“And I thought you were an arrogant bastard.”

“I was an arrogant bastard.”

“Oh, right,” I said, suppressing a sad giggle.

“But you weren’t a nutcase, were you?”

I shook my head, grateful for the validation.

“I can let you see him, if you’d like.”

My heart skipped a beat and seemed to rise physically in my chest.

“But I have to tell you, Charley, he won’t pull through. He’s brain-dead.”

Just as quickly, it plummeted to my toes and the floor seemed to slip out from under me. Brain-dead? How could that be?

“He has been since it happened,” he added. He stood and walked around the desk to put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the state plans to terminate care in three days.”

“You mean pull the plug?” I asked. A wave of panic washed over me. I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly parched and raw.

Neil’s lips thinned in regret. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. With no relatives to contest it—”

“But what about his sister?”

“Sister? Farrow has no living relatives. And according to his file, he’s never had any siblings.”

“No, that’s not right,” I said, reopening the file and tearing through the pages. “He had a sister that night.”

“You saw her?” Neil’s voice was filled with hope. He didn’t want Reyes to die any more than I did.

Knowing there would be nothing about his sister in the file, I stopped and closed it again. “No,” I said, trying not to let disappointment swallow me whole. “The landlady told me.”

With a disappointed sigh, Neil collapsed into the chair beside me. “She must have been mistaken.”

* * *

As I drove to the Guardian Long-Term Care Facility in Santa Fe, where they were keeping Reyes, my head swam in a sea of information, trying to fit each piece into neat little folders, to organize what I’d learned. Reyes had continued his education, and one year after his conviction, he’d received a degree in criminology. Then, surprisingly, he’d switched to computers. He had a master’s in computer information systems. He’d bettered himself. He would have been a productive, taxpaying member of society when he got out.

Yet now they were going to kill him. Neil had explained that the only way to stop the state would be to get an injunction, but I’d have to have a damned good reason. If I could just find his sister …

As I picked up my phone to call Cookie, it rang with her personal ringtone, Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

I flipped it open, and Cookie asked, “Well?”

“He’s in a coma.”

“No stinkin’ way.”

“Stinkin’ way. And they’re going to take him off life support in three days, Cook. What am I going to do?” The emotions I’d held at bay in Neil’s office threatened to break free. I fought hard to tamp them down with the deep-breathing techniques I’d learned on my Yoga Boogie DVD.

“What can we do? Did Mr. Gossett tell you?”

“I need to find Reyes’s sister. She’s really the only one who can stop this. Not that I’m giving up. I’ll blackmail Uncle Bob. Maybe he can do something.” I was not going to lose Reyes without a fight. Finding him after all these years … there had to be a reason.

“Blackmail is good,” she said.

The world turned green as I pulled my car into a parking lot that resembled an English garden. Before hanging up, I gave Cookie yet another job. According to the article I’d read the night before, Reyes had spent three months at Yucca High. Maybe his sister did, too. I needed those transcripts.

Cookie went to work on the transcripts as I headed inside the gorgeous health-care facility. This was certainly better than the prison infirmary. I figured they couldn’t have cared for a comatose patient in prison, so they moved him here. Neil had called ahead and told the corrections officer watching Reyes that I would be paying him a visit.

When I walked down the hall to the nurses’ station, the officer stood in an alcove off the main hallway, flirting with an RN. I couldn’t blame him. Watching a comatose prisoner could hardly be exciting. And flirting was fun.

He straightened when I approached, and the RN hastened off to see to her duties. “Ma’am,” he said, tipping an invisible hat. “You must be Ms. Davidson.”

“I am. I guess Mr. Gossett got ahold of you.”

“He did, indeed. Our boy’s in there,” he said, gesturing to a sliding-glass door across the hall with a pale blue curtain covering the opening.

A little surprised the officer didn’t ask for an ID, I headed toward the door. Well, most of me headed for the door. My boots were cemented to the floor. What would I find when I went in? Would he look the same? Would he have changed much in the ten years since the mug shot had been taken? In the twelve years since I’d seen him? Would he have the look of prison about him? The hardness that seemed to saturate people who’d done such a substantial amount of time behind bars?

The officer seemed to recognize my distress. “It’s not bad,” he said, sympathy softening his voice. “He has a breathing tube. That’s probably the worst of it.”

“Do you know him personally?”

“Yes, ma’am. I asked for this duty. Farrow saved my life once during a prison riot. I wouldn’t be standing here today if not for him. Felt like the least I could do, you know?”