Officer Bernadette Manuelito found the dead man slumped over in the cab of a blue pickup abandoned in a dry gulch off a dirt road -- with a rich ex-con's phone number in his pocket ... and a tobacco tin nearly filled with tracer gold. It's her initial mishandling of the scene that spell trouble for her supervisor, Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police -- but it's the echoes of a long ago crime that call the legendary former Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn out of retirement. Years earlier, Leaphorn followed the trail of a beautiful, young, and missing wife to a dead end, and his failure has haunted him ever since. But ghosts never sleep in these high, lonely Southwestern hills. And the twisted threads of craven murders past and current may finally be coming together, thanks to secrets once moaned in torment on the desert wind.