He looked up. “And that was the last time I saw her. I woke up before dawn the next morning, but Wendy had disappeared, overnight bag, the whole nine yards. For a while my head was pounding so hard I couldn’t remember where I was or why. And then, little by little, everything cleared and I started to worry something terrible had happened to her. I got up and went to the safe to get my gun. It was gone.”

“Do you think she drugged you?” Teo asked.

“I can hold my liquor, and I hadn’t had more than two drinks, maybe three. The evening was fuzzy, but by then my head was clear enough to figure out what must have happened. I threw on my clothes and took off for Calvo’s casita. I wasn’t sure who to worry about, Wendy or the doctor. The sun still wasn’t up, and nobody else was around. When I got there, his door was ajar. I went in and Calvo was on the floor, blood pooled all around him.”

He paused, and Teo leaned forward to encourage him, though neither of us spoke.

“My gun was lying next to his body,” he said. “The one I’d loaded myself, so even if the gun had been wiped clean, my fingerprints would still be on any bullets that hadn’t been fired. I’d been arrested once, so my prints were in the system, and the gun was registered to me. I realized that I’d been well and truly set up.”

We waited, but he didn’t continue.

“If I was in that situation, here’s what I would do,” Teo said. “I would grab the gun and make sure everything I’d touched since entering was wiped clean. Then I would go back to my room, pack, wipe down that room and get the hell out of there. All before the sun rose.”

He nodded. “Pretty much. Except when I went back to our room to grab my clothes, I saw that the jeans I’d worn the day before had blood on them. She must have taken them with her to Calvo’s casita and afterward dumped them on our closet floor, grabbed her own things and left. But not before she slipped his wallet and some kind of fancy watch in the jeans’ pocket.”

“You still have them?” Teo asked.

“You’re kidding? Gun, wallet, watch, jeans? Buried somewhere along the Turquoise Trail on the way back to Albuquerque. The only mistake she made? She didn’t use enough of whatever drug she slipped me. I’m sure I was supposed to sleep until the maids arrived.”

When neither of us knew what to say, Ex went on. “So that’s what happened. Except all the parts where I just went along with whatever she said because I was crazy about her. If you want to believe something badly enough, you do.”

Silence fell, except for a flute-like trill of a bird in the forest canopy beyond us, and the whirring of insects. “Yeah,” I said at last. “Sometimes you do.”