Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"Really?" I said.

Her eyes crinkled at the corners.

FOUR HOURS LATER OUR fingerprint man called. The shell casing found on the carpet of Swede Boxleiter's apartment was clean and the apartment contained no identifiable prints other than the victim's. That same afternoon the sheriff called Helen and me into his office.

"I just got off the phone with the sheriffs department in Trinidad, Colorado. Get this. They don't know anything about Harpo Scruggs, except he owns a ranch outside of town," he said.

"Is he there now?" Helen said.

"That's what I asked. This liaison character says, 'Why you interested in him?' So I say, 'Oh, we think he might be torturing and killing people in our area, that sort of thing.'" The sheriff picked up his leather tobacco pouch and flipped it back and forth in his fingers.

"Scruggs is a pro. He does his dirty work a long way from home," I said.

"Yeah, he also crosses state lines to do it. I'm going to call that FBI woman in New Orleans. In the meantime, I want y'all to go to Trinidad and get anything you can on this guy."

"Our travel budget is pretty thin, skipper," I said.

"I already talked to the Parish Council. They feel the same way I do. You keep crows out of a cornfield by tying a few dead ones on your fence wire. That's a metaphor."

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING our plane made a wide circle over the Texas panhandle, then we dropped through clouds that were pooled with fire in the sunrise and came in over biscuit-colored hills dotted with juniper and pine and pinyon trees and landed at a small windblown airport outside Raton, New Mexico.

The country to the south was as flat as a skillet, hazed with dust in the early light, the monotony of the landscape broken by an occasional mesa. But immediately north of Raton the land lifted into dry, pinyon-covered, steep-sided hills that rose higher and higher into a mountainous plateau where the old mining town of Trinidad, once home to the Earps and Doc Holliday, had bloomed in the nineteenth century.

We rented a car and drove up Raton Pass through canyons that were still deep in shadow, the sage on the hillsides silvered with dew. On the left, high up on a grade, I saw a roofless church, with a facade like that of a Spanish mission, among the ruins and slag heaps of an abandoned mining community.

"That church was in one of Megan's photographs. She said it was built by John D. Rockefeller as a PR effort after the Ludlow massacre," I said.

Helen drove with one hand on the steering wheel. She looked over at me with feigned interest in her eyes.

"Yeah?" she said, chewing gum.

I started to say something about the children and women who were suffocated in a cellar under a burning tent when the Colorado militia broke a miners' strike at Ludlow in 1914.

"Go on with your story," she said.

"Nothing."

"You know history, Streak. But it's still the good guys against the shit bags. We're the good guys."

She put her other hand on the wheel and looked at me and grinned, her mouth chewing, her bare upper arms round and tight against the short sleeves of her shirt.

We reached the top of the grade and came out into a wide valley, with big mountains in the west and the old brick and quarried rock buildings of Trinidad off to the right, on streets that climbed into the hills. The town was still partially in shadow, the wooded crests of the hills glowing like splinters of black-green glass against the early sun.

We checked in with the sheriffs department and were assigned an elderly plainclothes detective named John Nash as an escort out to Harpo Scruggs's ranch. He sat in the back seat of our rental car, a short-brim Stetson cocked on the side of his head, a pleasant look on his face as he watched the landscape go by.

"Scruggs never came to y'all's attention, huh?" I said.

"Can't say that he did," he replied.

"Just an ordinary guy in the community?"

"If he's what you say, I guess we should have taken better note of him." His face was sun-browned, his eyes as blue as a butane flame, webbed with tiny lines at the corners when he smiled. He looked back out the window.

"This definitely seems like a laid-back place, yes-siree," Helen said, her eyes glancing sideways at me. She turned off the state highway onto a dirt road that wound through an arroyo layered with exposed rock.

"What do you plan to do with this fellow?" John Nash said.

"You had a shooting around here in a while?" Helen said.