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hunched his shoulder to anchor the phone. Digging into his pocket, he produced a pen and notepad.
    “Okay, Tess, shoot.”
    He didn’t like what he heard. His speckled green eyes grew stormy and his jaw went all square.
    “Where and when?” he barked. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there. Just hold the fort.”
    The cell phone flipped shut. Mitchell stuffed the pad and pen back in his pocket and threw me a disgusted look.
    “That was Agent Garcia. Agents from the El Paso FBI office and Fort Bliss’s CID detachment are converging on the scene as we speak. They want to compare notes with Sheriff Alexander and me. We’re meeting at Pancho’s.”
    Pancho, whose full name remains a mystery, runs a bar/ cafe/motel/convenience store in Dry Springs. The only bar, cafe, motel or convenience store in Dry Springs.
    Some folks claim Pancho lost the sight in his left eye in a free-for-all following a Mexico City soccer match. Others insist his wife jammed a thumb in the socket after catching him with a younger woman. Wish I’d thought of that. However he’d acquired it, Pancho’s black eye patch and his bar were fixtures in this corner of West Texas.
    Frowning, Mitchell checked his watch. “This could take a while. The FBI is bringing in its own forensics team. I want to see what they turn up. I’ll call you and let you know when I can get back down to the site.”
    “How about I call you when we finish analyzing the data? If we find anything, I can run the results up to Dry Springs.”
    “That’ll work.” He scribbled his cell phone number on a notebook page, added Agent Garcia’s for backup and tore out the sheet. “I’ll make sure one of us is available when and if you call.”
     
     
    WE struck pay dirt late that afternoon. Literally and figuratively.
    It didn’t look like much at first. A blurred digital image recorded in that instant before I whipped up my visor to see what the hell had snagged EEEK’s foot pedal. The bodies showed only as greenish lumps, which was fine with me, but Rocky got all twitchy. That’s his way of expressing excitement. That, and an unfortunate tendency to expel gas.
    “We can re-synthesize this,” he exclaimed. “I’ll lighten it to show more detail. Might be something here Mitch can use.”
    I didn’t stick around to watch. I’d already gotten up close and personal with the Gruesome Twosome. I had no desire to repeat the experience. Instead I went into our admin center and used my laptop to Google one Patrick J. Hooker.
    Even with the tabloids’ usual 99.9999999% margin of error, Patrick J. Hooker was one bad dude. A native of Michigan, he’d joined the army at eighteen and shipped out right to Iraq. Didn’t take him long to realize the hired guns working for private contractors like Blackwa ter and Kellogg Brown & Root made mega-bucks compared to the average grunt.
    After his time in uniform, Hooker returned to Iraq as a mercenary but was hustled out of the country after an incident involving a young Iraqi girl. He popped up next in Colombia, where he allegedly brokered a deal with a big-time drug lord for a shipment of stolen arms. A joint U.S.-Colombian Drug Eradication Task Force went in to recover the arms and were ambushed en route. The ensuing shoot-out left three U.S. Marines and six Colombian police officers dead.
    I say allegedly because despite Hooker’s extradition to the States and long months in pre-trial confinement, prosecutors couldn’t prove he was the one who actually delivered the stolen arms. His lawyer subsequently pushed a writ of habeas corpus through the courts and the U.S. government was forced to dismiss all charges for lack of direct evidence. The Colombian government took it from there and were transporting Hooker back to their country for trial when he escaped.
    I was skimming through an article summarizing the complex legal issues in Hooker’s case when a shout summoned me back to the lab.
    “Lieutenant! Take a look at this.”
    “This” was