El Salvador? Ramon wondered, staring in disbelief at the paper in his hand. What about Jalisco?

  Grandma Lupé, his paternal grandmother, had told Ramon countless stories about how she and Grandpa Pepe had made the long trek north from Jalisco to the US, crossing the border at Yuma. For several years they had worked in the lettuce fields around Yuma before finally making their way to better work and better lives elsewhere. And that was what Ramon wanted to discuss with his mother that night. Either Grandma Lupé had lied about Jalisco, or else Ramon’s mother had lied about everything.

  Taking down and putting away decorations took less time than getting them out and putting them up, but Ramon kept his own counsel about the DNA issue until after the job was done and Larry had retired for the night. Only then, when he and his mother were alone in the kitchen and sharing glasses of eggnog, did Ramon finally spill the beans.

  “I got my DNA results back from Ancestry dot com last week,” he mentioned casually.

  His mother responded to those quietly uttered words with a sharp intake of breath. Her face paled. Her hand shook as she carefully set her empty glass down on the table. For a long time she simply sat there saying nothing.

  “I never meant for you to find out,” she managed at last. “I always hoped you wouldn’t.”

  “But I did,” Ramon replied, more brusquely than intended. “So why don’t you tell me the rest of it, Mom? If Frank Muñoz isn’t my father, who is?”

  Sylvia didn’t answer immediately. “He was my boss at work,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “He was my manager in the fast-food restaurant—the taco shop—where I worked when I was a senior in high school. One night after work, he raped me.”

  Ramon suddenly felt as though his heart had been ripped from his body. He had thought he’d be hearing about his mother having an affair of some kind and that his birth father had been her lover, but this was far worse. He had never imagined his mother as a possible rape victim. Now Ramon was the one stunned to silence.

  “It happened in the back room of the restaurant one night after everybody else left,” Sylvia continued. “I thought it was my fault—that I had somehow caused it to happen. I quit my job the next day, but I was so ashamed that I didn’t tell anyone. Then, when I realized I was pregnant, I was scared. I couldn’t stand to give up the baby or have an abortion, so…”

  “So you married Frank Muñoz and told him I was his?”

  Sylvia nodded brokenly.

  In that moment Ramon understood for the first time what a terrible price his mother had paid in order to keep him—a price, it turned out, they had both paid.

  “Does he know?”

  “Maybe,” Sylvia said with a shrug. “We never discussed it.”

  Ramon took a moment to gather himself. He remembered those poor, damaged girls from Eugene, the ones he’d had to interview while creating that composite. Their raw pain had been palpable, and here he was learning that his mother had suffered through a similar nightmare. Even so, he plunged on.

  “Who is he?” Ramon asked at last. “What’s my father’s name? I want to find the son of a bitch and punch his lights out.”

  “Sergio,” Sylvia answered. “His name was Sergio Gomez, but you won’t be able to find him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s dead,” she said. “He died in prison of hepatitis. He’d been sentenced to life without parole for raping and murdering two other girls. I’m lucky he didn’t murder me.”

  With those few spoken sentences everything Ramon had ever wondered about his family life suddenly clicked into place and made sense. Standing up, he walked around the table, where he knelt in front of his mother’s chair and took her tear-stained face in his hands.

  “I’m so very sorry about this,” he said softly. “You were a terrified eighteen-year-old girl. Faced with impossible choices, you did the best you could, and I’m grateful for that. Thank you for keeping me. Thank you for not letting me go.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said hopelessly. “You were an innocent baby. What happened wasn’t my fault, and it wasn’t yours, either.”

  With that, Sylvia fell sobbing inconsolably against her son’s shoulder. While she let go of more than two decades of heartbreak and grief, Ramon felt a sudden sense of relief—his birth father may have been a worthless piece of crap, but at least he wasn’t Frank Muñoz.

