they pick them up, carelessly discarded here because it didn’t matter anyway. One trip over the border fence and through the wild canyons—infested with rattlers, scorpions, and bandits—had been aborted, but that made no difference. Soon the illegal—in this case, the form showed, one Maria Torres—would be back, and others would follow in a never-ending stream. I let the paper drift from my fingers.
Then I walked away from the hut where so much had come to an end and stood at the very edge