“Can I help you?” asked a man in English. He looked around to see a cassocked priest standing next to him, surveying the church. “I’m Father Fernando.”

  “Father. I’m Peter Ross. I’m looking for someone—a friend—” He didn’t know how to being to classify Esmeralda. “Someone I’ve lost.”

  “Who?”

  “Her name is Esmeralda Sanchez. She lives—” He stopped because Father Femando’s face had lit up. He nodded happily and smiled.

  “Yes, Esmeralda, of course. But she’s lost? I thought she was at the hospital.”

  “Hospital?” Pete felt as if he’d missed a step. “Is she hurt?”

  “Oh, no, they say she is all right, just very tired. But she’s staying with the boy, the one she saved from the river last night when the railroad blew up. They’re at Hospital de la Inocente.”

  “When—” Pete took a deep breath. “Never mind. How do I get there?”

  Esmeralda was asleep in a chair next to the bed of a little boy who was asleep, too. He didn’t really look like Jaime, but he looked very fragile, hooked to tubes. His eyelashes were as long as Esme’s.

  God, she looked so pale.

  Pete took her hand as she slept and watched as she came awake. She raised her head horn her arms and saw him without recognition at first. Then her eyes widened, and before she could say his name, he leaned in and kissed her, a long, warm, loving kiss that left them wrapped together. He held her tightly and said her name over and over until she winced and he realized that she was wearing a bandage along the right side of her back.

  “I hear you’re a hero,” he said. “Again. Aren’t you making a habit of this kind of thing?”

  “I was there, Peter, I saw it. It was just like Jaime said. There was a child singing, and there was fire—oh, God, Pedro, all those people. I was so scared.”

  He smoothed her warm, curly hair back from her face to look at her again. She was there?

  “You were where exactly?”

  “On the bridge.” She took a deep breath. “I was trying to get to Ana, because I didn’t warn her—”

  He had to close his eyes against the certainty of how close he’d come to losing her. “Why didn’t you just come across the border?”

  “My papers were at your apartment, I left them—I had to do it, Peter, I had to come. I don’t know why.” She pulled back a little to glance at the boy on the bed. “I didn’t know. But I saw the man put the sack on the bridge. He tried to kill me. A white man.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was there, too. I saw it explode. The experts say it went off early. Nobody knows what triggered it—”

  If he’d known she was up there, he would have gone mad. Maybe that was why God had spared him the knowledge, to keep his mind on the job. He traced the line of her cheek with his fingers and thought again how lucky he had been, how incredibly lucky.

  The boy on the bed opened his eyes and coughed. Esmeralda reached over and took his hand. She squeezed his fingers until the boy’s roving eyes found her, and he smiled.

  “Pobrecito,” she said. “It’s all right. Esta bien.”

  “Who is he?” Pete asked. She smoothed the boy’s hair back, let her hand drift over his forehead.

  “No one knows. He can’t talk. They call him Juanito. They think his parents died when the bomb went off.”

  There had been four bodies found, all drowned, none of them carrying identification. There’d probably been more killed, but it would take days for the bodies to be found, maybe weeks. He avoided thinking of that job, grateful that at least it wasn’t his this time.

  “How is Agent Garman?” she asked, and surprised him into laughter. “He saved my life, mine and Juanito’s. I couldn’t have made it alone.”

  “He’s fine.” If he survived the hot sauce at lunch. “Es—”

  She turned to look at him, her smile a slice of teasing heaven, her eyes warm and glowing. “Everything’s all right,” she said. “It’s over now.”

  But he knew it wasn’t. Not as long as Rámon Cruz was out there, waiting.

  Chapter 25

  November 26, 1996

  Dr. Ana Gutierrez

  The room at the bombing investigation headquarters had not changed, and neither had the faces in it. Three FBI agents, whose names Ana did not remember, and someone from the Border Patrol as an observer. An El Paso police detective sat on a folding chair in the corner.

