He jerked his chin at the shoe polish pleas scrawled on the van. “Your son was murdered?”

“He was.”

“How?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Throat cut? Bled out? Killed one place, dumped another?”

I examined the man more closely. He wore blue coveralls and had the steel-gray flattop haircut and broomstick-up-the-ass posture of an ex-soldier.

“They found him in a trash bin in Los Angeles,” I said. “Two years ago.”

“My wife was buried in the desert outside Tonopah,” he said. “Coyotes dug up her remains, and a crew of linemen happened upon them.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

Hot wind blasted across the parking lot, scattering trash and rocking the Econoline. The sky was the color of dirt, the sun missing in action.

“Let’s go to my house and talk,” the man said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “You can say what you have to say here.”

“I could,” the man said. “But I won’t. And besides, it’s not so much what I’ve got to say as what I’ve got to show you.”

In my search for Benny’s murderer, I’ve wasted time on mad scientists, fallen under the spell of false prophets, and been led to lots of dead ends by conspiracy theorists of every stripe. This one-eyed man was different, I could tell. Those of us in pain are sensitive to pain in others. We’re tuned to the distinctive frequencies of grief.

“How far?” I said.

“Twenty miles,” the man said. “My name’s Czarnecki. Follow me in your van.”

He walked to an old green Ford pickup crowned with a camper, got in, and pulled out of the lot. We headed up into the hills south of town. He drove fifty miles an hour whether he was on the freeway or on a twisty two-lane mountain road. We turned off onto a dirt track somewhere near Truckee. The road ended a few miles and a couple of creek crossings later at a cabin and some outbuildings spread over an acre of sagebrush and Ponderosa pines.

Czarnecki parked in front of the cabin. A blue jay harangued me from the top of a tree as I joined him. The cabin was old but solid. A rocking chair waited on the porch next to a coffee can full of sand and cigarette butts. An American flag hung next to the front door.

Czarnecki led me into the one-room structure. A sofa, a TV, a bed in one corner with a sleeping bag on it instead of sheets. A sink, a refrigerator, a stove, a table with two chairs. There was some clutter—antique bottles lined up on the mantel above the stone fireplace, rusty branding irons, taxidermied animals—but everything looked to have been arranged, not strewn haphazardly.

“Want a beer?” Czarnecki said, going to the refrigerator.

“No, thanks,” I said.