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  For my parents.

  And for my brother.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  A Note on the History Behind the Novel

  Also by Andrew Hunt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a lot of people thanks for this book.

  I would like to thank my agent, Steve Ross, at Abrams Artist Agency. What a rewarding experience it has been to get to know Steve over the past many months. He has been a tireless advocate, a quick responder to e-mails (often getting back to me before I even hit the send button), and a reassuring voice of support and sage advice through this process.

  I reserve a special thank-you for Peter Joseph at St. Martin’s Press. From the day in October 2011 that Peter e-mailed me to let me know City of Saints won the Tony Hillerman Prize, working with him has been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. He walked me through several edits of the book with a level of skill, kindness, patience, and intelligence that left me inspired to keep improving the finished product. I will forever be grateful for his meticulous eye for detail, superb editing suggestions, and for simply believing in this book.

  Thank you to everyone at St. Martin’s Press, especially to India Cooper, who invested a level of care of professionalism in the copy editing of this book that deeply touched me, and to Margaret Sutherland Brown, who was always extremely helpful in assisting in the different stages of preparing the manuscript for publication.

  Thank you to E. L. Doctorow and Mary Louise Oates for convincing a confused teenager back in the 1980s that he could pull it off. Thank you to Michael Miner, the best writing mentor I’ve ever had, for those unforgettable days in Vancouver at the Praxis Screenwriting Centre, when he taught me how to tell a good story.

  Thank you to Anne Hillerman, Don Strel, and Jean Schaumberg for a great weekend in Santa Fe and for keeping the beautiful spirit of Tony Hillerman alive.

  Thank you to my family. Madeline and Aidan: You’re the best daughter and son a father could ever ask for. Thank you for putting up with my many shortcomings and for bringing so much joy and love to my life. Luisa: Words cannot express how fortunate I am to have you for a companion. Our long walks and wonderful vegan meals, our laughter, and our many magical moments together, sustained me from page one to the very end of the novel.

  Ruth and Tony: You have both enriched my life greatly and I’m proud to call you family. You will both always have a place in my home and my heart.

  Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents, Emery Kay Hunt and Linda Hunt, and my brother Jeff. I love each of you with all my heart. I know I live far away, but your love reaches across the vast distances and always reminds me that my home is with you, in Utah.

  This was the country the Mormons settled, the country which, as Brigham Young with some reason hoped, no one else wanted. Its destiny was plain on its face, its contempt of man and his history and his theological immortality, his Millennium, his Heaven on Earth, was monumentally obvious. Its distances were terrifying, its cloudbursts catastrophic, its beauty flamboyant and bizarre and allied with death.

  —WALLACE STEGNER

  One

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1930

  “It is enough. This is the right place.”

  Brigham Young uttered those words when his wagon reached the mouth of Emigration Canyon and he gazed out at this valley. That was almost eighty-three years ago. July 24, 1847. We celebrate that date in Utah—Pioneer Day—with picnics, fireworks shipped in from China, and, to the extent that it can be called “revelry,” revelry. On this bitter cold winter’s morning, at half past seven, I stood on the opposite side of the valley and to the south of the vantage point the prophet enjoyed all those years ago. Maybe “enjoy” is the wrong word. When he first laid eyes on the Salt Lake Valley, Young was recovering from a bout of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, or—as doctors now call it—tick typhus.

  Closing my eyes to the icy wind cutting my face, I pictured Young, wasting away in the back of his covered wagon, arms and face splotched with rashes, plagued by headaches and muscle pain. If he came out of that canyon now, on this cold February morning in 1930, he’d see a different place than he saw in ’47: a city with wide roads, clanging streetcar bells, ten-story buildings, and a huge granite temple with a gold-plated angel on top, blowing his horn triumphantly.

  That’s the north side of town. Out here, where I stood in snow up to my shins, the valley hadn’t changed much since the prophet’s arrival. Meadows everywhere, with a farm here and there, but mostly these were unused fields, home to clusters of box elders and pines. Deputy Lund and I drove to this spot following an early-morning call to my home from the weekend dispatcher. I asked her to contact the coroner before heading out. It had snowed the night before, so our Model A county car struggled to get out here.

  The gangly deputy pacing in the snowy clearing—auburn hair, high cheekbones, long neck—that was me, dressed in regulation cream felt Stetson, leather jacket with green deputy’s shirt underneath, khakis, and black patent leather shoes that do a bad job of keeping snow out.

  My confusion came from being green. I had been doing this a mere eight months up till that morning. Despite that, dead bodies were nothing new to me. I had encountered my share since starting this job. I had hauled corpses out of collapsed mines, dislodged them from the interior of crunched automobiles, and served as a stretcher-bearer for a body found at the bottom of a canyon. He was eighteen—poor lad—and not sufficiently experienced to take on such a steep climb.

