Kiss of the Bees

Under normal circumstances, no right-thinking member of the Desert People would have gone anywhere near the haunted, moldering ruins of the deserted village known as Ko’oi Koshwa—Rattlesnake Skull. An Apache war party, aided by a young Tohono O’othham woman, a traitor, had massacred almost the entire village. The only survivors, a boy and a girl, had sought refuge in a cave on the steep flanks of Ioligam several miles away.

More recently, in the late sixties, a young Indian girl named Gina Antone had been murdered there. Anthony Listo, now chief of police for the Tohono O’othham Nation, had been a lowly patrol officer during that investigation. From time to time, he had been heard to talk about the girl who had been lured from a summer dance to one of the taboo caves on Ioligam, where she had been tortured and killed. Her body had been left, floating facedown, in the charco—a muddy man-made watering hole—near the deserted village itself.

A whole new series of legends and beliefs had grown up around that murder. The killer, an Anglo named Carlisle, was said to have been Ohbsgam—Apachelike. People claimed that the killer had been invaded by the spirits of the dead Apaches who had attacked Rattlesnake Skull Village long ago.

All the caves on Ioligam were considered sacred and off-limits. They had been officially declared so in the lease negotiations when the tribe allowed the building of Kitt Peak National Observatory. In the aftermath of Gina Antone’s death, however, the caves close to Ko’oi Koshwa became taboo as well. People said Ohbsgam Ho’ok—Apachelike Monster—lived there, waiting for a chance to steal away another young Tohono O’othham girl. Parents sometimes used stories about the bogeyman S-mo’o O’othham—Hairy Man—to scare little boys back in line. On girls they used Ohbsgam Ho’ok.

Manny Chavez, thirsty but no longer drunk, considered all these things as he headed for the charco near what had once been Rattlesnake Skull Village. It was late in the season. Most of the other charcos on the reservation were already dry and would remain so until after the first summer rains came in late June or July. But no one ran any cattle near Ko’oi Koshwa. Without livestock to reduce the volume of water, Manny reasoned that he might still find water there—at least enough to get him the rest of the way to the highway.

Earlier, as Manny walked, he had heard and seen a four-wheel-drive vehicle making its way both up and down part of the mountain. Suspecting the people inside of being Anglo rock-climbers, Manny had given the tangerine-colored older-model Bronco a wide berth. He’d be better off on the highway, trying to hitch a ride in the back of an Indian-owned livestock truck, than messing around with a carful of Mil-gahn.

Now, though, as Manny approached the charco, he was surprised to see that same vehicle parked nearby. A man—an Anglo armed with a shovel—was digging industriously in the dirt. Manny may have been nawmki—a drunkard—but he was also Tohono O’othham, from the top of his sand-encrusted hair to the toes of his worn-out boots. The thought of this Mil-gahn blithely digging for artifacts on the reservation offended Manuel Chavez.

“Hey,” he shouted. “What are you doing?”

The man with the shovel stopped digging and looked up. “You can’t dig here,” Manny said. “This is a sacred place.”

For a moment the two men stared at each other, then the Anglo, who was much younger than Manny, climbed out of the hole he was digging in the soft sand. He came at Manny with the shovel raised over his shoulder, wielding it like a baseball bat.

There was no question of Manny standing his ground. He looked around for a possible weapon. Off to his right was a small circle of river rock surrounding a faded wooden cross, but the rocks were too far away and too small to do him any good. Turning away from the Mil-gahn’s unreasoning fury, Manuel Chavez tried to run. He tripped and fell facedown in the sand.

The first blow, the only one he felt, caught him squarely on the back of the head.

David Ladd lay in the darkened hotel room waiting to fall asleep and grappling with the overwhelming fear that another panic attack would come over him and catch him unawares. The plague of attacks and dreams had left him feeling shaken and vulnerable. He knew now that another attack was inevitable. The only question was, when would it come? What if it happened while he was with Candace? What would she think of him then? He was young, strong, and supposedly healthy. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to people like him, but it was happening.

At last, emotionally worn and physically exhausted, David Ladd fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. Sometime later, he was jarred awake by the sound of a key in the lock and then by the opening door banging hard against the inside security chain.

“David,” Candace called through the crack in the door. “Are you in there?”

Groggily, he staggered over to the door and unlatched the chain. “It’s you,” he mumbled.

Dropping several shopping bags to the floor, Candace stood up on tiptoe and kissed him. “Who else did you think it would be?”

“I was just taking a nap,” he said. “I’m still half asleep. I’ll go take a shower and see if it wakes me up.”

“Sure,” Candace said. “Go ahead.”

He had finished his shower, shut off the water, and was just starting to towel himself dry when Candace knocked softly on the door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” he said, wrapping the towel around his waist.

Candace burst into the room wearing little more than a glowingly radiant smile on her face.

“Oh, Davy,” she said, throwing both arms around his neck and crushing the soft flesh of her warm breasts against his damp chest. “I love it. It’s absolutely gorgeous. And it fits perfectly. How did you know what size?”

For a moment or two, David Ladd didn’t understand what was going on or grasp what she was talking about. Then, catching a glimpse of Astrid Ladd’s ring on Candace Waverly’s finger, he realized she had found it just where he had left it—on the nightstand table with his watch.

Crying and kissing him at the same time, Candace seemed totally oblivious to the droplets of water on his still-wet body. “And the answer is yes,” she whispered, with her lips grazing his ear. “Yes, yes, yes! Of course, I’ll marry you, even if it means living in your one-horse hometown.”

Marry! At the sound of the word, David Garrison Ladd’s legs almost buckled under him. For the length of several long kisses he was too stunned to reply. And by the time Candace’s impassioned kisses subsided, it was pretty much too late. By then she was leading him back across the artificially darkened room to the bed.

Sinking down on the mattress, she pulled David down on top of her naked body, drawing him into her while her eager hips rose up to meet him. That wasn’t the time to tell her that this was all a terrible mistake—that he had never planned to give her Astrid Ladd’s ring in the first place. He did the only thing that made sense under the circumstances—he kissed her back.

Other than that, he kept his mouth shut. And after their lovemaking, while he was drifting on a pink haze, she snuggled close and kissed his chest. “What a wonderfully romantic surprise,” she murmured. “But I have a surprise for you, too.”

“What’s that?”

Candace reached over on the nightstand and picked up a piece of paper. A check. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Look at it,” she said. “It’s made out to both of us.”

When he looked at it more closely, David Ladd’s eyes bulged. It was a personal check in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars, made out to David Ladd and Candace Waverly Ladd and drawn on a joint account belonging to Richard and Elizabeth Waverly.

“What’s this?” David asked.

“A bribe,” Candace answered with a grin. “For eloping. Daddy says it’ll only work as long as Mother knows nothing about our engagement and hasn’t had time to plan anything until it’s too late. Once she gets wind of it and starts arranging things, the deal is off. He’s already married off two daughters, and he doesn’t want to do another one. And I don’t blame him.”

“Eloping,” David Ladd echoed. “What are you talking about? Us? When?”

“Today, dummy,” she said, snuggling under his chin and nuzzling his neck. “Right now. I thought you’d catch on as soon as you saw all the suitcases. I have it all figured out. We can drive through Vegas on our way to Tucson and get married there. It’s not that far out of the way. I already have a dress and everything.”

“What about your job?” David Ladd mounted one small but clearly futile objection.

“With Dad’s firm? What about it? I got laid off,” Candace beamed. “Yesterday afternoon. So not only do I get the time off, I can collect unemployment benefits, too. Isn’t that a great deal?”

“It’s great, all right,” David Ladd muttered while that post-coital pink haze disintegrated into a million pieces around him. He managed to infuse the words with a whole lot more enthusiasm than he felt, although “great” wasn’t exactly the word he would have chosen.

“And I love the ring,” Candace continued. “It’s gorgeous.”

“I’m glad you like it” was all David could manage. After all, what else could he say?

After making a quick trip down the Sasabe Road to take a report on a one vehicle/one steer accident in which only the steer had perished, Deputy Brian Fellows stopped off at the Three Points Trading Post to buy himself a much-needed Coke to get him through the rest of his long afternoon shift.

As summer heated up, daytime temperatures on the arid Sonoran Desert made working the night shift suddenly far preferable to working days. One of the local radio stations held an annual contest, offering a prize to the listener who successfully guessed the correct day, time, and hour when the “ice broke on the Santa Cruz.” Loosely translated, that meant the day, hour, and minute the thermometer finally broke one hundred for the year. From that time on, from the moment daytime temperatures crossed that critical century mark until well into September, Brian, along with any number of other low-totem-pole deputies, found himself working straight days.

With school out for the summer, the trading post was full of ten or so kids—two Anglo and the rest Indian—milling around between the banks of shelves. Brian smiled down at them. The Anglos grinned back, while the Indians shied away. The deputy liked little kids, and it hurt his feelings that the Tohono O’othham children were frightened of him. Because he knew some of the language, he tried speaking to them in Tohono O’othham on occasion. That always seemed to spook them that much more. Was it the color of his skin? he wondered. Or was it the uniform? Maybe it was a combination of both.

Back in his county-owned Blazer, he sat looking up and down Highway 86, watching passing vehicles made shimmering and ghostlike by the waves of heat rising off the blacktop. This quiet Saturday afternoon there didn’t seem to be much happening in his patrol area, which covered Highway 86 west from Ryan Field to the boundary of the Tohono O’othham Reservation, and along Highway 286 from Three Points south to Sasabe on the U.S./Mexican border.

It was boom time once again in the Valley of the Sun. Tucson and surrounding areas in Pima County were experiencing a renewed population growth, but this part of the county—the part included in Brian’s patrol area—wasn’t yet overly affected. Sometimes he would be called out to an incident on Sandario Road that led north toward Marana. There he could drive for miles without seeing another human or meeting another vehicle. The same held true for Coleman Road at the base of the Baboquivaris. And the back and forth chatter on the radio seldom had much to do with the area assigned to Deputy Brian Fellows. Those long straight stretches of highway leading to and from the reservation yielded more drunk drivers than other parts of the county. They also had more than a fair share of auto accidents. Those mostly happened at night on weekends.

Brian had been a deputy four full years. Other officers who had come through the academy after him were already starting to move up while Brian was still stuck in what was—in terms of departmental advancement—the equivalent of Outer Mongolia. But Brian was resigned to the fact that it could have been much worse. If Bill Forsythe had wanted to, he could have figured out a way to get rid of Brian Fellows altogether. In fact, considering Brian’s close connection to Brandon Walker, it was a little surprising that the ax hadn’t fallen in the wake of Brandon’s departure.

Still, Brian didn’t dwell on the unfairness of it all. He was too busy being grateful. After all, he was doing what he had always wanted to do—being a cop and following in Brandon Walker’s footsteps. As for the rest? Nothing much mattered. Brian was single and living at home. Taking care of his disabled mother in his off-hours pretty much kept him out of the dating game, so the low pay scale for young deputies didn’t bother him all that much, either.

There were times when Brian was struck by the irony of his position. He was persona non grata with the current administration of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department because of his relationship to the previous sheriff, who was, after all, no blood relation but the father of Brian’s half-brothers.

Tommy and Quentin had been four and five years older than Brian, and they had been the banes of the younger child’s existence. But if it hadn’t been for them, Brian never would have met their father, a man who—more than any other—became Brian’s father as well.

None of the other boys—Davy Ladd included—had ever seemed to pay that much attention to anything Brandon Walker said or did. In fact, they all seemed to be at odds with him much of the time. Not Brian. For him, the former Pima County sheriff, even in defeat, had always been larger than life—the closest thing to a superhero that ever crossed the path of that little fatherless boy.

“How’s it going, Mr. Walker?” Brian Fellows had asked several months earlier, when he had stopped by the house in Gates Pass on his way back from patrol.

Brandon, working outdoors in his shirtsleeves, had looked up to see Brian Fellows, a young man he had known from early childhood on, step out of a Pima County patrol car.

“Okay,” Brandon said gruffly, reaching down to pull out another log of mesquite. “How about you?”

“Pretty good,” Brian replied, although the answer didn’t sound particularly convincing.

“How’s your mother?”

Brian’s mother, Janie Walker Fellows Hitchcock Noonan, had been Brandon Walker’s first wife. Years earlier, when Brian was a sophomore at Tucson High, his mother had been in what should have been a fatality car wreck. She had been paralyzed from the waist down. Janie’s boyfriend du jour—a lush who had actually been at the wheel of the car and who had walked away from the accident without a scratch—had skipped town immediately.

In subsequent years, most of the responsibility for his mother’s care had fallen on Brian’s narrow but capable young shoulders. Some people rise above physical tragedy. Janie Noonan wasn’t one of those. She was a difficult patient. For months she had railed at Brian, telling him that if he didn’t have guts enough to use a gun to put her out of her misery, the least he could do was bring her one so she could do the job herself.

By now Janie was fairly well resigned to her fate. She appreciated the fact that Brian had stayed on, patiently caring for her when most young men, under similar circumstances, would have moved out. That didn’t mean she treated him any better, though. Janie had grown into a helpless tyrant. In the absence of her other two sons, Brian became her sole target, but he was used to that. It seemed to him that his mother had simply taken up the role formerly filled by his older brothers, Quentin and Tommy.

“Nobody likes a Goody Two-shoes,” Quentin had told him on more than one occasion. “They think you’re nothing but a stupid little wimp.”

The difference between Brian Fellows and his best friend, Davy Ladd, was that Davy would usually rise to Quentin’s challenge and fight back, regardless of the bloody-nosed consequences. Brian was a survivor who kept his mouth shut and let the taunts wash over him.

By now, though, at age twenty-six, he was tired of being a “good boy.” He was beginning to see that there wasn’t much percentage in it, although he didn’t really know how to be anything else other than what he was.

“Mom’s about the same,” he said, answering Brandon Walker’s question in a matter-of-fact manner that didn’t brook sympathy.

Looking at this handsome young man in his deputy sheriff’s uniform, Brandon couldn’t help remembering a much younger version of the same young man, a little lost boy who had stood forlornly on the front porch of his ex-wife’s home each time Brandon had come by to pick up his own two sons, Quentin and Tommy.

Brandon no longer remembered where they had been going that day—maybe to a movie, maybe to the Pima County Fair, or maybe even to a baseball game. What he hadn’t forgotten was the solemn, sad-eyed look on Brian’s face that had changed instantly to sheer joy the moment Brandon asked him if he wanted to come along.

“You’re not taking him, are you?” Quentin had demanded, his voice quivering in outrage.

Brandon’s older son had a surly streak. Of all the kids, he had always been the sullen one—the spoiled brat with the chip on his shoulder. Janie had seen to that.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Brandon asked.

“Because he’s a pest,” Quentin spat back. “And a baby, too. He’ll probably wet his pants or have to go to the bathroom a million times.”

Brian had wavered on the porch for a moment, as if afraid that Quentin’s argument would carry the day. When Brandon didn’t change his mind, the boy had raced into the house to ask Janie for permission to go along. Moments later, he had come charging back outside.

“She said it’s all right. I can go!” Brian had crowed triumphantly, racing for the car.

“I get to ride shotgun!” Quentin had snarled, but Brian hadn’t cared about that. The backseat was fine with him. At that point he would probably have been grateful to sit in the trunk.

“You’ll take turns,” Brandon had told Quent, trying to instill in him a sense of sharing and fair play. And that was how it worked from then on—the boys had taken turns. But Brandon Walker’s lessons in enforced sharing had been lost on Quentin. Rather than teaching him how to be a better person, Brandon Walker’s kindness to Quentin’s half-brother fostered an ugly case of burning resentment that spanned the whole of Brian Fellows’s childhood.

“How about a cup of coffee or glass of iced tea?” Brandon had asked finally, emerging from a tangled skein of memory. Brian’s face had brightened into almost the same look Brandon remembered from that day on the porch.

“Sure, Mr. Walker,” he responded. “Coffee would be great.”

In all those intervening years, while the other three boys had gone through their various stages of smart-mouthed rebellion, Brian had never called Brandon anything but a respectful “Mr. Walker.”

Shaking his head, Brandon led the way into the house. One of his main regrets at losing the election had been missing the chance to watch this promising young man mature into the outstanding police officer he would someday be. That was something else Quentin had cost him—the opportunity of seeing ‘little’ Brian Fellows grow into Brian Fellows, the man.

“People at the department are asking about you,” the young deputy said, as he settled onto a chair at the kitchen table.

“You don’t say,” Brandon replied gruffly. “Well, go ahead and tell them I’m fine. On second thought, don’t tell them anything at all. If you’re smart and want to get anywhere in Bill Forsythe’s department, you won’t even mention my name, much less let on that you know me.”

After Brandon poured cups of coffee, the two men were quiet for a few moments. Brandon didn’t mean to pry, but in the end he couldn’t resist probing.

“How are things going out there?” he asked. “I mean, how are things at the department really going?”

Brian shrugged. “All right, I guess. But there are lots of people who miss you. Sheriff Forsythe’s”—Brian paused, as if searching for just the right word—“he’s just different, I guess. Different from you, that is,” he finished somewhat lamely.

“You bet he is,” Brandon replied, not even trying to keep the hollow sound of bitterness out of his voice. “The voters in this county wanted different. As far as I can see, they got it.”

Once again the two men fell silent. For a moment Brandon Walker felt vindicated.

A parade of boyfriends and briefly maintained husbands had wandered through Janie’s life and, as a consequence, through the lives of her three sons as well. One of them—Brian no longer remembered which one—had told him that children should be seen but not heard. Brian had taken those words to heart and had turned them into a personal creed. What had once been a necessary tool for surviving Quentin’s casual and constant brutality had become a way of life. Brian Fellows answered questions. He hardly ever volunteered information, although Brandon Walker could tell by looking at him that the young man was clearly troubled about something.

“So what brings you here today?” the older man asked at last.

Brian ducked his head. “Quentin,” he answered.

“What about Quentin?”

“He’s out,” Brian answered. “On parole.”

“Where’s he living?”

“Somewhere in Tucson, I suppose. I don’t know for sure where. He hasn’t come by here, has he?”

Brandon shook his head. “He wouldn’t dare.”

Brian sighed. “He has been by the house a couple of times, wanting money and looking for a place to stay. I had to make him leave, Mr. Walker, and I thought you should know what’s going on.”

“What is going on?” Brandon asked.

Brian swallowed hard. “He came by to hit Mom up for money, for a loan, he called it. She had already written him two checks for a hundred bucks each, before I caught on to what was happening. She can’t afford to be giving him that kind of money. She still has some, but with the nurse and all the medical expenses, it’s not going to last forever. I don’t know what to do.”

“Go to court and get a protection order,” Brandon Walker said at once. “Janie has given you power of attorney so you can handle her affairs, hasn’t she?”

Brian nodded. “Yes.”

“As her conservator, you have a moral and legal obligation to protect her assets.”

With a pained expression on his face, Brian nodded again. “But Quentin’s my brother,” he said.

“And he’s my son,” Brandon replied. “But that doesn’t give him a right to steal from his own mother.”

“So you don’t think I did the wrong thing, by not letting him stay at the house?”

With his heart aching in sympathy, Brandon looked at the troubled young man sitting across from him. “No,” he had said kindly. “I don’t blame you at all, and neither will anyone else. With people like Quentin loose in the world, you have a responsibility to protect yourself. If you can, that is. And believe me, Brian, since I happen to be Quentin’s father, I know that isn’t easy advice to follow.”

