The knife had pierced Seth Halloran's heart, exactly at the spot that would stop it cold. Poor guy would've dropped right where he stood.

I hit speed dial and tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder.

"Got a report for me yet, Lancaster?" Gus asked.

"Our witness," I said, not taking my eyes off the body. "The portrait photographer. He heard yelling and ran to investigate."

"Tell me something I don't know," Gus said.

"I'll do you two better," I replied. "One, the witness finally has an ID. His name's Jeb Inscore."

"Inscore, huh? Not a name you hear often."

I agreed. "Secondly, Jeb hid in a nearby alley, where he saw two unknown men standing over the victim. One of them was holding a knife. Jeb saw blood on it."

"That's not what he said the first time."

"Nope," I said. "At least not on the official record. Gus, this wasn't an accidental death. Seth Halloran was murdered."

Gus snorted, though I knew he was intrigued. Murder had certainly been the rumor. "How do you figure that?"

"Because I have proof," I said. "I found his body."

There was a pause on the other end and I pictured Gus's bushy gray eyebrows dropping into a glower.

"Lucy, what the devil are you talking about? How could you find his body? My great-great-granddaddy Seth died in 1849."

"He was murdered in 1849," I said. "Thanks to Jeb Inscore and his photography skills, I'm looking at a photo that shows us the real truth. Hang on and I'll email you a copy."

"This is why I call my company Ancestry Investigations," I said as I attached two jpeg files to an email and hit send. "Like a detective, I know the truth doesn't die because the person has. You simply have to be good at following the trail — and I'm pretty damn good at it."

Gus said, "Winnie Dell knows I always hire the best, Lancaster, so if she recommended you, I'm hardly surprised you're talented. Now if you're going to keep yapping, tell me how you found this Inscore fellow's photo I'm about to see."

I grinned, moving the phone from my right ear to my left. Dr. Winnie Dell was the curator at the Hamilton American History Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the person to pass along my name to Gus when he was looking for someone to research his family genealogy. Winnie was also my former boss from five years ago, when I worked part-time at the Hamilton Center while studying for my master's degree in information science and honing my lineage-hunting techniques on friends and coworkers. Her recommendation had been an honor, to be sure. Winnie knew more talented genealogists than you could shake a stick at, yet she'd felt I had what it took to work with the patriarch of one of Texas's most powerful families.

"Thirty's still relatively young in the world of professional genealogists," she'd reminded me before my first introduction to Gus, "but you've got both the talent to handle Gus Halloran's project and the personality to handle Gus himself."

When I asked her what she meant by that, Winnie said, "I mean that man is a stubborn, opinionated old coot." Patting her salt-and-pepper bob, she added, "I should know, being a proud old coot myself."

Minutes later, I was holding my hand out to a big bear of a man in a three-piece suit. At seventy-five, Gus still had a full head of gray hair, matching bristly mustache, and dark blue eyes that were hypnotizing in their confidence. It was the stare of a businessman who'd made a lot of money by not being easily impressed. I shook his hand, saying, "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Halloran. I understand you're a stubborn, opinionated old coot."

After a brief moment of shock, he'd roared with laughter, kicking off one of my biggest ancestry projects to date, as well as a lovely grandfather-granddaughter–like friendship.

Though at present, I felt he might disown me if I didn't get on with my explaining.

"Okay," I said, "as you know, the newspaper clipping you showed me said Seth had been trampled to death by a loose draft horse." The yellowed, three-paragraph article from The Western Texan gave the time and date of Seth's demise as the early morning hours of February 17, 1849. The place was Commerce Street, then but a dirt road in the still-young city of San Antonio, Texas.

"My great-great-grandmother never believed that cockamamie story," Gus said. "She went to her grave saying he was murdered."

"We now know Jennie Halloran was right." Mostly, I thought, glancing at another piece of evidence I had yet to reveal. "Regardless, we also know that article called the witness 'a local portrait photographer, aged thirty-six years,' but he was never named outright."

"Always thought that seemed strange," Gus said.

"I did, too, and I'd been wondering ever since if being trampled by a horse in nineteenth-century San Antonio was suspicious enough to have warranted an inquest. You and Phyllis were in Napa when I called you to talk about looking into it further, remember?"

Winnie Dell had encouraged me to ask Gus for permission to keep investigating, reminding me that he had been wanting someone to dig into the mystery his whole life.

Not one to welcome interruption when he and his wife were on vacation, though, Gus had replied, "Lancaster, do whatever you like, and put it on my tab," before hanging up on me.

"Anyhow," I said, "a couple of weeks back, I went to the Archives and requested the Bexar County inquest records for the time period surrounding 1849. The records are on microfilm and it took a while to get them through interlibrary loan, but they came in a few days back."

Austin's Texas State Library and Archives Commission, also known as the Lorenzo de Zavala State Archives and Library Building, was located a couple hundred feet east of the state capitol, and both buildings were within walking distance from my office on Congress Avenue that I shared with two other self-employed friends. The massive federal depository, with its treasure trove of genealogical resources, was so much my second office that I knew many of the staff by name and spent free time there volunteering, helping to organize programs for the public on topics relating to genealogy, history, and historical-documents preservation.

I told Gus, "There was indeed an inquest and Jeb Inscore was listed as the sole witness. He'd even written 'photographer' as his occupation, which sealed it that I'd found the right man. As you mentioned, it's not like the surname Inscore is one you hear of every day, so I took a chance, did my thing, and tracked down his descendants. Two of his great-granddaughters are still alive. One of them, Betty-Anne Inscore-Cooper, is eighty-two and still lives in San Antonio. I called her, explained who I was, what I was researching, and asked if she might be willing to talk to me about her great-grandfather and any stories regarding Seth."

"Initiative!" Gus crowed. "Just what I like to hear."

Oh, yeah. High-five to me! In my mind, I raised my palms overhead and quietly smacked them together.

Betty-Anne Inscore-Cooper had welcomed my initiative as well, saying she'd be honored to tell me about her great-grandpa Jeb.

"If you'd also like to see some of his photographs — the kind where no one is smiling because they're afraid the camera will steal their souls — my hall closet is filled with boxes of them," she'd said with a tinkling laugh. "There's also two more boxes I've...