Kristy rolled her eyes as Dr. Sun smiled. “Will you take this seriously, Nat?”

“Yes, mom. Now, will you drive me home please?” She stood and grabbed her purse.

Her purse…

You brought the wrong purse, Ms. Ellis.

She glanced down at it. The wrong purse. Who told her that? It was just her regular purse, packed with her wallet, a notebook, pens, too many pencils, and lip gloss… It wasn’t wrong.

You stood out.

The smooth male voice popped into her memory again. A male voice. But the doctor had said there was no harm done to her person. No evidence of sexual activity. No drugs.

“It’s just my purse,” she whispered, tucking her phone in the side pocket. She had a sudden flash.

Lights pulsing. A cold gin and tonic. Where was he? Why all the mystery? She grabbed her phone from her purse and fired off a tweet before she stuffed the phone back in her purse. Ugh, this music was impossibly loud…

“Natalie?” Kristy was standing there, keys in hand. “You ready? The nurse said you could just check out at the desk in front.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She waved her hand at Kristy, pulling the phone out of her pocket and opening Twitter. She quickly clicked on the tab for her own profile and checked her last tweet.

Eleven hours ago. At #Boca and bartender isn’t light on the gin. Looks like this dress was a good choice after all.

Boca. The club downtown. She’d been at Boca in her nice dress, drinking gin and tonics. “Kristy, what did I say I was doing last night? What did I tell Dan?”

She frowned. “He said you were going out to follow up on a lead for the coyote story.”

The coyote story. All her notes were at home, but she’d look through them. It sounded like she’d gone out the night before, hoping to meet someone about the piece she was working on. “Why would I have gone to a nightclub for that?”

Kristy shrugged. “No idea. Would you have written it down?”

She pulled her notebook out and flipped to the last page she had written on as they walked down the hospital corridor. There were a series of Spanish names and phone numbers. The address for the Mexican Federal Authorities in Ensenada. Another phone number for her police source out in El Centro. She remembered all of them.

“There’s nothing new here. I’ll have to check at home.”

“Well, if it’s important, you’ll have it written down.” Kristy patted her shoulder. “You always do.”

Natalie tucked her notebook away and hoped like hell her friend was right.

She sipped the coffee she’d reheated as she looked through notebooks, scanned the scattered sticky notes attached to her desk, and looked on the back of computer printouts for any clue as to why she’d been at a fancy nightclub in downtown San Diego the night before.

Since the mid-90s, reporters and others who followed crime in the Southwest had been aware of the startling frequency of young women being abducted near and around Ciudad Juarez. Authorities seemed reluctant to look into the matter too deeply. Some said it was a serial killer. Others said it was a result of sociological and cultural factors that led young working women to be targeted. Corruption. Drug cartels. Organized crime. NAFTA, for goodness sake. Everyone had a theory, but Natalie didn’t care. She’d seen evil. Looked it in the face at an early age. She just wanted it to stop. Hundreds of women had been killed and no one seemed to be able to do awn able tonything about it.

And when isolated reports began trickling in about the bodies of young women being found in the desert on the California-Mexico border, Natalie couldn’t ignore it. Some of the reports speculated the women were victims of a coyote, a human smuggler, who was tricking the women into paying him, only to abandon them in the desert. Many of the bodies had been found in extremely remote locations and all were Mexican citizens. Others said whatever was hunting in Juarez had moved west, ready to wreak havoc on the women of Tijuana and Baja California.

The reports from both sides of the border were troubling. The pictures were gruesome.

When Natalie had sought permission to pursue the story from her editor, she’d been given the go-ahead, but only if it didn’t interfere with her regular assignments. So far, most of her work on the case had been gathering police reports from Mexico and the outlying desert towns in Imperial County, looking for any names that repeated, any patterns that hadn’t been noticed. Most of the work had been done at night, so most of her notes were here at home.

She threw down her pencil in frustration and rubbed her eyes. She still had a strange feeling in her head. Not a headache, necessarily. Just a vague fuzziness that wouldn’t go away. Most people probably would put it down to exhaustion, but Natalie rarely tired, even when others were falling down. This just wasn’t like her…

Leaning back in her desk chair, she heard her phone chirp, signaling a text message. She went to the kitchen to pick it up.

“Dez?”

Natalie frowned. She hadn’t spoken to Dez in ages. Not since her old friend had quit the university library and gone to work for that private foundation in Pasadena. They’d met when Natalie was doing research on a story for the college paper. Dez and her best friend had both been helpful—librarians really were the best researchers—but Dez had been the one she’d kept in touch with the most.

How did it go last night? The message bubble glowed on the screen.

“How did what go last night?” A burst of excitement flooded her and she flipped to her call history. There it was: a forty-minute conversation with Dez Kirby at seven o’clock in the evening. She’d initiated the call to Dez. Dez, who had given her a lead that must have led her to Boca in her best dress.