“Go!” Ramon shouted at Larry over the racket of the smoke alarm. “Head for the back door. I’ll bring Mom!”

  As smoke filled his lungs, Ramon willed himself to keep moving. When he reached his mother, he swept her into his arms, flung her over his shoulder, and made for the kitchen. He fully expected to have to shove her out through the hole in the back door, but Larry had had the presence of mind to unlock the deadbolt, leaving the door wide open.

  Coughing and choking, Ramon staggered outside and headed for the street. As he neared the end of the driveway, it was all he could do to remain upright. He was close to falling when AJ stepped forward and relieved him of his burden. At that point, Ramon dropped to his knees and stayed there for the better part of a minute, coughing, choking, and gasping for breath. When the spasm finally ended, he looked around. Both his parents were safe, sitting on the ground side by side and watching in transfixed horror as their home went up in flames.

  In the distance, Ramon heard wailing sirens signaling the approach of emergency vehicles. A cop car arrived first. A uniformed officer leaped out of the vehicle and ran toward them.

  “Come on,” he shouted, beckoning toward them. “You need to move back and make way for the fire trucks. Whose car is that?” he demanded, pointing at AJ’s Civic. “Get that thing out of here!”

  While AJ moved his car, the cop helped Ramon usher his parents to the far side of the street. By the time they reached their neighbor’s lawn, Ramon realized his mother wasn’t just coughing. She was clearly having trouble breathing. A fire truck arrived first, followed by an ambulance. Ramon raced in that direction and approached the first EMT he saw.

  “Come quick,” he shouted. “It’s my mother. She can’t breathe.”

  The EMTs took charge. Within a matter of moments, Ramon’s mother was placed on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance with Larry climbing in after her. “Where are you taking them?” Ramon asked before the medic could slam the door shut.

  “Portland General,” was the curt reply.

  Ramon nodded. That was the same hospital where Larry had been scheduled to have his knee replacement.

  I guess that’s not happening, Ramon thought as the ambulance rolled away. “Is your mom going to be okay?” AJ asked when Ramon returned.

  “I hope so,” Ramon said, “but how the hell did this happen?”

  “It had to be a bomb,” AJ replied.

  “A bomb?” Ramon repeated in disbelief. “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m not,” AJ said. “It must have been inside the box.”

  “What box?”

  “When I pulled up, there was a cardboard box—a delivery box—sitting on the porch. I decided to use it for target practice and threw your dad’s papers at it. As soon as they hit, the damned thing blew sky high.”

  After that, there was nothing more either of them could do but stand and watch in mute disbelief as Larry Rogers’s mid-century modern burned to the ground. When firefighters sprayed water on it, the flames seemed to get worse.

  Several minutes passed. “Where’s your car?” AJ asked.

  With his parents’ cars in the garage, Ramon usually parked his 4Runner on the street. At this point, it was both out of sight and out of reach behind a barricade of fire trucks. “Over there,” he said, pointing.

  “Come on, then,” AJ said. “We can’t do anything here. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  Nodding, Ramon followed AJ to where he had parked the Civic. Once inside the vehicle, neither of them spoke for the next several minutes. AJ was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “Who would do something like this to your parents?”

  Ramon shook his head. “I have no idea,” he answered. “None whatsoever.”

  All he could think about was watching the flames eat through his parents’ house and wondering what, if anything, would be left.

  “Well, it sucks,” AJ said. “I’m so sorry.”

  At the hospital, Ramon directed AJ to drop him off at the entrance to the ER. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Your car’s not here,” AJ pointed out. “How will you get back home?”

  “If I even have a home,” Ramon replied gloomily.

  “Look,” AJ said, “I gotta finish delivering my papers, but put my number in your phone. That way you can call me if you need a ride.”

  “Thanks,” Ramon said, keying in the number.

  “I’ll give you my grandfather’s number, too,” AJ added. “His name is Hiram Jones. If you can’t reach me, call him.”

  With the second number added, Ramon headed into the hospital. He spotted Larry on the far side of the ER’s lobby. Some kind soul had taken pity on him and loaned him a pair of scrubs and some hospital socks, so at least he was no longer barefoot and wearing his pajamas. Sitting alone with his head buried in his hands, Larry Rogers was a picture of utter defeat. Ramon’s mother was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Mom?” he asked as he approached.

  Larry raised a grief-stricken face. “Sylvia had a heart attack,” he answered.

  “How bad is it?”

  “I don’t know. They’re running some tests—scans, they called them, but she’s probably going to need surgery.”

  Ramon took a breath before sitting down next to Larry and putting a comforting arm around his stepfather’s broad shoulders.

  “It’ll be all right,” Ramon murmured softly. Those were the only words of solace he could summon.

  “Will it?” Larry demanded. “If I lose her, what will I do? And what about the house? How bad is it? Will we even have a place to go home to? And what the hell happened? Was it a gas leak or what?”

  That was when Ramon realized that Larry had been so focused on what was going on with his wife that he had no idea about what had happened at the house or the extent of the damage.

  “It was a bomb,” Ramon said quietly.

