Santa Fe in the late summer of 1883. Lester Lloyd Goodman is dead and buried, and his railway empire lies in ruins. Cooper enjoys his bittersweet revenge, but only for a short while, because something else is wrong: Doc McCoy has disappeared. He was kidnapped and poisoned. The person behind the disappearance seems to be Goodman’s widow. She meets Cooper in a church in Santa Fe, where she makes him a diabolical offer: she will spare Doc’s life if Cooper will carry out a few assignments that will brand him as a criminal. Cooper agrees. Together with his friends he sets out to free Doc McCoy. But the more enmeshed they become in the crime, the clearer it becomes that much more is involved than the revenge of a young woman.