Vaughn earned his police badge with the Albuquerque City Police Department when he was twenty-two. That year marked Gwen’s first arrest, after she shoplifted a necklace from a Tucumcari jeweler. Wallace Meyer himself did the honor. Didn’t matter to him that Gwen’s parents had tended his horses every week for years. He recommended the maximum sentence to the judge for a petty misdemeanor—ninety days in juvenile hall and a five-hundred-dollar fine.

Vaughn pulled his patrol car into the driveway of the house he grew up in, parking behind his dad’s four-by-four Chevy. He knew by the collection of beat-down, piece of crap cars lining the street that Dad was holding class in his workshop. He’d retired from service as a farrier and now taught at the college full-time. When the mood struck him, he held class at his personal blacksmith shop in the house’s original garage.

Vaughn stepped from the car and adjusted the brim of his hat. The aroma wafting out of the kitchen windows told him Mom was home too, and baking cookies. Good timing on his part.

When Vaughn and his sisters were growing up, Mom worked alongside Dad as a farrier. They’d met while his dad was going through farrier college in Texas, and his mom had taken to the profession like a termite to wood. Eager to establish their own business, they’d picked up and moved west, to Tucumcari. A year later, Vaughn was born.

Mom gave up her career when she decided her firstborn daughter needed more rigorous supervision. Vaughn sometimes wondered if she ever missed her job. He liked to believe she regularly stole away to the blacksmith shop when no one was paying attention to craft trinkets out of forged steel for her church’s craft sales the way some women knitted hats or painted. Working with metal had been her favorite part of the job. Her hands looked too soft and fragile to handle the hammers and heat anymore, but a guy could dream.

Rounding the corner of the walkway that cut between the house and the garage, he saw a half-dozen folks gathered around his dad. Most looked college age, with a couple middle-age guys thrown in.

Small-time ranchers, when they scaled back their businesses or passed the work on to their children, sometimes signed up for farrier school. Probably the first time in their working lives they had time to learn how to shoe a horse. For the most part, professional farriers were called upon for horseshoe maintenance around ranch country. It was a skill that took a lot of know-how to master, and it was easier and more cost-efficient for a rancher to hire a farrier than learn the trade himself.

Vaughn leaned against the wood siding of the house, watching. He never got tired of listening to his dad teach, like he’d taught Vaughn so many years ago.

Dad bent over an anvil, tongs in one hand and a rounding hammer in the other, giving a lesson on shaping a toe clip. “Make the first blow a hard one. That’ll seat the shoe against the anvil.”

He demonstrated with a whack of the hammer that made the two older men in the class flinch from the noise.

“Hey there,” his dad said when he noticed him. “My son, Vaughn,” he said to his class in that proud father way that made Vaughn feel eighteen again.

He gave a two-finger wave.

Dad held out the rounding hammer. “Want to show them how a sheriff does it?”

“Nah, I’m on the clock. Besides, I never was as good as you.”

Dad beamed at that, his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache curving up at the ends. “Are you staying for dinner?”

Vaughn shook his head. “Need to have a word with Gwen, then get back to work.”

Dad paused, midswing of the hammer. Guess he read Vaughn’s tone and phrasing correctly. Having a word with Gwen meant she was in trouble.

Straightening, Dad passed the tongs and hammer to the nearest student. “Go ahead and take a few practice swings.”

Walking to Vaughn, he doffed his gloves and wiped his hands on his leather apron. “Everything okay?”

His code for What did she do this time? Up close like this, he looked old, with more gray hairs than brown, and his skin grizzled from too many years working near high heat and smoke.

“Nothing new.”

Dad nodded and smoothed his mustache, his eyes radiating a weary sorrow. Damn, Vaughn hated to cause his parents more grief. They’d suffered enough because of Gwen’s illness. Not much he could do about it now though. Not with Meyer ready to punish Vaughn by lashing out at his sister.

“Class is almost over,” Dad said. “Stop by the workshop before you leave. I’m forging a new sole knife tonight and could use your input.”

What he really wanted was the scoop on Gwen, and Vaughn respected him enough to give it to him straight. “Will do.”

As Dad resumed his lesson, Vaughn opened the kitchen door, then took his hat in hand. Mom was at the sink washing dishes.

