Queen of the Night

Thirteen

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 10:00 a.m.

76º Fahrenheit

Jonathan Southard slept in that Sunday morning. When he finally awakened, he felt rested, relaxed, and absolutely triumphant. Unbeatable. Part of that was due to having had a good night’s sleep for the first time in days. The antibiotics seemed to be doing their work. The hand was still lame-the urgent-care doc had said something about a severed tendon-but at least the throbbing was gone and the infection seemed to be lessening.

But Jonathan was glorying in more than physical well-being. He also felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment. Not guilt. Accomplishment. He supposed he should have felt like a monster, but he didn’t. Timmy and Suzy had been collateral damage; the Indians, too. But everyone else deserved it.

There was only one thing he regretted, and that was the fact that one name was missing from Jonathan’s deadly roster. Kathleen Bates had been Jonathan’s old boss. She was also the one who had given him his “outplacement counseling session.” Of course, the job she had should have been his. Had that been the case, she would have been the one getting the boot. And he knew that she had reveled in kicking him down the stairs.

For a moment he went so far as to consider going back to California and taking care of her before he left the States for good. He wasn’t really worried about the cops. They’d never figure out what had happened. In Jonathan’s experience, most police officers were too stupid to live, much less work in a bank. Besides, Jonathan’s IQ clocked in at something north of 156. Not even his mother had ever so much as hinted that he wasn’t smart.

Unfortunately, his sense of self-satisfaction lasted for only five minutes or so, until he picked up the remote control and turned on his television set. The hazy news broadcasters on his snowy, non-high-def set were busy reporting on the quadruple homicide that had occurred overnight out on the reservation. They didn’t call it a reservation. They called it the Tohono O’odham Nation, but that was beside the point.

What mattered was the disturbing realization that the bodies had been found far sooner than Jonathan had expected. He had thought he’d have all morning to make his leisurely way to the airport and then catch his plane for south of the border. But the reporter on the screen was saying that police had yet to identify the victims, pending notification of next of kin.

Hearing those fateful words propelled Jonathan straight up in bed.

Once the authorities identified Jack and Abby Tennant-with their car right there at the crime scene, even a stupid street cop could probably manage that much-then someone was even now heading for Abby’s son’s home in Thousand Oaks, for Jonathan’s home, to give him the bad news about his mother’s death. When that happened-maybe it already had happened-the jig would be up. Once Esther and the kids were found dead, Jonathan, the missing husband, would move to the very top of the suspect list. Cops in two states would be looking for him-seriously looking.

Jonathan had made arrangements to meet up with new identification once he crossed into Mexico, but he had planned on crossing the border using his own ID. Now he spent some time second-guessing that decision, but since there was no alternative, he decided he would try going to the airport early. Maybe he’d be able to get his ticket and make it through security before anyone raised the alarm.

He called for a cab to come take him to the airport. Ignoring Los Amigos’s paltry version of a breakfast buffet, he dragged his roll-aboard luggage out through the lobby. His minivan was parked in the far corner of the lot. Jonathan didn’t dare glance in that direction for fear someone might notice and wonder why he was taking his luggage and leaving without taking his vehicle with him.

The cab arrived with amazing alacrity. On the ride to the airport, Jonathan couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder once or twice, but when they drove up to the departure gates, Jonathan was appalled to see a collection of cop cars gathered there. Not city cops-county cops.

Jonathan understood at once why they were there-they were looking for him. They had to be. He also understood that if he stepped inside the airport, he might still be able to purchase a ticket, but he wouldn’t make it through security screening and out to a gate. That’s where the cops would be waiting and watching-at the security checkpoints.

Worried about airport security, he had left his Glock in the car when he left the motel. He had been afraid that if the weapon showed up in his checked luggage, it might arouse suspicion. Now, though, he wanted it back. Once the cabdriver returned him to Los Amigos and dropped him off, he went straight to the minivan and retrieved the weapon from under the front seat.

Is that how all this is going to end, he wondered, in a hail of bullets?

Jonathan still had that collection of pills he had brought along from California. That and some booze-well, enough booze-would probably do the trick if it came to that, but he had to believe that it was still possible for him to make a clean getaway. That would only be possible if he made his move soon-very soon.

He was hungry. He had planned on eating breakfast at the airport. Now he needed to find some food, but he didn’t want to spend a lot of time driving around town in case someone had caught on and put out a bulletin of some kind on his minivan. When he left the hotel, he wound through downtown. A mile or so from Tucson’s downtown area, he happened on a family-owned coffee shop called Chaffin’s, the kind of place that was crowded with Sunday-brunch-style gatherings.

