“What time did it go missing?” he asked.

  “No one’s sure, but they found it about five this morning on a chestnut tree at the front of the house,” Tony said.

  “The front of the house?” Danny said.

  “Yes, what difference does that make?” Tom asked.

  “Our killer’s getting pretty bold,” Danny said. “I take it no one’s blaming this on a coyote?”

  Tom shook his head and looked embarrassed. “No, I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”

  “Not a coyote, not a fox, not a wolf,” Tony said.

  “So how did you hear about it?” Danny asked.

  “I was up at six this morning. I heard the story on the news, texted Tom, told him what you told me last night, and he came right over,” Tony muttered.

  Danny was confused. “Wait a minute. What did I tell you last night?”

  “That your friend Bob Randall was an expert and he could break open the whole cat-killing case for us.”

  Danny nodded. “Oh yeah, that. I forgot about that. Yeah, he’s got a PhD in criminal psych.”

  “Can we go see him today?” Tony said anxiously.

  “I’d like to talk to this guy, too,” Tom said, and he was fidgeting and drumming his fingers, which Danny knew would eventually drive him up the wall.

  “Uh, I don’t think so. It’s a Saturday. It is a Saturday, right?”

  “Yes,” Tony said impatiently.

  “No … maybe after school on Monday or something,” Danny said.

  Tony pulled open the living room curtains, flooding the room with light and making Danny wince. “No,” she announced. “We have to do it today. Something’s changed. Something’s happened. ‘Bold,’ you said. Yes, he’s gotten bolder and the interval between the killings has dropped. First weeks, now days,” Tony said forcefully.

  “This Bob sounds like a pretty interesting dude,” Tom said.

  Danny shook his head. It would mean asking Walt to take them, and the last thing he wanted to do was involve Walt.

  “It’s a Saturday. I don’t think we can go to the prison on a Saturday,” Danny said.

  “All we can do is ask. When your parents come down, we’ll ask them. They can only say no.”

  Danny nodded reluctantly. “OK, we’ll see. Look, I need to take a shower.”

  “I’ll say,” Tony said, and winked to show that she was only kidding.

  After finishing his cereal, Danny went into the bathroom to have a shower. When he came out, having changed into jeans and a gray hoodie, everyone was eating some kind of cake.

  “Sit down,” Juanita said. “Look what Walt got us.”

  “Have some cake,” Walt said.

  Danny shook his head. “I just brushed my teeth,” he said, but he sat at the table anyway.

  “What’s the occasion?” Danny asked, staring at a large carrot cake.

  “Your mother’s first full week at her new job. Some of my chaps made it for her,” Walt said.

  Danny regarded the carrot cake with suspicion. “This was made by convicts?”

  Walt shook his head. “We don’t call them that. They’re really a very nice bunch of people,” Walt said.

  “Did you check if there were any poisoners in there?” Danny asked.

  Tom paled and looked suspiciously at the bit of cake, frozen on the fork in front of him.

  Tony laughed and swallowed the big piece in her mouth. “Actually, that’s why we came over here,” she said.

  “Oh?” Walt said.

  “Yes, Danny tells us that your foreman, Bob Randall, is an expert in criminal psychology, and we were wondering if he had any insight into the cat killings that have been going on around here.”

  “What cat killings?” Juanita asked.

  “You want to go and see Bob?” Walt asked.

  “This morning, if possible,” Tom said.

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” Walt said, looking at Juanita. “We promised that we’d take a trip up to the casino.”

  Danny’s mother put down her fork. “What cat killings?”

  Tony filled her in and explained that they wanted to look into it because nobody else was taking it seriously.

  “What about the local police?” Juanita asked.

  Tony scoffed. “Sarah Kolpek’s mother told my mother that Sheriff Rossi thinks it was some kind of freak accident.”

  “You told your mother to call Sarah’s mother without consulting me? I mean … us?” Tom said, clearly miffed and looking at Danny for support.

  “Could it have been a freak accident?” Juanita asked.

  Tony shrugged. “I guess … maybe … I don’t know. That’s why we need to talk to Bob. Danny says he’s the big expert.”