Months after that last courtesy visit to Gates Pass, Brian was sitting in his air-conditioned Blazer next to the trading post at Three Points, sipping his Coke and wondering how soon his friend Davy would be home when the call came in over the radio. An INS officer was requesting assistance. The dispatcher read off the officer’s location.

“Highway 86 to Coleman Road. First left after you cross off the reservation. It gets confusing after that. The INS officer says just follow her tracks. You’re looking for a charco.

“By the way,” the dispatcher continued. “Are you four-wheeling it today?”

“That’s affirmative,” Brian said, putting the Blazer in gear.

“Good,” the dispatcher told him. “From the sounds of it, if you weren’t, I’d have to send in another unit.”

With lights flashing and siren blaring, Brian Fellows sped west on Highway 86. At first he didn’t think anything about where he was going. He was simply following directions. It wasn’t until he turned off the highway that he recognized the place as somewhere he had been before. He had gone to that same charco years earlier, the summer Tommy disappeared. The four of them had gone there together—Quentin and Tommy, Davy Ladd and Brian.

By then, though, he was too busy following the tracks to think about it. Kicking up a huge cloud of dust, he wheeled through the thick undergrowth of green mesquite and blooming palo verde. He jolted his way through first one sandy wash—the one where Quentin had gotten stuck—and then through another, all the while following a set of tracks that could only have been left by one of the green Internationals or GMC Suburbans the Immigration and Naturalization Service sends out on patrol around the desert Southwest, collecting illegal aliens and returning them to the border.

Brian spotted the vehicle eventually, an International parked next to the shrine he remembered, Gina Antone’s shrine. The small wooden cross, faded gray now rather than white, sat crookedly in the midst of a scattered circle of river rocks.

Maybe while Davy’s home, Brian thought, parking his Blazer, we can come out here with flowers and candles. We can paint the cross and fix the shrine up the same way we did before.

It was nothing more than a passing thought, though, because right then, Deputy Brian Fellows was working. When he stepped out of the Blazer, there was no sign of life. “Anybody here?” he called.

“Over here,” a woman’s answering voice returned from somewhere in the thick undergrowth. “And if you’ve got any drinking water there with you, bring it along.”

Brian grabbed a gallon jug of bottled water out of the back of the Blazer and then started in the direction of the woman’s voice. “Watch out for the footprints,” she called to him. “You’re probably going to need them.”

Glancing down, Brian saw what she meant. Something heavy had been dragged by hand through the sandy dirt, leaving a deep track. A single set of footprints, heading back toward the charco, overlaid the track. As instructed, Brian Fellows detoured around both as he made his way into a grove of mesquite. Ten yards into the undergrowth he came to a small clearing where a woman in a gray-green uniform was bending over the figure of a man. He lay flat on his back, with his unprotected face fully exposed to the glaring sun. A cloud of flies buzzed overhead.

“What happened?” Brian asked.

The woman looked up at him, her face grim. “Somebody beat the crap out of this guy,” she said.

Brian handed over his jug of water. By then he was close enough to smell the unmistakable stench of evacuated bowels, of urine that reeked of secondhand wine.

“He’s still alive then?” Brian asked.

“So far, but only just barely. I’ve called for a med-evac helicopter, but I don’t think he’s going to make it. He can’t move. Either his back’s broken or he’s suffering from a concussion, I can’t tell which.”

The man lying on the ground, dark-haired and heavy-set, appeared to be around sixty years old. The large brass belt buckle imprinted with the traditional Tohono O’othham maze identified him as an Indian rather than Hispanic. One whole side of his face, clotted with blood, seemed to have been bashed in. His eyes were open, but the irises had rolled back out of sight. He was breathing, shallowly, but that was about all.

“Thanks for the water,” the woman said, opening the jug and pouring some of it onto a handkerchief. First she wrung out some of the water over the man’s parched lips and swollen tongue, then she laid the still-soaking cloth on the injured man’s forehead. That done, she sprinkled the rest of his body as well, dousing his bloodied clothing.

“I’m trying to lower his body temperature,” she explained. “I don’t know if it’s helping or not, but we’ve got to try.”

It was all Brian could do to kneel beside the injured man and look at him. His mother’s condition had taught him the real meaning behind the awful words “broken back.” He wasn’t at all sure that keeping the man alive would be doing him any favor. What Brian Fellows did feel, however, was both pity and an incredible sense of gratitude. If the man’s back was actually broken or if he had suffered permanent injury as a result of heatstroke, someone else—someone who wasn’t Brian—would have to care for him for the rest of his life, feeding him, bathing him, and attending to his most basic needs.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Keep the damn flies and ants away,” the woman told him. “They’re eating him alive.”

Brian tried to comply. He waved his Stetson in the air, whacking at the roiling flies, and he attempted to pluck off the marauding ants that peppered the man’s broken body. It was a losing battle. As soon as he got rid of one ant, two more appeared in its place.

“Because there’s water in the charco, a lot of undocumented aliens come this way, especially at this time of year,” the woman was saying. The name tag on the breast pocket of her uniform identified her as Agent Kelly.

“I usually try to stop by here at least once a day,” she continued. “I saw the tracks in the sand and decided to investigate. When I first saw him, I was sure he was dead, but then I found a slight pulse. When I came back from calling for help, his eyes were open.”

Suddenly the man groaned. His eyes blinked. He moved his head from side to side and tried to speak.

“Easy,” Agent Kelly said. “Take it easy. Help is on the way.”

Brian leaned closer to the injured man. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked. “Do you know who did this?”

The man trained his bloodshot eyes on Brian’s face. “. . . Mil-gahn,” he whispered hoarsely.

The sound of the softly spoken word caused the years to peel away. Brian was once again reliving those carefree days when he and Davy had been little, when they had spent every spare moment out in the little shed behind Davy’s house, with Brian learning the language of Davy’s old Indian baby-sitter, Rita Antone. When they were together, Davy and Rita had spoken to one another almost exclusively in Tohono O’othham—they had called it Papago back then—rather than English. Over time Brian Fellows had picked up some of the language himself. He knew that the word Mil-gahn meant Anglo.

“A white man did this?” Brian asked, hunkering even closer to the injured man.

“Yes,” the man whispered weakly in Tohono O’othham. “A white man.”

“He hit you on purpose?” Brian asked.

The man nodded.

“Do you know who it was?” Brain asked. “Do you know the man’s name?”

This time the injured man shook his head, then he murmured something else. Brian’s grasp of the language was such that he could pick out only one or two words—hiabog—digging, and shohbith—forbidden.

“What’s he saying?” Agent Kelly asked.

“I didn’t catch all of it. Something about forbidden digging. I’ll bet this guy stumbled on a gang of artifact thieves, or maybe just one. The Indians around here consider this whole area sacred, from here to the mountains.”

“That’s news to me,” Agent Kelly said.

Overhead they heard the pulsing clatter of an arriving helicopter. “They’ve probably located the vehicles, but they’ll have trouble finding us. I’ll stay here with him,” she directed. “You go guide them in.”

The helicopter landed in the clearing near where the cars were parked. After directing the emergency medical technicians on where to go, Brian went back to his Blazer and called in. “I need a detective out here,” he said.

“How come?” the dispatcher wanted to know. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve got a severely injured man. He may not make it.”

“You’re talking about the drunk Indian the Border Patrol found? We’ve already dispatched the helicopter—”

“The helicopter’s here,” Brian interrupted. “I’m asking for a detective. The guy says a white man beat him up.”

“But he’s still alive right now, right?”

“Barely.”

“Go ahead and write it up yourself, Deputy Fellows. The detectives are pretty much tied up at the moment. If one of ’em gets freed up later, I’ll send him along. In the meantime, this case is your baby.” The dispatcher’s implication was clear: a deputy capable of investigating dead cattle ought to be able to handle a beat-up Indian now and then.

Brian sighed and headed back toward the charco. Brandon Walker was right. With Bill Forsythe’s administration, the people of Pima County had gotten something different, all right.

In spades.

From somewhere very far away, Lani heard what sounded like a siren. She opened her eyes. At least, she thought she opened her eyes, but she could see nothing. She tried to move her hands and feet. She could move them a little, but not much, and when she tried to raise her head, her face came into contact with something soft.

Where am I? she wondered. Why am I so hot?

Her body ached with the pain of spending hours locked in the same position. She seemed to be lying naked on something soft. And she could feel something silky touching her sides and the bare skin of her immovable legs and arms. A cool breeze wafted over her hot skin from somewhere, and there was a pillow propped under her head.

A pillow. “Maybe I’m dead,” she said aloud, but the sound was so dead that it was almost as though she hadn’t said a word. “Am I dead?” she asked.

The answer came from inside her rather than from anywhere outside.

If there’s cloth all around me, above and below and a pillow, too, she thought, I must be in a casket, just like Nana Dahd.

For weeks everyone, with the possible exception of Lani, had known that Rita Antone was living on borrowed time. The whole household knew it wouldn’t be long now. For days now, Wanda and Fat Crack Ortiz had stayed at the house in Gates Pass, keeping watch at Rita’s bedside night and day. When they slept, they did so taking turns in the spare bedroom.

Over the years there had been plenty of subtle criticism on the reservation about Rita Antone. The Indians had been upset with her for abandoning her people and her own family to go live in Tucson with a family of Whites. There had also been some pointed and mean-spirited criticism aimed at Rita’s family for letting her go. The gossips maintained that, although Diana Ladd Walker may have been glad enough to have Rita’s help while she was strong and healthy and could manage housekeeping and child-care chores, they expected that the Mil-gahn woman would be quick to send Rita back to the reservation once she was no longer useful, when, in the vernacular of the Tohono O’othham, she was only good for making baskets and nothing else.

Knowing that Rita must have been involved, ill will toward her had flourished anew among the Tohono O’othham in the wake of Brandon and Diana Walker’s unconventional adoption of Clemencia Escalante. Not that any of the Indian people on the reservation had been interested in adopting the child themselves. Everyone knew that the strange little girl had been singled out by I’itoi and his messengers, the Little People. Clemencia had been kissed by the ants in the same way the legendary Kulani O’oks had been kissed by the bees. Although there was some interest at the prospect of having a new and potentially powerful Medicine Woman in the tribe, no one—including Clemencia’s blood relatives—wanted the job of being parents to such a child.

By now, though, with Rita Antone bedridden and being lovingly cared for by both her Indian and Anglo families, the reservation naysayers and gossips had been silenced for good and all.

On that last day, a sleep-deprived Fat Crack came into the kitchen where Diana and Brandon were eating breakfast. Gabe helped himself to a cup of coffee and then tried to mash down his unruly hair. It was still standing straight up, just the way he had slept on it, slumped down in the chair next to Rita’s bed.

“She’s asking for Davy,” Fat Crack said. “Do you know where he is?”

Diana glanced at her watch. “Probably in class right now, but I don’t know which one or where.”

“Let me make a call to the registrar’s office over at the university,” Brandon had told them. “Once they tell us where he is, I’ll go there, pick him up, and bring him back home.”

Fat Crack nodded. “Good,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much time.”

Forty-five minutes later, Brandon Walker was waiting in the hall outside Davy’s Anthropology 101 class. As soon as Davy saw Brandon, he knew what was going on.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“Pretty bad,” Brandon returned. “Fat Crack says we should come as soon as we can.”

They had hurried out to the car which, due to law-enforcement privilege, had been parked on the usually vehicle-free pedestrian mall.

“I hate this,” Davy said, settling into the seat, slamming his door, and then staring out the window.

“What do you hate?”

“Having old people for friends and having them die on me. First Father John, then Looks At Nothing, and now Rita.”

At age ninety-five, Looks At Nothing had avoided the threat of being placed in a hospital by simply walking off into the desert one hot summer’s day. They had found his desiccated body weeks later, baking in the hot sand of a desert wash not a thousand yards from his home.

“I’m sorry,” Brandon said, and meant it.

At the house, Davy had gone straight into Rita’s room. He had stayed there for only ten minutes or so. He had come out carrying Rita’s prized but aged medicine basket. His face was pale but he was dry-eyed. “I’m ready to go back now,” he said.

He and Brandon had set out in the car. “She gave me her basket,” Davy said a few minutes later.

“I know,” Brandon said. “I saw you carrying it.”

“But it’s not mine to keep,” Davy added.

Brandon Walker glanced at his stepson. His jaw was set, but now there were tears glimmering on his face. “I get to have Father John’s rosary and Rita’s son’s Purple Heart. Everything else goes to Lani. It isn’t fair!”

Brandon was tempted to point out that very little in life is fair, but he didn’t. “Why, then, did she give it to you today?” he asked.

“Because Lani’s only seven, or at least she will be tomorrow. She can’t have the rest of it until she’s older.”

“When are you supposed to give it to her?”

Davy brushed the tears from his face. “That’s what I asked Rita. She said that I’d know when it was time.”

Brandon pulled up in front of the dorm, but Davy made no effort to get out. Instead, he opened the basket, picked through it, and removed two separate items, both of which he shoved in his pocket. Then he put the frayed cover back on the basket.

“Dad,” he said. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What’s that?” Brandon asked.

“I can’t take this into the dorm. No one would understand. And somebody might try to steal it or something. You and Mom have a safety deposit box down at the bank, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind putting this in there and keeping it? I mean, if it isn’t really mine, I don’t want to lose it. I need to keep it safe—for Lani.”

“Sure, Davy,” Brandon said. “I’ll be glad to. If you want me to, I’ll drop it off this morning on my way to the department.”

“Thanks,” Davy said, handing the basket over. “And tell Fat Crack that I’ll come back out to the house as soon as I’m done with my last class. I should be done by three at the latest.”

But Rita Antone was gone long before then. She died within half an hour of the time her little Olhoni left, taking Understanding Woman’s medicine basket with him.

Nine years later, the bank had gone through several different mergers and had ended up as part of Wells Fargo. The bank had changed, but not the medicine basket, at least not noticeably. Maybe it was somewhat more frayed than it had been a decade earlier, but the power Oks Amichuda had woven into it years before still remained and still waited to be let out.

The day after Nana Dahd died was the worst birthday Lani ever remembered. It seemed to her that a terrible empty place had opened up in her life. The cake had been ordered well in advance, and everyone had tried to go through the motions of a party, just as Rita would have wanted them to. When it came time to blow out the candles, however, Lani had fled the room in tears, leaving the lighted candles still burning.

Brandon was the one who had come to find her, sitting in the playhouse he had built for her in the far corner of the backyard.

“Lani,” he called. “Come here. What’s the matter?”

She crept outside and fell, weeping, against him.

“Nana Dahd’s dead, and Davy’s mad at me,” she sobbed. “I wish I were dead, too.”

“No, you don’t,” he said soothingly. “Rita wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. We were lucky to have had her for as long as we did, but now it’s time to let her go. She was suffering, Lani. She was in terrible pain. It would be selfish for us to want her to stay any longer.”

“I know,” Lani said, “but . . .”

“Wait a minute. What’s that in your hand?”

“Her owij,” Lani answered. “Her awl. She gave it to me yesterday. She said I must always keep making baskets.”

“Good.”

“But why was Davy so mean to me?” Lani asked. “I called him at the dorm and asked him if he was going to come have cake with us. He said he was too busy, but I think he just didn’t want to. He sounded mad, but why would he be? What have I done?”

“Nothing, Lani,” Brandon said. “He’s upset about Rita, the same as you are. He’ll get over it. We just have to be patient with each other. Come on, let’s go back inside and have some of that cake.”

Obligingly Lani had followed him into the house. The candles were already out. She managed to choke down a few bites of cake, but that was all.

Three days later, at the funeral at San Xavier Mission, Lani was shocked to see Rita lying in the casket with her head propped up on a pillow.

“But Nana Dahd doesn’t like pillows,” Lani had insisted, tugging at her father’s hand. “She never uses a pillow.”

“Shhhh,” Brandon Walker had said. “Not now.”

On the face of it, that was all there was to it. There was never any further discussion. Brandon’s “not now” became “not ever,” except for one small thing.

From that day on, Dolores Lanita Walker never again used a pillow.

Not until now.

10

On the Fourth Day I’itoi made the Sun—Tash. And Elder Brother went with Tash to show him the way, just as Sun travels today.

For a long time Tash walked close to the earth, and it was very hot. Juhk O’othham—Rain Man—refused to follow his brother, Chewagi O’othham—Cloud Man—over the land, and Hewel O’othham—Wind Man—was angry and only made things hotter and dryer.

All the desert world needed water. The Desert People were so thirsty and cross that they quarreled. When u’uwhig—the Birds—came too near each other, they pulled feathers. Tohbi—Cottontail Rabbit—and Ko’owi—Rattlesnake, and Jewho—Gopher—could no longer live together. So Jewho became very busy digging new holes.

When the animals had quarreled until only the strongest were left, a strange people came out of the old deserted gopher holes.

These were the PaDaj O’othham—Bad People—who were moved by the Spirit of Evil. They came from the big water in the far southwest, and they spread all over the land, killing the people as they came until every man felt that he lived in a black hole.

The Desert People were so sad that at last they cried out to the Great Spirit for help. And when I’itoi saw that the PaDaj O’othham were in the land, he took some good spirits of the other world and made warriors out of them.

These good spirit warriors chased the Bad People but could neither capture nor kill them. And because his good soldiers from the spirit world could not destroy the Bad People, who were moved by the Spirit of Evil, I’itoi was ashamed.

“That must have been very interesting,” Monty Lazarus was saying.

Diana snapped to attention and was embarrassed to realize that she had once again allowed her mind to wander. Talking and thinking about Andrew Carlisle still had the power to do that. She had thought that writing the book about him would have cleared the man out of her system once and for all. Her continuing discomfort during this interview seemed to suggest that wasn’t the case.

She wondered if she’d said anything stupid. Whatever she had said, no doubt Mr. Lazarus would quote her verbatim.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I’m getting tired. What was interesting?”

“Interviewing Andrew Carlisle’s mother.”

Diana didn’t remember when the interview had veered into discussing Myrna Louise, but it must have. “Right,” she said. “It was.”

“She’s still alive then?” Monty asked.

“Not now. She died within weeks of the time I saw her. It’s a good thing I went to see her when I did. Other than talking to Andrew Carlisle himself, my interview with Myrna Louise was one of the most important ones I did for the book. I was nervous about seeing her after what I’d done to her son—leaving him blind and crippled. I had no idea how she’d respond to me. Just because a court had ruled I had acted in self-defense didn’t mean that would carry any weight with the man’s mother.”

“Didn’t you say in the book someplace that he tried to kill her once?”

Diana nodded. “He did, but she got away. What I found strange was that she didn’t seem to hold it against him. She told me that there wasn’t any point in carrying grudges and that he was her only reason for still hanging on. She said that if she was gone, he wouldn’t have anyone at all.”

“So when you went to interview her, how did it go?” Monty Lazarus asked.

“It was fine,” Diana said. “Myrna Louise Carlisle Spaulding Rivers couldn’t have been more gracious.”

The first time Diana had met Myrna Louise, it was mid-morning in the somewhat grubby lunchroom of the Vista Retirement Center in Chandler, Arizona. Andrew Carlisle’s mother, with a walker strategically stationed nearby, was seated on a stained bench shoved carelessly up to a chipped table in the far corner of the room. She looked up at her visitor from a game of solitaire played with a deck of sticky, dog-eared cards.

