“You’re avoiding my question.”

Grace shifted her weight and sighed. “I want you to be safe. Last night and today have been scary for me.”

Clayton pulled back his head and scanned Grace’s face. “In spite of my mother’s agenda, I have never wanted to be the tribal police chief.”

Grace placed her hand gently on Clayton’s chest. “I know. Let’s not get into a fight over this. Just call your mother.”

“Maybe later. Just so you know, over the next week I’ll be gone most of the time. I’m driving to Albuquerque in the morning for the autopsy, and from there I’m going up to Santa Fe.”

“Will you see your father?” Grace asked.

Clayton shook his head in mock disbelief. Until several years ago, he’d never known who his father was, but a chance meeting with Kerney on the Mescalero Reservation had forced his mother to admit to the truth. “You just love referring to Kerney as my father, don’t you?” he said.

“Well, he is your father,” Grace replied sweetly, “and I do my best to encourage you to think of him that way.”

“I’m working on it,” Clayton said with a smile. “Yes, I will see him, and also pay my respects to Sara and say hello to Patrick if time allows.”

Grace poked him in the ribs with a stiff finger. “You make sure that time allows, Sergeant Istee.”

Clayton laughed. “The hardest part of being a Mescalero is dealing with the matriarchy.”

Early in the morning over coffee in an eatery on Cerrillos Road near police headquarters, Detective Sergeant Ramona Pino asked Detective Matt Chacon to give her an update on his attempt to recover data from hard drives taken from the computers at the Riley residence.

“Nada, zip, zilch,” Matt replied, chewing on a toothpick, which was his habit, “but all may not be lost, to turn a phrase.”

“That’s cute, Matt,” Ramona said. “Give me details.”

“Details, I don’t have, but I do have an idea about what it took to scour those hard drives, which can tell us something about the person who did it.”

“Explain,” Ramona said.

“Most of your typical computer users will either purchase or download a free hard-drive eraser utility that does a fairly adequate job of destroying data. However, a good computer forensic specialist can often find information that hasn’t been overwritten in clusters because of something called file slack.”

Ramona rolled her eyes skyward. “This is all so very riveting.”

Matt laughed. “Be patient, Sarge, I’m getting there. In this particular case, both hard drives were cleaned and sanitized to the max.”

“How is that done?”

“Simply put, by repeatedly overwriting and replacing hard-drive surface information with random numbers or characters. On hard drives that have been cleansed by your typical software end user, I’ll normally find file slack that has been dumped from the computer’s memory, which makes it possible to identify passwords, log-on information, and prior computer usage we call legacy data. But not this time. Everything was as clean as a whistle. I’m betting whoever did this is no average user when it comes to computers. In fact, it could well be the individual is an IT specialist. But if not, he or she is a gifted amateur techie.”

“And you can tell this by how the hard drives were erased.”

“Yep. Whoever did this used the techniques and standards set by the Department of Defense to cleanse computer hard drives.”

“What else have you got?”

Matt looked surprised. “Nothing right now. I was waiting on you to tell me what Internet service provider the victims used so I could get a subpoena to access their records.”

Ramona drained her coffee and gave Chacon an apologetic look. With the discovery of Denise Riley’s body in the horse trailer and the ensuing work that it entailed, she’d totally forgotten to follow up as promised.

“Never mind,” Matt said with a smile. “I’ll do it. Do you know if the evidence search at the residence turned up any floppy disks, zip drives, or compact disks? I didn’t see any when I was there.”

“I’ll take a look at the evidence sheets when I meet with the sheriff’s investigators and let you know.”

“Thanks.” Matt slid out of the booth. “Also, ask about any software. If they secured anything like that during the search, have them give me a call. I’ll pick it up for analysis.”

“Coffee’s on me,” Ramona said.

“Thanks,” Matt said, knowing full well that it served as a partial apology on Ramona’s part.

Outside the restaurant, Ramona took a call on her cell phone from Don Mielke of the sheriff’s department asking her to show up for an investigative team meeting at the sheriff’s office in fifteen minutes. She told him that she was on her way, passed the word of the meeting by radio to the two other detectives Chief Kerney had assigned to the case, and drove out of the parking lot, still feeling a bit miffed with herself for failing to get Matt Chacon the information he needed.

Several years ago, the county had built a new law enforcement complex on Highway 14, a state road that ran from Santa Fe through the old mining towns of Cerrillos, Madrid, and Golden, into the Ortiz Mountains, and down the back side of the Sandia Mountains that rose up east of the city of Albuquerque.

Designated a scenic route and named the Turquoise Trail, most of Highway 14 was indeed picturesque, with views of high, heavily forested peaks and several old mining towns along the way that were definitely worth a stop.

One such town was Cerrillos, named for the nearby hills, where according to fact or legend—Ramona wasn’t sure which—Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb, had experimented with a precious metal extraction method he’d devised. When the effort failed, Edison shut down his operation and returned to his laboratory in New Jersey to invent other wonderful gadgets.

However, miles before travelers reached Cerrillos or the other old mining towns, they had to pass a cluster of institutional buildings outside the city limits that paid homage to a decision that had been made by the city fathers years before statehood. When the legislature had given Santa Fe first choice of either being home to the territorial prison or the college, the city officials had picked the pokey. At the time it had supposedly been a no-brainer; the prison would bring many more jobs to the community than a college ever could. Which meant that Santa Fe missed out on being the home of the largest university in the state, which Ramona saw as a slow-growth blessing in disguise.

Travelers on the Turquoise Trail thus encountered the stark and foreboding old prison a short distance from Santa Fe. The scene of a bloody, ghastly riot in 1980, it was now closed and rented out to filmmakers as a movie set. Visible nearby were the modern, high-security penitentiary that had been built to replace it, enclosed by towering fences topped with concertina wire; the neat and tidy Corrections Department headquarters and training academy, where the bureaucrats looked after the welfare, safety, and rehabilitation of their incarcerated clients and trained their guards to manage and control the inmate population to keep them from rioting again; and finally, across the road, the Santa Fe County Adult Detention Center and the separate law enforcement complex that housed the S.O.

Inside the county law enforcement building, a group of deputies, sheriff’s investigators, and several state police agents were milling around in a large conference room waiting for the meeting to begin. At the front of the room behind a large table, the sheriff; his chief deputy, Leonard Jessup; and Don Mielke, who ran the major crimes unit for the S.O. and carried the rank of major, were engaged in quiet conversation. On the table was a stack of folders.

Ramona took a seat at the back of the room, where she was soon joined by her two detectives. After a few late stragglers wandered in, Sheriff Salgado convened the meeting while Mielke and Jessup distributed the folders, which contained copies of the briefing report.

Ramona flipped though the document as Sheriff Salgado highlighted preliminary findings from the crime scene and subsequent follow-up activities. All in all, the S.O. had done a creditable job, and Ramona didn’t see any missteps or gaps in the work that had been carried out on the case so far.

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