Seated at the long counter and relishing the anonymity, he ate his short stack and downed his coffee and orange juice. As he did so, he idly wondered if he’d even be able to find pancakes once he made it into Mexico. Years ago, in Tijuana, Esther had ordered French toast and had been disappointed when her order came with French bread toasted. Pancakes might suffer in translation the same way.

Finally the guy next to him got up and went to pay his bill, leaving an untidy stack of maple-syrup-spotted Sunday newspaper sitting on the counter. Jonathan appropriated it and opened it to the front page. The article about the shootings on the reservation didn’t add much to what had already been reported on the local television news.

Using the newspaper as cover, he sat there for some time, reading it and drinking one cup of coffee after the other, but he wasn’t really reading. Jonathan was thinking. When he finally put down the paper and went to pay his tab, he had analyzed his situation and come up with a plan of action. Leaving his waitress a respectable tip, he exited the restaurant and went looking for a grocery store. He was pretty sure that was where he’d find what he needed.

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:00 p.m.

81º Fahrenheit

By the time Brandon and Diana made it back to Tucson from Sonoita, it was early afternoon. They rode with the convertible’s top closed. Even so, they could tell that the Invicta’s aging air conditioner was losing ground in its war with the summer heat.

Rather than driving straight through to Casa Grande in that, they stopped by the house in Gates Pass long enough to trade Diana’s vintage Buick for Brandon’s CRV. As for Damsel? After her morning’s adventure, she was more than happy to curl up in her favorite place on the couch and snooze the rest of the day away while her people went off to do whatever people do when they’re out.

On their way north, Brandon and Diana talked. Yesterday Brandon had been trying to run away from his own worst fears. Today those fears were realized. Yesterday, isolated and dreading what the unknown future might hold, he had felt impotent and hopeless. Now he knew that there was a very real possibility that he would lose Diana-that she would drift away from him into that strange fog of unknowing. That was a terrible prospect-an appalling prospect, but if that truly was what was happening, if Diana’s strange visitations were part of early-onset Alzheimer’s, at least now they were dealing with a known opponent, a named opponent.

And, if nothing else, he and Diana were finally talking about it. They were dealing with it together-would deal with it together. Somehow that made it less scary as far as Brandon was concerned. They had made it through tough times together before, and they would do so again.

One by one they tried to look the worst-case scenario in the eye, attempting to sort out strategies that would help them navigate whatever was coming and make the best of it. Now that they had decided the Invicta would remain in the family, they also determined that from now on, in case the fog descended again-or, rather, when the fog descended again-Brandon would take charge of all car keys, including locking them away in his gun safe if he deemed that course of action necessary.

Brandon had never tried his hand at golf. He just wasn’t interested in chasing little white balls across grassy lawns and trying to herd them into holes, but he remembered reading somewhere that Alzheimer’s patients who had once played golf were still able to do so long after their other mental faculties seemed to desert them.

For that very reason he was enthusiastic about Diana’s sudden interest in trying her hand at making pottery. It was something that she had enjoyed once in the distant past. He hoped it would help hold her interest now. Since the Invicta would still be occupying its space in the garage, however, one of the bedrooms-most likely the one that had been Davy’s-would be turned into Diana’s pottery studio.

And if they needed more help around the house-both of them carefully avoided saying the word “attendant”-maybe Lani could help them find someone from the reservation who would be willing to come live in and be there to help out out as necessary.

As they talked, the miles seemed to melt away. Today, as Brandon drove into Geet and Sue Farrell’s neighborhood, it didn’t look quite as grim as it had appeared to him on the previous day. Yes, the trim on the house still needed scraping and painting and the thirsty palm trees were still wilting in the heat, but it wasn’t as distressing as it had seemed yesterday.

The day before when he had noticed the wheelchair-accessible van parked in their driveway, he had taken that as a sign of defeat. Today, that same van with its handicapped-parking placard spoke to him in a different way. It was one of the tools Sue and Geet were using to get along-had used to get along. Brandon doubted Geet would be up to taking many more trips away from his living room hospital equipment and oxygen mask, but the van was part of how he and Sue had coped so far. It was how they had made it to here.

And we’ll make it, too, Brandon thought.

He pulled into the driveway and parked next to the van. “Do you want me to wait in the car?” Diana asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s too hot. Come on in. You can talk to Sue while I visit with Geet. She needs company, too.”

When the time comes, so will I, he thought.

He led Diana around the house to the back-door entrance and knocked. When Sue answered she looked marginally better than she had the day before. The haircut helped, but she also looked better rested.

“Back so soon?” she asked.