  At last Ramon pushed his mother away. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “I won’t mention any of this to a soul unless you tell me it’s okay.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  In that moment Ramon had a whole new appreciation for Larry Rogers. Ramon had been almost thirteen years old when he first met the man who would become his stepfather. From the beginning, Larry had always been far more of a father to him than Frank Muñoz ever was. A desperate Sylvia Garcia may have married the wrong man the first time around, but she had gotten it right the second time, and for that her son was incredibly grateful.

  CHAPTER 15

  FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 8:30 p.m. (MST)

  At eight thirty that evening, Stu Ramey dropped Ali and Cami off at the Fixed Base Operator. After carrying their luggage inside, he didn’t wait around for the pilots to show up or to watch their plane take off. Instead, he climbed into his truck and headed out. On the way to Flag, he had checked in with both Lance and Mateo to see how things were going at work. Assured that everything was under control, Stu stopped off at his house in the Village of Oak Creek rather than continuing on to Cottonwood.

  The news that the incident on I-17 had been a deliberate act as opposed to an unfortunate accident had cast a whole new light on the situation, leaving Stu sick with worry. If B. Simpson had been the intended target, as Detective Biba seemed to believe, how had a potential killer or killers known not only that B. would be traveling in Hal Holden’s vehicle, but also the exact date and time when they’d be driving on that particular stretch of roadway?

  Stu had already ordered a complete scan of all company-owned electronic devices to see if any of their systems had been compromised. No incursions were found, unless, of course, someone was using software similar to Lance Tucker’s GHOST, which would have made tracking impossible. Barring that, however, it seemed reasonable to assume that High Noon’s network remained secure.

  Where was the leak, then—on one of Hal Holden’s devices, maybe? It had been easy for Stu to order security checks on High Noon’s company-owned devices, but that wasn’t the case with Hal’s electronics. He was a vendor as opposed to an employee, and any search of his devices had to be conducted under a cloak of secrecy. That was why Stu had assigned the task to Frigg earlier in the evening, but it wasn’t until he was driving back from Flagstaff that she responded.

  “Good evening, Stu,” she said. “I hope you’re having a pleasant evening.”

  The evening wasn’t pleasant at all, but Stu went with the flow. “I am, thank you,” he replied aloud. “What have you got for me?”

  “It took time to access Mr. Holden’s equipment,” Frigg said, “but I have located a keylogger.”

  Keyloggers register every keystroke made on an individual keyboard, thus giving whoever is behind it complete access to any information typed on an individual computer, which is then passed along to any connected devices.

  “Can you tell where it’s from?” Stu asked.

  “I don’t have a final answer on that,” Frigg replied. “I’m still following up on it. So far I’ve managed to trace it to an IP address in Albania.”

  Albania? Stu thought. Why would someone in Albania want to track the movements of an airport limo driver from the Village of Oak Creek, Arizona?

  “That means,” Frigg continued, “if Mr. Simpson was the actual target, all of his travel arrangements would have been available to anyone having access to Mr. Holden’s hacked computer.”

  Stu gripped the steering wheel as the news settled in. “Good work,” he muttered.

  “Will there be anything else?” Frigg inquired.

  Stu thought about that for a time before he answered. That Albanian IP address suggested a sophisticated, international connection that was more likely to lead back to B. than to Hal Holden, so maybe Biba’s single-minded focus on B. as the target wasn’t that far off the mark after all. Still, the keylogger had been found on Hal’s devices and not on B.’s, so while the official investigation remained firmly fixed on B., maybe someone else should take a hard look at Hal Holden.

  “There were two people in that wrecked Lincoln,” Stu said. “That means one was the intended victim and the other collateral damage. The official investigation is operating on the assumption that B. was the target and Ali is the only viable suspect.”

  “According to the latest data,” Frigg intoned, “twenty-eight percent of all homicide victims die at the hands of someone they know, often a spouse or a love interest, so focusing the investigation on Ms. Reynolds would be a logical course of action.”

