“You’re sure?”
Jem nodded, but he was staring in the direction Zeb had gone.
“What about the other one, Kai?”
The blond man gave another quick shake of his head, but before Tean could press the question, Katie emerged from the trailer.
“Sorry about that,” she said.“I couldn’t find my flashlight.Ready?”
As they made their way toward the side-by-side, Tean said, “This is going to be a strange question, but by any chance have you seen a man with a scar on his arm?”He traced a crescent on his arm, the way Jem had shown him.“He wouldn’t be a big man.”
Katie shook her head.“No.Why?Oh my God!Does the killer have a scar like that?”
“No,” Jem said with a laugh.“I wish it were that easy.It’s someone we want to talk to, that’s all.”
Disappointment crossed Katie’s face.“Sorry.I haven’t seen anybody like that.”
“What about—” Tean began.
But Jem cut him off with a tight shake of his head.
“You know what?”Tean said.“I’m jumping the gun.Let’s see this place first.”
Katie took them out of the lot and into the dark.For the first quarter mile, they followed the two-lane road.Then she pulled off onto a flat stretch of ground and said, “Hold on,” before starting up a hill.
Loose stones pinged off the side-by-side’s undercarriage, and the ATV rocked from side to side as they climbed.The grade was steep, and occasionally a tire whined as it sought purchase and found only air.Through the windshield, the night sky tilted, dropped down, rose up again.Tean grabbed the door handle.Jem, he was unsurprised to see, wore a huge grin—and when they came down unexpectedly hard enough to jar Tean’s teeth, Jem’s grin got bigger.
The ride became smoother when they reached the top of the hill, although only marginally, and they rode for close to fifteen minutes with nothing but the ping of stones, the crunch of crushed sage, and the groan of the suspension for company.The headlights made paper cut-outs of the night ahead of them: blank except for lichenous rocks, the brittle ball of an uprooted thistle, the fluttering leaves of sage.And then red rock rose again, and Tean realized he was seeing another side of the mesa.
Katie slowed the side-by-side in front of a break in the rock.She put her hand on the keys, but she didn’t turn off the engine.“Up there,” she said.“Just past a big deadfall.You can’t miss it.”
“Do you mind showing us?”
Shivering, Katie said, “You’ll see it right away.”Then she said, “I’m sorry.I know I said I would, but it—it’s weird, you know.”
“No problem,” Jem said.
“Do you want the radio so you can call back if you need anything?”
“We’re all right.”
“Do you want me to wait?”
Jem glanced at Tean.
“We can walk back,” Tean said.“It’s less than a mile.”
They got out of the side-by-side, and Katie gave them a miserable wave before starting off into the night again.
Tean turned on his phone’s flashlight.The wind was up, carrying the smell of the dust from the steppes and the sweet earthiness of the sage.It raked Jem’s hair out of its neat part and across his forehead, and he put a hand up, caught himself, and the corner of his mouth turned when he saw Tean looking at him.
The dark fissure in the rock turned out to be the mouth of a gully.A trickle of water that could barely be called a creek ran down the center of a mostly dry bed, but it was enough moisture in this part of the world that the gully was green by comparison with the land they’d just crossed.Bushes grew on the slopes, and higher, slender pines rippled like smoke as the wind tore at them.It even smelled different—like green things, like damp soil, like pine sap and the crisp edge of juniper.From a long way off, the rumble of an engine came across the mesa.Not a car or a truck, which meant Katie on the side-by-side.
A band of bright pink, sprayed onto the bole of a struggling cottonwood, caught Tean’s eye.“This must be part of the ranch’s property.I bet that’s why Katie was so nervous about coming back here—she said she wasn’t trespassing, but…”
Not long after that they reached the deadfall she’d mentioned, a gnarled tree that had fallen across the bed of the creek.The bark was silvery and coarse and crackled under the flashlight’s beam.Mountain mahogany.The twisted trunk wasn’t huge, but the way it had fallen made it difficult to get past—a little too big to climb over easily, but too low to go under either.Tean stepped up onto a nearby rock, slung a leg over the branch, and slid across to the other side.
“This is going to tear up my jeans,” Jem muttered.