Brandon nodded. It seemed odd to him that he and Geet had been friends for years, but until this moment their wives had never met. Once the necessary introductions were out of the way, Brandon left Diana in the kitchen with Sue while he made his way back into the living room. This time he was better equipped to deal with the hospice equipment he saw there. Sue’s tangle of sheets still covered the sofa, but now a kitchen chair had been drawn up close to the bed.

Geet himself lay propped up in his hospital bed with his closed eyes turned toward a muted television set where the Padres were playing the Diamondbacks. It seemed to Brandon that in those few intervening hours the man had wasted away that much more. The skin on the gaunt bones of his face was gray. His lips were almost white. Death was coming and it was coming soon. Brandon knew what this looked like. He had seen the same thing in the hospital room where they had taken his father.

Geet’s eyes blinked open without warning. He studied Brandon for a moment as if unsure of who he was. Then he grinned-at least it looked like a grin.

“Hey,” he said. “Weren’t you just here, or do I have you mixed up with someone else?”

“I was here,” Brandon said. “Yesterday. You handed over that case file.”

“Ursula’s,” he said.

“Yes,” Brandon agreed. “Ursula’s.”

Geet stirred. Cancer had robbed him of almost everything, but for a few moments the old intensity burned through. His eyes focused. He paid attention. “Did you talk to her-to the witness?”

“To June Holmes?” Brandon returned. “Yes, I did.”

“Why wouldn’t she talk to me before this?” Geet asked. “Why now?”

“Because her husband was still alive,” Brandon explained. “She didn’t send you that note until after Fred Holmes died.”

“Why?” Geet asked. “What does that have to do with the price of peanuts?”

“She claims Fred was the one who did it-the one who murdered Ursula Brinker. She said she didn’t know about it until five years ago. When Fred finally got around to telling her, he had just been diagnosed with cancer. She waited until after he was dead to send you that letter.”

“But I checked Fred Holmes’s alibi,” Geet objected. “I had witnesses who placed him in Phoenix that whole weekend.”

Brandon was struck by the fact that even after all these years and even in the throes of cancer, Geet still had a complete grasp of the details of that case. He had no difficulty recalling the names of the people involved.

For him it’s like golf, Brandon thought. Or throwing pots.

“The alibi came from his mother?” Brandon asked.

“Yes.”

“She may have thought he was there, but he wasn’t. He drove to San Diego and back without his mother ever knowing he was gone.”

“Why did it happen?” Geet asked.

“Ursula and June started out as friends. On that trip they evidently became closer than friends.”

“As in a homosexual encounter?”

Brandon knew Geet had suspected as much. He nodded. “Someone walked in on them and caught them in the act. Word about what had happened got back to Fred. According to June, it was just a onetime thing. Maybe it was; maybe it wasn’t. At any rate, this was a long time before Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. Fred and June had both been raised as devout Mormons where that kind of thing was then and still is a big no-no. When Fred heard about it, he went ape and drove straight to San Diego to put a stop to it. Ursula ended up dead.”

“Who spilled the beans and told him about what was going on?”

“June said she thought maybe it was Margo.”

“The girl who owned the car.”

Brandon nodded.

Geet thought about that for a moment. “A couple of people hinted around that something like that might have happened between Ursula and June. I wondered about Fred from the beginning, but as far as I could tell, his alibi checked out. What if she’s lying?”

“What if June Holmes is lying now?” Brandon asked.

Geet nodded. “What if June was the one who ran up the flag to Fred in the first place?” he asked. “Maybe she knew he was likely to overreact?”

“I don’t think so,” Brandon said. “I don’t think she told Fred about what happened before Ursula died, but she did shortly after it happened. She thought that when she made her confession to him that he’d drop her like a hot potato. She’s spent most of the last fifty years being grateful that he didn’t. When he finally got around to telling her what had really happened, he was counting on her standing by him the same way he had stood by her. He figured those forty-five years of gratitude would keep her from spilling the beans. It was also a form of punishment.”

“Sounds like it worked on both counts,” Geet grumbled.

Brandon nodded. “She didn’t say a word to anyone about it until after he was dead. By the time you reopened the case, Fred had already confessed to her. That’s why she refused to talk to you. She didn’t want her kids and grandkids to know what Fred had done. And she didn’t want them to know about what she and Ursula had done, either.”

Geet shook his head. “If you ask me, it seems a little suspect and way too convenient that she’s blaming Fred now, after he’s dead and unable to defend himself. Do you believe her?”

“Actually, I do,” Brandon told him. “She had her suitcase packed and her cat crated. She fully expected that I was coming to pack her off to jail. She was under the impression that by knowing about it and not telling, that made her an accessory after the fact. I think she was on the level.”