  But murder victims? This lady was my first, and a baptism by fire she was. The fabric of her dress—torn to shreds—still hung on her battered body. Her skin was split open in at least thirty places, and broken bones jutted out of some of them. Splattered blood in the snow resembled rose petals sprinkled on a white wedding cake. Squatting near her, I lifted her skull high enough to see it was smashed and one of her eyes was missing.

  Not even a seasoned lawman should have to behold such a sight, I thought.

  More questions galloped circles in my mind. How old was she? Was she from around here or passing through? Why did the last person she ever encountered in her life hate her enough to do this?

  Such questions would drive me crazy if I let them. My attention shifted to lesser concerns, like feeling irked for having to work on a Saturday. No choice, though—I was the low man on the totem pole. So it stood to reason I would have to be there, shivering and spotting those little details: bits of brain i
n her hair; bone jutting out of her thigh covered with snow; her torn stockings, light brown, held up by garters.

  I didn’t need a professional with a degree from Johns Hopkins to tell me this was no accident. The killer had it in for this woman. Her mangled remains spoke volumes, and I’d grown weary of standing in that place, trying to make sense out of something senseless in that bitter cold. My hands had gone numb from the cold, and I exhaled steam. Despite the freezing weather, the seagulls circled in full force, crying and diving.

  “ID’d the stiff yet?” asked Roscoe Lund, my partner.

  He said it in a taunting way, as only he could, as if to rub it in that I hadn’t identified her yet. He sat on the Ford’s running board, dressed in a deputy’s outfit that matched mine. No taller than me, Roscoe was twice as thick, owing primarily to muscle. He kept his Stetson tilted far back on his bristly head, and his perpetual five o’clock shadow hardened his appearance. He had a bulbous nose, not as bad as W. C. Fields, but getting there, and the indentations on it gave me reason to believe it had been broken. His deep voice, wide shoulders, cleft chin, and short neck gave him a giantlike quality—as if he had climbed down the beanstalk and, instead of chasing Jack on the ground, run straight to the sheriff’s office to apply for the deputy vacancy.

  I continued squatting by the woman’s remains, turning halfway so I could see him out of the corner of my eye. “I’ll let the coroner have at it.”

  Roscoe picked odd times to smile. Like now, for instance. “Not so much as a driver’s license, huh?”

  “Nope, but I don’t want to move her before Livsey gets here. I’m sure he’ll give her a good going-over.” Livsey was Tom Livsey, deputy county coroner.

  “Who do you suppose she is?”

  “I don’t know.” I reached out and hooked my index finger over a string of pearls wrapped around her busted neck and gave them a wiggle. A few were spotted with blood. “I’m guessing she’s loaded. Or she’s married to someone who is.”

  Roscoe popped a lid off a can of smoking tobacco and sprinkled a line on cigarette paper. He licked the edge and rolled it, put the end between his lips, flipped open a lighter. The flame danced, and the cigarette tip crackled orange as he inhaled. He doesn’t care about this dead woman. He just wants to wrap this up and go home and go back to sleep, I thought as I eyed him puffing.

  Roscoe had never told me where he lived. He had complained about having to get up at 6:00 A.M. on a Saturday but did not mention a wife or any other family. The only fragments I knew came from rare hints he dropped. He offered no clues about his age. I guessed him to be in his late thirties. He once let it slip that he served in the American Expeditionary Force and fought in the Battle of Belleau Wood near the Marne back in June of ’18. That was the most he ever said about himself, and even then, he was spare with the details. He also made a fleeting reference to almost dying of influenza after returning to the States, but he obviously recovered.

  That was all I knew about Roscoe Lund. Oh, and one other thing: He made it a point to say, often, “Goddamn Mormons” or “Mormon sonsabitches—hate ’em all.” He would glare at me each time, knowing full well that I had been a lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  He didn’t go on the warpath today, though. He stayed focused. In this case, focused for him meant saying—over and over—how much he hated being out here so early on a Saturday morning. I went over to the car, to where he sat smoking, opened the back door, and snatched a folding plate camera off the backseat, expanding it like an accordion.

  “Got a yen for snappin’ pretty scenery, have we?”

  I glanced at the overcast sky. “It’s supposed to snow more.”

  I went back to the spot and began snapping photos of tire tracks. They were everywhere—crisscrossing north, south, east, west, and all points in between—and they all led to the same place: the corpse.

  “How many times you figure she was hit?”

  “I count at least five separate sweeps in this direction.”

  “Five?” echoed Roscoe, flipping his cigarette into the snow.

  “Yep,” I said, holding the camera to one side and gesturing to each pair of tracks. “One … two … three … four … five … possibly a sixth set over here. Maybe a seventh. I can’t be sure.” I pointed to a piece of bloody white fur near the victim. “I’m guessing that’s her ermine, and there’s a high-heel shoe over there in the snow.”

  “Christ almighty,” he said, shaking his head. “Who’d wanna hit a broad that many times? Once probably would’ve done the trick.”