  “Coffee?” the agent asked, the same one who’d questioned her last time. She took the cup black and sipped the hot liquid without tasting it. What she was about to do sickened and terrified her, but she had no choice.

  Do the right thing, Ana, he’d said, her brother, the brave one. After watching the explosion last night, after seeing the death and the terror, she couldn’t do anything else.

  “Okay, Ana, we’re ready to listen if you’re ready to talk,” he said, “I’m Agent Miller, these are Agents Simons and Galvan.”

  She nodded, automatic courtesy, and took a deep breath. She could still taste the foul green river when she swallowed.

  “I know Rámon Cruz,” she said. “He was at the clinic, but he left before you got there yesterday. I haven’t heard from him since.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this yesterday?” he asked very gently. “Were you afraid?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “He said there’s a bomb in a school. He said he’d blow it up if I said anything. Please, you have to find the school. It’s a private Anglo school, it has big white columns—”

  Agent Miller sat back in his chair, staring at her in shock for a second, then turned to one of the other agents and told him to get photographs of every private school in the city. The agent left at a run.

  “He has my brother, too,” she said. Tears had collected in her eyes, blurring her vision, and now threaded cold down her cheeks. “Gabriel. He’s in a wheelchair. He said he’d kill him if I didn’t cooperate.”

  She cried for a while in silence while they all watched. Agent Miller gave her some tissues, and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose, feeling foolish and empty. She was a little comforted by the compassion on his face, whether it was real or imagined.

  “We’ll find him,” he said. “Ana, this is important—did you know he was going to plant the bombs?”

  “He—” She felt something catch in her chest, like a pulled string. “He asked me to hold a package for him. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. I—that was just before the first bomb. He hid it in my clinic. I didn’t know it was a bomb.”

  It sounded pitiful. Stupid. She swallowed a mouthful of shame and looked away as Agent Miller judged her and found her wanting. After a while his chair scraped, and he got up to pace around the room. One of the other agents leaned forward and said, “Tell us everything, from the first moment you saw Rámon Cruz.”

  She did, pausing for breaks when they wanted clarifications. An agent came in with Polaroid photographs of schools; she put her finger on one of them remembering the classic white columns, the smiling uniformed teenagers.

  “Mount Olive Academy,” Miller said, and handed it to the El Paso detective. “Close it. Get those kids out of there as soon as you can, and send in a bomb team to look for a device.”

  “Tell them—” She gulped hard. “Tell them to look for a backpack with toys inside.”

  The detective left in a hurry, with two of the three FBI agents. Miller stayed, sliding back into his chair across from her. The room looked very empty with just the two of them and the silent Border Patrol officer at the back, the glare of the one-way mirror behind Miller’s back.

  “I have some bad news, Ana,” Miller said quietly. His dark eyes held hers. “They found your brother in an alley about seven blocks from your clinic. His throat was cut.”

  She sat very still, trying to put the words together with her last sight of Gabe. She’d told him good morning, hadn’t she? She’d said something stupid, like Don’t get into trouble, and gone downstairs to another day of work. She hadn’t really believed, not really, that Rámon would kill his own people.

  Her people. The loss didn’t seem real. She kept waiting for someone to tell her it was a mistake.

  “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?” Miller asked. She raised her eyes from contemplation of the table and focused on him.

  “I want to see him,” she said. “Before I say another word, I want to see my brother.”

  “He’s already been identified. There’s no need.

  She stared at him until he nodded and came around to take her arm as she rose to her feet. She didn’t know why until her knees betrayed her. Why were her legs shaking?

  The sunshine outside felt warm and strangely distant. Agent Miller and another man she didn’t know took her off the Army base to a small gray building downtown. She knew the city morgue building, of course; she’d even sent people to it. But this—this—

  It was a mistake.

  She followed Agent Miller down a long hallway and into a small room with a curtained window. The air smelled metallic from the heaters but felt chilly, and there was the smell a medical student never quite forgets, the smell of dead flesh.