Reaching into his pocket, Brandon withdrew the Ziploc bag containing the hunting knife and handed it over to Geet.

“What’s this?”

“That may be the murder weapon,” Brandon told him. “After Fred died, one of their sons was going through his tools and found this hidden in the back of one of the drawers in his father’s tool chest. In all the years June and Fred were married, she said she had never seen it before, didn’t know it existed. I’ll get it over to the crime lab and see if they can find any DNA evidence. There might be some, right there in the crack where the blade meets the handle.”

Geet examined the knife through the clear plastic and then gave it back to Brandon. “What if there is?” he asked with an exasperated shrug. “What’s the point? Ursula is still dead. So are her parents. So is Fred. What about justice? No one is ever going to pay for that crime.”

“June is paying,” Brandon said quietly. “She may not have murdered Ursula, but she knows now that what the two of them did together that day was the ultimate cause of her friend’s death. I believe she’ll regret it every day for the rest of her life.”

Geet leaned back against his pillows, closed his eyes, and shook his head in obvious disgust. “So that’s it, then,” he said. “I’ve spent a lifetime chasing after this case and it’s all for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” Brandon told him. “We finally have a better idea about what happened. Regardless of whether it goes to trial, I believe we can both know that this case is finally closed.”

“If Fred’s the one who did it, I should have caught him sooner,” Geet insisted. “There must have been something I missed, something that would have given the game away.”

“What if you had solved it?” Brandon asked. “What then? Fred might have gotten sent up for a couple of years, but you and I wouldn’t be here right now, Geet. It was because Ursula’s murder wasn’t solved that Hedda Brinker used her lotto millions to start The Last Chance. I personally know of at least fifteen separate families that TLC has helped over the years-families who now have answers about their murdered loved ones that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Geet nodded. “I suppose that’s true,” he admitted, but the spark of focus that had briefly animated him seemed to have run its course. He closed his eyes briefly, then held out his hand. When Brandon took it, Geet’s skin was hot and paper-thin, but the grip of his handshake was surprisingly firm.

“Thank you, Brandon,” he said. “Following up on this last case of mine means more to me than you know.”

“You’re welcome,” Brandon said, rising to his feet. “Glad to help out.” He walked toward the door, then stopped. “Turns out it’s probably my last TLC case, too.”

Geet’s eyes popped open. “Why’s that?”

“Diana,” Brandon said with a shrug. “I think we’re facing some health issues, too. I’ll probably let Ralph know that I’m going to have to stand down.”

The fact that he’d made the admission surprised him. It was one thing to tell the kids. It was something else to mention the situation outside the immediate family.

“I’m sorry,” Geet said. “I hope it works out.”

“Thanks,” Brandon said. “I hope so, too.”

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:30 p.m.

87º Fahrenheit

When Brian’s cell phone rang, he expected it to be Kath. He had told her he was still working-that he wouldn’t be able to be there that afternoon to watch the girls while she went shopping.

The caller, however, turned out to be Alex Mumford. “Who the hell is Jake Abernathy?” she wanted to know.

“That would be one of Sheriff Forsythe’s fair-haired boys. I take it he called you?”

“Why didn’t you call me?” she returned pointedly.

“I got pulled from the case,” he said. “Abernathy’s lead.”

“That may be, but he’s also a jerk,” Alex said. “He called me up and started throwing his weight around. Make that he was trying to throw his weight around.”

“I take it that didn’t work out for him all that well?”

“You think?” Alex replied with a laugh. “I’m all for interagency cooperation and all that crap, but not when someone pisses me off. So here’s the deal. I did get those phone numbers added to the warrant, but I don’t have any information back on that just yet. It is Sunday, after all, but when I do get some information, I’ll be calling it in to you. I seem to have lost Detective Abernathy’s number.”

Brian laughed, too. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be glad to pass it along. When I do, Abernathy will go straight up and turn left. A ripple in the force and all that. He’s not going to like it.”

“Good,” Alex Mumford said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:45 p.m.

88º Fahrenheit

Ginny Torres’s heart was light as she wheeled her grocery-laden shopping cart through Safeway while her three-year-old son, Pepe, babbled happily if unintelligibly in the child’s seat. It was close to naptime, but so far he hadn’t hit the wall.

Ginny generally hated Sundays. There was always more than she could do in one day-laundry, household chores, grocery shopping. She worked five days a week at the AOL call center and one day a week at a hair-care kiosk at Park Place Mall. Not that she wasn’t glad to have both jobs. She was.

