It was more junkyard than ranch. There were old TV sets, lawn mowers, desktop computers, and appliances strewn through the weeds along the sides of the driveway. An assortment of automobile parts filled a tumbledown garage. The vehicles they’d been stripped from sat exhausted in the late afternoon sun, skeleton-like and blasted with desert grit. A fenced-in area housed more junk: bicycles, old tools, an engine hoist, refrigerators, propane cylinders, rusty barrels. A complex nest of satellite dishes dominated the backyard, with some kind of cellular or transmission tower erected beyond this, thirty feet tall and creaking in the wind.

Luke approached the house, giving the dogs as wide a berth as possible. One was a German shepherd, the other a rottweiler. Both had wild, frothy jaws and looked like they had been raised with a sharp stick. Luke kept his pistol by his side, lest one of those cage doors spring open. They were secured by only a single bolt, as thin as a pencil. Enough vibration might shake them loose.

“It’s all good, pooches,” Luke assured them. “You stay right where you are, and I won’t have to shoot you.”

He hastened up the porch steps to the front door. His heart was pounding, but it had little to do with the dogs. He was—assuming their intel was correct—on the bat-faced man’s property. Had Lisa been brought here three years ago? Was she still here, chained up in the basement? Might this be an anticlimactic dead end, and Ramón entirely innocent, after all?

“Maybe,” Luke whispered, but the atmosphere suggested otherwise. This felt like a heartless, off-center place.

He tucked his .38 into the back of his jeans and knocked on the door.

No answer. Luke waited thirty seconds before knocking again, harder, reenergizing the dogs’ frenzy. Still nothing. Luke sighed, took a step back. He then noticed the surveillance camera above the door, and another at the end of the porch, scanning the driveway. These, coupled with the attack dogs, indicated that Ramón took his home security very seriously. What was he trying to protect?

Luke walked across the porch to the nearest window and peered through. A sparse dining area opened into the kitchen. Compared to the outside, it was clean and orderly. It had little character, though. A single plant struggled on the counter, and a flag drooped from a hook on the wall.

“Venezuelan,” Luke muttered to himself, recognizing the flag’s colors. “Not Mexican. My bad.”

Not that it mattered. Would Detectives Montecino and Kraemer have followed up more assiduously if he’d nailed Señor Smokescreen’s nationality?