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thing when it was over, holding the small gauze pad in place over the needle hole. The tangle of metal lurched a little bit and stopped again. Estelle Reyes conferred with Torrez, and then she reached for the wrecking bar that Torrez still held. She worked intently, wrenching and prying, and Torrez stood back and watched. The whole ball of metal shook. When a piece of bodywork curled open just right, she took more pictures—she must have been on her fifth roll. She stopped taking pictures and scrambled up the bank. “No, not yet,” she shouted when Les moved a hand toward the winch controls.
    “Let me borrow your slicker, sir,” she said to me. In the sixteen months she’d been with the department, she’d never called me anything but that. Not Bill, not Gastner. Just “sir.”
    “Is there very much?” I asked.
    “A kilo, maybe.” She took the folded rain slicker that I dug out of the trunk of 310.
    “Grass?”
    “No.” She raised an eyebrow and shook her head. “It must have been under the front seat originally.”
    “With that kind of impact, it could have started out anywhere.”
    “True.” Estelle Reyes took the slicker back down the hill, and I went with her this time, standing between her and the spectators. She made the transfer slick and fast, then backed away, holding the small bundle under her arm. “We’ll have to take the car apart bolt by bolt. I’ll have Les put it down in one of his bays. That way we can have a little security.” She sounded as confident as a ten-year veteran.
    Shortly after three, Estelle Reyes was satisfied that she had gleaned all she could until morning. She had an exhaustive inventory of personal effects. She had photos of skid marks, dirt tracks, grease blotches in grass, bent metal, and torn people. She was a methodical worker, and used a 35-mm with tripod, flash, filters, the works. A goddamned artist. And after each shot, she stopped to make notations in her field book. The rest of us, including me, did as she asked. And now, because the little package had changed the complexion of the crash, Estelle was extra careful.
    Finally, the car was gone, the debris collected. When Detective Reyes was sure she needed no more pictures of the scene, she held up her hands. “All right,” she said. “We can secure this area until morning. Daylight might find us something. Torrez or somebody needs to stay with the car. Locking it up isn’t enough. I’ll get down there when I can.”
    “He’ll be there until Encinos relieves him. Eddie Mitchel is going to sit out here.” Stealing from other shifts and double-timing was all we could do.
    “And Bishop went to the hospital. I’ll call him so he can put a lid on things down there. I should be back out about seven,” Estelle Reyes said. Then she hesitated. “Before I go to the hospital, I’m going up to the lake for a quick look. Won’t do much good in the dark, but you never know. Oh, and you might tell Mitchel to sit out of sight. Maybe just up the hill by the water tank. He might turn up something interesting. You never know. Somebody might be worried about their package.”
    “Fine,” I said. “Be careful. And make sure your radio is on.” We watched the rest of the traffic pull away.
    “It’s going to be a mess,” Estelle said. “And all those poor kids.”
    “You’d better believe it. And we better be damn sure we don’t make any mistakes. When we find out where that shit came from, I have a feeling some folks in this town will advocate a return to lynching.”
    “Maybe we should donate the rope.” It was a line from a joke, but there was no humor on Estelle Reyes’s pretty young face.

Chapter 3
    Sheriff Holman wasn’t a cop. He spent his time playing politics and working innocuous civil cases, something he actually did pretty well. But that night he did something else that clicked my estimation of him up several notches. The dispatcher, Gayle “Wondergirl” Sedillos, had called him as soon as she