They had been living in Safford and doing all right-up until Felix, her husband, had been laid off from his well-paying job with Phelps Dodge. That had come as a big shock to the system. In the end, they’d had no choice but to come limping back home to Tucson, where they were able to live not quite rent-free in one of Felix’s parents’ rentals.

In the process, Ginny had made the leap from stay-at-home mom to major breadwinner. Her call-center job didn’t pay exceptionally high wages, but it did come with medical benefits. With a toddler to worry about, that was huge. Felix, on the other hand, found occasional construction and yard-work jobs. When he wasn’t working one of those, he took care of Pepe. On those occasions when both he and Ginny had to work, Felix’s mother looked after Pepe. That way, at least Ginny and Felix didn’t have to worry about paying for child care.

In other words, things could have been a lot worse, but Ginny did find herself wishing sometimes that Felix didn’t have such an aversion to doing housework-women’s work, as he liked to call it. He could be home all day without seeing any need to pick up the vacuum cleaner, and he could step over or around the mounds of dirty clothes out in the garage without once taking it on himself to start a load of laundry. Felix never fussed when it was time to go to the store for beer, but going to the store for groceries? Never. Grocery shopping was something else that had to wait for Ginny’s precious “day off.”

Today, though, with the exception of two items, she was picking up staples only-laundry detergent, dog food, and canned goods-things that could sit in an overheated car for several hours without coming to grief, because today, after her shopping excursion, she and Pepe weren’t going straight home.

Pepe’s third birthday was on Monday, but they were celebrating it today with tamales and tacos at Felix’s folks’ place. All the cousins would be there for an afternoon of fun in the pool. All Ginny and Pepe had to do was to show up, bringing along the birthday cake and ice cream-those were the only perishables in the cart. That cake was appropriately decorated with tiny plastic replicas of Wall-E and Eva and the ice cream was Pepe’s favorite, all chocolate all the time.

Ginny was looking forward to the party. Her mother-in-law, Amelia, would be in her element, spoiling her husband, her sons, and her grandkids. The children would be busy splashing around in the pool, the men would be out on the patio drinking beer, and the sisters-in-law would sit around the kitchen table drinking iced tea and griping about their husbands, all of whom were cut from the same cloth. To a man, all five of Amelia Torres’s sons were utterly incapable of lifting a finger around the house.

At the checkout stand, the cashier rang up the cake and then smiled at Pepe. “Whose birthday?” she asked.

“Mine!” he announced proudly, thumping his chest.

“And how old are you?” The cashier’s name tag said “Helen.”

It took some maneuvering on his part, but eventually Pepe managed to hold up three fingers.

“Three, really?” Helen asked.

Ginny and Pepe nodded in unison.

“Enjoy him,” Helen said. “They grow up so quickly. Do you need any help out with these?”

On Sunday afternoons, the store wasn’t normally that crowded, but today the open checkout stands all had lines, and the carryout clerks were totally occupied.

“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “I can manage. Don’t bag the cake, but double-bag the ice cream. Otherwise it might melt before we make it to Grandma’s house.”

A few minutes later, Ginny pushed the heavy cart out through the automatic sliding doors. The early-afternoon June heat was like a physical assault. It burned into her face and skin, and she was glad that the interior of her four-year-old and fully paid for Honda came with cloth seats instead of leather. The cloth might be harder to keep clean, especially when something sweet got spilled on it, but at least it didn’t fry your bare skin when you climbed inside.

Pepe was still blabbing away as Ginny angled the shopping cart through the busy parking lot. She had hoped that she would manage to convince him to take a nap before the party, but it was beginning to look as though that wasn’t in the cards.

As Ginny neared the Accord, she pressed the button on the remote. As close as she had to be before the doors unlocked, Ginny was pretty sure she needed to put in a new battery in her remote.

The parking lot was spacious. Even on this busy Sunday afternoon there were still plenty of open stalls, but a dust-covered minivan had parked close enough to her car that both tires were on her side of the designated parking lines. Creep, she thought.

With Pepe still in the cart, Ginny carefully loaded the groceries into the trunk, making sure the cake was properly wedged into a spot where it couldn’t possibly come to grief. The ice cream she set aside to put in the front seat along with her purse in hopes the AC could maybe help keep it from melting before she made it to her in-laws’ place on the far side of I-10. Pepe unfortunately took exception to her plan. He wanted to keep the cake with him, and he launched himself into a nap-deprived temper tantrum.

Once the groceries were loaded, Ginny lifted her son out of the car and then wrestled him, screeching at the top of his lungs, into his booster seat. With him screaming and kicking, Ginny was grateful that this car seat was a lot easier to operate than the backward-facing ones they had used when Pepe was younger. Then, with him properly belted but still howling, Ginny hurried to return the grocery cart to the cart collection point three cars away.