  Juanita looked at the three kids and suppressed a tight smile. It was certainly rather morbid that they were taking an interest in a cat that had died, and it was definitely strange that they wanted to interview a prisoner, but Danny didn’t make friends that easily and these children seemed to be his friends. And they weren’t “the bad crowd”—quite the reverse. Tony was intelligent, polite, nice. And Tom, although a little odder, was the same.

  “I want you to call up your parents and get permission, and if they say it’s OK, then we’ll all go. What do you think, Walt?” Juanita said.

  Walt shook his head. “Honey, I know you had your heart set on showing us the casino.”

  “We can do both. Ask your parents if it’s OK and we’ll do both!” Juanita said brightly.

  “Great,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, sure,” Tom said.

  Tom called his mother, who didn’t appear to mind at all and merely asked if it was some kind of school project for Mr. Lebkuchen, to which Tom replied that it wasn’t—not really.

  Tony got out her cell phone and fake-dialed her home. Not in a million years would her father let her visit a casino, never mind a federal prison, but her imaginary father was a man cut from a different cloth.

  “Dad … yeah, it’s me. Listen, Danny’s mom wants to know if it’s OK to drive out to Correctional Institution Road? … No! Don’t be silly. The minimum-security prison next to the Supermax … Oh, there’s some kind of psychology expert there we want to talk to about the cat killings … I will … Thank you, Papa. Oh, and can we visit Danny’s mom’s casino? … Thanks, Dad.”

  She hung up.

  Danny had seen through the lie immediately, and he marveled at her. On the surface Tony was a bubbly, typically extroverted teenager, but Tony’s icebergian depths were a lot more interesting—she’d probably (to extend the analogy) quite enjoy ramming into a passenger ship in the dead of night just to see what happened. And now that he was in the psych biz Danny had a go at summing up everyone else’s personality, too. Tom seemed a pretty well-adjusted kid—a little fidgety, a little geeky, but doing OK considering his dad was off at war and his brother had died. Walt also had a few nervous tics: He sang to himself with distressing regularity, and that Englishy accent was worse than Madonna’s during her London years. Juanita was a hardworking, fairly typical Latina mother, and if there was a mystical Cherokee side to her, Danny never saw it.

  That’s everyone, Danny thought, and then shook his head.

  No, not quite everyone. What about me?

  While the others talked and finished their cake, Danny did something he rarely did, which was to turn his external sensors on himself.

  What kind of a person is Danny Lopez? he asked. An only child who dug skateboarding and, until his laptop vanished into some UPS black hole, Halo 3 and YouTube. Shy? Introverted? Yeah, those were good words. He was also a bit of a dreamer, too: that day he’d tried to hitch to Chicago to see his father, getting Jeffrey from the Tropicana Wash and—

  He looked up.

  Everyone was staring at him.

  “Well?” Tom said impatiently.

  “Well what?”

  “Are you ready to go?”

  “Sure.”

  In ten minutes they were in the car. Predictably, Walt wanted them to split into two groups so he could show Tom the Tesla, but Juanita sensibly insisted that they all take the Volvo instead. Walt huffed a little in the front passenger’s seat, which made Danny oddly pleased. He did not want to sit in the middle between Tony and Tom, though, and he didn’t want either of his “guests” to be forced into the middle, so they pulled out the third-row seat and Danny sat behind everyone.

  Juanita turned on the radio but all they could get was Focus on the Family again, and Pastor Ted Swanson’s local phone-in program, which was all “Gay soldiers are terrorizing their colleagues at Fort Carson” and “Mexicans in Colorado Springs worship the Devil,” so she turned it off.

  They drove through the Ute Reservation, which to Danny’s eyes didn’t look that different from any other part of Colorado. The houses that he caught glimpses of between the trees were the same ranch-style homes as those in Colorado Springs. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t like the pueblos he’d visited in New Mexico, with big communal buildings and a very distinct look.

  “Where’s the actual Reservation itself?” he asked his mother.

  “This is it. It’s all around you,” she replied.

  The casino was also something of a letdown.

