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  “I shot a guy this morning,” I say. “There are a lot of people who can verify.”

  “You shot a guy?” Purvis says. “Another one?”

  “This one lived,” I say. “Not that it matters much. Both shootings were justified.”

  Purvis says nothing, but his gaze is long and hard, and I can tell that he is skeptical.

  I tell Purvis the specific exit where I stopped for gas and bought my hamburger, and I note the time I was there.

  “They probably have security footage,” I say, “if no one remembers me.”

  “Okay,” Purvis says, sounding satisfied. “I’ll have someone check this out. I’m going to have one of our techs swab your hand for gunshot residue.”

  “I just told you I fired my gun this morning.”

  “Come on, Rory. You know we have to do this. What if your alibi turns out to be bogus? We need to be thorough.”

  “I understand.”

  A weighted silence falls between us.

  “Look,” I say. “I played nice. So what can you tell me? You’ve got to understand where I’m coming from here. Anne was my wife, and she called me about those prank calls she was getting. That’s why I asked someone to swing by her house in the first place.”

  Purvis looks back at the house with a forlorn expression on his face and then pulls himself together with a curt nod. “Someone came in and killed Anne in cold blood,” he says. “We don’t know jack shit besides that.”

  “Looks like a crime of passion to me,” I say.

  Purvis nods, not necessarily in agreement. It’s more like acknowledgment.

  “Anything stolen?”

  “Not that we can tell.”

  “Any sign of forced entry?”

  “Nope.”

  “So it was someone she knew?”

  “Possibly,” Purvis says, reluctant to commit himself to any theory.

  We both know that most murders are committed by people who know the victim.

  “Have you located her ex-boyfriend?” I ask. “Calvin Richards.”

  “Ex?” Purvis says.

  “That’s what she told me. Said they broke up a couple weeks ago.”

  “Interesting,” Purvis says. “We’re looking for him.”

  Purvis puts a hand on my shoulder, a signal that he is about to walk away and get back to work.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll get the guy.”

  It’s the right thing to say, but Purvis’s delivery sounds flat, as if he doesn’t believe the words any more than he expects me to.

  Chapter 9

  I PULL MY Ford up the driveway of my parents’ ranch. Every light in the house is on, and both of my brothers’ trucks are in the driveway. The front door is open, so all Mom and Dad have to do is swing open the creaky screen door to step out on the porch to greet me. My brothers follow, and their wives, one with a baby in her arms, the other trailed by her two children, ages two and four.

  It’s a large family homecoming that would have filled my heart with joy under any other circumstances.

  “We heard,” Dad says, his voice shaky.

  Mom comes down the porch steps and wraps me in a hug.

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” she says.

  My brother Jake hugs me next. He is the youngest and always loved Anne, saw her like a big sister. He’s the most emotional of the three of us. Quick-tempered. Hotheaded. But also sentimental. His wife, Holly, said she fell in love with him because he cried when they saw a cheesy Nicholas Sparks movie on their first date.

  “I’m sorry, bro,” he says in my ear. “I’m so…”

  His voice breaks and he can’t continue.

  Chris is the middle brother and only two years younger than me. He puts an arm around my shoulder. Somehow, he turned out to be the steadiest of the three of us. Reliable. Modest. Never one to get into a fight.

  I think I fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two. I am oldest, so I always thought maybe the two of them gravitated toward the two sides of my personality.

  Both of my sisters-in-law, Holly and Heather, hug me and express their condolences.

  Then Beau, my two-year-old nephew, says, “Hi, Unky Ror. You okay?”

  I drop to my knees and hug the boy’s tiny body. I haven’t cried yet, but there’s something about having an innocent child asking after me that makes me break down. It’s like I can’t help myself. Tears come flooding out, and I realize I’m squeezing Beau too tight.

  It’s hard for me to believe that there’s still joy left in the world. In a universe without Anne—in a universe where she could die the way she did—everyone else still gets to breathe and laugh and cry.