  “A bomb?” Larry repeated in disbelief. “Somebody threw a bomb at our house?”

  “Nobody threw it,” Ramon explained. “A box was left on the front porch. The bomb was in that.”

  “What kind of box?”

  “A delivery box. When AJ drove up…”

  “The paperboy?” Larry asked.

  Ramon nodded. “He threw your newspapers at the box. When they hit the box, it blew up.”

  “How’s that possible?” Larry wondered.

  That was one of the things Ramon had been wondering about during that long period of silence as AJ had been driving him to the hospital.

  “I’m guessing someone placed it there during the night,” Ramon said. “It was rigged so the slightest movement would set it off.”

  For a time Larry Rogers said nothing, but when he finally spoke it was in a voice filled with quiet fury. “That son of a bitch!” Larry muttered finally. “He’s the one who did it, and she’s the one he was after.”

  Ramon was taken aback. In all the years he had known Larry Rogers, he had never heard a single bad word escape the man’s lips.

  “Wait, you think Mom was the target?” Ramon asked in dismay.

  “Of course she was!” Larry declared. “Who else? She’s the one who goes out to get the papers every morning. If being hit by the morning papers was enough to set off that bomb, you can bet if she had picked it up to carry it into the house, she would have been blown to pieces.”

  “It sounds like you know who’s responsible,” Ramon ventured.

  “Of course I do,” Larry replied. “Your father. Who else? He swore on a stack of Bibles that he’d get her someday. Maybe the fire didn’t kill her, but if she dies due to that heart attack, he will have succeeded all the same.”

  Ramon was still trying to sort things out. “You’re saying my father threatened my mother?” Ramon asked. “Where? When?”

  “The last time they were together,” Larry replied. “They were at the jail. She had just told him that she wasn’t going to post his bail, and that she hoped he’d rot in prison. He went berserk. He swore he’d get even with her if it was the last thing he ever did.”

  Ramon’s mother had never mentioned a word to Ramon about his father making that kind of threat, but then there were a lot of things his mother had never mentioned. The news wasn’t especially surprising, however, because making threats was Frank Muñoz’s second nature.

  “But he’s still in prison,” Ramon objected. “How could he?”

  “No, he’s not,” Larry said. “He’s out on parole. He got out a couple of months ago. Your mother and I were told he was living in Las Vegas with his younger sister.”

  Something else Mom never mentioned, Ramon thought. It took several seconds for him to sort out what he should say next. Finally, the words came to him.

  “All right, then,” he said. “If that’s the case, we need to go back to the house and tell the detectives what you just told me.”

  “No,” Larry said.

  “What do you mean, no?” Ramon objected. “If my father’s a suspect in what happened, we need to tell them. I’m calling a cab.”

  Larry didn’t seem to hear what he was saying. “Go ask one of the nurses if we can borrow one of those wheelchairs,” he said.

  “I’ll get you one,” Ramon agreed, “but let me call the cab first.”

  “Forget the damned cab!” Larry snarled, drawing alarmed glances from everyone in the room. “I don’t want a cab! I need a wheelchair. It’s ten after seven. We may be a few minutes late, but it’s probably not too late for my pre-surgery check-in.”

  Ramon glanced at the clock on the wall. It was indeed ten past seven—ten minutes past the end of Larry’s original knee replacement check-in time, but Ramon didn’t understand. With everything else that had happened that morning, was he still thinking about going through with it?

  “You can’t mean that,” he said.

  “I most certainly do,” Larry replied. “Your mom’s been looking after me and my bad knees for years. Now she’s the one who needs help. The only way for me to be there for her is to get my knees fixed, and that’s what I intend to do. Now get me that damned chair!”

  Ramon stared at Larry with new eyes, realizing that he had loved the man all along, but never more than in that moment.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, standing up and stuffing the phone in his pocket. “One borrowed wheelchair coming right up.”

  CHAPTER 28

  BLYTHE, CALIFORNIA

  Friday, January 3, 2020, 6:30 a.m. (PST)

  The call came in at six thirty in the morning as Detective Juanita Ochoa was stepping out of the shower. She was just toweling off when her husband opened the door and stuck his head into the bathroom. “You’ve caught a case,” he said, “make that a double.”

  Juanita had been a homicide cop for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office for the past six years. She didn’t have to ask a double what. She knew what Armando meant.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Northwest of town on Solar Farm Road,” he answered. “I told them you’re on your way, and don’t worry about the kids. I already called Mom. She’s on her way over to help with breakfast and get the kids off to school.”

  For Juanita, someone who had grown up mostly without family, that was one of the many blessings of living just down the street from your in-laws. Nana could always be counted on to drop everything and come on the run as needed. Armando was a captain with Blythe PD. Juanita worked for the sheriff’s department. With two kids in elementary school—Gabe in third grade and Yoli in first—Nana’s help was needed far too often.

  “Breakfast before you go?” Armando asked.

  “Better not,” she answered. “Just coffee.” Once in her vehicle and headed out, she radioed Dispatch. “What’s the deal?”

  “Two gunshot victims—young African American males, early to mid-twenties,” was the reply. “One was shot execution style in the back of the head. The other one was shot in the back.”