  The exterior looked like a Motel 6, and a small simple neon sign declared, THE GLYNN CASINO AT THE UTE AND CHEROKEE NATIONS FAMILY RESORT, which wasn’t the most memorable name he’d ever seen. Doubtless, with time people would just call it the Glynn. Inside, it reminded Danny not of the new complexes on the southern part of the Strip but rather of the older casinos in downtown Las Vegas like the Golden Nugget—but admittedly a Golden Nugget without the cigarette-stained carpet or plaster-cracked walls, because everything, of course, was brand-new. Rows of slots, blackjack tables covered with tarp, roulette wheels, a sports book. There were bars, a restaurant, even a kids’ play area. There were no windows but a lot of flashing lights and big extractor fans to suck out the cigarette smoke. Smoking was banned in bars in Colorado, but this was an Indian nation and thus exempted from the rule.

  “So this is a casino?” Tony said with wide-eyed wonder.

  “You never been in one before?” Tom scoffed.

  “Have you?” Tony asked.

  “Well, no, actually not really,” Tom admitted.

  “What do you think?” Juanita asked.

  “Wow, it’s really cool,” Danny said. “And you’re running the whole thing, huh?”

  Juanita glowed with pride. “The whole kit and caboodle. Of course, we still have so much to do—so much, you’ve no idea—but I think we’ll open on time.”

  They took a tour and as Juanita was explaining how the various games of chance worked to Tom and Tony, Danny was looking at the rows of slot machines and imagined the grim-faced retirees with their buckets of change sitting in front of them, putting in quarter after quarter of their savings, day after day, month after month, until one day it would all be gone.

  “Listen, can I meet you guys back at the car? I’m feeling a bit funny,” Danny said.

  Walt nodded. “We were climbing the whole time, we’re up at nine thousand feet now.”

  “That must be it,” Danny said.

  “Are you OK?” Juanita asked.

  Danny nodded and slipped away from the others. The sun was out now and it was into the forties. He sat on the curb by the car in the massive, empty parking lot.

  “Help you, son?” a man asked.

  Danny looked up into the face of a security guard. A lean, dark-skinned man in his sixties, with a short gray ponytail. Bit of a beaky nose and dark eyes. Obviously a Native American. He was carrying a walkie-talkie.

  “I’m just waiting for my mom,” Danny said, and then he added: “She’s the manager here. Juanita Brown.”

  The man nodded. “Mind if I sit?” he asked after a long pause.

  “Help yourself.”

  The security guard sat down next to Danny on the curb. The effort made his lungs give off a rattly, wheezing sound, and Danny wondered if he’d be able to get back up again. “Thought you might be one of those protestors,” the security guard said when his breath was back.

  “Protestors? What do you mean?”

  “Oh, we’ve had a few protestors from town, about the casino. It was bad about six months ago—people chaining themselves to bulldozers, that kind of thing. Church folk. Stopped now mostly. Mr. Glynn told us to make some donations to the right people. We did it, and it stopped.”

  “Focus on the Family, the Metropolitan Faith Cathedral thingy … those people?”

  “Yes. And we had the Tesla folks, too. Did one of his big scientific experiments up here. Radio or radar or something. From here to his lab in Cobalt, where that school is now. There was only a shack left here, but those folks said we should preserve it as a national monument. Preserve the hut! Ha!”

  “Did you preserve it?”

  “Of course not. This is our land, Tesla had no business being here in the first place.”

  “You’re a member of the uh, the Ute tribe?”

  “Cherokee Nation. Dan Flight of Eagles,” the man said, offering Danny his hand. Danny shook it. “Hey, my name’s Danny, too. And you know, technically I’m Cherokee as well—at least part Cherokee, I guess.”

  The security guard nodded, looked at him closely. “You either is or you ain’t,” he said.

  Danny nodded shamefacedly and stared at his shoelaces, then at the pristine concrete of the parking lot stretched in front of him. Man and boy lapsed into a long silence.

  Juanita and the others came back from their tour. The security guard got sprightly to his feet and gave Juanita a little nod.

  “How was it?” Danny asked.

  “Good. Everyone’s hungry now. Are you feeling any better?”

