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get this circus underway.” I heard the tension in her voice, and knew her patience was thin. All the traffic obliterated prairie marks, pulverizing everything into the fine dust that now rose into the night. She’d done a good job of traffic directing, though. No one parked near the power lines.
    â€œI’m on my way.” My way was a sedate walk, since night, flashlights, and trifocals make a rotten combination. Ahead, silhouetted against the lights and inky sky, a plume of water fanned out from the pumper, and I could hear the hiss against the flames. It would have done the prairie good to burn off a few million acres, but that wasn’t going to happen.
    Miles Waddell, the rancher whose pickup had been blasting its lights into our faces, and who owned all the land to the south, advanced from his vehicle but stopped well short of the cattle guard where one of the twin legged poles had toppled, sprawling across the county road, one of its legs reared high in the air where it had teeter-tottered across a big juniper corner post that anchored the section fence.
    The wires were a jumbled mess, and the heavy transformer complex that the pole had also carried had broken from its supports and lay askew. That’s where the fire had started, the power lines arcing into the grass. And odds were I’d seen the initial lightning bolts of the short circuit from my perch on Cat Mesa, twenty miles away.
    I reached Estelle’s vehicle and stopped. She had parked directly across the road, and Jackie Taber was unreeling the yellow tape to keep the hordes at bay. With the power now shut down, the electric company crews still kept their distance, waiting for the word from the Sheriff to move in.
    My first view through the binoculars told me that nobody was going anywhere for a while. This wasn’t about the little fire, or the downed poles. A body lay in the dust of the electric company’s two track along the power line, just a few feet from the last broken stump. The victim was lying on his back, arms thrown wide. In the vague, flickering light, the body had that same flat, deflated look shared by Deputy Perry Kenderman. And just beyond his feet, the stump of the electric pole had been cut off three feet above the ground, leaving sharp splinters on one side where the electric tree had taken leave of its stump. Above the dead man, the butt of the pole hung suspended, teeter-tottering over the fulcrum offered by the fence line’s juniper corner post.
    Even a simple crime scene gives up its details a few at a time. Some investigators would claim that, just as there is no such thing as a “routine” traffic stop, there is no such thing as a “routine” homicide crime scene. This night, the questions tumbled in one atop the next, with no coherent pattern or order.
    The most obvious explanation to me, from my vantage point a hundred yards away where I leaned against the front fender of the undersheriff’s Charger, was that somehow this unfortunate soul had stumbled upon the driver of the Nissan pickup, perhaps as the killer was putting the chain saw to the final pole. And like the unsuspecting Perry Kenderman, a single slug had dropped the passerby in his tracks. Nissan man had left the victim to stare at the stars. I was uncomfortable with that scenario, easy as it was. Nothing directly connected this site, this death, with the Nissan. I hadn’t seen it parked in this lonely place.
    But maybe…and where was the victim’s vehicle? Had he been a Mexican afoot? Our harsh desert ate a few of them every season. Or had the little Nissan pickup belonged to him, only to be stolen after his murder? If that was the case, what odd circumstance had set the killer afoot in the desert in the middle of the night, so eager to kill and steal a truck? Again, someone from across the border? I grunted in disgust and dug a toe of my right boot into the dust. That scenario just didn’t work, for