  For Juanita, this was a familiar scenario, one that most likely meant a single shooter. When the first victim was shot, the second one had tried to make a run for it and hadn’t succeeded.

  “Who found them?”

  “A guy named Mickey O’Rourke. He works maintenance at the solar farm. He was on his way home from work this morning and ended up needing to take a dump by the side of the road. Some kind of food poisoning, I guess. Anyway, he pulled over and climbed down to where a culvert goes under the road so he’d be out of sight. That’s where he found the bodies. Deputies Lane and Rojas are already at the scene.”

  “Is Rudy coming with me?” Juanita asked.

  Rudy Shepherd was her usual partner.

  “Nope, he called in sick. Doc says he’s got pneumonia. You’re on your own on this one.”

  “Got it,” Juanita said.

  She arrived on scene fifteen minutes later. Solar Farm Road was a straight dirt track that ran north and south through seemingly barren wasteland. There were no commercial buildings or residences within miles of the place, so there wouldn’t be any surveillance video coverage shedding light on what had happened.

  Juanita pulled up and parked on the side of the road behind a collection of vehicles that included an older-model Ford pickup, two Riverside County marked patrol cars, and a van labeled RIVERSIDE COUNTY CORONER. Someone was sitting in the truck. The other vehicles were empty, meaning Juanita was late to the party.

  Exiting her unmarked, she looked down the steep embankment and located the cluster of people standing in the bed of a dry wash. As Juanita made her way down the incline, Deputy Lane hurried up and met her as she reached level ground.

  “Any idea how long they’ve been dead?”

  “A while,” he answered. “A couple of days, at least. I hope you brought your jar of Vicks.”

  Juanita paused to survey the scene. The two bodies, not yet covered, lay faceup in the wash’s fine sand just inside the culvert’s five-foot-tall opening. The bodies were several feet apart. One of them had obviously been shot several yards from where he lay. Seeing the trail of drag marks leading to the body, Juanita surmised that was the victim who had been shot in the back.

  Finished with that initial visual survey, Juanita approached the culvert. As her nostrils were assailed by two separate odors—the pungent smell of human excrement mixed with the unmistakable scent of decomposition—she understood Deputy Lane’s remark about needing her jar of Vicks. If Mickey O’Rourke hadn’t been sick already, this would have done the trick.

  Deputy Coroner Abigail Leavitt stood off to one side, puffing away on a cigarette and dropping the ashes into a Styrofoam cup so as not to contaminate the crime scene.

  “How’d you beat me here?” Juanita asked.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” Abby said. “Shall we?”

  The two women approached the bodies together. This was Abby’s show. Juanita stood to one side taking notes while the deputy coroner did her preliminary examination. She estimated the two male victims had been deceased for twenty-four to thirty-six hours. No wallets or ID were found at the scene or on either body. Both men showed indications of having worn jewelry—watches and rings—but those were no longer present. The missing items suggested robbery as a possible motive.

  Both victims had been shot through and through, one in the forehead and the other in the back. On the second victim, the bullet had entered the body just under the left shoulder blade and exited through the chest, most likely impacting at least one or two vital organs along the way.

  “Can you raise fingerprints?” Juanita asked.

  “Yes, but not here,” Abby replied. “That’ll be easier to do in the morgue than it will be out here in the sand.”

  “Will you schedule the autopsies for today?”

  “Sure can,” Abby said cheerfully. “As far as I know, these two guys are first in line. Will you be joining us?”

  “Yes, but I’ll need to stick around here for a while. The CSIs should be arriving any minute, and I want to talk to the guy who found them.”

  While CSIs began photographing the crime scene, Juanita climbed back up to the road. O’Rourke was still sitting in his truck when she walked up to it and knocked on the driver’s window.

  “Can I go home now?” he demanded, rolling the window down, without actually looking her in the eye. Most of the time, that kind of evasion would have been suspect, but in this instance Juanita understood the man was beyond humiliated.

  “Not quite yet. I’m Detective Ochoa,” she explained. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I left work a little before six—a couple of minutes early, I guess. I was having stomach cramps, but I figured I’d be able to make it home in time. I was wrong about that. I stopped here because I thought I’d be out of sight down inside the culvert, and that’s where I found them.”

  “Do you know either one of the two individuals?”

  “Never seen ’em before.”

  “Did you see anything unusual today—any unfamiliar vehicles or people who looked out of place?”

  O’Rourke shook his head. “Nothin’,” he said.

  “You gave your contact information to the deputies?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “You can go then, sir,” she said. “I hope you feel better.”

  “Boy, you and me both!”

  Back in the wash a pair of deputies was loading the corpses into body bags. No shell casings were found, but they located a slug in the blood-stained sand at the far end of the drag marks. Studying the projectile, Juanita thought it looked like a .22 LR, but that was just a hunch on her part. The ballistics folks would have to sort that out for sure.

  The last part of processing the scene called for gathering up whatever litter there was to be found in the area, most of which would end up having nothing to do with the murders. When the trash had been properly bagged, Juanita excused herself and headed for Indio, an hour and a half away.