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“Another attack on the pueblo flocks.”
    He raised up. “Well, why didn’t you let someone know?”
    â€œI didn’t think I would end up so far out, but when I knew we were closing in on her—”
    â€œHer? It’s a female?”
    â€œYes. With two young cubs. She’s wounded, and she looks half-starved.”
    â€œYou must’ve got a good look at her, then.”
    I nodded. “She visited last night.”
    Kerry brought water for Mountain from the ATV, and a thermos of hot coffee. He poured some in a cup and handed it to me. I held it between my palms for a moment and watched the steam curl from the surface.
    The sound of an engine whined from the east as another ATV approached, rocking and dipping over the rough terrain, disappearing into arroyos and then surfacing seconds later. Soon FBI Agent Diane Langstrom unfolded her long-legged form as she climbed out of the seat and gave me a dutiful smile. “We have got to quit meeting like this,” she said.
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    In the chapel, Diane circled the corpse with a camera, the flash shooting sparklike rays of white light into the dimly lit space. She snapped a lens cap over the camera’s eye. “With the body frozen, it will be hard to determine the time of death.”
    Roy, Kerry, and I watched as she got down on all fours and sniffed the victim’s open mouth, then drew back. She lifted the hem of the dusty black dress and peeked underneath. The men turned away, pretending to examine the chapel’s architecture.
    Diane looked up at me. “The body’s been moved since the victim died. There’s signs on the tops of her legs that the blood pooled there, as if she’d spent the first hour or so after death facedown. I don’t see any indication of sexual assault, but we’ll let the medical examiner decide; she’s on the way. These marks on the neck are from a rope. See the crosshatch pattern of the fiber? Nylon rope.”
    â€œHanged?” the Boss said, looking up at the vigas that spanned the roof.
    â€œNo, strangled. If she were hanged, there’d be a sort of upside-down V pattern where the rope pulled up on either side. This is straight around. She was strangled, and from the side, because it’s worse here, on the left—the rope cut right through the flesh of the neck. Somebody made sure it took. I’m going to use my sat phone and make a call,” she said, springing to her feet and dusting off her hands. “This is a hate crime. We got a special unit for that.”
    While we waited for the medical examiner to arrive, we split up to look for tire tread marks, footprints, or tracks in the surrounding ground surface, but it proved fruitless since the previous night’s high winds had disturbed the topsoil, and patches of snow still covered some of the recesses. Plus, before I had been aware that it was a crime scene, I’d explored much of the area both on foot and horseback with the wolf alongside. I didn’t mention that Mountain had trounced the corpse in his encounter with the cougar.
    I approached Kerry as he crouched on the ground outside the compound wall, examining a pot shard. He looked up the slope to the ruin. “This must have washed down from up there,” he said, rising to his feet. Mountain came over to see what he held in his hand, sniffed the shard with disinterest, and then trotted away. Kerry looked at me. “Babe. What were you doing all the way out here by yourself?”
    I shook my head. “I was doing my job.”
    â€œYou need to buddy up when you’re this far out of range.”
    â€œBuddy up? We don’t even have enough staff in the winter to man the phones!”
    â€œWell, you can call me if—”
    â€œAnd you’ll stop working at your job and come help me do mine?”
    He turned his head to the side and looked at me, a furrow across his brow that nearly joined his brown eyebrows in