“You must be Diana Walker,” Myrna Louise said as Diana walked up to the table. “I’ve seen your picture before. On your books.”

“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Diana said.

Myrna Louise smiled. “I didn’t have much choice, now, did I? I’m not going anyplace soon. I figured I could just as well.”

Her hair, an improbable color of red, was thin and wispy. Her face may have been made up with a once-practiced hand, but now there were a few slips. A dribble of mascara darkened one cheek, and some of the too-red lipstick had smeared and edged its way up and down into the wrinkled creases above and below her lips. The teeth were false and clicked ominously when she spoke, as though threatening to pop out at any moment.

“Anyway,” she added, “I wanted to meet you. I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

“For my son, of course. For Andrew. He was a good boy when he was little. Good and so cute, too. I used to have the curls from his first haircut, but I finally threw them away when I moved here. Carlton made me get rid of them.”

“Carlton?”

“Carlton Rivers, my late husband. My latest late husband. Anyway, when I told him about what Andrew had done—or rather, what he had tried to do—he said I should just forget about him. He said I should forget I’d ever even had a son. He said I should leave him in prison and let him rot. Andrew tried to kill me, you see. The same day he tried to kill you, as a matter of fact. I got away, though. When he got out of the car at that storage place, I just drove myself away. You should have seen his face. He couldn’t believe it—that I was driving. I almost couldn’t believe it myself. I’d never done it before—driven a car, that is. Not before or since.”

Diana took a deep breath. “You’re not responsible for your son’s actions, Mrs. Rivers. There’s no need for you to apologize to me.”

“A reverend comes by and conducts church services here every Sunday,” Myrna Louise continued as though she hadn’t heard Diana’s response. “I tried to talk to him about Andrew once or twice after I found out about the AIDS business. I suppose you know about that?”

Diana nodded.

“I asked him if he thought that was God’s way of punishing Andrew. You know, an eye-for-an-eye sort of thing. Just like he lost his eyesight over what he did to you.”

“God didn’t throw the bacon grease,” Diana said. “I did.”

“But God’s responsible for the result, isn’t he?” Myrna Louise insisted. “If God had wanted it to work that way, he could have just burned him, but he wouldn’t have been blind. Don’t you see?”

“Not exactly,” Diana said.

“Well, anyway, now I hear you’re writing a book about him.”

“Yes, although it’s not just about him. It’s about all the people whose lives he touched. Whose lives he changed.”

“Or ended,” Myrna Louise added sadly. “It serves him right that he doesn’t get to write his own book. He asked you to do that, to write it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s hard for me to believe, but I don’t suppose anything about Andrew should surprise me anymore. I would think he would have wanted to write it himself, even if he couldn’t get it published. He’s still angry with me about the manuscript, you know.”

“What manuscript?”

“Of his book. The book he wrote when he was in prison the first time.”

“And what happened to it?” Diana asked.

“I burned it,” Myrna Louise said thoughtfully. “One page at a time.”

“There aren’t any copies left?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And what did your son call this book?”

Myrna Louise shook her head. “I don’t remember the name of it now. After all these years, I guess I’ve managed to forget what it was exactly, although I remember the title had something to do with Indians. I didn’t read the whole thing, just parts of it. It was awful. I couldn’t believe anyone could write such terrible stuff. The things his main character did to other characters were just awful. It made me feel filthy just having in my hands. But of course, I know now that he must not have made some of that up.”

“What do you mean, he didn’t make it up?” Diana asked.

“That he had actually done some of those things himself. And that there were others.”

“Other what?” Diana asked.

“Other victims,” Myrna Louise answered. “Ones the police knew nothing about.”

For several moments after that, Diana didn’t trust herself to speak. She was thinking about the ashes of the cassette tape she had swept out of the fireplace and thrown into the garbage can before Brandon and the kids came home from Payson. If there were other victims, did that also mean there were other tapes?

“You told me a little while ago that he tried to kill you the same day he attacked me.”

“He didn’t exactly try,” Myrna Louise corrected. “He was going to. He planned to, but I drove away before he had a chance.”

“Did he have a tape recorder or tapes with him that day?”

Myrna Louise pursed her lips. “It’s really hard for me to talk about this,” she said.

“About what?”

“About the tape recorder.”

Diana felt a chill run up and down her spine. “So there was a tape recorder?”

“Yes,” Myrna Louise answered. “Yes, there was.”

“What happened to it?”

“That’s the part I don’t want to talk about. When the detectives found it under the car seat in Jake’s Valiant—my second husband’s Valiant—I told them it was mine and they let me keep it. If you write into your book that it was really Andrew’s, I might still get in trouble over it. For concealing evidence.”

“What did you do with the tape recorder, Mrs. Rivers?” Diana asked. “It could be very important.”

“I pawned it,” Myrna Louise answered. “Andrew asked me about it later, about what had happened to it. I told him the detectives took it. So, please, it’s better if you don’t say anything about it at all. It could raise all kinds of ruckus.”

“When you took the recorder, were there any tapes with it?”

“Only some blanks. A whole package of blanks.”

“But none that had been used?”

For a long time after that, Myrna Louise Rivers didn’t answer. She had gathered up the deck of cards from the table and sat there absently shuffling them. Finally she reached for her walker and stood up.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Rivers,” Diana said. “I haven’t had a chance to ask you . . .”

“We have to go back to my room now,” Myrna Louise said. “They’ll be setting up for lunch in a few minutes anyhow, so we’ll need to be out of the way. But I want to give you something.”

Vista Retirement Center was laid out in a quadrangle. The front wing of the building was the common area with the dining hall, a recreation area, library, and lobby. One of the side wings was the convalescent wing. The two other wings were devoted to patients who were still well enough to come and go on their own. The wings were connected by shaded breezeways, but in the 110-degree heat, the shade didn’t make that much difference.

By the time they reached Myrna Louise’s room in the far back wing, Diana was worried the woman was going to faint with exertion. She sank down on the side of the bed, breathing hard.

“I’m not much good in all this heat,” she gasped at last when she could speak. “Sit down. Let me catch my breath.”

A wall-unit air conditioner grumbled under the screened window, but the air flow didn’t make a dent in the hot dusty air of that small, spartan room. In addition to a bed, the room contained a single easy chair, a dresser with a small television set on it, and a kitchen table with two chairs. A door led to a tiny bathroom. The place was grim enough that it reminded Diana more of a monk’s cell or prison accommodations than it did a retirement home. Diana sank into the chair and waited until a winded Myrna Louise Rivers was finally able to speak.

“There are some shoe boxes on the top shelf of the closet,” the woman managed at last. “If you wouldn’t mind bringing me the bottom one, I’d appreciate it.”

Diana did as she was told. In the closet she found three shoe boxes stacked one on top of the other. From the weight of the first two, it seemed likely that they contained shoes. The third one seemed to hold something as well, but it felt far too light to be a pair of shoes. When Diana shook the box slightly, it gave a muffled rattle, as though whatever was inside had been packed in tissue paper.

Taking the box over to the bed, she handed it to Myrna Louise. The woman’s gnarled, liver-spotted hand shook as she reached out to take it. “That’s the one,” she said.

Holding it on her lap for a few moments, she gazed off into space as though her thoughts were far away from this grim place where she was living out her final years. She sat with one hand resting on the lid as if she were unwilling to open it.

“I send him candy, you know,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Every year on his birthday, I see to it that he has a box of chocolates from me. I know he gets them although he never sends thank-you notes. Andrew never was big on thank-you notes, you see. The problem is, it’s hard for me to connect the person I’m sending the candy to—the person who is my son—to this.”

She gave the shoe box a desultory pat. “It doesn’t seem possible that the little boy I used to make birthday cakes for is the same person. Does that make sense?”

Diana nodded and said nothing.

“He came back home the day before all that happened,” Myrna Louise continued thoughtfully. “He had been gone overnight in Jake’s car. I didn’t ask him where he had been—I never asked him that, because he would have told me it was none of my business. But when he came home, he was wearing this.”

Carefully she removed the lid. Inside the shoe box Diana saw a splash of vivid-pink material. Slowly Myrna Louise lifted the fabric from the box and unrolled it, revealing a bright pink silk pantsuit. Something hard and small was at the very center of the roll of material—something Myrna Louise deftly covered with one hand before Diana could glimpse what it was.

“That’s a woman’s pantsuit, isn’t it?” Diana asked. “Why was your son wearing that?”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” Myrna Louise said, passing the top to Diana so she, too, could finger the delicate material.

“And expensive,” Diana added. “But you still haven’t told me why was he wearing it.”

“At the time he said it was like kids playing dress-up, but I realized later that it was a disguise he wore when he left that hotel in Tucson after he killed that man, that guy who worked in the movies.”

Johnny Rivkin’s name leaped to the forefront out of the long-buried past. He had been the second victim in Andrew Carlisle’s three-day reign of terror after he was released from prison in June of 1975. Rivkin, a noted Hollywood costume designer, had met Andrew Carlisle at a well-known gay watering hole, a pickup joint, in downtown Tucson. After meeting in the bar at the Reardon Hotel, Rivkin had invited Carlisle to join him for a drink in his hotel suite at the Santa Rita a few blocks away. That casual invitation had ended several hours later with Johnny Rivkin’s throat slit.

“When Andrew brought this into my house,” Myrna Louise was saying, “I was upset. I hated seeing him dress like that because he wasn’t queer—at least I didn’t used to think so. But it was made of real silk. I had real silk myself once, back when I was married to Howie—Andrew’s father. But not since. And I guess I must have been a little envious, too. So when that police officer came to see me that night in Tempe . . .”

“Detective Farrell?” Diana asked, remembering G. T. “Geet” Farrell, the Pinal County detective who had joined forces with Brandon Walker and Fat Crack in trying to track down Gina Antone’s newly released killer.

Myrna nodded. “That’s right. That’s the one. When he came by asking me questions, I knew they were going to take Andrew away and lock him up again. So when I went down the hall to use the bathroom, I took this out of Andrew’s closet and put it in mine. I didn’t think he’d mind.

“Everything happened that night. For months afterward, I just left it there in my closet without daring to touch it. Then one day I was invited to go to a senior singles dance and I decided to try it on. I thought if I had the sleeves and pants shortened, maybe it would fit. That’s when I found this,” she said. “It was there in one of the jacket pockets the whole time.”

Myrna Louise moved her hand. There, in her lap, lay a single cassette tape.

Without having to listen to it or even touch it, Diana Ladd Walker knew exactly what it was. In that moment, though, she found herself able to be grateful for one small blessing. In 1968, when Gina died, and again in 1975, VCRs and video cameras had been invented, but they weren’t available to everyone.

And most especially Diana was grateful that they weren’t available to Andrew Philip Carlisle.

Mitch Johnson tried to listen carefully while Diana told him about the interview with Myrna Louise. What interested him most of all was what she left out. Again, there was no mention of Andy’s tape. So he had been right about that. She had kept that part of their exchange a secret—not only in writing the book but probably also in what she told those closest to her. That was all right, she wouldn’t be able to keep that secret forever. Not after tonight.

The other item of interest was what she said about Myrna Louise’s death. She had said a stroke. When word of Myrna Louise’s death had come to the prison, Andy had laughed at the incompetent ninnies who ruled it as death by natural causes.

“Why is that so funny?” Mitch had asked.

“Because they’re wrong. Because I made arrangements to have someone slip her a little something.”

As well as Mitch knew Andy by then, the whole idea was a little startling. “Your own mother?” Mitch asked.

“Why not?” Andy returned. “Once she handed Diana’s little care package over to my hired-hand delivery boy, there was no sense in her hanging around. After all, that damned rest home was costing a fortune. And don’t pretend to be so shocked, Mitch. After all, it’s in your own best interests.”

“Mine!”

“You bet. Myrna Louise’s rent at that retirement home was coming directly out of my pocket—and yours, too.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Mitch had said. “But you arranged the whole thing from here?”

“Sure,” Andy said. “If you’ve got enough money, hiring decent help is no problem.”

Mitch continued going through the motions of seeming to listen intently and of taking notes, but he was losing interest. There comes a time in every bullfight when it’s time to end the capework and uncover the sword. His purpose was to leave Diana Ladd Walker with something to think about later on. Something that would, in the aftermath of what was about to happen between Lani and Quentin, leave her questioning all her smug assumptions about the kind of person she was and how she had raised her children.

He waited until she paused. “Listening to you now and remembering the way you describe Andrew Carlisle’s mother in the book, you make her sound perfectly ordinary.”

“She was perfectly ordinary,” Diana said. “That’s what I wanted to show about her. Myrna Louise Rivers was far less educated than her son and hadn’t had the benefit of all the advantages that accrued to him from his father’s side of the family. People like to believe that monsters beget monsters, but she wasn’t a monster, not by any means. I think it’s far too easy for society to believe that killers inherit their evil tendencies from their parents and then pass them along to their own children. As I said in the book, I don’t believe that’s true.”

“Is that the case in your own situation as well?”

Diana frowned. “What do you mean?”

“In the case of your stepson, Quentin. You don’t feel that his upbringing had anything to do with what happened to him or to the other son, the one who ran away?”

Mitch was delighted to see the angry flush that flooded Diana Walker’s face. “No,” she said firmly. “Quentin Walker and Tommy Walker were both responsible for their own actions.”

“But isn’t it possible that your relationship with their father closed those two boys out somehow and that’s why they ended up going so haywire?”

Gleefully, Mitch saw the muscles on Diana’s jawline contract. “No,” she said. “I don’t think that at all. By the time I met them, both those boys were headed in the wrong direction. There was nothing their father and I could do to change that course.”

Maybe it didn’t seem like much of a seed, but once Brandon and Diana Walker were trying to come to grips with the fact that their son Quentin had murdered his sister Lani, it would give them something more to think about.

Monty Lazarus made a show of glancing at his watch. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Look at the time. I promised Megan that I’d have you home in plenty of time for your dinner. Based on that, I booked another appointment. I’m supposed to meet some friends, and I’m about to be late. Would you mind if we finished this up and shot the pictures sometime tomorrow?”

If Diana Ladd Walker had posed for a photo right then, the camera probably would have captured exactly what she was thinking—that it would have given her the greatest of pleasure to shove the camera right back down Monty’s arrogant goddamned throat.

“That would be fine,” she said, trying not to let her relief show at finally escaping this interminable interview. Maybe by tomorrow she could find a way to be reasonably civil to this jackass.

“What time?”

“Say two o’clock.”

“All right. And where? Out at the house?”

“No. Not your place. I have some locations in mind. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know where to meet me.”

“Fine.” Diana got up and started away, but before she went too far, she remembered her manners. “Thanks for the refreshments.”

“Think nothing of it,” Monty Lazarus said with an ingratiating smile. “It was my pleasure.”

The EMTs immediately went to work attempting to stabilize their patient. Agent Kelly and Deputy Fellows suddenly found themselves with nothing to do. Sent packing from the scene of all the action, the two officers retreated to the spot where their vehicles were parked.

Agent Kelly was a short, sturdy blonde with closely-cropped hair, gray-green eyes, and an easy smile. Brian had no idea how long she had been out in the baking sun with the injured man, but her face was flushed. The shirt of her green uniform was soaked with sweat.

Opening the door to her van, she put the two empty water jugs—both his and hers—on the floorboard of the front seat, and then she pulled out another. Screwing open the cap, she held the jug over her head and poured, letting the water spill down. Once she was thoroughly soaked, she handed the gallon jug over to Brian. “Live a little,” she said.

After a momentary hesitation, Brian followed suit. “My name’s Katherine Kelly, by the way,” she told him as he gave the jug back to her. “Kath for short. We didn’t exactly have time for official introductions before.” She held out her hand.

Before, when they had been working together and dealing with a crisis, Brian had been totally at ease. Now his natural reticence reasserted itself, leaving him feeling tongue-tied and dim-witted. “Brian Fellows,” he managed awkwardly.

If Kath Kelly suffered any social difficulties, they didn’t show. “Did you call for a detective?” she asked.

Brian nodded. “I did, but they’re not sending one,” he said. “Everybody’s busy, so I’m told. They told me to write it up myself, but the way Dispatch said it, you can tell they’d as soon I dropped the whole thing. After all, the guy’s just an Indian.”

Kath Kelly’s gray-green eyes darkened to emerald. “There’s a lot of that going around in my department, too,” she said. “So are you going to drop it?”

“No, I’m going to take Dispatch at their word and investigate the hell out of this. Crime-scene investigation may not be my long suit, but I’ve done some.”

“I can help for a while, but as soon as the helicopter leaves, I’ll have to get back on patrol. Before I forget, you don’t look much like an Indian. Where’d you learn to speak Tohono O’othham?”

“From one of my friends, in Tucson,” he said.

“Really.” Kath smiled. “Pretty impressive,” she said. “I speak French fluently and Spanish some, but I couldn’t understand a word that poor guy was saying. It’s a good thing you showed up. Is that why they have you working this sector of the county, because of your language skills?”

Brian shook his head. “Hardly,” he answered with a short laugh. “Nobody at the department knows I speak a word of Papago. And don’t tell them, either. It’s a deep, dark secret.”

For the next half-hour, working in a circle from the outside in, they carefully combed the entire area, finding nothing of interest. They were almost up to the edge of the charco before they came to a spot where, although someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to try to cover it up, there was clear evidence that the soil had recently been disturbed.

“It looks to me like this is where the bad guy was doing his forbidden digging,” Brian observed.

Kath Kelly nodded. “And the Indian showed up and caught him in the act. What do you suppose was down there?”

“It could be a lot of things,” Brian said. “There used to be an Indian village right around here called Rattlesnake Skull. My guess is we’ve stumbled on your basic artifact thief.”

“Sounds like,” Kathy agreed.

Before Brian could answer, one of the EMTs came looking for them. “Could the two of you give us a hand?” he asked. “We brought a gurney along, but we can’t use it—not in this soft dirt. And this guy’s way too heavy for two of us to carry him on a stretcher.”

It took all four of them to haul the wounded man out of the mesquite grove toward the waiting helicopter. The man was mumbling incoherently as they loaded him aboard. Again, Brian wasn’t able to make it all out, but he was able to pick out one or two words, one of which sounded like pahl—priest.

“I think he’s asking for a priest,” Brian told the EMT. “He’s probably worried about last rites.”

The man shook his head urgently. “Pahla,” he said. “Pi-pahl.”

The EMT looked at Brian. “What’s the difference?”

Brian shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I know some Tohono O’othham, but obviously not enough.”

“Just in case, we’ll call for a priest all the same,” the EMT replied, heading for the door.

“Wait a minute,” Brian called after him. “You didn’t happen to find any ID on the guy, did you?”

“None,” the medic told him. “Not a stitch.”

“And where are you taking him?”

“John Doe’s on his way to TMC.” Moments later, the helicopter took off in a huge man-made whirlwind. When the dust finally settled, Agent Kelly reached in her pocket and extracted a business card.

“If they’re gone, I’d better be going, too, but here are my numbers in case you need to reach me about any of this.”

“Good thinking,” Brian said, fumbling for one of his own cards. “I probably will need to get in touch with you. For my report.”

Kath Kelly looked up into his face as she took the card. “You’re welcome to call me even if it’s not for your report,” she said with a smile.