  Then Dad is there, laying a steadying hand on my shoulder. My father, the strongest man I knew growing up, helps me to my feet. He looks older than I remember, his wrinkles more defined, his age spots standing out against unusually pallid skin.

  “Son,” Dad says, “we’ll get through this together.”

  Inside, the adults talk into the night. I fill them in on what little I know, sparing them the grisly details at the scene. We share stories of Anne. We take turns crying.

  As the night stretches into the morning, after my brothers’ wives and children have long since departed for bed, the rest of us decide we might as well stay up till dawn. We file into the kitchen, investigate what’s in the cupboards, and begin making food for the next day. A tomato and spinach quiche for breakfast. Ham and turkey sandwiches for lunch. A venison lasagna for dinner.

  At eight o’clock, with the sun bathing the fields in a bright morning glow, my brothers get started on the ranch’s morning chores while my parents and I load the meals into Dad’s work truck and drive over to Anne’s parents’ house.

  Her parents greet us on the porch. Anne’s father, a retired school principal, looks like he’s aged twenty years since I last saw him. Her mother seems like a fragile husk of the vibrant woman I once knew. I bet that twenty-four hours ago they looked more alive than this.

  Anne’s mom holds me in a tight hug. Her body trembles in my arms.

  “Oh, Rory,” she says. “She never stopped loving you.”

  “I never stopped loving her,” I say.

  “You two got married too young,” she says. “Nothing else went wrong with your relationship. I wish you could have made it work.”

  “Me too.”

  Anne’s parents invite us in. We cut up the quiche and sit at the kitchen table to eat, but no one has much of an appetite.

  Anne’s mom asks me if I’ll sing a hymn at the funeral.

  “Bring your guitar,” she says. “That will be nice.”

  I sang for years in the church choir as well as in a country band during high school, but I explain that I haven’t picked up my guitar in more than a year. I didn’t even bother taking it with me down to McAllen. It’s in Dad’s study, collecting dust.

  But she insists that I play, and I acquiesce.

  “So, Rory,” Anne’s father says, “what do the police know?”

  “Not at the table, Hal,” Anne’s mom says.

  “I want to know what the cops know. They haven’t told us a damn thing.”

  “Not much,” I tell him. “Not yet, anyway. But they’ll figure it out.”

  I silently curse myself, because my words sound as hollow as DeAndre Purvis’s did at the crime scene.

  Chapter 10

  “ARE YOU SURE you want to see this?”

  The words are spoken by Freddy Hernandez, the county medical examiner. He also happens to be a high school friend of mine. In Redbud, pretty much everyone is. That’s one of the best things about living in a small town.

  I’m here strictly off the record. I have been given no official permission to help with the investigation. But when bullies picked on Freddy in high school, calling him a wetback and a border jumper and asking to see his green card, I always stood up for him. I won several fistfights—and lost a few—in defense of the Mexican immigrant who would go on to become the v
aledictorian of our class.

  When I called in this favor, Freddy couldn’t say no.

  “I’ve seen autopsies before,” I assure Freddy.

  “Yeah, man, but this is Anne. It’s not easy for me to see her like this. I can’t imagine what you must be feeling.”

  We’re in Freddy’s examination room, a pristine space with hospital-white walls and gleaming stainless steel workbenches.

  Anne is lying on a metal table, with a sheet draped over her body from head to toe. At various points, objects protrude up from her body, tenting the sheet in places.

  “Okay,” Freddy says, and he pulls the sheet away.

  I put my hand on the counter to steady myself. The world feels like it’s been knocked off its axis and is spinning too fast, tilting at the wrong angle, threatening to spin me right off the surface of the planet.

  “Breathe, my friend,” Freddy says.

  I close my eyes and take long, slow breaths. When I feel like I won’t pass out, I open my eyes and look again.