“Hey, Ma.” He bussed her cheek with a kiss as his eyes trolled for the cookies he’d smelled from the driveway. They weren’t cooling on a rack, and they weren’t on the kitchen table. He checked the cookie jar. Empty.

She shooed him away with her drying towel. “Get on with you, now. They’re still in the oven.”

“Aw, you didn’t even give me a chance to use my advanced detective skills,” he said with a smile and wink. “Gwen around?”

She eyed him suspiciously, her face turning guarded. “In her room.”

He squeezed her hand. “Everything’s fine. I need to tell her some news I heard yesterday.”

A frown tugged at her lips, but she nodded and returned to the sink. Vaughn walked down the hallway, twirling his hat on his finger, his eyes passing over innumerable framed family photos. The trip they took to Texas when he was little. Vaughn in a big red cowboy hat sitting on a pony. Stephanie and Gwen sitting on Santa’s lap, screaming their fool heads off. Pictures that had been hanging there his whole life, but that he couldn’t resist glancing over every time he visited.

He stopped outside Gwen’s door, wondering, as he had the whole drive over, what the hell he was going to say. Thirty years old and she was living in the same room that held her crib when she was a baby. She’d been in and out of this room her whole adult life, depending on the boyfriend of the moment or whether she’d been fired for stealing from the stores she worked at.

A television was on inside. He knocked three times and waited.

She opened the door and gave him the once-over. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I haven’t left the house all week except to go to a party last night.”

Great. A real high achiever. “Yeah, that’s good. May I come in?”

Giving the door a shove to open it all the way, she turned and walked into the room. Vaughn followed, closing the door behind him.

At least she wasn’t a slob. No piles of clothes on the floor, and her desk had only a stack of papers on one corner. She clicked off the television and perched on her neatly made bed. Vaughn took the desk chair.

“I’ve got a problem and I need your help,” he said. Bullshit all the way, but as a cop he’d learned that everybody loved to feel important.

She rolled her eyes. “Spare me your condescending cop-speak.”

Oh, sheesh. God help a man with sisters.

His throat reminded him that a cigarette would feel real good right about then, and really steady his nerves. He swallowed a few times. “A situation’s come up at work, a disagreement between my department and the Tucumcari police on how to prosecute a crime.”

That got her attention. “You and Wallace Meyer have hated each other’s guts for years. What is it this time?”

“The crime involved his son.”

“Junior? He wasn’t at the party last night, and everybody had a different opinion about why. He’s in jail, isn’t he?”

Vaughn leapt to his feet, blinking fast and whipping up the air with his arms. “Whoa, now. You party with Wallace Meyer Jr.?”

“Not last night, I didn’t.”

Oh, hell, no. “He’s . . . he’s . . . a friend of yours?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. Why?”

Vaughn crossed the room in two strides to hover over her. “Gwen, listen to me. Junior’s bad news. He’s into some scary stuff that could get you in trouble or maybe even killed. What about his pals, Elias Baltierra, Shawn Henigin, and Jimmy de Luca? Are you friends with them too?”

“Jimmy, yeah, we’re cool. Eli and Shawn come around sometimes, but I wouldn’t call them friends.”

He leaned in closer. “Any idea where I could find them right now?”

“How should I know? I only see them around parties, is all.”

He hated that he had to ask this next question, but couldn’t see a way around it. “Tell me the truth—are you using drugs?”

Sneering, she gave him a shove that backed him out of her face. “Don’t be a jackass, Vaughn. Do I look like a junkie?”

He knelt, hands on hips, right up close to her, and gave her the same thorough looking over he might give someone he’d pulled over for erratic driving. Her skin was tan, not ashen, and free of scabs and sores. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot. No dark circles under her eyes or weird bruising anywhere. But her hair smelled faintly of pot.

He fluffed her hair and took another whiff. Yep. Eau de Ganja.

“Hey!” she squealed, swatting at him.

Swabbing a hand over his face, he paced to the other side of the room and watched his dad’s class through the window, reining in his fury. When he could speak without shouting, he rounded on her. “Damn it, Gwen. Pot? You’re thirty, for Christ’s sake! When are you going to grow up?”

She vaulted from the bed, and he knew by the fire in her eyes that he’d tripped her temper switch. Lovely. Just what he needed.