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the Gulf twenty miles to the east. Built in the nineteenth-century southern tradition, it had been constructed of brick and limestone with wide wooden verandas on both floors that were meant to take advantage of the meager and torpid Gulf air that made its way across the surrounding miles of scrub-brush flats and into the east Texas woods of cypress and loblolly pine. The house was situated in the center of a cypress grove encircled by a high wall, its pediment crowned with sharp wrought-iron fleurs-de-lis.
Now all that was left of the estate lay within those same dun-colored, crumbling walls. The big cypresses and oaks remained, casting a perpetual twilight of shadow over grounds which had been unattended for so long no one remembered them otherwise. The old house itself was hidden, obscured by the wild undergrowth of dead weeds and grasses, lost within the matted tangles of coral and butterfly vines. The once wooded countryside had been scored and cross-hatched by the shaggy streets of one of the city's Latin barrios that had crowded and bullied itself right up to the pitted estate walls. The Houston Ship Channel was less than a mile away, and in the near distance toward the bays the barrios died away where miles of oil refineries, stark and sprawling, attached themselves to the channel like noisome tumors.
    The entrance to the Belgrano estate faced Chicon Street in the core of the barrio, its graffiti-smeared walls abutting the sidewalk, its badly rusted gates sagging over a strip of bald caliche that went from the street to about three feet inside the gates, the span of an arm's reach through the wrought-iron bars where the smooth paving stones had been plundered over the years. The body lay in this patch of chalky dust.
    It was approaching nine-thirty in the morning and the dry heat had already stirred the insects in the parched undergrowth on the other side of the high wall. The edge of the dead man's right shoulder and the tip of his splayed-out right shoe were just now being touched by the thin light of the morning sun; the rest of him was in the blue shade, suspended on the white bed of caliche dust in his own silence and in the rasping drone of the insects.
    He lay on his back, his legs straight out and parallel to each other and to the gate, his left shoulder up under the bars themselves as if he had been trying to crawl under. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit with stripes of a lighter gray, the coat neatly closed with a single button above his waist. A soiled white shirt, open at the collar and without a tie, showed above the V of his coat lapels. His hands were placed properly inside the coat pockets, the thumbs outside as if he were posing for a quaint old-fashioned photograph. He wore a pair of scruffy black lace-up shoes, but the laces were missing, the empty eyelets giving the impression of dispossession. He appeared to be a Mexican in his early thirties, chunky, not tall.
    In the very center of the man's lead-colored forehead, just above his eyebrows, a single carpenter's nail protruded from his skull. There was no mess; it was very neatly done. One end of a tiny black string was tied to the nail, and to the other end of the string was tied a large red ant. The ant was trying to walk away from the string, and in doing so was clambering back and forth in a shallow arc across the dreaming gaze of the man's opened eyes.
Chapter 2
SCENES of homicide, Haydon thought as he stood over the reposing body, were contradictory affairs. The minimal constants, by definition, never varied: a criminal death; a Cain, an Abel. The variables were infinite: time and space and circumstance. It was not when or where or why men murdered that made homicide investigations a tedious business. It was the surety of it, the inevitability that during every single day that dawned man could be depended upon to prove again that even after thousands of years of progressing civilization, he was utterly incapable of controlling his