Even at the end of the aisle Ginny could still hear Pepe’s full-fledged screeching. Returning to her vehicle, she edged between the poorly parked minivan and her Honda. She opened the door and prepared to put her purse and the ice cream on the front passenger seat. When she tried to do so, however, she was astonished to see a man, a stranger, sitting there in the passenger seat. Not only was he there, he was holding a gun.

“Don’t make a sound,” he growled at her. “If you do, your baby dies.”

Ginny’s breath caught in her throat. A charge that seemed like electricity shot through her body. Her fingertips tingled. The car keys dropped from her suddenly clumsy hands. The key fob fell to the floorboard inside the car. Her purse and the bagged ice cream landed with a splat on the pavement next to the car.

“Who are you?” she demanded when she was able to speak. “What do you want? What are you doing in my car?”

“Open the door of the car next to you,” he said, pointing at the minivan. “There’s a roll-aboard suitcase on the front seat. Put that in the backseat of this car. Then close that one and get in this one. Don’t call to anyone. Don’t make any fuss or your baby dies.”

Ginny looked back over her shoulder at the grubby silver minivan. It looked innocuous enough-like a perfectly normal car. Surely this wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.

“Did you hear me?” the man barked. “Do it now. Move.”

Ginny looked at Pepe, who, still screaming in full meltdown mode, had yet to notice the stranger’s presence. With her whole body quaking, Ginny backed away from the Honda and pulled open the passenger-side door of the minivan.

The car was filthy inside and out. The passenger-side floorboard was full of trash-empty fast food and drink containers. But the roll-aboard bag was there on the seat, just as the man had said it would be. It was heavier than Ginny expected, but she hefted it out and lugged it over to the back door of her Honda. As she shoved it inside, she looked around desperately, hoping someone was aware of what was happening, but she saw no one-no one at all. The minivan was tall enough that it obscured her movements from the view of anyone coming and going through the store’s front entrance.

She started to reach down to retrieve her fallen purse and the ice cream. Then she stopped. If she left those items there, maybe whoever found them would be smart enough to figure out that something bad had happened. Then again, maybe whoever saw her purse sitting there on the ground might just steal it for themselves.

Trying to control her trembling body, Ginny got back into the car. The man sitting beside her was middle-aged, pudgy, and balding. There was a long scabby cut that ran from his eyebrow to his cheek, as though he had been in a fight of some kind. That was also when she noticed, for the first time, that the hand that held the gun was actually in a sling. One of his arms, the right one, was hurt and bandaged. Maybe that was why he had wanted help in moving that suitcase. Or maybe he thought that dragging luggage around a grocery-store parking lot might attract too much unwanted attention.

Ginny groped around on the floorboard and finally managed to find the keys she had dropped earlier. With her hand still trembling, she picked them up. It took several tries before she was able to insert the key in the ignition. When the Accord’s engine turned over, the AC fans came on full-blast, spewing hot air into the vehicle. Without putting the car in gear, she looked back at Pepe.

“It’s okay,” she said to her hysterical son as soothingly as she could manage, but her voice felt brittle, as if it might shatter into a million pieces. “We’ll be okay. Hush now.”

But Pepe didn’t listen and he didn’t hush. He kept right on howling. He had no idea that they were in danger. All he wanted was his cake.

Ginny turned to the man. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “What do you want?”

“Don’t talk, drive,” he ordered. “Get us out of here.”

Ginny was an ordinary young woman-a young mother. This seemed impossible. Surely she and Pepe couldn’t be kidnapped by an armed assailant in broad daylight right in the middle of Tucson! But clearly the unthinkable-the impossible-had happened, was happening. Ginny also knew that if called upon to do so, she would fight for Pepe’s life with her last dying breath. That very real possibility forced her to try to calm herself. She held the burning steering wheel with both hands and used the pain on her palms to help bring her mind into focus. Her life depended on it; so did Pepe’s.

She strapped her own seat belt in place. As she did so she remembered that weeks earlier someone had sent her an e-mail about this very thing. Usually, she discarded those Internet chain letters without even looking at them. For some reason, she had read that one all the way through, and the advice had stayed with her.

The message had said that if you were ever carjacked, you should smash your vehicle into something stationary and then get out and run like hell. The idea was that the deploying air bags would probably knock the weapon out of the assailant’s hands, temporarily disarming him. Even if he ended up firing at you as you ran away, not that many people could shoot weapons well enough to hit a moving target.

