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when people blow their brains out, their gun hand doesn’t land conveniently on the table or desktop or wherever, still gripping the weapon. The recoil generally throws the arm out and the weapon with it. Whoever did this to Alma had been watching too much television.
    Moments later, we heard the sirens screaming in the distance. The pasty-faced guests watching through the bedroom door breathed a collective sigh of relief, like children rescued from a scary movie. I knew I had limited time to examine the rug before the booted paramedics rumbled across it with their heavy equipment, so I stepped backward, careful to retrace my footsteps, until I could see other footprints pressed into the thick carpeting. The almost iridescent green color made it tricky to pick them out. But, in addition to the tiny holes left by Alma’s sandals and my pumps and the impressions of Dr. Gregory’s loafers, I could see the distinctive prints of stirrup-heeled, pointed-toed cowboy boots: a two-inch-wide half-circle for the heel and about three quarters of the front sole. I knelt down and,with my finger, drew a line in the pile down one side of the three visible prints, then boxed them in.
    “Try to stay away from these prints,” I said to the paramedics in a loud voice as they rushed past me.
    Alma was still breathing when they wheeled her off.
    The patrolmen and officers began to take charge of the scene, and after a couple of minutes I heard Jack Lewis’s dress-parade stride strutting down the gray terrazzo in his shiny lizard Tony Lamas and his voice snapping orders to his little lieutenant, Evan, who always skittled alongside him like a sand crab on a leash.
    Okay. Okay. Maybe I am as surly about Jack as he is about me, but he’s got all the toys of his office, toys and power I used to have before I got caught in bed with the judge. Now I’ve got the prestige of a marshal’s badge and am—and I’m not just making this up; most of the top law-enforcement officials in the country will back me up on this—a better, smarter, more thorough, creative, competent, higher-rate-of-more-successfully-prosecuted-crimes detective than he is. But facts are facts: I am no longer the chief of detectives of a major metropolitan area (my department in Santa Bianca was twice the size of Jack’s in Roundup, I might add). And he is. And it makes me crazy. And he knows it. He knows I’m better and he knows he’s got the cards. So we’ve forged a sometimes gracious, sometimes rancorous truce, packed with mutual suspicion and resentment, like eight-year-olds whose mothers have forced them to apologize to each other but who still hate each other’s guts and can’t wait to trip each other on the way down the hall.
    “Hey, Bennett,” he greeted me. “You losing weight? You look pretty good.”
    “Even if I lost a hundred pounds, Jack, I’d still be more woman than you could handle.” This was an exaggeration.If I lost a hundred pounds I would be dead, or at least very, very, very sick.
    “Any idea whose prints these are?” He peered down at the carpet square.
    “Sorry. I don’t know many of the guests. Most of the men have on boots.”
    “You aren’t going to help me much, are you?”
    “Don’t be silly, Jack. I just don’t know.”
    “And you have no ideas, either. Right?”
    I grinned at him. “I’ll get out of your way,” I said. “I know you’ve got a lot to do. Call me if I can help.”
    As I walked back to join Richard, I concentrated on the expression I’d seen on Johnny Bourbon’s face, because it was so unlike the fear and horror on any of the others, and it came down to two words: Glory and Salvation.

SIX
MONDAY MORNING - SEPTEMBER 7
    T he sun hadn’t crested the hills into the main valley of the ranch when Richard and I left on our early-morning ride, he on his big palomino stallion, Hotspur, and me on my small quarterhorse mare, Ariel. The gentle wispy clouds above us were golden peach pink, the sky was a deep azure