Only when the girl’s wounds had been tended and she had been ensconced in a hospital room did Anne allow him to ask a single question. Even then she had sat on the bed with an arm around Leah Lawton, offering a mother’s comfort and support as Leah told the tale.

“You’re a brave girl, Leah,” he said when she finished.

“I don’t want to be brave,” she whispered, tears spilling over her lashes as Anne hugged her shoulders. “I want my mom.”

Lauren Lawton had still been in surgery when Mendez and Tanner had gone to locate the bodies of Roland Ballencoa and Michael Craig Houston in the hills west of town.

Coyotes had been there ahead of them, leaving the corpses half-eaten and covered in flies and vultures by the time the crime scene unit arrived. It seemed a fitting end for men who had preyed on others, Mendez thought. Nature’s justice was swifter and more appropriate than anything the courts would ever have handed Ballencoa or his partner.

By the time he and Tanner had processed the scene on the mountain and Ballencoa’s house in town, they had pulled nearly forty hours without sleep or a shower or a decent meal.

“Do you want me to take you to a hotel?” he asked as they walked away from Ballencoa’s house.

She dredged up a sarcastic half-smile. “I usually say no to sex until the second or third crime scene.”

Mendez managed a weary smile. “To the hospital?”

She nodded. Sleep, food, hygiene could all wait. Lauren Lawton was out of surgery, conscious and talking.

The hospital had settled into its quiet evening routine. The lights had been turned down low. The staff and visitors and the bustle they brought with them during the day had dissipated.

Two beds had been pushed together in Lauren’s room, and Leah lay sleeping the blissful, dreamless sleep that was drug-induced in the bed farthest from the door.

Lauren was awake in her bed. She kept her left hand, IV needle taped in place, just touching her daughter, to reassure herself that her child was really there, alive and safe. And that she herself was alive and safe.

Her head felt as heavy and hard as a bowling ball. Her breathing was shallow by necessity. Even with drugs it felt like the knife was still jammed between her shoulder blades, and she could feel the instability of her broken ribs as her chest expanded and contracted.

The surgeon had told her that she was as lucky as someone who had been stabbed in the back with a hunting knife could be. She had lost a lot of blood, but the knife had missed every major artery and organ it could have pierced. A millimeter in any direction and she would have been dead.