Miguel let Maive chatter on while he skewered her stalker with a malevolent glare. No matter how disconnected from reality this maniac might have been, there could be no mistaking the malignant intent with which the Mexican was fixing him. Miguel wished he could hear what the man was saying on the phone. Almost certainly gibberish, but if he was talking about Maive, that might be important to know, to gauge the depth of his obsession. Unfortunately, the thickness of the snowfall was deadening all sound, even her voice, just an arm’s length away.

Miguel shook his head and scolded himself. This fool is no threat. He probably believes he is talking directly to God himself.

If he had been somewhere else, out on the range, say, picking his way through a forest, breaking trail on horseback, he might have recognised the ambush a few seconds earlier. Perhaps he would’ve been able to do something about it.

But Miguel Pieraro, father, widower, a vaquero’s vaquero, was not a man of city streets and built-up places. He was most at home in the saddle. Not shuffling along a footpath, his arms loaded down with groceries, carried for a woman who was making him feel more and more every day that he might move beyond the horror and loss he had sustained down in east Texas.

The car that hit Miguel and Maive as they crossed the intersection, while his attention was focused entirely on the tall, rake-thin fanatic, was travelling at over sixty miles an hour. A dangerous speed on potholed streets under the best of conditions. Calculated insanity during a heavy snowstorm.

It was a quiet car, chosen for that very reason. Solid-iron bull bars recently affixed to the front of the vehicle absorbed most of the damage when it struck them. Investigators examining the burnt-out hulk of the vehicle – the murder weapon – after it was found not long afterwards, would make a note of that detail. It implied a good deal of planning and preparation.

The police officers who would come to visit Sofia Pieraro on that terrible Thursday, to tell her of her father’s death, were not investigators. They were just beat cops. They couldn’t do much for her. The only solace they had to offer was the assurance that her papa had died instantly, and that his friend, Mrs Aronson, had not suffered. She was in a coma when the paramedics arrived.

8

FORMER URUGUAYAN–ARGENTINIAN BORDER REGION, SOUTH AMERICAN FEDERATION

The rough path she’d earlier cut through the forest sped her return to the crossroads. Caitlin took up a position where she could fire on the entrance to the building without easily being fired upon. She placed herself so that the heavy mud-brick columns supporting the roof of the portico blocked any line of sight to her from inside.

Then she waited.