  She held her breath, like a child, as Agent Miller stepped back away from her and the curtain slid open.

  The subject is a young Hispanic male, approximately thirty years old, well nourished. Evidence of massive exsanguination—Her mind gibbered on in medical terms, a cushion to protect her from what she saw. He was too pale to be Chicano, his skin the palest amber, a completely unnatural color. His short, dark hair was still neatly combed. His face wasn’t at peace, it was simply slack and empty, and his eyes were closed. The sheet was pulled carefully up around his neck.

  His legs ended abruptly at mid-thigh. As she saw that pitiful detail, her breath exploded out of her, and it all focused for her. Gabriel’s face. It was her brother’s face.

  Agent Miller put a hand under her arm, but she didn’t need it. After a moment of listening to a silence that would never hold her brother’s laughter again, she said, “Let me tell my family.”

  A new voice behind her said, “There’s no need, Ana, I’ve told tham.” Sister Teresa. Ana turned blindly toward the voice, saw her aunt’s kind, sorrowful face, and collapsed into her arms, resting her head against the stiff fabric of her nun’s habit. Teresa let her cry in peace as the curtain rolled shut and Gabriel vanished forever from the world.

  Teresa rode back with her in the FBI car, holding her hand, sensibly saying nothing. Ana watched the road ahead without any real interest. The road took them back to Fort Bliss. They parked in the same gravel lot, and she glimpsed her diseased old Pinto leaking oil on the pristine gravel. They would whisk that stain away, she was sure of it. No sign of her here tomorrow.

  Tomorrow seemed a wearyingly long way off.

  In the front lobby Ana passed four people, obviously waiting for someone inside the secured area. They were all Hispanic, and one of them spat on her. She stopped, astonished, staring at the man’s furious black eyes until Agent Miller tugged her on behind the guard station.

  “Cabróna!” the man sneered. “Traitor!”

  “We brought in some of the Sons of Aztlan.” Miller said quietly. “Don’t take it personally. The opinion is that we’re persecuting Hispanic activists.”

  “Aren’t you?” she asked, and pulled away from his touch. “Rámon isn’t one of them. He’s insane, don’t you see that? You can’t blame the Aztlan movement for what this man has done. He doesn’t speak for them!”

  Teresa put a quieting hand on her shoulder.

  “Dr. Gutierrez, you don’t seem to understand the realities of the situation. Cruz has popular support in the barrio. He’s a folk hero, like Billy the Kid. He brought down the Border Patrol. There are people out there, a lot of them, who maybe wouldn’t set the bombs, but they cheer the results all the same, and those people are dangerous.” Agent Miller almost hissed the word. “Those are the people who put money in the kitty for the’relief fund’ that ends up buying automatic weapons. This is Ireland all over again, don’t you see that? If Cruz gets what he wants, this city will blow apart. He’s just the fuse. It’s people who believe in him who are the bomb.”

  She kept her voice quiet as she said, “And your answer is to tell us what to think.”

  Agent Miller sighed and looked up at the ceiling for help. “Ma’am, I wish I had an answer. I wish to hell I did. But all I can do is to keep an eye on people we think are the most dangerous elements and hope people like you can understand right and wrong. Can you?”

  She bit her lip and said, “I’m talking to you. Instead of spitting on you. You tell me.”

  A man emerged from an office and handed Miller a piece of paper; he read it and nodded. “They’ve gone through Mount Olive Academy with a fine-tooth comb,. Dr. Gutierrez, and there were no bombs. As a precaution we’re also sweeping every other private school with a predominantly Anglo population, but I don’t think we’ll find anything. We think he was bluffing.”

  “Bluffing—” She was completely stricken.

  “Don’t blame yourself, you couldn’t take the chance. There was no way to know, and he’s crazy enough to try it. If he had targeted the school, though, I think he would have already blown it. He has to know you’re here by now, if he didn’t know we brought you in yesterday. There’s no reason for him not to carry out his threat, unless it was a bluff. It’s okay, Doctor. We won that round.”