  Anne’s skin is so pale it’s almost translucent. What blood was left in her body has been pulled down by gravity, and the underside of her legs, her butt, and her back are bruised from where the blood settled after her heart stopped pumping. The objects that poked up against the sheet are trajectory rods—like barbecue skewers—that Freddy has inserted into the bullet holes to measure the angle of the bullets’ flight.

  I try to look past all the horrors that have been done to her body to recognize the beautiful woman who always made my heart race. The woman I held in my arms and promised to love forever, in sickness and in health, is now a stiffened, lifeless carcass.

  “Tell me what you know,” I say, my mouth dry.

  “All right,” Freddy says, and then he clears his throat and shifts into a professional tone. “I’ve already done the X-rays, and it looks like she’s got three bullets in her body. Investigators recovered three at the scene, so we’re guessing at this point that it was a six-shot pistol, and the perp fired all six.”

  “The good news,” he adds, “is that with this many slugs, forensics is bound to get some good sample striations, and they’ll be able to match the gun easily.”

  I can hardly concentrate. I’m not sure what I thought I would accomplish by seeing her like this. I felt, in some strange way, like it was my duty. But now I’m afraid all my memories of her will be marred by this horrific sight.

  “I’ve taken a blood sample and a urine sample, as a matter of routine,” Freddy says. “We’ll test those for everything we can, but we don’t expect to find anything fishy.”

  Freddy clears his throat. “No bruising or tearing in the genital area. No signs of rape.”

  Thank God for small favors, I think.

  “Judging by the angles and the evidence collected at the scene, it looks like the first shot was this one.”

  Freddy points to an inflamed bullet wound in Anne’s shoulder. The plastic rod poking out of it is perpendicular to her body.

  “The bullet shattered the shoulder socket,” Freddy says. “It seems she then fell down and started crawling. The perp followed, shooting her from behind. In the leg, the arm, the stomach. She was hemorrhaging badly, but none of the wounds were immediately fatal.”

  My stomach begins to burn, but there is nothing in there for me to throw up.

  “It looks like Anne rolled over onto her back,” Freddy says. “Then there’s a shot to her chest. Her right lung. Missed her heart.”

  “It was like he was toying with her,” I say. “Torturing her with bullets.”

  “Yes,” Freddy agrees. “Until the last shot. The powder burns show us that he held the gun right to her head before pulling the trigger. Putting her out of her misery.”

  “Or executing her,” I say.

  I imagine a person leaning over Anne, saying some final insult to her, and then shooting her in her beautiful face, just as he had threatened.

  “Can you tell how tall the shooter was?”

  “It’s hard to say since most of the shots were coming from a downward angle,” Freddy says. “But the first shot suggests someone who wasn’t that tall. Maybe a little taller than Anne, but not much.”

  Anne was five six. Cal is at least six foot.

  “Are you sure?” I ask.

  “We’ll have a better idea after I compare my notes on the body with what they find at the scene,” Freddy says. “But I don’t think we’ll find anything too conclusive. That’s what I’ll say if I’m subpoenaed for trial, anyway. There’s no way anything I’ll report will be enough to overturn the conviction of, say, a certain long-haul trucker.”

  “What have you heard, by the way?” I ask. “Have the authorities found this certain long-haul trucker yet?”

  Freddy shrugs. “Purvis told me that Cal claims to have been on the road. Taking a load to New Jersey, supposedly. Purvis is checking his alibis.”

  We’re quiet for a moment.

  “Rory,” Freddy says earnestly, “I don’t think you’ll want to stick around for what’s next. Once I finish taking photos, I’ve got to start cutting into her to find those bullets. And then I need to take out her organs and weigh them.” He hesitates and adds, “After that, her brain.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I don’t want to see that.”

  Before I leave, I step up to the table, lean over—avoiding the skewer sticking out of her cheekbone—and kiss Anne’s cold, rubbery forehead.

  “I love you,” I whisper.

