NightScape

"No big deal. It's my business to deduce things," Romero joked.

"Oh? And what business is – " John straightened, his blue eyes as cold as a star, watching Luke come through the crowd. "You were told not to leave the stand."

"I'm sorry. I had to go to the bathroom."

"You should have gone before we started out."

"I did. But I can't help it if-"

"That's right. You can't help me if you're not here. We're almost out of squash. Bring another basket."

"I'm really sorry. It won't happen again."

Luke glanced self-consciously at Romero, then back at his brother, and went to get the squash.

"Are you pla

You don't exactly win friends and influence people, do you? Romero thought. "Yeah, I'll take a couple of those squash. I guess with the early frost that's predicted, these'll be the last of the tomatoes and peppers, huh?"

John simply looked at him.

"I'd better stock up," Romero said.

He'd hoped that the passage of time would ease his numbness, but each season only reminded him. Christmas, New Year's, then Easter, and too soon after that, the middle of May. Oddly, he'd never associated his son's death with the scene of the accident on the Interstate. Always the emotional co

Rust-colored, ankle-high hiking boots. They so surprised him that he slowed down and stared. The close look made him notice something so alarming that he slammed on his brakes, barely registering the squeal of tires behind him as the car that followed almost hit the cruiser. Trembling, he got out, crouched, stared even more closely at the hiking boots, and rushed toward his two-way radio.

The shoes had feet in them.

As an approaching police car wailed and officers motioned for traffic to go past on the shoulder of the road, Romero stood with his sergeant, the police chief, and the medical examiner, watching the lab crew do its work. His cruiser remained where he'd stopped it next to the shoes. A waist-high screen had been put up.

" I'll know more when we get the evidence to the lab," the medical examiner said, "but judging from the straight clean lines, I think something like a power saw was used to sever the feet from the legs."

Romero bit his lower lip.

"Anything else you can tell us right away?" the police chief asked.

"There isn't any blood on the pavement, which means that the blood on the shoes and the stumps of the feet was dry before they were dropped here. The discoloration of the tissue suggests that at least twenty-four hours passed between the crime and the disposal."

"Anybody notice anything else?"

"The size of the shoes," Romero said.

They looked at him.

"Mine are tens. These look to be sevens or eights. My guess is, the victim was female."

The same police officers who'd left the pile of old shoes in front of Romero's locker now praised his instincts. Although he had long since discarded the various shoes that he'd collected, no one blamed him. After all, so much time had gone by, who could have predicted the shoes would be important? Still, he remembered what kind they'd been, just as he remembered that he'd started noticing them almost exactly a year ago, around the fifteenth of May.

But there was no guarantee that the person who'd dropped the shoes a year ago was the person who'd left the severed feet. All the investigating team could do was deal with the little evidence they had. As Romero anticipated, the medical examiner eventually determined that the victim had indeed been a woman. Was the person responsible a tourist, someone who came back to Santa Fe each May? If so, would that person have committed similar crimes somewhere else? Inquiries to the FBI revealed that over the years numerous murders by amputation had been committed throughout the U.S., but none matched the profile that the team was dealing with. What about missing persons reports? Those in New Mexico were eliminated, but as the search spread, it became clear that so many thousands of people disappeared in the U.S. each month that the investigation team would need more staff than it could ever hope to have.

Meanwhile, Romero was part of the team staking out that area of Old Pecos Trail. Each night, he used a night-vision telescope to watch from the roof of the Baptist church. After all, if the killer stayed to his pattern, other shoes would be dropped, and perhaps-God help us, Romero thought-they too would contain severed feet. If he saw anything suspicious, all he needed to do was focus on the car's license plate and then use his two-way radio to alert police cars hidden along Old Pecos Trail. But night after night, there was nothing to report.

A week later, a current model red Saturn with New Hampshire plates was found abandoned in an arroyo southeast of Albuquerque. The car was registered to a thirty-year-old woman named Susan Crowell, who had set out with her fiance on a cross-country car tour three weeks earlier. Neither she nor her fiance had contacted their friends and relatives in the past eight days.

May became June, then July. The Fourth of July pancake breakfast in the historic Plaza was its usual success. Three weeks later, Spanish Market occupied the same space, local Hispanic artisans displaying their paintings, icons, and woodwork. Tourist attendance was down, the sensationalist publicity about the severed feet having discouraged some visitors from coming. But a month after that, the similar but larger Indian Market occurred, and memories were evidently short, for now the usual thirty thousand tourists thronged the Plaza to admire Native American jewelry and pottery.

Romero was on duty for all of these events, making sure everything proceeded in an orderly fashion. Still, no matter the tasks assigned to him, his mind was always back on Old Pecos Trail. Some nights, he couldn't stay away. He drove over to East Lupita, watched the passing headlights on Old Pecos Trail, and brooded. He didn't expect anything to happen, not as fall approached, but being there made him feel on top of things, helped focus his thoughts, and in an odd way gave him a sense of being close to his son. Sometimes, the presence of the church across the street made him pray.

One night, a familiar pickup truck filled with moss rocks drove by. Romero remembered it from the night his son had been killed and from so many summer Saturdays when he'd watched baskets of vegetables being carried from it to a stand at the Farmers' Market. He had never stopped associating it with the shoes. Granted, at the time he'd been certain he'd stopped the wrong vehicle. He didn't have a reason to take the huge step of suspecting that Luke Parsons had anything to do with the murders of Susan Crowell and her fiance. Nonetheless, he'd told the investigation team about that night the previous year, and they'd checked Luke out as thoroughly as possible. He and his three brothers lived with their father on a farm in the Rio Grande gorge north of Dillon. They were hard workers, kept to themselves, and stayed out of trouble.

Seeing the truck pass, Romero didn't have a reason to make it stop, but that didn't mean he couldn't follow it. He pulled onto Old Pecos Drive and kept the truck's taillights in view as it headed into town. It turned right at the state capitol building and proceeded along Paseo de Peralta until on the other side of town it steered into an Allsup's gas station.