If you travel Texas Highway 16 from San Antonio to Zapata, it becomes increasingly lonely, marked by mile after dusty mile of deserty vegetation—mesquite, thorny blackbrush, prickly pear, and the like.

Sometimes you can spot a scissor-tailed flycatcher rocking back and forth on a telephone wire. More often your only company is an occasional caracara hunched over his fencepost like some gloomy sentinel who's assigned himself the job of discouraging trespassers.

And trespasser I was. I hadn't been in Zapata since Erica's quinceañera, her fifteenth-birthday celebration, twenty years ago. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have ventured down that lonely road even now if I'd felt I had a choice. And I couldn't help wondering, for that matter, why the caracara chose to patrol there on such a dreary January day. Although this proud Mexican eagle fascinated me, he was still a bird of prey, and pickin's looked pretty slim to me.

Maybe we both needed the solitude. For me it offered a chance to mull over everything Erica had told me. I couldn't imagine who would want to murder Laura Velásquez. But I couldn't imagine her committing suicide either, which had been the official conclusion. Sweet Laura, with her angelic smile...

I found it inconceivable that Laura had died from an overdose of prescription barbiturates, and felt my legal instincts kick into overdrive. Who was Laura's doctor? Why had he prescribed barbiturates in the first place? Could the pharmacy have made a mistake? How I'd like to question a few people! Probably
the very reason Erica wanted me to keep a low profile.

Erica said it was a "hate crime" but was too distraught to explain her reasons. It seemed unlikely to me. People who commit hate crimes usually make a big production of them and like to see their names in the paper. Bombing things and torturing people was more their style. Poisoning didn't fit the picture.

Erica had also rambled on about how Laura's grandmother—Laura's Abuelita—had "upped and moved back to Mexico" six months ago and hadn't been heard from since. But that was as incoherent as the rest of her outpourings. I couldn't make the connection. Besides, Abuelita had been talking about going back to Mexico ever since I'd known her.

And how long had that been? How long since I'd let myself think of the past, the way I was doing now? I had tried so hard to develop the habit of never looking back. I certainly didn't want to dredge up any romantic memories of Ryan.

Back to the problem at hand, I told myself sternly. And what exactly was the problem? Although Laura's death seemed to be the immediate concern, I sensed there were deeper issues at stake...