  “Logical maybe,” Stu countered, “but what if it’s not right? We know about the keylogger. Warren Biba doesn’t. Whoever installed that on Hal’s computer is most likely behind all of this. We need to find out who that is, and in order to do that, I want to know everything there is to know about Hal Holden.”

  “Of course,” Frigg replied. “I’ll get right on it. Would you like me to send my results as they come in?”

  After Aunt Julia’s late-night party in Payson the night before and this extremely stressful day, Stu knew he needed sleep in the worst way. “Just queue them up for me,” he said. “Once I get home, I’m going straight to bed. I’ll look at your findings in the morning.”

  “Very good, then,” Frigg told him. “Drive safely and sleep well.”

  CHAPTER 16

  PRESCOTT, ARIZONA

  Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 9:00 p.m. (MST)

  At nine o’clock that night, when Chief Detective Biba assembled his team in the conference room at the Arizona Highway Patrol’s District 12 headquarters in Prescott, he was not a happy camper. This was supposedly a holiday, but he had been on duty since midmorning. He wasn’t thrilled about that, and his wife, Dena, was off the charts.

  He was also now the lead detective in charge of investigating not one but two major incidents that had occurred almost simultaneously earlier in the day on I-17. One of them, a single-vehicle rollover, had resulted in two seriously injured people being airlifted to the nearest ER trauma unit. The other, a vehicular fire, had occurred about a mile south of the original incident. The brush fire resulting from that had snarled north- and southbound traffic in Central Arizona for hours on end.

  With the two incidents attracting massive media attention, his team was stretched thin. It consisted of four uniforms—the troopers who had originally responded to the scene, two detectives; the CSIs who had investigated each of the two damaged vehicles; and the weird little tech guy who had spent the day assembling and analyzing any dashboard camera video and all available security footage of the vehicles involved. Unfortunately, someone in that very small group of people was supplying inside information to outsiders.

  “All right, people,” Biba announced as they settled into their chairs, “listen up. I want to know the identity of the so-called anonymous source who’s leaking information to the media!”

  The room went completely silent in the face of Biba’s accusatory gaze. No one moved so much as a muscle, and no one responded.

  At last Biba continued. “The lab has now confirmed that paint fragments discovered on the left front fender of the wrecked Lincoln Mark V from the single-vehicle rollover is consistent with paint used on 2012 Chevrolet Silverado crew cabs. A stolen, burned-out, and abandoned crew cab of that make and model was found a mile south of the wrecked Lincoln only a few minutes after the original incident. We know that, the crime lab in Phoenix knows that, and now anyone in the country who happens to have an Associated Press newsfeed on their cell phone does, too.”

  The room remained locked in silence. Eventually Biba spoke again.

  “So here’s the deal. I’m a detective, and I’m very good at what I do. Once I identify that anonymous source, he or she will be gone. Understood?”

  This time several heads nodded in silent agreement. Leaks to the media during important investigations were always a bad idea.

  After another long, uncomfortable pause, Biba went on. “We’ve got two patients in St. Gregory’s in Phoenix. One is in serious condition; the other is critical and on a ventilator. That means we’re looking at two counts of vehicular assault. If the guy on the ventilator croaks, it becomes vehicular homicide. So what have we got? Let’s start with you, Peach Fuzz.”

  He pointed to the department’s twentysomething tech whizz, a guy whose name was Darren Curtis, and someone Biba never addressed by name. Looking nervous and miserable, Darren rose to speak, having to clear his throat several times before any words emerged. “I’ve examined the surveillance footage from Kingman Redi-Mix, the company that owned that stolen Silverado. At 10:26 p.m., December 31st, their security cameras recorded a pair of headlights approaching the property but the vehicle remained out of camera range. Two individuals, both wearing hoodies, emerged from the unidentified vehicle and used a bolt cutter to unlock a gate and gain entry to their grounds.