Then, tucking his card in her breast pocket, she turned and walked away, leaving an astonished Brian Fellows staring after her.

For eleven long years, Brian Fellows had been his mother’s main caretaker. Her overwhelming physical need had attached itself to Brian’s own hyper-developed sense of responsibility. His mother’s illness had sucked him dry, robbing him of the last of his adolescence and blighting his social life in the process.

At age twenty-six, faced with clear encouragement from a woman he found immensely attractive, he was left blushing as she drove away.

“I’ll be damned,” he said to himself. “I will be damned.”

Diana fumed all the way home. How dare Monty Lazarus imply that whatever had happened with Quentin and Tommy was in any way her fault? She was no more responsible for Quentin ending up in prison than Myrna Louise was for Andrew Carlisle’s being there.

By the time she drove past the Leaving Tucson City Limits sign two blocks before the turnoff to the house in Gates Pass, she was starting to feel better. The tension in her jaw relaxed. Their home, as well as five others, sat on a small ten-acre parcel which, because of the attractive nuisance of a nearby target-shooting range, had never been annexed by the City of Tucson.

As she turned off Speedway onto the dirt drive leading up to the house, she could tell by the tire tracks left in the dust that several large, unfamiliar vehicles had come in and out that way earlier in the day. That was one thing about living at the end of a dirt road. You learned to read tracks.

She expected to find Brandon still outside, laboring over his wood. Instead, after hanging her car keys up on the pegboard just inside the kitchen doorway, she wandered on into the living room, where she found a showered, shaved, and nattily dressed Brandon Walker sitting on the couch reading a newspaper. Two champagne glasses and an ice bucket with a chilled bottle of Schramsberg sat on the coffee table in front of him.

“What’s this?” Diana asked.

“A little surprise,” he said. “Could I interest you in a drink?”

Nodding, Diana sank gratefully down on the couch beside him. “How was it?” he asked.

“Awful. It seemed like it went on forever,” she replied. “And it’s not over yet. We ran out of time to do the pictures. Those are scheduled for two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

“After spending half of today, you’re still not done? What’s this guy doing, writing an article or a biography?”

Diana laughed. Just being home and watching Brandon pour the sparkling liquid into one of the glasses made her feel better. “As a matter of fact, it may be a little of both. Monty Lazarus has an unusual approach to doing an interview. Calling it roundabout is giving it the benefit of the doubt.

“So what have you been up to all afternoon, and what’s the big occasion? I haven’t seen you this dressed up or happy in months.”

Brandon handed her a glass and then touched his to hers. “To us,” he said.

“To us,” she nodded.

Brandon took a sip. “I spent most of the afternoon loading up three livestock trucks full of wood,” he answered. “Fat Crack told me yesterday that he thought he knew someone who could use it. Today Baby Ortiz came by with a bunch of other Indians, and we loaded up three truckloads to take to the popover ladies over at San Xavier.”

As a toddler, Gabe’s older son, Richard, had wandered around with his diapers at half-mast, much the way his father always wore his low-riding Levi’s. It hadn’t taken long for people to start calling him A’ali chum Gigh Tahpani—Baby Fat Crack. Now forty years old and half again as wide as his father, most people simply called him Baby.

“Baby says he thinks the wood chips might help with the mud problem on the playfield down at Topawa.”

“And whoever’s going to use the wood will come get it?” Diana asked.

“That’s right. They’ll come load it and haul it away.” Brandon laughed. “I’ll bet you thought you were going to be stuck with that mountain of wood permanently, didn’t you?” he teased.

“It was beginning to look that way,” Diana agreed.

“It makes me feel good that someone’s going to get some benefit out of all my hard work,” Brandon added seriously. “And as for my being dressed to the nines, I thought I’d straighten up and give the Friends of the Library a real treat, show up as author consort in full-dress regalia.”

He put one arm around Diana’s shoulder and pulled her close. “It’s also an apology of sorts. I’ve been a real self-centered jerk of late, haven’t I?”

“Not as bad as all that,” she answered with a laugh.

They sat for several minutes, enjoying their champagne and the comfort of a companionable silence. “What time do we have to be at the dinner?”

Diana looked at her watch. “Megan said six, but we don’t really have to be there until seven.”

“You mean we have two whole hours all to ourselves?”

She smiled at him over her glass. “Wait a minute,” she said coyly. “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

Brandon shrugged. “You saw Lani’s note. She said she was going directly to the concert . . .”

One of the first and most ongoing casualties of the loss of the election had been to their sex life. Diana had managed to put it out of her mind, but now that Brandon was actually suggesting making love, she wasn’t about to turn him down.

Diana stood up and started for the bedroom. “Here goes my hairdo and makeup,” she said.

“I didn’t think about that,” Brandon said. “If you don’t want to . . .”

Stopping in the bedroom doorway, she turned and smiled. “Nobody said anything about not wanting to,” she said. “It just means that I’ll go to dinner with the natural look. It’s a lot more like me than this is. Now come in and close the door,” she added. “And go ahead and lock it. Lani said she wouldn’t be home before the concert, but let’s not take any chances.”

As Mitch Johnson drove back toward the RV, he was almost wild with anticipation. He had come through the interview with flying colors, done his capework admirably, but the next segment of the adventure would contain the two parts of the plan Andy had lobbied for so adamantly. The rest of the program he had been content to leave entirely in Mitch’s hands, to let the person with the ultimate responsibility for putting the plan into action noodle out the details. But for Andy, this was the sine qua non.

“If you can manage to lay hands on the girl,” Andy had said, “whatever else you do to her, be sure her mother knows that it’s coming from me. Understand?”

Understand? Of course, Mitch had understood. How could he have spent seven and a half years living with Andy Carlisle and listening to the man obsess about women’s breasts without understanding? The trick was doing what Andy wanted without being caught.

Women’s breasts and what Andy had done to them had been his undoing, at least part of it. Somebody had lost the toothmarks from Gina Antone’s mutilated body, but the detectives had matched the ones on the dead woman at Picacho Peak and the ones on Diana Ladd and had used them as part of the evidence that sent Andrew Carlisle to prison for the second time. Andy had talked about that constantly, about how once a woman’s breast was exposed to him, he was physically incapable of not biting it.

“So what’s the problem here?” Mitch had asked one day, when he was feeling particularly brave and when he felt as though Andy had beaten the subject to death. “Didn’t your mother ever nurse you?” he had asked. “How come, when you talk about tits, it’s only in terms of mangling them or biting them off instead of using them the way God intended?”

“What my mother did or didn’t do is none of your damned business.” Andy said the words in a way that made Mitch’s blood run cold. He knew at once that he had stepped over some invisible line, and he sincerely wished he hadn’t.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to insult your mother. It’s just that sucking on a woman whose boobs are overflowing with milk can be a beautiful thing. I thought maybe you might have tried it.”

“No,” Andy had responded. “I never have.”

“Damn,” Lori muttered.

Half-asleep, Mitch rolled over on his side to face her. “What’s wrong?”

“Mikey didn’t eat,” she said. “He already fell back to sleep. He barely touched the one side, and I’m soaking wet on the other.”

Mitch reached out and cupped Lori’s swollen breast in one hand. She was right. The leaking milk had soaked her nightgown from armpit to waist.

“If you’d let me, maybe I could take some of the pressure off.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll go get the breast pump.”

“No, don’t,” he said. “Let me do it. Please. It won’t hurt anything. Mikey won’t know.”

Lori didn’t answer right away, but she didn’t move his hand, either. Finally she sighed. “All right,” she said. “I guess it would be all right, just this once.”

There was no need to unbutton the gown because she slept with it open. Mitch did have some trouble unfastening the nursing bra. He had seen her do it, of course, but watching it done from the inside out wasn’t the same as doing it from the outside in and in the dark as well. At last, though, he ran his hand over her damp naked breast. The distended nipple lay erect and inviting beneath his grazing fingertips.

“If you’re going to do it,” Lori said, “don’t take all night.”

Whenever he’d had the chance to watch Lori nurse, he’d observed the strange mixture of anticipation and dread with which she greeted Mikey’s clamping his hungry lips over her nipple. Sometimes she’d make a sound that was almost like the sigh of satisfaction Mitch’s grandmother used to make after taking a sip of too hot coffee.

Raising up on his elbows, Mitch leaned over and clamped on. As his lips closed around her nipple, he felt her body tense and instantly afterward go limp as the sweet, hot milk shot into his mouth. It gushed out at him, shooting all the way to the back of his mouth, teasing his tonsils, almost triggering his gag reflex, but he fought that down and concentrated on sucking, on draining her without ever gripping her with his teeth.

There was more milk inside her than he expected, but at last that one was empty. He sat up to find that in the dark she had deftly unfastened the other side, and now, giggling, she pulled him down onto that one, too, holding him by the back of the neck, pressing him against her, groaning with pleasure as his now aching jaws relieved the pressure on that sore breast as well.

Ever since they had brought Mikey home from the hospital three weeks earlier, Mitch had been intensely curious about the process. For weeks he had begged Lori to let him taste her, but what had never crossed his mind was that the process might pleasure her as well. The fact that she was enjoying it almost as much as he did unleashed months of pent-up sexual deprivation. When he let go of her nipple, she was still laughing so hard that at first she didn’t seem to notice that he was prying her legs apart. But she did notice.

“No, Mitch,” she said. “It’s still too soon. The doctor . . .”

By then Mitch Johnson wasn’t interested in what the doctor had said or in what Lori wanted, either. He desperately craved the solace her body had to offer. He craved it and he took it. He had barely shoved himself home when his aching need exploded inside her like a burst of Fourth of July fireworks.

Afterward as he drifted in a mellow haze, he realized she was crying. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.

“You raped me.” She didn’t say it loud, but he knew she meant it.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “You wanted it as much as I did. You were asking for it.”

“You raped me,” she repeated dully. “I told you no and you did it anyway.”

“I did not rape you,” he declared. “How could I? You’re my wife.”

As far as Mitch Johnson was concerned, the subject was closed. In Tucson, Arizona, in 1975, Lori Kiser Johnson didn’t try pressing charges because she knew they wouldn’t stick. What she did do, however, was far more effective. From then on, she never said yes to Mitch again, not when it came to sex. Oh, he did get a piece of tail now and then, but only when he took it. And there was never any response. She lay beneath him whenever he did it, dry and unmoving, letting him inside her because she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, but making sure neither one of them enjoyed it.

Considering that turn of events, it was hardly surprising that a few months later Mitch was out in the desert shooting hell out of a bunch of wetbacks. As frustrated as he was, who wouldn’t?

As Mitch turned left on Coleman Road, he saw a huge cloud of dust come roiling up out of the desert about a half mile away. A moment later a helicopter emerged from the cloud and set off toward town. That struck him as odd—worried him a little—but clearly it had nothing to do with him. Two miles down the road, behind a locked gate, the Bounder sat in undisturbed, solitary splendor exactly as he’d left it.

When he stopped the car, he got out and stood for a moment listening. The only sound was the steady thrum of the air conditioner. He had created an extra duct that ran through the storage unit. It was hot, and it wouldn’t have done to have Lani Walker baked to a crisp or suffocated before he had his chance at her.

He stood there observing the Bounder and the vast tract of empty desert around it. He was almost sorry to leave this place. It had been good to him, had allowed the creative juices to flow. But it was time. He had other places to go, other fish to fry, including the stupid-ass second lieutenant from Asheville, North Carolina, who had led his platoon into a Vietcong trap and permanently fucked up Mitch’s knee.

Like it or not, it was almost time to abandon the desert. Mitch had already called his landlord to say he was moving and had notified the power company, telling them to shut off the juice as of Wednesday. His would be a planned exit. There would be no question about him deciding to leave after all the shit hit the fan.

If anyone had seen him standing there, they might have thought he was simply admiring the landscape. What he was really doing was seeing how long he could keep from opening the door. Would she be awake or not? Her reaction to the drug had been so pronounced that he worried now that she might still be groggy. That would be too bad. The moment she saw his face, he wanted her to know. Anything less than that wouldn’t be enough.

It had been fun toying with Diana without her having the foggiest idea of what was really going on. But with Lani it was different. Diana had said she was a smart girl, and Mitch Johnson desperately wanted that to be so. He wanted her to be smart enough to realize what was happening. To Mitch’s way of thinking, knowing in advance, foreseeing the possibilities and dreading them, were the only things that would place Lani Walker any higher on the evolutionary ladder than the dumb little bird he had crushed in his fist years earlier.

Finally, taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and put his key in the Bounder’s custom-made dead bolt. Then he opened the door and stepped inside.

“Honey, I’m home,” he called as he pulled the door shut behind him.

While Candace was in the bathroom getting ready to go to dinner, Davy paced the room. It wasn’t just the ring. It was everything. There was a hole in the pit of his stomach. His palms were wet. Sweat was already soaking through his clean shirt. And the only thing he could think of was that something was wrong—terribly wrong—at home.

Finally, feeling numb, he picked up the phone and dialed. His mother answered, sounding annoyed or sleepy, he couldn’t tell which.

“Is Lani there?” he asked.

“She’s not home from work yet,” Diana said. “And she’s supposed to go straight from work to a concert with Jessica Carpenter. Why, is something wrong?”

“No,” Davy mumbled. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

“What about?” Diana asked. “You sound worried.”

David Ladd’s mind raced, trying to find a plausible reason for calling that had nothing to do with what he was feeling. “It’s a secret,” he said, as inspiration struck. “It’s about your anniversary present. But that’s all right. I can talk to her tomorrow.”

“Give me your number,” Diana said. “I’ll leave her a note in case she does come home before the concert.”

Blushing to the roots of his light-blond hair, David Garrison Ladd looked down at the phone on the nightstand and read his mother the number of the Ritz Carlton in Chicago, Illinois. He put down the phone praying fervently that Lani wouldn’t stop by the house before the concert.

“Who was that?” Candace asked when she came out of the bathroom. “I thought I heard you talking to someone on the phone.”

“I just called home to give the folks a progress report,” he lied. “My mother worries about me, and I wanted her to know that everything is fine.”

Deputy Fellows was used to working on his own. After Kath Kelly left, it took some time for him to get his mind back on the job, but eventually he did. He made plaster casts of what footprints he found. He combed the area again, looking for clues. And three separate times he retraced the path of the dirt track from the place where the attack had taken place to the spot where Kath Kelly had found the injured man lying in the dirt.

It was a long way. Almost a hundred yards. The question was why the killer would drag his victim anywhere at all? Eventually the answer became clear. The attack had been a reaction to being discovered rather than a premeditated crime. As such, the attacker didn’t view himself as a killer. Rather than finish his victim off, he had simply dragged the injured man away, and hopefully out of view, expecting nature to take its course.

That meant that the real crime and also the key to the attacker’s real intentions and identity had something to do with the digging back on the edge of the charco. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Brian went back to his truck, took a long drink from the last of his water, and collected his shovel. At four-ten, he started to dig.

Digging is a solitary occupation done with an implement that has changed little from ancient times to modern. The act of shoving a sharp spade into the dirt and then extracting a heaping shovel leaves plenty of time for reflection.

With the scattered remains of Gina Antone’s shrine mere feet away from him, pieces of Brian Fellows’s own life intruded into his thoughts about the case he was working on. Most people would have said that Brian came from a “troubled background.” He had found respite from his half-brothers’ constant taunting only at school and during those precious hours when he had managed to escape Janie’s chaotic household to spend time at the Walker place in Gates Pass.

As Davy Ladd’s faithful shadow, Brian had been welcome in places where he never would have been able to venture otherwise. He had walked, wide-eyed, into the dimly lit adobe hut where a blind medicine man named Looks At Nothing had lain confined to a narrow cot. The blind man had been sick, dying of a lingering cough, but he had nonetheless continued to smoke his strange-smelling cigarettes, lighting them one after another, with a cigarette lighter that somehow never once burned his fingers.

Those Tohono O’othham people—Rita, Looks At Nothing, Fat Crack, all of them—had been unfailingly kind to little Brian Fellows in a way his own family—mother, stepbrothers, and successive “daddies”—never had.

And now, as he worked in the hot sun with his shovel, he felt as though he was protected somehow from the restless spirits that Davy Ladd had once told him inhabited this place. He had barely come to that conclusion when his shovel bit into something hard. Not wanting to break it, he tossed his shovel aside and then got down on his knees to dig in the sand by hand.

Almost immediately, his hand closed around something long and smooth and straight. When he pulled whatever it was free of the dirt, he saw at once that it was a bone. A leg bone of some kind, he thought. Maybe from a weakened cow that had once become trapped in the muddy charco and drowned. He dug some more and was rewarded with another long bone and what looked like a rib of some kind. Up until he found the rib, he kept thinking the bones belonged to an animal. The rib, however, had a very human look to it. Then his hands closed around something round and smooth and hard. The hair rose on the back of his neck. Letting go of the skull, he didn’t even bother to finish pulling it free of its earthen prison.

Instead, he climbed out of the hole, walked back to his Blazer, and called in. Fortunately, the dispatcher on duty earlier had gone home for the day. “Where’ve you been, Fellows? I was about to send someone out looking for you.”

“Great,” Brian said. “If you’re sending somebody, how about a homicide detective? Have him come equipped with shovels and some water—especially the water. I’m about to die of thirst.”

“A homicide detective. Why? What have you got? The last I heard you were working on an assault. Did the guy die?”

“Not as far as I know,” Brian Fellows said. “That guy was still alive when they loaded him into the helicopter. But somebody else out here is dead as a doornail.”

“Dead?” the dispatcher returned. “Who is it?”

“How should I know?” Brian answered. “That’s why I need a homicide detective.”

“I’ll get right on it,” the dispatcher said. This time Deputy Fellows was relatively sure the man meant what he said.

It was about time.

11

So I’itoi gave orders to chase the evil ones to the ocean. When they reached the shore of what is now the Gulf of California, Great Spirit sang a song. As I’itoi sang, the waters were divided and the Bad People rushed in to go to the other side. Then Elder Brother called the waters together again, and many of the PaDaj O’othham—the Bad People—were drowned, but some reached the other side.

Great Spirit again tried to have his good warriors kill those evil ones that had escaped the waters, but the warriors would not. And I’itoi—Spirit of Goodness—felt so ashamed that he made himself small and came back from the other side through the ground, under the water.

Many of his people returned with I’itoi, but some could not, and these were very unhappy, for the PaDaj O’othham who had not been destroyed were increasing.

Then I’itoi’s daughter said she would save these good Indians who were not happy. She took all the children to the seashore, where they sat down and sang together. This is the song that I’itoi’s daughter and A’ali—the Children—sang:

O white birds who cross the water,

O white birds who cross the water,

Help us now to cross the water.

We want to go with you across the water.

Kohkod—the Seagulls—heard the song. They came down and studied I’itoi’s daughter and the children. Then Kohkod flew up and circled around, singing:

Take these feathers that we give you

Take these white feathers that we give you—

Take the feathers floating round you

And do not fear to cross the water.

So the Indians took the white feathers that the seagulls gave them. They bound the feathers round their heads and crossed the water safely. That is why, nawoj, my friend, the Tohono O’othham keep those white feathers—the stoha a’an—very carefully, even to this day.

Candace and David had a beautiful dinner together in the hotel dining room. The champagne Candace ordered was Dom Perignon. “It’s okay,” she said, sending a radiant smile in Davy’s direction over the top of the wine list. “Daddy said we could have whatever we want. It’s on him.”

