Tera’s eyes narrowed. When she’d called Johan to update him on Luke’s location, he had answered the phone quickly—before she even heard the ringing tone. Ramón? he’d said, thinking she was someone else, and Tera had detected the desperation and anger in his voice.

Her cop intuition went from tingling around the baseboards to thumping a hammer against the wall.

“A lot of Latinos in Nueva Vida,” Tera said. “Probably a lot of Ramóns. What’s his surname?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

Savannah screwed her lips together and looked down at the floor.

“You can talk to me,” Tera pressed, holding up her phone. “Or I can fill this joint with cops and you can talk to them.”

“I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then tell me what I need to know.”

Savannah sucked through her teeth, looked at the lights over the stage, then nodded. “Okay, shit, okay.” She stepped closer to Tera and whispered so that she couldn’t be heard, although there was little chance of that beneath the mad thump of rock music. “Ramón’s a dealer, small-time, not exactly El Chapo. He sells party drugs—ecstasy, mostly. Lives out in Pale Bone.”

Tera pulled up Track-U-Gen on her phone. Luke’s blip had spent two hours in Pale Bone, mostly at an address on the east side of town.

“Sierra Vista Road?” she asked.

Savannah shrugged and ran her thumb across the star tattooed on her cheek.

“What else can you tell me?”

“That’s it. That’s all I know.”

Tera didn’t push. This wasn’t the time or the place. She thanked Savannah with a stiff nod and left Stray Bullets beneath a cloud of unease. The sick feeling intensified. She stopped halfway across the parking lot—leaning against the hood of a dusty pickup truck—and took several deep breaths to keep from vomiting.

“Jesus,” she gasped. “Jesus Christ.”

She had colluded with Johan because she believed (or wanted to believe) Luke had killed Kitty, but the photos Tera had seen were evidently fake. Kitty had been here, with Luke, only a few hours before. And if Luke was innocent in this, then maybe . . .

Tera recalled her conversation with Luke at his friend’s funeral, when he’d asked if any part of her believed he hadn’t killed his wife. I have this much doubt, she had replied, holding her thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. Some days that doubt had grown to as much as a full inch, but never more than that. Now, though, it expanded, it opened like an old wound, one Tera didn’t know she had.

“Don’t go there,” she chided herself, starting hesitantly toward her car. “Of course he killed his wife. Because Occam’s fucking razor.”