  “They entered a 2012 Silverado crew cab, gray in color, and drove it away. Stealing the vehicle was evidently their sole purpose. Since no effort was made to enter the building itself, no alarms sounded. Two minutes after cutting through the perimeter fence, the suspects were gone. The first vehicle left the scene shortly thereafter. At the time the pickup was stolen, it was equipped with Arizona plates.

  “The owner of Kingman Redi-Mix, Mr. Kenneth Spelling, has the company’s security surveillance feed sent to his home computer overnight and checks it first thing every morning. At eight thirty today, he noticed that the crew cab was missing and reported it as stolen.

  “At 2:37 a.m., the dash cam license plate reader on a Highway Patrol vehicle recorded the Silverado with the correct plate number driving eastbound on Interstate 40 fifteen miles west of Flagstaff. It was traveling at the posted speed limit at the time and appeared to have only one occupant.

  “At eight fifteen this morning, the manager of the Super 8 motel in Flagstaff called nine-one-one to report that two hotel guests, visitors from New Mexico, had awakened this morning to discover that license plates had been stolen from two separate vehicles, parked side by side in the motel’s parking lot. Unfortunately, the motel’s surveillance system is currently inoperable. However, two badly damaged New Mexico plates, matching the ones reported stolen this morning, were located at the scene of the vehicular fire on I-17.”

  “If two vehicles were involved, where’s the other one?” someone asked.

  While a relieved Darren sank back into his seat, Biba took over.

  “No idea,” he said, “and that’s the crux of the matter. What Peach Fuzz told us suggests a good deal of premeditation on the suspects’ part. Stealing those plates at the last minute was designed to avoid an LPR encounter that might have registered the discrepancy between the vehicles in question and their accompanying plates. In other words, this was not a random event.”

  Biba paused long enough to survey the room. “What else?” he asked.

  One of the CSIs raised her hand. “The fire was started by someone stuffing a lit, accelerant-soaked rag into the gas tank opening. Within a matter of seconds the whole thing went kaboom. The fire burned hot enough to destroy any possible evidence, and it also served as a major distraction, allowing the suspects to flee the scene without being apprehended.”

  “No evidence of any kind was found in the truck?” Biba asked.

  “None,” the CSI replied with a shake of her head. “And any tire tracks left at the scene were obliterated by the arrival of first responders.”

  “What do we know about our hospitalized victims?” Biba asked.

  This time Detective Steven Flack spoke up. “The driver and owner of the Mark V is one Hal Holden, a sixty-seven-year-old widower and retired cop from Pasadena, California, who resides in the Village of Oak Creek. He runs a small, privately owned limo outfit called Oak Creek Car Service. He was driving his passenger, Mr. B. Simpson, to Sky Harbor where he was expected to board a London-bound British Airways flight. Holden’s wife, Rose, passed away from cancer several years ago. He has a daughter from a previous marriage, Sheila Rafferty, who resides in Washington, DC. I was unable to speak to her directly, but when I called to notify her about the incident, I was advised that she was already on her way.”

  “Before you made contact?” Biba asked.

  Steven nodded. “Correct,” he said.

  “I’d like to know who reached out to her,” Biba said. “Given both the timing and the distances involved, it’s unusual for someone to beat law enforcement to the punch when it comes to delivering that kind of news.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Steven said.

  “Does this Holden guy have a girlfriend?”

  Flack shook his head. “No, sir, not so far as anyone knows. According to neighbors, he’s an ordinary guy who spends his time either golfing or driving to and from Sky Harbor.”

  “What’s the deal with Simpson?”

  This time Detective Julie Morris took the floor. “He’s considered to be high profile in the Sedona/Cottonwood area,” she offered. “He and his wife, Ali Reynolds, are fairly well-to-do, living in Sedona but owning and operating a small tech company called High Noon Enterprises with headquarters in Cottonwood.”

  “What kind of tech?” Biba asked.

  “Cybersecurity,” Detective Morris answered. “As far as I can ascertain, most of their business is international in nature, and Mr. Simpson travels extensively, going in and out of the country on an almost-weekly basis while his wife handles operations here.”