  “Do you mind?” I asked, not looking up from the viewfinder. “Lady or woman. Not broad.”

  Roscoe laughed. “I don’t think she cares.”

  “Yeah? Well, I care.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. The choirboy has a thing for damsels.”

  More viewfinder scenes: tire tracks heading from northeast, crossing over the body, and continuing southwest toward the road. Snap. Turn crank, advance film.

  “I could use some help,” I said, lowering the camera.

  “Hey, I won’t lift a pinky to do Cannon’s shit work—not while that fucker is out glad-handing and kissing babies to get reelected. Hell, he’s not even doing that right now; he’s getting his beauty sleep while we’re out here working our asses off in the freezing cold.”

  Now I was the one laughing, prompting a glare from Roscoe. “I don’t see what’s so goddamn funny.”

  I checked the camera to see how many snapshots remained. “Something tells me when your time comes to keel over, the cause of death won’t be listed as work-related exhaustion.”

  “Keep it up, choirboy. You’ll be writing gags for Amos and Andy in no time flat.”

  I walked to the corpse and tapped the small of her back with the tip of my shoe. “Just a vessel.”

  “What’d you say?” asked Roscoe.

  The wind whistled through the pines. Snow started falling.

  “Speak up!” he said. “What’d you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. You’re talking to yourself again.”

  A Pontiac pulled up and parked at the bottom of the hill, and deputy county coroner Tom Livsey got out of the car and started up the icy path, dressed in a bowler and topcoat, carrying a briefcase full of equipment. I watched him approaching while I returned the camera to the trunk of the car. Tom grew up a stretch down the road from my childhood house in American Fork, so a certain familiarity existed between us. He had a reputation for professionalism and an eye for detail, and he did most of the hard work behind the scenes while his boss, coroner Laird Nash, merrily took all the credit. When Tom reached the murder scene, we shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, but he and Roscoe didn’t acknowledge each other.

  Tom crouched near the body and lifted a torn piece of her dress with the tip of his pencil. “Who called it in?”

  “Virgil Porter,” I said. “He lives in that shack over there.” I pointed to the top of the hill, at a whitewashed box with a steep-sloped roof. A smoke column curled up from the chimney, and a flatbed truck was parked out front. “He found her body when he got home from work this morning. That was about five, uh, five fifteen or so.”

  Livsey squinted at the house. “I’m surprised his wife didn’t hear anything.”

  “He lives alone.”

  “Oh. I see. Did you get a statement from him?”

  “Yep,” I said, plucking a spiral notebook out of my pocket. “It’s all right here. Says he saw a dark object in the snow at the base of the hill, along with some kind of animal—maybe a coyote. He lit a kerosene lantern and came down here, and this is what he found.”

  “What was his demeanor like, Art?”

  “He was visibly upset. Hands shaking.”

  “I think he shit his skivvies,” said Roscoe.

  Roscoe’s foul language offended Livsey’s Mormon sensibilities. He couldn’t help making an angry face at my partner. “Find any identification o
n her?”

  “Nope.”

  Livsey stayed low, examining the body for another minute before standing up straight. “Jane Doe. We don’t get enough of those.” He looked at us. “I can take it from here, fellas. The morgue wagon is on its way. Thanks for your hard work, Art.”

  Heading back to the county car, I overheard Roscoe mumble—under his breath, but still audible—“Fuckin’ prick.” I opened the driver’s side door and raised my foot to the running board when I spotted a familiar black sedan with gold stars painted on white front doors. The car halted about twenty yards away, and two men in fedoras and suits got out and began walking toward us. I recognized them instantly as plainclothes Salt Lake City police homicide detectives. The Salt Lake City law enforcement community is small. Most of us know each other by name. Sometimes, thanks to an active gossip mill, we know more about each other than that.

  Detective Buddy Hawkins, a redhead, likely in his midthirties (though I’d never asked him his exact age), with fair skin and a prominent chin, had style, no two ways about that. This morning, he had dressed up in one of his fancy double-breasted worsted suits, with a crisp white shirt and red-and-blue-striped tie, and a dark fedora pushed far back on his head. He and I attended the same church, and from time to time we’d strike up a chat after priesthood meetings. Behind him tailed his hatchet-faced partner, Detective DeWitt “Wit” Dunaway, a frumpier dresser, big-eared, hat pulled low. His tie was crooked and poorly tied, and I never knew his disposition to be anything other than sour. They stepped through snow in our direction, and Roscoe muttered something about “those sonsabitches.” Unlike Hawkins, who was born and raised in small-town Heber, Utah, Wit hailed from out of state. His previous job had been in Boston, where—according to rumors—he was one of the ringleaders in the big 1919 police strike out there. He lost his job because of it and somehow ended up here, on the other side of the country, investigating homicides, pushing pencils, and cursing his fate.

  I lowered my foot off the running board and faced the police detectives.

  “Morning, gents,” I said.