“Exactly how much did Bridget and Larry’s wedding set your folks back?” David asked once the sommelier left the table. Bridget was Candace’s next older sister. Her wedding had taken place two months before Davy and Candace met.

Candace shivered. “You don’t even want to know,” she said. “It was a complete circus. She had nine attendants.”

David gulped. “Nine?”

“The reception was a sit-down dinner for three hundred at the club. It was awful. ‘Ghastly’ is the word Daddy used. He was a little drunk before it was all over that night. I remember him taking me aside and telling me that night that no matter what, he wasn’t going to go through that again.”

The waiter returned carrying a champagne bucket. Candace winked at Davy. “All Daddy’s doing is making good on that promise.”

The wine was served with all due ceremony. “I finished reading your mother’s book last night,” Candace Waverly said over the top of her glass a few moments later. “You hardly ever talk about that, you know. I remember your saying once that your mother was a writer, but until she won that big prize last month, and until Mom saw her on ‘The Today Show,’ I didn’t know she was an important writer. My dad only reads boring stuff like The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, but still he’s dying to meet her. So’s Mother.”

“She’ll probably be in Chicago on tour sometime,” David said without enthusiasm. “Maybe she can meet your folks then.”

“What do you think of it?”

“What do I think of what?” David Ladd asked. “Of her going on tour? Of her meeting your parents?”

Candace glared at him in mock exasperation. “No, silly. Of her book.”

In fact, like his stepfather, David Ladd had avoided reading Shadow of Death like the plague, and for many of the same reasons. For the first seven years of his life, Davy had been an only child, the son of a woman obsessed by her dream of becoming a writer. In the beginning, maybe Davy hadn’t had to contend with sibling rivalry as such, but there had always been competition for Diana Ladd Walker’s attention. All his life David had felt as though he was forever relegated to second place, first behind Diana’s typewriter, and then behind Brandon Walker and Lani and a succession of ever smaller computers.

With that foundation, it wasn’t at all surprising that Davy regarded his mother’s increasing success in the world of writing with a certain ambivalence. When it came to Shadow of Death, however, ambivalence turned to active abhorrence. He resented the idea that his mother would have anything at all to do with Andrew Carlisle—with the monster who had single-handedly brought so much destruction on the Ladd family. Andrew Carlisle was the single individual who bore ultimate responsibility for the death and subsequent disgrace of David Ladd’s father, Garrison. Once released from prison, Carlisle had come back to Tucson. In a binge of vengeance, he had brutalized and raped David’s mother while Davy himself remained imprisoned and helpless behind a locked root-cellar door.

Whatever innocuous words Diana Ladd Walker may have used to tell her side of that story, the one thing they couldn’t absolve Davy of was the fact that he hadn’t helped her. After all, what kind of a son wouldn’t save his mother? Whenever David Ladd thought of those long-ago events, it was always with an abiding sense of shame and failure. He had let his mother down, had somehow forsaken her, leaving her defenseless in her hour of need. What could be more shameful than that?

For years Davy had fantasized about that day. In those imagined scenarios, he always emerged from the cellar and did battle with the evil Ohb. In those daydreams, Davy Ladd always fought Andrew Carlisle and won.

In writing Shadow of Death, Davy doubted his mother had taken his feelings on the subject into account. By reporting what happened in a factual manner—and Diana was always factual—she had no doubt held up Davy’s glaring inadequacy for all the world to see. Everyone who read the book—even Candace—would know about David Garrison Ladd’s terrible failure in the face of that awful crisis.

“I haven’t read it,” he said after a long interval.

Candace looked shocked. “You haven’t? Why not?”

David Ladd thought about that for a minute more before he answered, fearing that just talking about it might be enough to bring on another panic attack and send his heart racing out of control.

“I guess you had to be there,” he said finally. “Maybe my mother doesn’t mind reliving that day, but I do. I don’t ever want to be that scared or that powerless again.”

“But you were just a child when it happened, weren’t you?” Candace objected.

David nodded. “Six, going on seven,” he said.

“See there?” Candace continued. “You’re lucky. Most kids never have a chance to see their parents doing something heroic.”

“Heroic!” David echoed. “Are you serious? Stupid, maybe, but not heroic. She could have had help if she’d wanted to. Brandon Walker wasn’t my stepfather then, but I’m sure he offered to help her, and I’m equally sure she turned him down. The other thing she could have done was pack up and go someplace else until the cops had the guy back under lock and key.”

“Still,” Candace returned, “she did fight him, and she won. He didn’t get away with it; he went to prison. So don’t call your mother stupid, at least not to me. I think she was very brave, not only back then—when it happened—but also now, for talking about it after all these years and bringing it all out in the open.”

David didn’t want to quarrel with Candace, not in this elegant dining room populated by fashionably dressed guests and dignified waiters. “I guess we’re all entitled to our opinions,” he waffled. “You can call her brave if you want to. I still say she was stubborn.”

Candace grinned. “So you could say that you come by that honestly.”

David nodded. “I guess,” he said.

They lingered over dinner for the better part of two hours, savoring every morsel. Then they went back up to their room and made love. Afterward, Candace fell asleep while Davy lay awake, waiting to see if the dream would come again, and worrying about what he would do if that happened.

How the hell could he be engaged and about to elope, for God’s sake? He liked Candace well enough, but not that much. No way was he in love, and yet her suitcases were all packed and waiting by the door. And her father’s bribe—her father’s astonishingly generous twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe!—was safely stashed in the side pocket of Candace Waverly’s purse.

Davy rolled over on his side. Candace stirred beside him, sighed contentedly in her sleep, and cuddled even closer. The soft curls on her head tickled his nose and made him sneeze.

All his life David Ladd had pondered the mystery of his parents’ relationship. He had never met his father. Everything he had heard about Garrison Ladd from his mother had been steeped in the dregs of Diana’s disillusion and hurt. As a teenager, David had often asked himself if it was possible that his parents had ever loved one another. If not, if they had never been in love, why had they gotten married in the first place? What had caused them to disregard their basic differences in favor of holy matrimony?

Now, lying next to Candace, he was blessed with an inkling of understanding. Perhaps Garrison and Diana had been swept along on a tide of misunderstanding and confusion neither one of them had nerve enough to stop. Perhaps they had woken up married one day without really intending to. David had read a book once called The Accidental Tourist. And now here he was about to become an accidental bridegroom.

And it would happen, too. Candace would see to it. Unless Davy himself had brains and guts enough to do something to stop it.

David Ladd had been brought up by Rita Antone, by a woman raised in a non-confrontational culture. Among the Tohono O’othham, yes is always better than no.

He wondered, as he drifted off to sleep, if someone had told Candace Waverly that little secret about him, or if she was simply operating on instinct. Probably instinct was the correct answer, he thought.

As far as he could tell, women were like that.

Mitch hadn’t thought that the girl would still be so far out of it, but she was. She lay quietly, making hardly any protest when he donned a pair of latex gloves and scrubbed her whole body with a rough, sun-baked towel—parts he had touched and some parts he hadn’t—making sure that no traces of his own fingerprints lingered anywhere on her skin.

It took time to make the tape, asking her leading questions in a way that elicited mumbled but predictable answers. By the end of that, though, Mitch was concerned that it would soon be time to leave for town to keep the date with Quentin. Still Lani Walker dozed on and off. That frustrated Mitch no end. What he required from her—what he wanted more than anything—was awareness and fear. Without those, what he was doing just wasn’t good enough. He knew he would have to treat her with scopolamine once more before they left for town—a much lighter dose this time—but in the meantime . . .

Taking out a pair of rubber-handled kitchen tongs he had purchased new for that sole purpose, he laid the metal teeth on the burner of the stove, turned on the fire, and set them to heat. He didn’t take them off the flame until the rubber handles were starting to smolder.

When Mitch returned to the bed, he found Lani Walker sleeping peacefully once again. He stood for a moment looking down at her and feeling godlike, observing the smooth skin of her body, flawless still, except for those few white marks. He had the power to leave that body flawless or to mar it forever. There was never any real question of whether or not he would do it. There was only one decision left to make—choosing which one he would take.

“Lani!” he called out sharply. “Lani, wake up.”

The long lashes fluttered open, but the dark eyes that looked questioningly up at him were vague and confused. There was no still comprehension in them, still no fear.

“Watch this,” he said.

For ease of use, Mitch had left the tape recorder sitting on the floor beside the bed with the controls set on pause. With his gloved left hand, he reached down and punched the “record” button, then he slammed his good knee into her abdomen. The force of the blow sent the wind rushing out of her. Holding her pinioned to the bed with the full weight of his body, he clamped the scorching teeth of the tongs into the fullness of her right breast, an inch and a half on either side of the tender brown nipple.

Even tied hand and foot, Lani bucked so hard beneath him that she almost pitched him off her. He had to grab hold of her waist with his free hand to keep from being thrown onto the floor. Even that far away, the fierce heat from the searing tongs warmed the skin of Mitch’s own face. The shockingly sweet smell of singeing flesh filled his nostrils.

It was a magic moment for Mitch. Feeling that naked body writhe in agony beneath his was as good as any sex he ever remembered. But the best part about it was the scream. That was far more than he could have hoped; better than anything he had ever imagined. Hearing Lani Walker’s shriek of torment, it was all Mitch could do to hold back an answering moan of his own, one of exquisite pleasure rather than pain.

At last she lay still beneath him. As soon as she did so, he unclasped the tongs. He had to force the metal free from the charred skin. Around the wounded flesh, a wave of shocked goose bumps slid across her body. Mitch was surprised to see them. Who knows? he thought. Maybe it did as much for her as it did for me.

Reaching down, he quickly switched off the tape before she had a chance to say something that might somehow lessen the impact of that beautifully unearthly scream. Her sudden stillness was so complete that for a moment Mitch was afraid she might have fainted, thus depriving him and putting a temporary end to his fun. But no, when he looked down, her watery, tear-filled eyes were wide open, staring up at him in outraged, accusing silence.

Mitch Johnson wanted her to speak to him then, but she did not. If nothing else, he would have liked her to beg and plead with him not to hurt her again, but she didn’t do that, either. After that one shrill, involuntary cry, no further sound escaped Lani Walker’s lips, not even a whimper.

As the girl studied him, Mitch thought about Eve in the Garden of Eden. Like Eve growing beyond her mindless goodness, Lani had emerged from the cocoon of her drug-induced slumber. Willingly or not, she had now tasted the forbidden fruit. The dark, burning eyes she focused on him had been forever robbed of their trusting innocence.

“Welcome to the real world, babe,” Mitch Johnson said, then he turned and walked away.

He held the tongs under running water from the faucet long enough to cool them down, until the fierce heat sizzled away, first into steam and then into nothing. Once they were cool enough, he put them back in the shopping bag they’d come in originally. Then he rewound the tape to the beginning, returned it to the plastic carrying case, and put that in the bag as well.

This one’s for you, Andy, he thought. It’s a promise I made and one I kept. Somehow I doubt Diana Ladd Walker will like it as much as you would. In fact, she won’t like it at all, but it’s something she and Brandon Walker will never forget, not as long as they live.

The pain was so blindingly intense that for a time Lani wasn’t aware of anything else. The whole universe seemed centered in the seared flesh of her wounded breast. It overwhelmed her whole being. There were no words that encompassed that awful hurt, no thoughts that made such inhuman cruelty understandable.

At last, though, through her unseeing anguish, Lani became aware of the man standing over her, aware of his eyes pressing in on her and of her nakedness under that invasive gaze. She squirmed, as if hoping to escape that look, but the scarves binding her hands and legs held her fast. The only way to combat that look was to stare back at him, holding his gaze with her own.

Studying him, she was suddenly aware that he wanted something more from her, as if what he had already taken wasn’t enough; as if he longed for something else in order to achieve real satisfaction.

Trying to imagine what that could be somehow took her mind away from the searing pain arcing through her body like the burning blue flash of her father’s welding torch. And then, as clearly as if she had read his thoughts, she knew. Standing there, clothed in his presumed superiority, he was waiting for her to speak, to say something. It was almost as though he needed her to acknowledge his brutality and then bow before it.

Her only weapon was to deny him that satisfaction. She kept quiet, biting her lips to hold them together. After a long moment, he melted out of her line of vision, leaving her to ride out the terrible pain alone and in utter silence.

But somehow she wasn’t alone. The vision came surging at her out of the past the moment she closed her eyes.

Lani was five years old again, standing naked in front of the mirror in her parents’ bathroom. She had pawed through her mother’s makeup and found the tube of concealer, the white lipstick-looking stuff Diana sometimes put under her eyes before she applied her other makeup.

Carefully, looking down at her body rather than watching her reflection in the mirror, Lani drew a perfect pair of half-moons on her flat chest, encircling the little brown knob of flesh that would someday grow into a nipple.

Then, pulling on her nightgown, she went racing through the house. She wanted to show someone her handiwork, but her parents were out. Instead, she went searching for Rita Antone. She found Nana Dahd in her room at the back of the house, working on a basket.

“Look,” Lani crowed, pulling up her nightgown. “Look at what I did. Now I can be just like Mommy.”

Rita’s face had gone strangely pale and rigid the moment she saw the circle Lani had drawn on her body.

“Go wash,” she ordered, in a terrible voice Lani Walker had never heard before. “Go wash that off. Do not do it again! Ever!”

“But why can’t I be like Mommy?” she had said later, after she had showered for a second time. Once again dressed for bed, she had come back to Nana Dahd’s room to say good night and hoping to make some sense of what had happened.

“Shhhh,” Nana Dahd had told her. “Your mother looks like that because the evil Ohb did something to her. Because he hurt her. You shouldn’t say such things. Someone might hear you and make it happen.”

Now someone had.

Lani’s eyes came open. The pain wasn’t any less. If anything, it was worse. She looked down at the angry welt of seared flesh. It was red now and blistered, but someday it, too, would be a pale white scar, almost the same as the one that encircled the nipple on her mother’s right breast.

And that was the moment when, without being able to say how, Lani knew this was the same thing. Lani had learned from reading her mother’s book that Andrew Carlisle had been blinded and terribly disfigured by the bacon grease Diana Ladd had thrown at him. And she remembered a few weeks earlier, when her mother had told her father at dinner that it had said in the paper that Andrew Carlisle was dead.

Mr. Vega had worn his hair long and in a ponytail when he had been out on the mountain, painting. This man’s hair was very short. He was neither blind nor disfigured, but he was somehow connected to the evil Ohb.

Knowing that, Lani had a blueprint of what to do.

“I’m going to untie you now.”

Once again the man was standing over her. “Actually, ‘untie’ isn’t the word. Do you see this knife?”

In one hand he held a long narrow knife. The blade was very long and it looked sharp. “I’m going to cut you loose,” he continued. “If you don’t behave, I’ll use it on you. Do you understand?”

Lani nodded again.

“All right then.”

One at a time, he cut through the strands of silk that had held her captive. As soon as he set her limbs free, the pins and needles in her arms and legs—the cramps in her shoulders and hips—were bad enough that the new pain took some of Lani’s attention away from the pulsing throb in her breast.

“Get up now,” he ordered.

She tried to stand and then fell back on the low bed with a jarring thud. “I can’t,” she said. “My legs are asleep.”

“Well, sit there, then.” He turned away for a moment and came back holding out a cup. “Drink some of this,” he said, sounding almost solicitous. “That must hurt, and maybe this will help deaden the pain.”

Lani had figured out by then that he must have drugged her, that he must have put something in the orange juice she had drunk that morning or whenever it was when she was supposedly posing for him. And if he had drugged her once, no doubt he was going to do it again.

She reached up as if to take the cup. Instead of taking it, though, she slapped it out of his hand, gasping with pain at the shock of the cold water slicing across her burned flesh, searing it anew.

“Why, you goddamned bitch!” he muttered. “There’s still some fight left in you, isn’t there. But believe me, there’s plenty more where that came from.”

He walked as far as the kitchen. She saw him pouring something into a fresh cup of water, then he came back. This time, before he gave her the cup, he knotted his other hand into the hair at the back of her neck, yanking her head backward.

“This time you’ll drink it like a good girl, or I’ll hold you down and pour the stuff down your goddamned throat. Got it?”

She nodded.

He placed the cup in her hand, and this time she drank it down. When she gave it back to him, he checked to make sure it was empty.

“That’s better,” he said. “You swallowed every drop. Here are your clothes now. Get dressed.”

Concerned about fingerprints, he had rinsed out her clothing earlier that morning, but hadn’t bothered to dry them. How could he? He didn’t have a dryer, and if he had hung them on the clothesline, someone might have noticed. They were still a sodden lump when he tossed them into her lap.

“I can’t wear these,” she said. “They’re wet.”

“So? This isn’t a fucking Chinese laundry,” he told her. “Go naked if you want to. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to me.”

After a struggle, she finally managed to pull on the jeans. The shirt hurt desperately whenever it touched the burned spot on her breast, but at least the man couldn’t look at her anymore. Without further protest she pulled on the wet socks and forced on the boots.

“Come on now,” he said impatiently. “Off we go.”

With her legs shaking beneath her, she staggered across the room. A few feet away, she stopped beside the easel. There in front of her was a picture—a picture that was undeniably of her.

Mr. Vega saw her stop beside the picture and look. “Well,” he said. “What do you think? Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for your parents’ anniversary present?”

“Tohntomthadag!” she said.

“You were talking Indian, weren’t you,” he observed. “What do those words mean?”

Lani Walker shook her head. She never had told Danny Jenkins that s-koshwa means “stupid.” Not caring what he might do to her, she didn’t tell Mr. Vega that in Tohono O’othham, the single word she had spoken, tohntomthadag, means “pervert.”

In the forty minutes between the time Brian Fellows called Dispatch for assistance and the arrival of the detective, Brian stayed in the Blazer. Working on a metal clipboard, he started constructing the necessary paper trail of the incident. He began with the call summoning him to assist Kath Kelly and had worked his way up to unearthing the bones when he realized how stupid he was. Rattlesnake Skull, the ancient village that had once been near the charco, had been deserted for a long time, but it had probably been inhabited for hundreds of years before that. It made sense, then, that there would be nothing so very surprising about finding a set of human remains in that general area. In fact, it was possible there were dozens more right around there.

Brian Fellows was still considered a novice as far as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was concerned. He cringed at how that kind of mistake might be viewed by some of the department’s more hard-boiled homicide dicks, none of whom would be thrilled at the idea of being dragged away from a Saturday-afternoon poolside barbecue to investigate a corpse that turned out to be two or three hundred years old.

Brian was putting together his backpedal routine when a dusty gray departmental Ford Taurus pulled up beside him. When the burly shape of a cigar-chomping detective climbed out of the driver’s seat, Brian breathed a sigh of relief. Dan Leggett. Of all the detectives Brian might have drawn, Dan Leggett would have been his first choice. Dan was one of the old-timers, someone who had been around for a long time. Dan had grown up in law enforcement under Brandon Walker’s leadership. He had a reputation for doing a thorough, professional job.

Tossing his clipboard to one side, Brian clambered out of the Blazer and hurried forward to meet the man.

“So what have you got here, Deputy Fellows?” Leggett asked. He handed Brian a plastic water jug and then paused to light a half-smoked cigar while Brian gulped a long drink. “Dispatch tells me they sent you out here to investigate a dead steer,” he continued once the cigar was lit. “They claim you turned that steer into first a beating and now a homicide.”

