“Any way he could’ve been a local?”

“No way, Doctor. This is a real small town.”

He sipped his coffee. “Hate to say it, but the whole thing sounds pretty frozen to me. Maybe I’ll make up an ending and put it in my book.”

“Beats reality,” I said.

He tapped his keyboard. “What you do sounds interesting. Maybe I could pick your brain sometime.”

“Sure. I noticed a salon on this side of the street. Was that originally Leonora Bright’s place?”

“Nope, Cozy Coiffure replaced something else — restaurant, I think. The Ramirez family runs that place. Estella and Ramon, no kids. They moved here from Ventura three years after Leonora got murdered. Took that long for the town to get anyone, running ads in other towns’ papers. Before that, folks had to drive to Los Alamos to get trimmed. The crime scene was the last store as you leave town. Want to have a look? I could use a stretch.”

We left the office and crossed the street. I asked him about Ojo Negro local government.

He said, “No mayor, no city council, we just rely on the county. Basically our issues are county issues, we’re kind of a stepchild to Los Alamos or anyone else who’ll have us.”

“How many residents?”

“Sign says a thousand but it’s much less. I’d guess two hundred, tops. The way we’re going, soon there’ll be nothing left — okay, here we are.”

He’d stopped in front of one of the boarded storefronts. Original pink stucco peeked through the flaking cocoa-brown repaint, patchy and florid, like a skin disease.

“Who owns it?”

“Condemned by the county, county never got around to auctioning it, no one seems to want it.”

A key lock slotted the doorknob. Cardenas turned the knob and the door swung open.

I said, “It’s never locked?”

“Sure it is,” he said. “But it’s not much of a lock. I got it open this morning with a nail file. Go ahead in.”

What remained of Stylish Lady was vacant space walled in warped panels of fake rosewood tongue-and-groove, darkened by the plywood window and filthy oilcloth shades concealing a high rear window.

Cardenas stayed in front, propping the door open with his body. “Otherwise it shuts and you’re in a cave.”

I thanked him and explored. Below the high window, the back door was hollow and flimsy. My footsteps were soft pads. Concrete floors created a great sound baffle. I thought of two woman savaged, their cries unheard.

In bad movies, detective savants learn volumes revisiting long-dormant crime scenes. This was dim, dead space and I wasn’t producing a single syllable.

“Where does the back door lead?”

“Kind of an alley. Go look.”

Behind the shop was a ribbon of rocky dirt that paralleled Ojo Negro Avenue, barely wide enough for one car. Dead end to the south, exit to the north.