But if I jump out and run away, she thought, what about Pepe in the backseat? He was strapped into his booster. That was something Ginny insisted on. In her vehicle, not wearing seat belts wasn’t an option. And what if Pepe’s belt didn’t hold when she deliberately wrecked the car? What if it malfunctioned? What if he came loose and went smashing through the windshield? Or what if he was left alone in the car with an armed and dangerous criminal? All those ideas raced through her mind at once like waves of heat rising off the pavement.

Ginny took a deep breath and turned toward the man with the gun. “Where do you want to go?” she asked, straining to be heard over the noise of Pepe’s overwrought protestations.

“Mexico,” he said.

“Where in Mexico?” she asked. “Nogales? Agua Prieta?”

“I don’t care. Just get me across the border.”

The car parked directly in front of Ginny’s Honda, an SUV, pulled out of its spot. Relieved, Ginny followed it out. That way she didn’t have to back up and show the killer that she had left her bag of ice cream and her purse sitting there on the ground in plain sight.

If the guy wanted to go to Mexico, Ginny knew she had another problem. Her driver’s license was in the purse along with her cell phone. So was her passport, and Pepe’s, too. She and Felix had gotten Pepe a passport when Grandpa and Grandma Torres had taken everyone-kids and grandkids included-with them on a Mexican cruise in honor of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Since then, Ginny had discovered that racial profiling did happen. In southern Arizona, if you looked Hispanic, it was always a good idea to have plenty of government-issue ID available, especially if you happened to get stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint.

But this time, when she reached the checkpoints, she wouldn’t have ID of any kind. What would this man do then?

Suddenly she made the connection. It had been all over the news when she turned on her TV earlier that morning. Someone had killed four people out on the reservation last night. Was this the same man? If it was, this guy wasn’t just desperate. He was a stone-cold killer who probably wouldn’t think twice about taking another life-or two.

Ginny took a deep breath and glanced in the rearview mirror.

Behind her she saw a woman hustle up to one of the carryout boys. She was waving her arms and gesturing, pointing first in the direction of Ginny’s Accord and then back to the place where Ginny’s purse and her bag of melting ice cream sat abandoned on the burning pavement.

For one giddy moment, Ginny allowed herself to hope that help was on the way, but that moment of respite was short-lived. She knew it would take time for help to get there. She needed to stall long enough for that to happen.

“I need gas,” she said.

That was true. She had less than half a tank, and there was a gas station right there in the corner of the parking lot. She also had no money and no credit card, but maybe she could get inside long enough to ask for help.

“We’ll get gas later,” the man said, waggling the gun in her direction. “Get us out of here now. Go that way.” He pointed southbound on Campbell.

Ginny drove as far as the exit onto Campbell and signaled to turn left. Within a couple of blocks, Pepe finally finished crying himself out and fell quiet. It was his usual nap time. Tired from shopping and from crying, and still blissfully unaware of the danger they were in, he seemed to be falling asleep. Mentally Ginny uttered a prayer of thanksgiving. The sudden silence gave her a chance to concentrate on what she was doing and to get herself under control.

She tried desperately to remember everything she had ever heard or seen about hostage situations on television and in the movies. Wasn’t she supposed to get the guy talking? Isn’t that what hostage negotiators always did-try to establish a line of communication?

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

The gunman shrugged and didn’t answer.

“If you’ll let Pepe and me out somewhere, you can have the car,” she said. “We won’t tell anybody. Just let us go. Please.”

She knew even as she said the words that this was a futile hope. He would never let them go. She understood full well there was only one way this nightmare would end, and it would be with Ginny and Pepe dead. She would never see Felix again. Never have a chance to tell him good-bye. And she wouldn’t live long enough to see Pepe go off to kindergarten, or graduate from high school, either. Her eyes filled with hot tears, but she blinked them back.

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Just drive.”

Since there was nothing else to do, Ginny drove. She forced herself not to look in the rearview mirror. If that woman in the parking lot had noticed something amiss and had summoned help-if by some miracle someone was following them-she didn’t want to risk doing anything that might warn the guy that help was on the way. And if there wasn’t anybody back there coming to help? Then it didn’t matter anyway.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked.

He glanced down at his injured hand. Ginny looked, too.

“Dog bit me,” he said.

That was all he said. He didn’t explain which dog had bitten him or why, and Ginny decided not to ask for any further clarification on that score.

“Why did you choose me?” she asked finally.

“I drove around until I found a car with a car seat in it,” he said. “I figured while you were dealing with the baby it would be easy for me to get in your car. And it was.”

Crap, Ginny Torres thought. They told you that you should always put your baby in a car seat. That was supposed to make it safer. Not this time.