“I never said it was a homicide,” Brian corrected, hoping to salvage a smidgeon of pride. “And it isn’t even a whole body. I dug up some human bones is all. If it turns out to be some Indian who’s been dead a few hundred years, you’ll probably think I’m a complete idiot.”

“Suppose you show me where these bones are and let me take a look for myself. Afterward, depending on the results, we can take a vote on Deputy Brian Fellows’s powers of observation and general reliability.”

“This way,” Brian said. He led Detective Leggett over to his small collection of previously unearthed skeletal remains. “There’s a skull down there too,” the young deputy said. “Down there, toward the far end of the hole. As soon as I realized what it was, I left it there for fear of destroying evidence.”

Leggett blew out a cloud of smoke, held the cigar so he was upwind of both the cigar and the smoke and downwind of the bones. He stood there for a moment, sniffing the air. Finally, he stuffed the cigar back in his mouth.

“Thank God whoever it is has been dead long enough that he or she doesn’t stink,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a second cigar and offered it to Brian. “Care for a smoke?” he asked.

Brian shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said.

Leggett shrugged and stuffed the cigar back in his pocket. “Just wait,” he said. “If you’re in the dead-body business long enough, you’ll figure out that there are times when nothing beats a good cigar. At least, that’s what I keep telling my wife.”

Clearly amused by his own joke, Leggett was still chuckling as he pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves and then dropped to his hands and knees in the dirt. Chomping down on the lit cigar, he held it firmly in place while he used both hands to paw away loose sand. Brian kept his mouth shut and watched from the sidelines.

It wasn’t long before Dan Leggett picked up a small piece of bone and tossed it casually onto the pile with the others. “Looks like a finger to me,” he mumbled.

Still saying nothing, Brian waited anxiously for Leggett to locate the skull. Eventually he did, pulling it out of the dirt and then holding it upside down while sand and pebbles drained out through the gaping holes that had once been eyes and nose. When the skull was finally empty, Dan Leggett examined it for some time without saying a word. Finally, with surprising delicacy, he set it down on the ground beside the hole, then he stood for another long moment, staring at it thoughtfully while he took several leisurely puffs on his cigar.

Brian Fellows found the long silence difficult to bear, but he didn’t say a word. Lowly deputies—especially ones who intend to survive in the law enforcement game—learn early on the importance of keeping their mouths shut in the presence of tough-guy homicide detectives. Finally, Leggett looked up at Brian and gave him a yellow-toothed grin.

“Well, Deputy Fellows,” Leggett said, “it looks to me like you’re in the clear on this one.” He knocked a chunk of ash off the end of the cigar, but Brian noticed he was careful none of it landed in the hole or on any of the recently disturbed dirt around it.

Brian had been holding his breath. Slowly he let it out. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because, if this guy had been dead for a couple hundred years, I doubt his head would have five or six silver fillings. I doubt the Indians who lived around here back then were much into modern dentistry.”

“No,” Brian agreed. “I suppose not. Can you tell what killed him?”

Leggett shook his head. “Much too soon to tell,” he said. “Looks like there was quite a blow to his head, but it doesn’t mean that’s what killed him.”

Stuffing the cigar back in his mouth, the detective climbed out of the hole. Brian was surprised to think the detective would give up the search so soon.

“So what do we do now?” Brian asked.

“We dig,” Leggett returned. “Or rather, you dig and I watch. I’ve got a bad back. I trust you were wearing gloves when you handled those first few bones?” Brian nodded.

“Good boy. Chances are there won’t be any fingerprints, but then again, you never can tell.”

As the sun went down behind the Baboquivari Mountains in the west, Detective Leggett sat to one side of the hole, smoking, while Brian Fellows dug. He pawed in the soft dirt with renewed vigor. Slowly, one bone at a time, the grisly collection beside the hole grew in size. After several minutes of finding nothing, Brian was about to give up when his gloved fingers closed around something thin and pliable.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Hey, look. A wallet.”

Leggett was at his side instantly, hand outstretched to retrieve the prize. “This hasn’t been down there long,” he said, holding it up to examine it in the fading light. Leaving the wallet to Detective Leggett, Brian returned to searching the hole for any remaining evidence.

“That’s funny,” Leggett reported a few moments later.

“What’s funny?”

“There’s a current driver’s license here,” Leggett reported. “One that still has a year to run. I would have thought the corpse was far too old for that.”

“What’s the name?” Brian asked, climbing out of the hole.

“Chavez,” Leggett answered. “Manny Chavez. Indian, most likely. There’s a Sells address but no phone number. Want to have a look?”

Leggett handed the wallet over to Brian, leaving the plastic folder opened to the driver’s license page. Brian glanced at it, started to give it back, then changed his mind to take a second look.

“Wait a minute,” he said, pointing to the picture. “That’s the guy from this afternoon. I’m sure of it.”

“What guy?”

“The one we air-lifted into TMC just before I called for a detective. The one who’d had the crap beaten out of him before Kath Kelly found him.”

“You’re sure it’s the same guy?”

“Hell, yes, I’m sure.”

“In that case,” Leggett said, “I guess I’d better go talk to him. You stay here and keep the crime scene secure. I’ll call for a deputy with a generator and lights to come out and relieve you.”

“What are you going to do?” Brian asked.

“I already told you. Go to the hospital and talk to the guy.”

“How?”

“What are we doing, playing Twenty Questions?”

“How are you going to talk to him?” Brandon insisted.

“You’re some kind of comedian, Deputy Fellows,” the detective said. “To quote a former President, read my lips. I’m going to talk to Mr. Chavez with my mouth.”

“Do you speak Tohono O’othham?” Brian asked.

“No, do you?”

Brian nodded. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

“No shit?”

“No shit!”

For a moment Leggett stood looking at him. Finally he shrugged. “In that case,” he said, “I guess we’ll get somebody else to secure the damn crime scene, because you’re coming with me.”

Mitch Johnson had a large, trunk-sized box that he sometimes used to haul canvases around. Both the top and floor of the custom-made wooden box had matching grooves in them that allowed him to stack in up to twenty wet canvases without any of them touching each other. In advance of heading into town with Lani, he had emptied the box and loaded it into the back of the Subaru. Then, after blindfolding Lani with one of the cut pieces of scarf, he led her out of the Bounder.

Already the new dose of scopolamine was having the desired effect. Clumsy on her feet, she stumbled and fell against him as she stepped down out of the RV. It gratified him to hear the involuntary moan that escaped her lips when the injured breast, encased now in a still-sodden cowboy shirt, brushed up against his body.

“Smarts, does it, little girl?” he asked.

The Bounder was air-conditioned; the Subaru had been sitting in the afternoon sun. The interior of the box was stifling as he heaved her inside, sending her body sprawling along the rough, splintery bottom. There were ventilation holes in the sides—that was, after all, the point of the thing. He put canvases inside it to dry. That meant that once he turned on the air-conditioning in the car, the temperature inside the box would reduce some, too. Enough to keep her from croaking, most likely. Not enough for her to be comfortable.

Mitch had slammed the tailgate shut and was headed for the driver’s seat in the Subaru when he saw a set of blue flashing lights snaking across the desert floor from Tucson. His heart went to his throat. A damned cop car! Surely they hadn’t already discovered the girl was missing. How could they?

Close to panic, he almost had a heart attack when the car slowed at the turn-off to Coleman Road and then again as the pair of headlights came speeding toward him. By then he could hear the siren wailing through the still desert air.

What the hell do I do now? he wondered. Really, there wasn’t any choice. He would have to gut it out. Bluff like hell and hope for the best, but in the meantime, he started the engine on the Subaru and then turned on both the radio and the air conditioner at full blast. That way, if the girl was still aware enough to make any noise, chances were the cop wouldn’t hear her.

Moments later, with his heart pounding in his throat, he saw the headlights take a sharp turn to the left a mile or so north of where the Bounder was parked. He could still see the blue lights flashing, but behind them there was only the pale red glow of taillights.

“Whew!” Mitch said aloud. “I don’t know what the hell that was all about, but it was too damn close for comfort.”

Wanda and Fat Crack were getting ready to go to the dance at Little Tucson. They had always enjoyed going to summertime dances, although Wanda liked it less now than she had before her husband’s elevation to tribal chairman. Before when they went to dances, they danced. Now, often as not, she was left to dance with one of her sons or grandsons while Gabe went about the never-ending business of politicking.

“Did you tell her yet?” Wanda asked, as she watched Gabe fasten the snaps on his cowboy shirt.

They hadn’t been talking about Delia Cachora, but Fat Crack knew at once who and what Wanda was asking about. Wanda had disapproved of his bringing Delia back to the reservation, after thirty years away, to take on the assignment of tribal attorney.

“We need somebody who knows how to go head-to-head with all those Washington BIA bureaucrats,” Gabe had told his wife back then while the tribal council was wrangling over the decision. “If she can handle those guys, she can take on Pima County and the State of Arizona.”

As Gabe expected, Delia Chavez Cachora did fine when it came to dealing with Mil-gahn paper-pushers. Where she fell short of the mark was in relating to the people back home, the ones who had never left the reservation. And that was part of the reason Fat Crack had hired David Ladd to serve as her intern. Schooled by Gabe’s Aunt Rita and old Looks At Nothing, Davy had forgotten more about being a Tohono O’othham than Delia Cachora could ever hope to know.

When Gabe didn’t answer, Wanda knew she was right. “You’d better tell her pretty soon,” she warned. “Davy’s supposed to be here next week, isn’t he? She may be real mad when she finds out.”

Looking in the mirror, Gabe slipped a turquoise-laden bola tie on over his head. He sighed as he pulled it tight under his double chin. “You’re right,” he said. “She’ll be mad as hell. Maybe I’ll tell her tonight, if I have a chance. If she’s there. That way she’ll have time to get used to the idea before Monday when I have to see her at work.”

The shrug Wanda sent in her husband’s direction as well as the derisive look said as clearly as if she had spoken that Wanda Ortiz didn’t think Delia Cachora would be over the issue of Davy Ladd anytime soon.

“She’ll be at the dance, all right,” Wanda told her husband. “If her Aunt Julia has anything to say about it, Delia will be working in the feast house.”

The painful shock of scraping along the rough wooden floor shattered Lani’s druggy haze and brought her back to agonizing awareness. But it’s better to hurt, she thought. At least that way I know what’s going on.

The blindfold had caught on a splinter of wood and had been pulled loose as she slid across the floor. When she realized the scarf was gone and opened her eyes, she knew it was daylight from the light leaking in through the ventilation holes. The interior of the box felt like a heated oven. Moments later, a car engine started and she could feel a tiny breath of cool air blowing across her damp clothing. The car started, but for some time it didn’t move.

There in the dark and alone, without the man watching her and gloating, there was no need to hold back the tears. Lying flat on her back, she gave in to both the pain and to her growing despair, letting the tears flow. She couldn’t understand why this calamity had befallen her, or what she could do about it.

Somehow, in her aching grief, Lani raised one hand to her throat. There, beneath her fingers, she felt the smooth, woven surface of the basket, the o’othham wopo hashda she had made from her own hair and from Jessie’s.

What if her hair charm, her kushpo ho’oma, fell into the hands of this new evil Ohb? Lani had woven the maze, the ancient sacred symbol of her people, into the face of the medallion. It was bad enough that Mr. Vega had copied the basket onto that awful picture of his, the one he had drawn of her while she slept, but Lani was suddenly determined that, no matter what, he would not have the basket itself.

Struggling in the dark, she worked desperately to unfasten the safety pin that kept the woven brooch on the slender gold chain. Even as her fingers struggled with the pin, Lani could feel the drug cloud begin to wrap itself around her, dulling her senses at the same time it soothed the terrible throbbing of her wounded breast.

She fought the drug with all the resources she could muster. And even though she couldn’t hold it off forever, she did manage to keep it at bay long enough to slip the precious woven disk into the safety of her jeans pocket.

Only then did she give in and let the enveloping sleep overtake her. Whatever the drug was, Lani hated it because it had made her helpless and turned her into a victim. At the same time, she loved it, too, because while she slept, the searing band of pain that was now her right breast no longer hurt her. The drug put her mind to sleep and the pain as well.

Her last waking thought was that Mr. Vega was right. The drug was awful, but it did help.

David Ladd fought his way up out of the nightmare with the awful scream still ringing in his ears. Throwing off the covers, he sat up in bed, shaking all over and gasping for breath.

“David!” Startled out of a sound sleep, Candace sat up in bed beside him. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”

“It was a dream,” he managed, through chattering teeth, but already the punishing heartbeat was pounding in his head and chest. Another attack was coming. Helplessly, he fell back on the pillows.

Scrambling out of bed, Candace reached for the phone. “I’ll call a doctor.”

“No, please. Don’t do that,” Davy begged.

“But David . . .”

“Please. Just wait! It’ll go away in a few minutes. Please.”

He held out one trembling hand. Reluctantly, Candace put down the phone and grasped his hand. With a worried frown on her face, she settled back down on the bed beside him. For the next several minutes she leaned over him, murmuring words he could barely hear or understand but ones that somehow comforted him nonetheless. Eventually the terrified beating of his heart began to slow. When his breathing finally steadied, he was able to speak.

“I’m sorry, Candace. I didn’t mean for you to . . .”

Realizing that the immediate crisis was past, her solicitous concern turned to a sudden blast of anger. “So what are you on, David Garrison Ladd?” she demanded. “Crack? Speed? LSD? All this time you’ve had me fooled. I never would have guessed that you did drugs.”

“But I don’t,” David protested. “I swear to God!”

“Don’t give me that,” she snapped back at him. “I’ve been around enough druggies in my life to know one when I see one.”

“Candace, please. It’s nothing like that. You’ve got to believe me. This has been happening to me for weeks now, every time I go to sleep. First there’s an awful dream and then—” He broke off, ashamed.

“And then what?” she demanded.

“You saw what happens. My heart beats like it’s going to jump out of my body. I can’t breathe. I come out of it soaked with sweat. The first time it happened I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I was going to die.”

“You should see a doctor,” Candace said.

“I did. He told me I was having panic attacks. He said they were brought on by stress and that eventually I’d get over them.”

“I’ve heard about panic attacks before,” Candace said. “One of the girls in the dorm used to have them. Isn’t there something you can take?”

“Nothing that wouldn’t be dangerous on a cross-country drive,” David told her. “All of the recommended medications turn out to be tranquilizers of some kind.”

“Oh,” Candace said. “And how long has this been going on?”

“For a couple of weeks now, I guess,” David admitted sheepishly.

“And why didn’t you tell me before this?”

David shrugged his shoulders. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what you’d think about me if I told you.”

“And it’s always the same thing? First the dream and then the panic attack?”

“Yes,” David said, “pretty much, but . . .” The rest of the sentence disappeared as he gazed off into space.

“But what?”

David swallowed. His voice dropped. Candace had to strain to hear him. “I used to dream about the day Andrew Carlisle came to the house and attacked Mother. But now the dreams are different.”

“Different how?”

“Different because Lani is in them. At the time all that happened, Lani wasn’t even born. This one was different, and it was the worst one yet.”

Getting up off the bed, David walked over to the window and stared outside at Chicago’s nighttime skyline. He stood there in isolation, his shoulders hunched, looking defeated.

“You said this dream was worse than the others,” Candace said. “Tell me about it.”

David shook his head and didn’t speak.

“Please tell me,” Candace urged, her voice gentler than it had been. “Please.”

David shuddered before he answered. “I was certain the first attack was over,” he said at last. “Mother was in the kitchen because I could already smell the bacon cooking. Burning, really. Then the door to the cellar fell open, just the way it always does in the dream, except this time, the room was empty except for Bone, my dog. He was there in the kitchen, licking up the bacon grease, but the house itself was quiet and empty, as though everybody had left.”

“Where did they go?”

Davy swallowed. “I’m coming to that. I called Bone to come, and the two of us went from room to room, trying to figure out where everybody had gone. I checked every room but there was nobody to be found, until the last one, Lani’s. They were in there, Lani and the evil Ohb. He had her on the bed and he was—”

Davy broke off and didn’t continue.

“He was raping her?” Candace supplied.

Davy shook his head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t see. All I know is he was hurting her, and she was screaming.” He put his hands over his ears as though Lani’s scream were still assailing them. “It was awful.”

“It was a dream,” Candace said firmly. “Forget it. Come back to bed.”

“But Rita, our baby-sitter, always said that dreams mean something. When I was a freshman in high school, I went out for JV football. One day Lani was taking a nap and she woke up crying, saying that I was hurt. Mom was trying to tell her it was nothing but a dream when the school nurse called to say that she thought my ankle was broken and that Mom needed to come pick me up.”

“You’re saying you think Lani might be hurt?”

Davy shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m saying. All I know is, that scream was the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“She never called us back tonight, did she?” Candace said thoughtfully.

Davy shook his head. “No,” he said. “She didn’t.”

“So let’s try again.” Ever practical, Candace sat up in bed, plucked the telephone receiver out of its cradle and handed it over to Davy. “It’s only a little after nine there,” she said matter-of-factly. “Maybe somebody will be home by now. What’s the number?” she said.

Grateful beyond measure that Candace hadn’t simply dismissed him as crazy, David Ladd held the phone to his ear while she dialed, then he waited while it rang. “The damned machine again,” he said finally, handing the receiver back to her. “Go ahead and hang up.”

“Leave another message,” Candace ordered. “Tell Lani or your parents, either one, to call you back as soon as they get home.”

Eventually the beep sounded in his ear. “Hi, Mom and Dad,” he said. “I’m still trying to get hold of Lani, but I guess nobody’s home. Give me a call. You already have the number. Bye.”

He put down the phone. Candace was looking up at him. “Better?” she said.

David nodded.

“Lie back down, then.”

He did as he was told. Moments later Candace snuggled close, her naked leg against his, her fingers brushing delicately across the hair of his chest.

“Whatever happened to Bone?” she asked. “I’ve read your mother’s book, but I don’t remember her saying what happened to the dog.”

“Poor old Oh’o,” Davy said. “I haven’t thought of him for years. When we first moved to Gates Pass he was my only friend and playmate. Nana Dahd always used to say that the first word I spoke was goks—dog—the day she brought him home as a gangly puppy.”

“What kind of dog was he?”

“A mutt, I’m sure. He looked a lot like an Irish wolfhound—he was that big, long-haired, and scraggly—but he could jump like a deer.”

“What was it you called him again?”

“Oh’o. In Papago . . . in Tohono O’othham . . . that means bone. And that’s what he was when Rita first brought him home, skin and bones. But he was a great dog.”

“What did he die of?”

“Old age, I guess. The year I turned thirteen. His kidneys gave out on him. My friend Brian Fellows and I carried him up the mountain behind the house and buried him among the rocks where the three of us all used to play hide-and-seek. Bone always loved being It.”

“I guess he really messed up the guy’s arm. His wrist, anyway.”

“Andrew Carlisle’s wrist?”

Candace nodded. “From what your mother said in the book, when you let him into the kitchen, he went after the guy tooth and nail.”

“He did?”

“Yup. He wrecked it. She talked about that in one of the scenes that takes place in the prison, about how when she saw him again after all those years, his face was all scarred up from the bacon grease. She talked about his arm then, too, about how he had to wear it in a sling.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” David Ladd said. “I never knew that before, or if I did, I’ve forgotten.”

