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myriad reasons. I watched the dark figures moving about in the harsh lights, and took a deep breath of impatience.
    Another state patrolman arrived, a grim-faced kid who looked so much like my eighteen-year-old grandson that he earned a double take from me. Doug Posey, the local Game and Fish officer, joined the party. More Posadas Electric Cooperative hardware, a couple more of the sheriff’s department’s dwindling staff. Then, coming up from the south, three Border Patrol SUVs raised their own dust cloud.
    We had so many flashing red and blue lights that it was impossible to find the Big Dipper.
    Slipping in quietly, Dr. Alan Perrone—finished with his preliminary examination of the unfortunate Perry Kenderman—parked immediately behind Estelle’s car and paused as he reached me. This time, I earned a long, careful scrutiny.
    â€œHell of a night.” He shifted his heavy medical bag to his other hand.
    â€œLooking endless,” I said.
    â€œAre you holding up all right? The sheriff tells me you watched all this from up on the mesa?” He turned his back on the light display and gazed off to the north, where Cat Mesa lay rugged and invisible. He shook his head in wonder.
    â€œI caught just a couple of flashes,” I replied. “My guess is that’s when the transformer went down. But it all beats the hell out of me. And then I saw a single vehicle driving north up to the state highway. That’s not much to go on.”
    He stood quietly, surveying the convocation ahead, an uncharacteristic moment of repose for the peripatetic physician. “So let’s see…” He thumbed his phone. A hundred yards away, it appeared that the undersheriff had her personnel organized to allow some working room. The now-covered body lay in isolation, the black plastic tarp bathed in harsh light from a portable generator.
    â€œLet me know,” Perrone said into his phone, and listened patiently, nodding now and then as if the speaker on the other end of the phone could see him. “I can bring him in with me.” The physician nodded again, glancing at me. “You bet.” He snapped the phone closed. “You know, we can probably do something about that insomnia of yours.”
    â€œMaybe tonight it paid off,” I said.
    He chuckle didn’t carry much mirth. “Are you up for a hike?”
    â€œHell, why not,” I replied. The sheriff had sent me out here, and I had taken that as just a simple courtesy extended to a former colleague and friend—and since I’d been the only one to witness the beginning of this episode, he’d want to keep me on a short leash until I’d handed in a thorough written deposition. But the last thing I needed right now was to gawk at a corpse.
    The undersheriff would have her reasons to invite me in, and I had the sinking feeling that the answer was obvious. I had known Perry Kenderman for years. Odds were good, in a county this small, that I would also know this pathetic figure lying here, under the black plastic.

Chapter Four
    Maybe Curtis Boyd’s final fading vision was the great Milky Way spreading across the desert sky. Maybe he had struggled for a few seconds to ponder his lot in life, and what he’d leave behind. All maybes that didn’t concern Dr. Alan Perrone. What did concern the medical examiner was how a veteran Posadas County rancher’s youngest son came to rest in this particular spot, dead as dead can be.
    I’d known the dad, Johnny Boyd, for thirty-five years. He had already become a Posadas County institution by the time I first met him. Service as chairman of the County Fair Board back when the economy allowed fairs, member and then president of the school board for a decade or more, active on the livestock board—he and his wife had raised four kids with all the usual family triumphs and catastrophes. His older bachelor brother, Edwin, had lived at the main house too, and