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:48 p.m.

88º Fahrenheit

N ow that Annie and Amy were six, they were old enough that Kath Fellows was willing to risk leaving them alone for an hour or so at a time. On this particular Sunday afternoon she knew she’d be in and out of the neighborhood grocery store in far less time than that. So after giving the girls a pep talk and promising to bring them both Twinkies if they were very good, she left them in the living room with orders to stay there watching a video until she came back.

Kath was at the checkout line and just signing the credit-card authorization screen when one of the carryout boys came charging into the store yelling, “Call nine-one-one.”

“Why?” the manager called back. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s an old lady outside who said she thinks a woman and her baby were just abducted at gunpoint, from right here in the parking lot.”

As people hurried out the door, Kath followed, pushing her cart of groceries. A crowd was gathering around the supposedly “old” woman, someone who looked to be in her sixties, who was pacing back and forth, yelling excitedly, and pointing back toward the parking lot.

“He had a gun,” she said. “I saw it. He got in the car while she was putting the grocery cart away. When she came back to her car, he made her get something out of this one.”

The woman pointed toward a dust-covered silver Dodge Caravan. “She put whatever it was in the backseat of her little car and then they drove out of here in that. But her purse is still here-right there on the ground-and so are some of her groceries.”

Kath listened to the chorus of excited voices as she loaded groceries into the back of her own Odyssey on the far side of the parking aisle. By the time she finished, she knew that Tucson PD was responding to the manager’s 911 call because she could hear the siren of an approaching patrol car wailing in the distance.

“What kind of vehicle were they in when they left here?” the store manager was asking the distressed woman. He was still holding his cell phone and still talking into it.

“Tan,” she said. “Light tan. One of those foreign cars. A Honda, I think, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Which way did they go?”

“South on Campbell.”

“And what about the guy? Did you see him? What did he look like?”

“Middle-aged, bald, and heavyset,” the woman said. “One arm was in a sling.”

That last comment hit Kath Fellows like a sledgehammer. She had spoken to Brian several times in the course of the day. She knew the man her husband was looking for-the killer he was looking for-was a middle-aged bald man with one arm in a sling. Slamming her car door shut, Kath raced across the aisle and pushed her way through the cluster of people until she was able to get a clear view of the tags on the back of the dusty silver minivan. California.

Long before the patrol car arrived, Kath Fellows was on the horn with her husband. Brian sounded groggy, as though he might have been caught napping at his desk when she called.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I meant to call earlier. I’m tracking auto dealers, and I still don’t know when I’ll be home.”

“It’s about your killer,” Kath told him. “Do you have a vehicle tag number for him?”

“Just a sec,” Brian said, shuffling papers. “I have it right here. Why?”

“I’m looking at a very dusty silver minivan, a Dodge Caravan with California plates.”

Brian read off the license information.

“That’s the one,” Kath said.

“What’s going on?”

“I think your guy just carjacked a woman and her baby.”

“Which way did they go?” Brian asked.

Kath heard the urgency in his voice. “South on Campbell in a tan sedan. Maybe a Honda. Is it possible they’re headed for the airport?”

“No,” Brian said at once. “Not that. Southard already tried the airport option this morning. It didn’t work. Besides, we’ve got that covered. He’s headed somewhere else. The smart money is on Mexico. Can you give me any more information on either the vehicle or on the victim, anything at all?”

Kath looked up in time to see that the arriving patrol car was still half a block away, wading through the intersection. The cops weren’t on the scene yet, but the woman’s purse was. It was still sitting where she had dropped it, on the ground next to the spot where her vehicle had been parked.

Before anyone could stop her, Kath had scooped up the abandoned purse. She had the wallet out and open by the time the cop car rolled to a stop in the midst of the milling crowd of excited onlookers.

“Stop her,” someone shouted, pointing at Kath. “That woman is trying to steal her purse.”

A burly young cop hurried up to Kath. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Is that your property?”

“Her name is Torres,” Kath said into the phone to her husband without answering the officer’s question. “Virginia Torres. Her address is 231 South Fourth.”

“Ma’am, I asked you once,” the cop insisted. “You need to answer me. Is that your purse or not?”

“Hope this helps,” Kath said. “I’ve gotta go.”

She closed her phone, handed the purse to the police officer, and reached for her own ID. “No, it’s not mine,” she said. “My name is Kath Fellows. I’m with the Border Patrol. According to her ID, the purse belongs to a woman named Virginia Torres. I believe she and her baby have just been carjacked. I think the man who did it is the shooter who killed those four people out on the reservation last night.”