Slowly, almost unthinkingly, Candace’s fingers began to stroke the inside of Davy’s thigh. “Stick with me, pal,” she said. “I’ll teach you everything I know.”

She seduced him then, because she thought he needed it. Because it was the middle of the night and because they were both awake and young and had the stamina to do it more than once a night. Afterward, as David Garrison Ladd drifted off into the first really restful sleep he’d had in weeks, he felt as though, for the first time in his life, he had made love.

12

You will remember, nawoj, that when I’itoi divided the water and saved his people, the Tohono O’othham, from the Bad People, some of the PaDaj O’othham escaped.

Now these Bad People lived in the south, and they were very lazy. They were too lazy to plant their own fields, so they came into the Land of the Desert People and tried to steal their crops—their wheat, corn, and beans, their pumpkins and melons.

The Tohono O’othham fought these Bad People and drove them away, but after a time, the beans and corn which the Bad People had stolen were all gone. The PaDaj O’othham were hungry again. They knew the Desert People were guarding their fields, so they decided to try a new way to steal the crops.

Near the village Gurli Put Vo—Dead Man’s Pond—which we now call San Miguel, the corn in the fields was ready to harvest. One morning Hawani—Crow—who was sitting in a tree, saw the Bad People coming up out of the ground and begin cutting the grain.

Crow was so astonished that he called out, “Caw, caw, caw!” This made the people who were living on the edge of the field look up. When they saw their crop disappearing into the ground, they cried out for help.

U’uwhig—the Birds—carried the call for help because the Desert People were always good to the Da’a O’othham—the Flying People—and never let them go hungry or thirsty. And very soon the Indians gathered and drove the Bad People back into the ground. But the bean fields were trampled, and the corn was badly damaged.

It was almost dark before the relief deputy showed up. Detective Leggett parked him in the middle of the road about twenty yards from the charco. “You stay right here,” he said. “I don’t want anyone coming up and down this road until we can get a crime scene team in here tomorrow morning. You got that?”

“Got it,” the deputy said.

By the time Dan Leggett and Brian Fellows grabbed a bite of dinner and then turned up at TMC, Manuel Chavez had already been wheeled off to surgery. The clerk on the surgery wing was happy to glean that one bit of information, that John Doe now had a name. She called the information back down to Admitting.

“That John Doe who just went into surgery is from Sells,” she told someone over the phone. “That means he’s Indian instead of Hispanic, so you might want to update your records.” The clerk covered the mouthpiece with her hand and turned a questioning look on Dan Leggett.

“Has anyone notified the family?”

Dan shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“We’re trying,” Detective Leggett told her, then he looked at Brian. “I’m going outside to have a smoke,” he said. “Since you’re the guy who told me you speak Tohono O’othham, you can do the honors.”

Obligingly Brian Fellows stood up and went in search of the nearest pay phone. He placed a call to the Tohono O’othham tribal police and spoke to an officer named Larry Garcia who spoke English just fine.

“Sure, we know Manny Chavez,” Larry told Brian Fellows. “What’s he done now?”

“Somebody beat him up pretty badly,” Brian replied. “He’s in surgery at TMC right now. Can you guys handle next-of-kin notification?”

“We’ll try,” Larry said. “He’s got both a daughter and a son. We should be able to find one of them. What’s your name again?”

“Brian Fellows. I’m a deputy with Pima County. I’ll be here at the hospital for a while longer. Let me know if you locate someone, would you?”

“Sure thing,” Larry said. “No problem. Give me your number.”

Brian gave him the surgical clerk’s extension, then went outside and found Detective Leggett stationed beside an overflowing breezeway ashtray, smoking one of his smelly cigars.

“What’s the scoop?” he asked. “Any luck?”

“The tribal police are working on it,” Brian replied. “They’ll let us know.”

“I’ve been standing out here thinking,” Dan Leggett said. “When you first contacted me, we thought the guy was digging up some kind of artifact. Maybe poor Manny Chavez made the same mistake. For the time being, let’s assume, instead, that the first guy was burying something, specifically that pile of bones. Why would somebody go to all the trouble of doing that?”

“Because he had something to hide,” Brian offered.

“And what might that be? Maybe our grave digger had something to do with the first guy’s crushed skull. Think about it. We’re talking the same MO as with Manny Chavez. Whack ’em upside the head until they fall over dead.”

Brian nodded. “That makes sense,” he said.

“So we’ve for sure got assault with intent on this grave-digging guy and maybe even an unknown and consequently unsolved homicide thrown in for good measure. That being the case, I’m not going to let this thing sit until morning. I’m going to go back out to the department and raise a little hell. I asked for a crime scene investigation team for tonight, but all I got was a deputy to secure the scene and the old ‘too much overtime’ song and dance. I want faster action than that. If I play my cards right, I’ll be able to get it. In the meantime, you hang around here and wait for the next of kin. Once they show up, get whatever information you can, but if the doc says we can talk to Manny himself, you call me on the double.”

“Will do,” Brian replied.

He went back into the waiting room and settled down on one of the molded-plastic chairs. While he sat there and waited for one or the other of Manny Chavez’s kids to show up, Brian finished filling out his paper. As he worked his way down the various forms, Brian was once again grateful that Dan Leggett had taken the call. The deputy was glad not only for his own sake, but also for the sake of Manny Chavez’s unnotified relatives, whoever they might be. There were plenty of detectives in Bill Forsythe’s sheriff’s department who wouldn’t have given a damn about somebody going around beating up Indians—plenty who wouldn’t have lifted a finger about it.

Fortunately for all concerned, Dan Leggett wasn’t one of those. He was treating the assault on Manny Chavez as the serious crime it was—a Class 1 felony. Not only that, Brian thought with a smile, the investigation Dan was bent on doing would no doubt necessitate interviewing everyone involved. Including a good-looking Border Patrol agent named Kath Kelly.

Time passed. Brian lost track of how long. He was sitting there almost dozing when the clerk woke him up, saying there was a phone call for him.

“Deputy Fellows?” Larry Garcia asked.

“That’s right.”

“I just had a call from one of my officers. He’s on his way to Little Tucson. There’s a dance out there tonight. We’re pretty sure Delia Cachora, Manny’s daughter, will be there. Once they find her, it’ll take an hour or more for them to get her into town. Will you still be there, at the hospital?”

Detective Leggett had given Deputy Fellows his marching orders. “Most likely,” Brian told him. “Have her ask for me.”

Quentin Walker was more than half lit and still in the bar at seven o’clock when Mitch Johnson finally showed up at El Gato Loco. Among the low-brow workingmen that constituted El Gato’s clientele, the well-dressed stranger sporting a pair of dark sunglasses stuck out like a sore thumb.

“You’re late,” Quentin said accusingly, swinging around on the barstool as Mitch sidled up beside him.

“Sorry,” Mitch returned. “I was unavoidably detained. I thought you said you’d be waiting out front.”

“I was for a while, but it was too hot and I got too thirsty waiting outside. Want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Well, order one for me, too. I’ve gotta go take a leak.”

The beer was there waiting on the counter when Quentin returned from the bathroom. Coming back down the bar, Quentin tried to walk straight and control his boozy stagger. He didn’t want Mitch to realize how much he’d already been drinking, to say nothing of why. Quentin still couldn’t quite believe he had killed that damned nosy Indian, but he had, all because he had walked up and caught Quentin red-handed with Tommy’s bones right there in front of God and everybody.

Now, Quentin was looking at two potential murder charges instead of one. Jesus! How had that happened to him? How could he have screwed up that badly? The one thing he didn’t want to lose sight of, though, was how much the money from those damned pots would mean to him now.

Nobody knew Quentin Walker owned a car. It would take days, weeks, maybe, for all the paperwork to make its way through official channels. With a proper vehicle and a grubstake of running money, Quentin might even be able to make it into the interior of Mexico. He could leave via that gate on the reservation, the one he had heard so much about from Davy and Brian. It was supposed to be an unofficial border crossing where Indians whose lands had been cut in half by the Gadsden Purchase could go back and forth without the formality of border guards of any kind.

When Mitch Johnson had first shown up with his offer to buy the pots, Quentin had been intrigued more than interested. Now, though, that very same offer of money was of vital importance. The last thing Quentin wanted to do was to spook Mitch into calling the whole thing off. If Mitch walked away, taking with him those five bills with Grover Cleveland’s mug shot on them, then Quentin Walker could be left high and dry, without the proverbial pot to piss in. He would have no money and nowhere to run, and he’d be stuck with two possible murder raps staring him in the face. Nobody was ever going to believe that Tommy’s death had been an accident.

“How about something to eat?” Quentin suggested, thinking that food might help sober him up. “The hamburgers here aren’t bad.”

“Sure,” Mitch Johnson said easily. “I’ll have one. Why the hell not? We’re not in any hurry, are we?”

Shaking his head, Quentin leaned his arms against the edge of the bar to steady himself. “Not that I know of,” he said. “I do have some good news, though.”

“What’s that?” Mitch asked.

“I used some of the money you gave me to buy myself some wheels. I picked up a honkin’ big orange Bronco XLT. It’s a couple years old, but it runs like a top. If you want, we could drive out to where the pots are in that. I don’t know what kind of vehicle you’re driving, but the terrain where we’re going is pretty rough, and the Bronco is four-wheel-drive.”

Mitch Johnson had to fight to keep from showing his disappointment. He had been planning all along that he’d be getting back almost a full refund of that initial five thousand bucks he had given Quentin. And he had less than no intention of giving the little creep his second installment. After all, once Quentin Walker was dead, he wouldn’t have any need of money—or of a car, either, for that matter.

Instead of bitching Quentin out—instead of mocking him for his stupidity—Mitch was careful to mask his disappointment. “So, you bought yourself a car?” he asked smoothly. “What kind did you say?”

“A Bronco.” To Mitch, Quentin’s answer seemed unduly proud. “It’s the first time I’ve had wheels of my own in years. It feels real good.”

“I’ll bet it does,” Mitch Johnson agreed.

After that exchange, Mitch sat for a long time and considered this changed state of affairs. His plan had called for the next part of the operation to be carried out in the Subaru. That way he would have the canvas-drying crate to use to confine either Lani and/or Quentin, should the drugs somehow prove unreliable. The idea of changing vehicles added a complication, but the whole point of being competitive—of being able to capitalize on situations where other people faltered—was being flexible enough to go with the flow. The idea was to take the unexpected and turn it from a liability into an advantage.

“Hang on here a minute,” Mitch said to Quentin. “And if my food comes before I get back, you leave my hamburger alone.”

“Sure thing,” Quentin said.

Mitch walked out to the far corner of the parking lot where he had left the Subaru. There, he unlocked the tailgate, opened the wooden crate, and checked on Lani, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Putting on his rubber gloves, he removed Lani’s bike from the crate. Hurriedly he wheeled it over to the orange Bronco parked nearby, an orange Bronco with a temporary paper license hanging in the window next to a prominently displayed as is/no warranty notice. Predictably, the Bronco wasn’t locked. Mitch hefted the mountain bike into the spacious cargo compartment and then went over to secure the Subaru.

“Sweet dreams, little one,” he said to a sleeping Lani as he once again closed up the crate. “See you after your brother and I finish up at the house.”

When Mitch went back inside, the food had been served. Mitch ate his lousy hamburger and watched Quentin wolf his. There was something about the man that wasn’t quite right. There was a nervous tension in him that Mitch didn’t remember from the night before, but he put his worries aside. Whatever was bothering Quentin Walker, that little dose of scopolamine Mitch had dropped into Quentin’s first beer would soon take the edge off. In fact, Mitch’s only real concern was that Quentin was far more smashed than he should have been. With Quentin drunk, Mitch worried that even a little bit of Burundianga Cocktail might prove to be too much.

The overheated afternoon had cooled into a warm summer’s evening when Quentin and Mitch Johnson finally left the bar. Quentin blundered first in one direction and then in the other as he attempted to cross the parking lot. He finally came to a stop and leaned up against the Bronco to steady himself.

“Geez!” he muttered. “That last beer was a killer. Hey, Mitch,” he said. “You wouldn’t mind driving, would you? The food didn’t do me a bit of good. I’m having a tough time here. I can give you directions, no problem, but with my record, I can’t afford to be picked up DWI.”

“No problem,” Mitch said. “Where are the keys?”

It took time for Quentin to extract the keys from his pocket and hand them over.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Quentin whined.

Mitch shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “After all, friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”

Detective Dan Leggett was pissed as hell. “What do you mean, you’ve recalled him?” he demanded.

“Just that,” Reg Atkins, the night-watch commander, returned mildly. “We can’t send a team of crime techs out there until Monday morning. You know as well as I do that Sheriff Forsythe won’t authorize any overtime right now, at least not until the start of the new fiscal year. Overtime is to be scheduled only in cases of dire emergency. One busted Indian and a pile of bones don’t qualify, at least not in my book. And in case you’re wondering, the same thing goes for deputies. Brian Fellows is off the clock as of fifteen minutes ago and the guy you sent out to Coleman Road just got called to a car fire out by Ryan Field.”

Less than six months from retirement, Dan Leggett was a member of the old guard. As someone who still owed a good deal of loyalty to the previous administration, he was a pain in Sheriff Bill Forsythe’s neck. Anybody else in his position might have shut up and let things pass. Not Dan Leggett. He was an unrepentant smoker, a loner, and a rocker of boats.

“You called them off?”

“Damned straight. If you think we’re going to have a deputy camped out by a charco all weekend long, you’re crazy as a bedbug.”

“But I want those bones examined.”

“Well, go get them and bring them back to the lab yourself, if you’re so all-fired excited about them. There are plenty of people to work on them if you ever get them here.”

Without another word, Dan Leggett stormed out of Reg Atkins’s office. Ever since Brandon Walker had been voted out of office, this kind of shit had been happening—especially to older guys, the ones who had been around long enough to know the real score. He had been a rookie deputy toward the end of Sheriff DuShane’s term in office. There had been lots of crap like this back then. It looked as though things had come full circle.

But if Sheriff Bill Forsythe thought he was going to run Dan Leggett off a day before his scheduled retirement day, he was full of it. And he wasn’t going to be bamboozled out of properly investigating these two possibly related cases.

At the charco even though the deputy was long gone, nothing seemed to be disturbed. Since Deputy Fellows had already made plaster casts, Dan Leggett simply drove as close as he could to the pile of bones without getting stuck in the sand. After extracting a trouble light from the trunk, he examined the grisly pile by the trouble light’s eerie orange glow.

There was nothing but partial skeletal remains here now, but Detective Leggett realized this had once been a living, breathing human being. A person. Somebody’s loved one. As such, whoever it was deserved some respect, certainly more than being tossed haphazardly in the trunk of an unmarked patrol car.

“Sorry about this,” Dan said aloud, addressing the skull whose empty eyes seemed to stare up at him. “But this is the only way I can think of to find out who you are and what happened to you.”

After that murmured apology, he put on his disposable gloves and loaded the bones into three separate cardboard evidence boxes. It was the best Dan Leggett could do.

He took the boxes back to the department and then lugged the surprisingly lightweight stack into the crime lab. “What’s this?” the lab tech asked, opening the top box and peering inside.

“It’s what’s left of a body,” he told her. “When you take them out of the box, I want every single one of them dusted for prints.”

“Come on, Detective Leggett. Fingerprints?”

“I’m an old man who’s about to retire,” Dan Leggett told the thirty-something technician. “Humor me, just this once. And while you’re at it, fax a dental photo over to that Bio-Metrics professor at the U. Who knows, we might just get a hit on his Missing Persons database.”

As tribal chairman, Gabe Ortiz could easily have gone straight to the head of the line at the feast house in Little Tucson. But that wasn’t Fat Crack’s style. Instead, an hour or so before the Chicken Scratch Band was scheduled to play, he and Wanda were standing in line waiting to be admitted to the feast house along with their bass-guitar-playing son, Leo, and everyone else who was waiting to eat.

Gabe could remember a time, seemingly not that long ago, when all the guys in the band had been old men. Times had changed. The problem was, the members of the band had always stayed pretty much the same—middle-aged. That was still true. What was different was that Gabe Ortiz was well into his sixties and one of the band members was his unmarried, thirty-eight-year-old son.

They filed into the feast house and took seats at the tables. Moments later, Delia Cachora herself showed up carrying plates. She set two plates down in front of Gabe and Wanda and then went back for more.

Leo caught his father’s eye. “When are you going to put in a good word for me with that new tribal attorney?” he asked.

“What do you want me to tell her?” Gabe asked. “That you’re a good mechanic? You’ve never worked on a Saab in your life.”

Leo laughed. “I could learn,” he said.

Delia Chavez Cachora had returned to the reservation driving a shiny black Saab 9000. In the reservation world where Ford and Chevy pickups ruled supreme, Delia’s car had created quite a stir—especially when word leaked out that the Saab’s leather seats were actually heated. In the Arizona desert, heated seats were considered to be a laughably unnecessary option. After months of driving in gritty dust, its once shiny onyx exterior had acquired a perpetually matte-brown overlay.

“Why don’t you talk to her yourself?” Wanda asked impatiently. “She won’t bite.”

“I knew her in first grade,” Leo said. “But I don’t think that counts.”

Delia returned to the table with two more plates, one of which she put in front of Leo Ortiz.

“Delia,” Gabe said, “this is my son, Leo. He says you were in first grade together. He wants you to know that he’s a pretty good mechanic.”

Leo Ortiz shrugged. “You never can tell when you might need a good mechanic,” he said with a laugh. “Or a bass guitar player, either.”

Delia Cachora studied Leo Ortiz’s broad face as if searching for a resemblance between this graying, portly man and some child she had known in school thirty years earlier. “I’ll bear that in mind,” she said. Then she headed back to the serving line to collect more plates.

Wanda looked at her husband. “Are you going to talk to her?” Wanda asked.

Fat Crack nodded. “After,” he said.

Wanda sighed, then she turned her attention on her son. “I don’t know why you’re so interested in her,” she sniffed disapprovingly. “Julia Joaquin, her auntie, tells me Delia can’t even make tortillas.”

Leo caught his father’s eye and winked. “Plenty of women can cook,” Leo said, “but I’ll bet Delia Cachora can do lots of other things.”

Gabe Ortiz laughed at his son’s gentle teasing, but it surprised him somewhat that Delia Cachora would turn out to be the kind of woman who would interest either one of his two sons, who, at thirty-eight and forty, respectively, were both thought to be aging, perpetual bachelors. If Leo did in fact find Delia attractive, by the time Gabe finished telling her about Davy Ladd’s upcoming arrival, Leo’s chances would be greatly reduced from what they were right then. Gabe had put the unpleasant task off for far too long already. It was time.

He waited until that group of feast-goers had finished eating. Then, on his way out, Gabe stopped by the dishwashing station where the tribal attorney stood over a steaming washtub of water with soapy dishwater all the way up to her elbows.

“Delia,” Gabe said quietly. “I need to talk to you.”

“Right now?”

“Whenever you have time,” Gabe answered. “I’ll wait outside.”

Wanda walked over to the dance floor with Leo while Fat Crack lingered outside the door to the feast house. Several minutes later, Delia Cachora joined him.

“Is something wrong?” Delia asked anxiously. “You look worried.”