  “Fine,” Danny said.

  They did McDonald’s drive-through for lunch and as she was sucking down a strawberry milkshake, Tony whispered to Danny in the backseat, “A casino, a prison, and McDonald’s in one morning—this is, like, the greatest day ever. Don’t ever mention this to my dad.”

  The prison was not what Tony, Juanita, or Tom had been expecting. Juanita was clearly relieved, but Danny could tell that both Tom and Tony were disappointed. Peach tree groves, allotment gardens, and a series of mobile homes with wire mesh over the plastic windows was not anyone’s idea of a prison—especially since to get here, they’d had to drive past the heavily armored Supermax ADX.

  “There are holes in the fence!” Tom said.

  Danny nodded. Great big holes that no one seemed to have any interest in repairing. Any of the prisoners could get out anytime they wanted if they put a little effort into it. Danny speculated that since most of them were nearly finished with their sentences, no one felt the need.

  Juanita pulled up to the gate and Walt leaned across her to talk to the guard sitting in the little booth. It was one of the guards Walt knew from chain-gang duty.

  “Hey, Trey!” Walt said.

  “Mr. Brown, what are you doing out here on a Saturday? There’s not a work detail going out today that I don’t know about, is there?”

  Danny was taken aback; people rarely called Walt mister anything. And certainly not people in uniform.

  Walt laughed. “No, no work detail. Just thought I’d show my family around if that’s OK, and I wanted to talk to Bob Randall if he’s here? … Wait a minute, ‘course he’s here. Where else is he gonna be?”

  Trey laughed and opened the barrier, and they drove into the prison.

  Bob was working in a garden, brushing snow off little bushy things that had been wrapped in plastic bags. He was in jeans and an orange T-shirt and he was wearing a Rockies beanie cap. Houdini the cat was sunning itself next to him.

  “That’s Bob over there,” Walt said, pointing him out.

  “He’s not exactly Hannibal Lecter, is he?” Tom muttered sarcastically.

  Walt introduced everyone, and Bob wiped his hand on his shirt and shook hands, giving Tony and Juanita little bows and saying, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am,” like an old-timey character from a Western.

  They met Houdini. Houdini was clearly not impressed by any of them, for as soon as they tried to pet him he ran off and hid under a wheelbarrow.

  “How do you like my vines?” Bob asked, pointing at the stubby bushes.

  “Grapevines?” Walt asked. “You can grow grapes in Colorado?”

  “Yeah, we get good quick frosts here and a lot of August heat; they make a nice Malbec-style red if you blend it with some of the grapes from around Trinidad. We sell six crates a year, makes a little money for the facility.”

  “Oh, that’s a wonderful idea,” Juanita said.

  “Bob’s too modest to say it, but I’ll bet the idea was his,” Walt said.

  Bob grinned and nodded. “I just hope they keep it up after I leave; none of my colleagues seems that interested, and these little guys take a lot of work.”

  They talked grapes and wine and other subjects Danny couldn’t care less about before Bob finally came to it. “So what brings you folks out here today?”

  Everyone turned to Danny. His face glowed.

  “Uh, well, we thought that maybe you could, uh, you know, ‘cause you’re sort of an expert, not an expert because you’re in here, Walt says you have a PhD, you know, that’s why,” he began before Tony interrupted.

  “Someone’s been killing cats in Cobalt and we wondered if you’d help us catch him,” she said.

  Bob rubbed his chin.

  “Well,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  They repaired to Bob’s trailer. As Danny recalled, it was a little cramped, but it wasn’t that bad: toilet, shower, window with a grill over it, a desk, a bookcase stuffed full of books. There were only two chairs though, so Danny, Tom, and Tony sat on Bob’s bed while Walt and Juanita sat in the chairs and Bob stood. He liked to stand, he claimed.

  Behind Bob on the wall there was a painting of guys walking through the snow. It seemed an odd thing to have on your wall. If it had been Danny in prison in landlocked Colorado, he’d have a Pacific Ocean scene on his wall, not snow. If you wanted snow, you could look at Pikes Peak any day of the year.