  Tears stream down my face as I walk outside into the bright, unforgiving Texas sunlight.

  Chapter 11

  “YOU’RE GOING TO need to eat something eventually,” Mom says to me as she places her final dish—a platter of homemade buttermilk biscuits—on the table.

  My family has gathered for Sunday breakfast, a standing tradition that I haven’t participated in since my reassignment. When I worked out of nearby Waco, I was able to make it to Sunday breakfast once or twice a month.

  Dad leans over and puts his hand on my arm.

  “It is nice to have you home, son, although I wish the circumstances were different.”

  This prompts my youngest brother to ask when I might be coming back to work in their neck of the woods.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s ridiculous that they made you go away,” Mom says, putting a dollop of butter on her grits. “You were just doing your job.”

  This starts a conversation about the shooting that sent me down to McAllen. Despite my sister-in-law Holly’s wish that we not speak about this in front of the children, my brothers and my mother start talking about how unfair it was for me to be punished for shooting a man who had been trying to kill me. Even though I’m thirty-five now, my family still rallies around me and decries any injustice against me, as if I’m still a teenager getting benched in the second half of a football game. I appreciate their loyalty, but deep down I know that this is simply the way things work.

  What I told Rip when we faced off was true, though I left out some of the more colorful details. The guy I shot, Wyatt Guthrie, dealt drugs, bought and sold stolen cars, and ran a dogfighting ring. I was working surveillance at the junkyard where Guthrie did all his business. I was only supposed to keep an eye on him, not take any action, but I spotted Guthrie beating one of his pit bulls with a tire iron, and I couldn’t stand to sit back and watch. I ran in and told Guthrie to freeze. Guthrie had a gun on his hip—this is Texas, after all; if it’s not concealed, you don’t need a permit to carry it—and he dropped the iron and stood there like a cowboy at high noon in an old Western.

  He went for his pistol, and I shot him through the heart before he even touched his gun.

  The dog lived. Anne kept me updated when she checked on it every weekend at the animal shelter. A few months ago, she gave me the good news that it had been adopted.

  The Guthries were a big family with a terrible reputation, but somehow they became organized enough to hire a lawyer to file a la
wsuit against the Rangers, and probably paid him off with Wyatt’s drug money.

  With the media coverage and an investigation under way, my boss sent me down to the border with no indication of when I would get to return.

  If ever.

  I accepted the penalty, but now, sitting with my family, I realize how much I’ve missed home.

  “Rory,” Dad says, “why don’t you stick around for a while? We’d love to have you around the house.” He has finished eating his meal and is chewing on a toothpick, a habit he picked up after he quit smoking.

  I open my mouth to say I can’t, but then I realize this is exactly what I need. With Anne murdered, I don’t see how I can drive back down south to my lonely apartment and go on like nothing happened. I’ll take a leave of absence until they’re ready to bring me back to the Waco office. There’s no reason for me to spend my time banished to McAllen, buried under paperwork.

  The whole family is waiting for a response. My youngest brother’s spoon is frozen in place halfway to his mouth.

  “I’m gonna try to do that, Dad.”

  “Hot damn!” Jake says, and claps his hands together.

  “No swearing at the table,” Mom says, but she is smiling along with everyone else.

  Dad explains that I can stay in the spare building on the ranch to have a little privacy. It’s an old bunkhouse, from back when the ranch hands slept on the property, and my parents have been converting it into a one-bedroom casita. My father and brothers work from time to time to renovate it, but the project isn’t finished yet.

  “It ain’t much to look at right now,” Dad says. “But the water works and there’s a cookstove and a refrigerator.”

  “Sounds great,” I say, touched by my family’s excitement.

  “After breakfast, I’ll take you out and show you what the place looks like,” Dad says.

  I nod and try to eat a few bites of my biscuits and gravy. My appetite seems to be coming back.

  “Bring your pistol with you,” Dad adds. “There’s a rattlesnake that’s been living under the porch.”