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botulism was a small price to pay for the ambrosial Mexican food to be had along any highway in Southern California. Then he drove on into the desert, into the sun, toward Blythe.
    The town was a wide, flat stretch of sand, ringed by mountains in the far distance. Out the car windows he saw silky dunes and palm trees and barrel cactus. As he drove in, he couldn’t help remembering the view from the air. In the desert outside Blythe, there were huge petroglyphs called intaglios , enormous drawings on the desert floor. The biggest and most famous one was called The Hunter, a primitive depiction of a giant with a spear. There was no way not to associate it with the killer who had massacred Cara’s family. A monster had come out of this haunting setting to do his bloody work.
    Roarke was going back to the very beginning: the first witness he intended to interview was Randall Timothy Trent. At the time of the massacre of Cara’s family Trent had been married to Cara’s aunt Joan, her father’s sister. He was not any kind of blood relative: a second husband, not the natural father of Joan’s two small children.
    The aunt was made Cara’s guardian by the court and the general hope had been that she and her then-husband would adopt the child, but Trent had left Joan and the children just a few months after Joan had taken five-year old Cara in. Cara remained with the family for only six months before the aunt returned her to Family Services, claiming inability to deal with Cara’s behavioral problems. Given that the child had witnessed the slaughter of her family by a psychopath, that she herself had nearly been killed by that same monster who left her for dead, Roarke would have hoped the aunt would have made more of an effort.
    Now the aunt was dead of heart failure at fifty-four, and her two children had been just six months and eighteen months when she took Cara in, too young to remember their five-year old cousin. Which meant Trent was one of the few people alive who had had prolonged contact with Cara Lindstrom right after the attack on her and her family.
    And he was a captive audience, since he was currently incarcerated, in medium-security Ironwood Prison, just fifteen minutes outside the town where Cara’s family had been butchered.
    Whether Trent’s present circumstances had anything to do with anything, Roarke didn’t know. But in his short experience with Cara Lindstrom, he’d found that everything meant something.
     
    The landscape was bleak: flat plains of sand and a dry red ridge of mountains behind the white expanse of prison, so stark in the desert setting the buildings seemed to have been dropped onto the middle of the desert by aliens.
    Ironwood was a medium-security facility, not as dank as so many other California prisons, and the population taking exercise behind the fence in the outer grounds looked to be about fifty percent Latino. Roarke knew a whole building had been converted to house “sensitive needs” inmates, an unlikely mix of ex-gang members and sex offenders who were equally at risk for inmate-on-inmate violence.
    Trent was neither a gang member nor a sex offender. He’d been convicted of assault on a prostitute, the last of a long line of assaults and altercations seeming to stem from anger impulse control, and undoubtedly alcoholism and other substance abuse issues. The assault on the prostitute crossed into a gray area that interested Roarke; it combined sex and rage, and that was more specifically the kind of offender that Cara Lindstrom was in the habit of dispatching.
    Roarke didn’t think that Trent had molested Cara, although he sure as hell had checked the Social Services records for any hint of it. Trent had had no priors for sexual assault or other similar charges. His criminal record had started a good five years after he’d moved out on Joan Lindstrom-Trent. There was no obvious evidence that he’d done anything at all untoward before then.
    But a con didn’t just