Gabe was worried. The business with Andrew Carlisle had kept him awake for most of two successive nights now. His only regret was that his state of mind showed so clearly to outside observers.

Fat Crack shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. “But there is something I need to talk to you about.” He led her away from the feast house, through the lines of parked cars, through groups of people gathered informally around the backs of pickups, laughing and talking. When they reached the Crown Victoria, Fat Crack opened the door and motioned her inside.

“Whatever it is, it must be serious,” Delia said.

“Not that serious. I wanted to talk to you about a friend of mine. A sort of cousin, actually. My aunt’s godson. His name’s David Ladd.”

In the world of the Tohono O’othham—where even the most direct conversational route is never a straight line—this was a straightforward way of beginning.

“What about him?” Delia asked.

“I’ve offered him a job.”

The car was silent for a moment. “David Ladd,” Delia repeated at last. “That doesn’t sound like a Tohono O’othham name.”

“It isn’t,” Fat Crack admitted. “Davy is Mil-gahn. He was my aunt Rita’s godson—a foster son, more or less.”

“Why are you telling me about this?” Delia asked. “Is there some legal problem?”

Gabe Ortiz took a deep breath. “I’ve offered him an internship,” he said. “In your office. He just graduated from law school at Northwestern. He’ll be home sometime next week and able to start work the week after that. I’ve hired him as your special assistant while he’s studying for the bar exam. As an intern, we won’t have to pay him all that much, and I thought that while you’re preoccupied by negotiations with the county, he’ll be able to help out with some of the day-to-day stuff.”

Delia’s reaction was every bit as bad as Gabe Ortiz had expected. “Wait just a damn minute here!” she exclaimed, turning on Gabe with both eyes blazing. “Are you saying you’ve hired an Anglo to come work in my office without telling me and without even asking my opinion?”

“Pretty much.”

“My understanding was that the tribal attorney always hires his or her own assistants,” Delia said.

“The tribal attorney works for me,” Gabe reminded her impassively. The fact that he was using his tribal council voice on her infuriated Delia Chavez Cachora even more.

“But you already told me, he’s Mil-gahn,” she objected. “An Anglo.”

Gabe Ortiz remained unimpressed. “So? Are you prejudiced against Anglos, or what?”

At thirty-eight, having fought her way through years of prejudice in Eastern Seaboard parochial schools, Delia Cachora knew about racial prejudice firsthand. From the wrong end.

“What if I am?” she asked. “I’m sure there are plenty of Indian law school graduates we could hire while they’re waiting to pass the bar exam. Besides, I can’t hire anyone anyway. We talked about that a couple of months ago. I’m already over budget.”

“I’m hiring Davy Ladd out of a special discretionary fund,” Gabe said. “One that comes straight from my office. The money to pay him won’t be coming out of your budget, it’ll be coming out of mine.”

“In other words, he’s coming, like it or lump it.”

Gabe Ortiz nodded. “I suppose that’s about it,” he said. “But wait until you meet him. He’s an unusual young man. I think you’ll like him.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Delia muttered. She opened the car door. “In fact, I wouldn’t count on that at all.”

Delia started out of the car and would have walked away, but just then a tow truck, red lights flashing, followed by a Law and Order patrol car, pulled up and stopped directly in front of the Crown Victoria. Gabe’s other son, Richard, climbed down from the truck.

“Here they are,” he was saying to the officer piling out of the patrol car.

As Gabe climbed out of the Crown Victoria, he immediately recognized Ira Segundo, a young patrol officer for the Tohono O’othham tribal police. “What’s the matter, Ira?” Gabe asked.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Cachora,” Ira said. “Baby told me she might be here with you.”

“I’m Delia Cachora,” she said, stepping forward. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s about your dad,” Ira Segundo said. “There was a problem over off Coleman Road. He’s been hurt.”

A curtain of wariness more than concern settled over Delia’s face. Since she had returned to the reservation, her father and her younger brother, Eddie, had only come to see her to ask for money. “What about him?”

“It happened at a charco over by where Rattlesnake Skull used to be—”

“By Rattlesnake Skull?” Gabe Ortiz interrupted.

Ira nodded. “We think maybe there was a fight of some kind. He must be hurt pretty bad. They air-lifted him to TMC.”

“You should be telling my brother this instead of me,” Delia said. “He’s the one who lives with him, but he’s probably off drunk somewhere. I’ll go get my car.”

“No, Delia,” Gabe said. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride.” Gabe Ortiz turned to his son. “Richard, I’m leaving you to take your mother home from the dance when she’s ready to go. Ira, I want you to put on your flashers and lead us into town.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Ortiz,” Ira said.

Still angry, Delia wanted to object, but something about the way Gabe issued the orders stopped her. She did as she was told and climbed back into the Crown Victoria. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said, once Gabe was back inside and had started the engine. “It’s my father, and I’m perfectly capable of driving myself.”

Already Gabe was threading his way through the army of parked cars. In the reflected glow of the dashboard lights, Delia was surprised by the grim set of his face.

“You’ve been away from the reservation a long time,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “Have you ever heard of Rattlesnake Skull?”

“Never,” she said. “I gather from what he said that it’s a deserted village.”

They were out of the parking lot now, and the lights on the patrol car were flashing in front of them. “Right,” Gabe said. “It is deserted, but a lot has happened there over the years. Before you go see your father and before you meet Davy Ladd, you should hear about some of it. I’m probably the only one who can tell you.”

When the banquet was finally over, Brandon and Diana Walker drove west across town. The evening had been surprisingly fun, and Diana was still giggling.

“You were absolutely great,” she told Brandon. “I don’t know why you’ve ever been spooked at the idea of talking to little old ladies. You charmed the socks off every one that got within spitting distance of you.”

Brandon grinned. “There’s nothing like a little sex in the afternoon to give a guy’s sagging ego a boost. But it turns out they were a pretty nice bunch of little old ladies . . .”

“And men,” Diana added.

“And a few men,” Brandon corrected. “The difference between the people we met tonight and most people is that the ones at the banquet all think I’m lucky to be able to be retired at age fifty-four. Everybody else thinks I’m either crazy or some kind of laggard.”

“They haven’t seen your woodpile,” Diana said.

Their mood was still light, right up until they drove up to the house in Gates Pass. “Damn it,” Brandon said. “It looks like Lani left every light in the house burning. One of these days she’ll have to pay her own utility bills. It’s going to come as a real shock.”

Brandon hit the automatic door opener and the gate on the side of the house swung open. “She also left her bike in the middle of the damn carport. What on earth is she thinking of?”

Diana sighed, dismayed to hear Brandon’s mood change from good to bad in the space of a few yards of driveway. “Stop the car,” she said. “I’ll get out and move the bike out of the way.”

She pushed the bike up to the front of the carport, giving Brandon enough room to park his Nissan next to her Suburban. No doubt the fragile mood of the evening was irretrievably broken. One way or another, children did that to their parents with astounding regularity.

The back door was unlocked, which most likely meant that Lani was home, but that was something else that would annoy her father. When Lani was home alone, she was supposed to keep the front and back doors locked.

Shaking her head, Diana went inside and discovered that Brandon was right. Almost every light in the house was blazing, but the note for Lani that Diana had left on the counter—the Post-it containing Davy’s phone number and telling Lani to call him back—was still on the counter, exactly where Diana had left it.

Through years of mothering teenagers, Diana Ladd Walker had discovered that looking in the sink and checking the most recent set of dirty dishes was usually a good way of getting a handle on who all was home, how long they’d been there, and whether or not they had dragged any visitors into the house with them.

The evidence in the sink this time left Diana puzzled. Other than the pair of champagne glasses she and Brandon had left there earlier in the afternoon, there was nothing but a pair of rubber-handled kitchen tongs. Knowing it wasn’t hers, Diana picked the utensil up and examined it under the light. The gripper part was somewhat scorched. It looked as though it had been used to cook meat of some kind, but there was nothing in the kitchen—no accompanying greasy mess—that gave Diana any hint of what that might have been.

As Diana automatically moved to the phone to check for messages, she could hear Brandon walking through the rest of the house, calling for Lani and switching off lights as he went. When Diana punched in the code, she found there were a total of five messages waiting for her. That bugged her. It was Saturday night. Couldn’t she and Brandon even go out to dinner without having the whole world phone in their absence?

The first message was timed in at three twenty-one. “Lani,” a female voice said. “This is Mrs. Allison from the museum. If you aren’t able to take your shift, you should always call in as soon as possible to let us know. I know tomorrow is scheduled to be your day off. If for some reason you aren’t going to be able to make your next shift on Monday, please call in on Sunday if you can. If I’m not there, leave word on the machine.”

Lani hadn’t made it to work? That didn’t make sense. She had left for work. How could it be that she was absent? The next message, at six-eleven, moments after Diana and Brandon had left for the banquet, was from Jessica Carpenter.

“Lani, what are you going to wear? Call me and let me know.”

“That figures,” Diana muttered as she erased that one.

The one after that was more worrisome. “Lani,” Jessica Carpenter said. “I thought you were going to be here by now. Mom has to go someplace after she drops me off, and if we don’t leave in a few minutes, she’ll be late. She says I should leave your ticket at the box office. I’ll put it in an envelope with your name on it.”

The next message, at nine-fifteen, was another one from Davy. “Hi, Mom and Dad. I’m still trying to get hold of Lani, but I guess nobody’s home. Give me a call. Bye.”

The last one was from Jessica once again. “It’s intermission and you’re not here. Are you mad at me or sick, or what? I’ll try calling again when I get home.”

Brandon came back into the kitchen just as Diana was putting down the phone. “Still taking messages?” he said.

“Lani didn’t go to work,” Diana said. “And she didn’t go to the concert, either.”

“Didn’t go to the concert?” Brandon echoed. “Where is she then? I’ve gone through the whole house looking for her.”

“Hang on,” Diana told him. “I’ll call the Carpenters and see if she ever showed up there.”

The phone rang several times and then the answering machine came on. Diana left a message for them to call her as soon as possible. “Nobody’s home,” she told Brandon. “Maybe they’re all still at the concert.”

“But Lani’s bike is here. Where would she be if her bike’s here?”

Brandon looked grim. “Something’s wrong. I’ll go back through the house and check again. Maybe I missed something. Do you have any idea what she wore when she left the house this morning?”

Diana shook her head. “I heard the gate shut, but I didn’t see her leave.”

This time they got as far as Brandon’s study. Before, Brandon had simply reached into the room and switched off the light without bothering to look into the room itself. Barely a step inside the door, he stopped so abruptly that Diana almost collided with him. “What the hell!”

Sidestepping him, Diana was able to see into the room herself. A fine spray of shattered glass covered most of the floor. In the center of the glass lay several broken picture frames. Looking beyond that, Diana saw that the wall behind Brandon’s desk—his Wall of Honor as he had called it—was empty. All his service plaques, his civic honors—including his Tucson Citizen of the Year and the Detective of the Year award—the one he’d received from Parade Magazine for cracking a dead illegal alien case years before—were all on the floor, smashed beyond recognition.

“Oh, Brandon!” Diana wailed. “What a mess. I’ll go get the broom—”

“Don’t touch anything and don’t come into the room any farther until we get a handle on exactly what’s happened here. It looks to me as though whoever it was broke into my gun case, too.”

Diana’s stomach sank to her knees. She had to fight off the sudden urge to vomit. “What about Lani . . .”

Brandon turned toward her, the muscles working across his tightened jaw. “Let’s don’t hit panic buttons,” he advised. “The first thing we should do is call the department and have them send somebody out to investigate.” Walking back to the kitchen, he picked up the phone. “Did you notice anything else out of place?” he asked as he dialed. After all those years with the department, the number of the direct line into Dispatch was still embedded in his brain as well as his dialing finger.

Diana thought for a minute. “Only that set of tongs over there in the sink. It looks as though somebody used it to cook meat or something, but I can’t tell what.”

Alicia Duarte was fairly new to Dispatch, but she had been around the department long enough that Brandon Walker’s name still carried a good deal of weight. Her initial response was to offer to send out a deputy.

“A deputy will be fine,” Brandon told her. “But I think we’re going to need a detective too. There’s a good chance that our daughter has disappeared as well, and the two incidents are most likely related.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff Walker,” Alicia said, honoring him with the title even though it was no longer his. “I’ll get right on it.”

Brandon put down the phone and then walked over to wrap his arms around Diana. “You heard what I said. Someone is on the way, although it’ll take time for them to get here.”

“What if we’ve lost her?” Diana asked in a small voice. “What if Lani’s gone for good?”

“She isn’t,” Brandon returned fiercely. It wasn’t so much that he believed she wasn’t lost. It was just that when it came to his precious Lani, believing anything else was unthinkable.

Brandon’s initial reluctance about adopting Clemencia Escalante disappeared within days of the child’s noisy entry into the Walker household. He was captivated by her in every way, and the reverse was also true. It wasn’t long before his daily return from work was cause for an ecstatic greeting on Clemencia’s part. When he was home, she padded around at his heels, following him everywhere, always underfoot no matter where he was or what he was doing.

When it came time to work on turning their temporary appointment as foster parents into permanent adoptive ones, Brandon had forged through the reams of paperwork with cheerful determination. Later, during caseworker interviews, he was charming and enthusiastic. But when the time came to drive out to Sells to appear before the tribal court for a hearing on finalizing the adoption, he was as nervous as he had been on the day he and Diana Ladd married.

“What if they turn us down after all this?” he asked, standing in front of the mirror and reknotting his tie for a third time. “What if we have to give her back? I couldn’t stand to lose her now, not after all this.”

“Wanda seems to think it’ll go through as long as we have Rita in our corner.”

The four of them rode out to Sells together. Rita and the baby sat in the backseat—Clemencia sleeping in her car seat and Rita sitting stolidly with her arms folded across her lap. She said very little, but everything about her exuded serene confidence. They found Fat Crack waiting for them in the small gravel parking lot outside the tribal courtroom. While Brandon and Diana unloaded the baby and her gear, Rita turned to her nephew.

“Did you do it?” she asked Fat Crack, speaking to him in the language of the Tohono O’othham. “Did you look at her picture through the divining crystals?”

“Heu’u—yes,” Fat Crack said.

“And what did you see?”

“I saw this child, the one you call Forever Spinning, wearing a white coat and carrying a feather, a seagull feather.”

“See there?” Rita said, her face dissolving into a smile. “I told you, didn’t I? She will be both.”

“But—”

“No more,” Rita said. “It’s time to go in.”

Molly Juan, the tribal judge, was a pug-faced, no-nonsense woman who spent several long minutes shuffling through the paperwork Wanda Ortiz handed her before raising her eyes to gaze at the people gathered in the courtroom.

“Both parents are willing to give up the child?” she asked at last.

Wanda Ortiz nodded. “Both have signed terminations of parental rights.”

“And there are no blood relatives interested in taking her?”

“Not at this time. If the Walkers’ petition to adopt her is denied, my office has made arrangements to place Clemencia in a facility in Phoenix.”

“Who is this then?” Molly Juan asked, nodding toward Rita.

“This is Mrs. Antone—Rita Antone—a widow and my husband’s aunt,” Wanda replied.

“And she has some interest in this matter?”

Ponderously, Rita Antone wheeled her chair until she sat facing the judge. “That is true,” Rita said. “I am Hejel Wi i’thag—Left Alone. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was Oks Amichuda, Understanding Woman. She was not a medicine woman, although she could have been. But she told me once, years ago, that I would find one, and that when I did, I should give her my medicine basket.

“Do you know the story of Mualig Siakam?”

Molly Juan nodded. “Of course, the woman who was saved by the Little People during the great famine.”

Brandon Walker leaned over to his wife. “What the hell does all this have to do with the price of tea in China?”

“Shhhh,” Diana returned.

“Clemencia has been kissed by the ants in the same way the first Mualig Siakam was kissed by the bees,” Rita continued. “Clemencia was starving and might have died if the ants had not bitten her and brought her to my attention. Some of her relatives are afraid to take her because they fear Ant Sickness. The Walkers are Mil-gahn, so Ant Sickness cannot hurt them. And I am old. I will die long before Ant Sickness can find me.

“The Walkers are asking for her because everyone knows that I am too old to care for her by myself, just as her own great-grandmother was. But I know that this is the child Oks Amichuda told me about—the very one.”

“And you think, that by keeping her with you, you can help her become a medicine woman?” Molly Juan asked.

Rita looked at Fat Crack. “She already is one,” Rita said. “She may not be old enough to understand that yet, and I will not tell her. It’s something she must learn for herself. But in the time I have left, I can teach her things that will be useful when the time comes for her to decide.”

Rita started to move away, but Judge Juan stopped her. “Supposing you die?” she asked pointedly. “What happens then? If Clemencia is living with a Mil-gahn family, who will be there to teach her?”

“The Walkers have a son,” Rita answered quietly. “His Mil-gahn name is David Ladd. His Indian name—the one Looks At Nothing gave him when he was baptized—is Edagith Gogk Je’e—One With Two Mothers.”

Molly Juan pushed her wire-framed glasses back up on her nose and peered closely at Rita. “I remember now. This is the Anglo boy who was baptized by an old medicine man years ago.”

Rita nodded. “Looks At Nothing and I both taught Davy Ladd things he would need to know, things he can teach Clemencia as she gets older even though the medicine man and I are gone.”

“How old is this boy now?”

“Twelve.”

“And he speaks Tohono O’othham?”

“Yes.”

“But what makes you think he would be willing to serve as a teacher and guide to this little girl?”

“I have lived with David Ladd since before he was born,” Rita said. “He is a child of my heart if not of my flesh. When he was baptized, his mother—Mrs. Walker here—and I ate the ceremonial gruel together. He is a good boy. If I ask him to do something, he will do it.”

That was when Judge Molly Juan finally turned to Diana and Brandon Walker. During the course of the proceedings, in an effort to keep the restless Clemencia quiet, Diana had handed the child over to Brandon. By the time the judge looked at them, Clemencia had grasped the tail of Brandon’s new silk tie in one tiny fist and was happily chewing on it and choking him with it at the same time.

“Sheriff Walker,” Molly Juan said, “it sounds as though your family is somewhat unusual. What do you think of all this?”

Still holding the child, Brandon got to his feet to address the judge. “Clemencia is just a baby, and she needs a home,” he said. “I hate to think about her being sent to an orphanage.”

“But what about the rest of it, Sheriff Walker? I know from the paperwork that your wife taught out here on the reservation for a number of years. She probably knows something about the Tohono O’othham and their culture and beliefs. What about you?”

Brandon looked down at the baby, who lay in his arms smiling up at him. For a moment he didn’t speak at all. Finally he looked back at the judge.

“On the night of my stepson’s second baptism,” he said slowly, “I stood outside the feast house and smoked the Peace Smoke with Looks At Nothing. That night he asked three of us—Father John from San Xavier Mission; Gabe Ortiz, Mrs. Antone’s nephew; and myself—along with him to serve as Davy’s four fathers. It seems to me this is much the same thing.

“If you let us have her, my wife and I will do everything in our power to see that she has the best of both worlds.”

Judge Juan nodded. “All right then, supposing I were to grant this petition on a temporary basis, pending final adoption proceedings, have you given any thought as to what you would call her?”

“Dolores Lanita—Lani for short,” Brandon answered at once. “Those would be her Anglo names. And her Indian name would be Mualig Siakam—Forever Spinning.”