  She stared at him, lost in the certain knowledge that she could have told Rafael the truth. She could have saved Gabriel’s life.

  “My brother’s still dead,” she said. “I didn’t win.”

  They put her in a room with Sister Teresa and left them alone for an hour or two. Someone brought in drinks when they were thirsty, and promised lunch. She paced the room, full of a restless energy that she knew was really exhaustion, and asked Teresa about Pete.

  “He’s fine,” Teresa said. Ana hadn’t dared ask it of any of the FBI men; she dreaded seeing the speculation in their eyes. “He wanted me to tell you some things, Ana. It’s what he was trying to reach you about, I think.”

  Ana turned toward her, frowning, and listened.

  Chapter 26

  November 27, 1996

  Peter Ross

  After getting Esmeralda new papers, Pete walked her home, and the trip seemed very short this time in her company. She laughed when he told her it was a long walk; for her it was a very minor distance. She walked everywhere she went.

  As darkness fell, they arrived at her house and found the groceries right where he’d left them on the front porch, a minor miracle in this part of Juárez that Esmeralda took as natural. She sorted through the food he’d brought, smiling over the treats and rarities, and fixed him what she called a traditional Mexican meal of thanksgiving, brown sugar beans and hot dogs.

  They made love in her bed, in the glow of thick vanilla-scented candles and the flutter of white curtains open to the night breeze. Her mouth tasted of brown sugar and her skin of rose and cinnamon, and she was the first lover he’d ever had that could laugh with him, laugh for pure joy, in the middle of it.

  He never wanted the night to be over, but the morning dawned bright and clear, and the rooster in the backyard made sure they knew it. Pete woke in her arms, warm and secure, and wondered how he’d ever managed to avoid this all these years of coming to this house, sitting so close to her. Had he been insane?

  She burrowed closer to his warmth, murmuring in protest when he slipped away. The wind coming in the window was cold, and his skin pebbled with chill bumps as he dressed. Esmeralda watched him with sleepy, sated eyes, warm in her cocoon of blankets.

  “I have to go,” he said, and kissed her a long, lingering goodbye. “Stay safe, Es. At least for one day, okay?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said serenely. “I have things to do here. Is safe, you see?”

  Safe was a relative term, he knew. The Border Patrol building had been safe, too. He kissed her again and shrugged on his coat before leaving. He closed the door, tried the knob, and stuck his head back inside.

  “Lock the door, Es!” he yelled. Her sleepy “Sí,” followed him down the steps. He heard the click of the lock and started walking toward the Copia Bridge, unable to keep a smile off his face in spite of what he knew was waiting for him on the other side of the border.

  His answering machine was full of messages from newspaper and television reporters, one from a reporter from the Enquirer who wanted to talk to “Our Lady of Miracles.” The last one was from Sister Teresa Gutierrez.

  He listened to the news of Gabriel’s murder with a sense of claustrophobia; all he could think of was Ana, always so strong, and how she would be breaking under this weight. Teresa told him the FBI had allowed Ana to return to the clinic to gather some things, but that the building It’self was closed for investigation. They were hoping for trace evidence, he assumed, left by Cruz or his men, but these men were soldiers; they packed their trash, policed themselves rigorously. Whatever they got would help convict, but it wouldn’t help catch.

  He sat in his apartment, looking out at the bright dry day, at the pastel stones that made up the rock wall outside. It had always struck him as strange that concrete and stones were such essential building materials out here; rock walls were a fixture of landscape design, as if chain-link fences or wood slats had never been invented. It was something that he’d always found weirdly charming about these people, that they thought a four-foot fence built of rocks would keep out intruders.

  The fences weren’t made to stand up to rain and snow. After every good rain half of them crumbled—like Ana, who was held together with cement and stone, a true child of the desert. Full of secrets.