Queen of the Night

Seven

Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

Lani drove toward Sells with the full moon rising behind the fast-moving Passat. Once she entered the open-range part of the highway, she slowed down in order to keep an eye out for wandering livestock that might be crossing the road in the moon-bright semidarkness. As she passed the turnoff for Little Tucson, she saw flashing lights in her rearview mirror. She pulled over and let the police vehicle speed past.

She recognized the Pima County logo painted on the side of the vehicle. That probably meant that there was a wrecked car somewhere out here in the night. She didn’t doubt that she’d know the details soon enough when ambulances brought the dead and dying into her ER at the hospital in Sells.

Back on the road, Lani kept going over her mother’s strange question. She also continued thinking about what Gabe had told her much earlier in the day about an old man with strangely puckered skin sitting by her parents’ swimming pool, a man whose presence Diana had absolutely denied. Now Lani wondered if Gabe had been right and if Andrew Carlisle had, against all odds, made an unwelcome ghostly appearance in the house at Gates Pass.

Lani more than anyone understood that Gabe Ortiz was a spooky kid. He often seemed to know things he wasn’t supposed to know, but that wasn’t surprising, because Lani still did that occasionally, too.

Fat Crack Ortiz had suffered from diabetes, an ailment so common on the reservation that it was sometimes referred to as the Papago Plague. He had refused all treatment for the disease, both medicinal and traditional, and eventually the disease had killed him.

The feast held at Ban Thak, Coyote Sitting, the night of his funeral was one of the biggest ones in recent memory. The women in Fat Crack’s life-his widow, Wanda, their daughters-in-law, Christen and Delia, along with the women from the village-had worked long into the night. Lani Walker and Diana Ladd had been there, too. Later, after cleaning up and as they were getting ready to leave, Delia’s water had broken. When it became apparent that there was no time to get the mother to a hospital in time for the delivery of her baby, Lani had stepped in to assist. Thus Gabe Ortiz had been born on the Tampico red leatherette of Diana Ladd’s prized Invicta convertible.

Holding the newborn child in those first few moments of life, looking down at a wrinkled new face that resembled a wrinkled old face, Lani had also understood that Gabe would be more than just his grandfather’s namesake. He would be a medicine man, a siwani, like the others who had gone before him-like Fat Crack, Looks at Nothing, Understanding Woman, and Lani Walker herself.

That knowledge about Gabe’s real destiny, like the scar on her own breast, was another of Lani Walker’s treasured secrets. It was why she spent so much time with the boy-why she made such a concerted effort to teach him fully all the things he needed to know.

On this night, though, she needed to tell him something else, and in telling it she couched the tale in the old traditional language. Part of it was one of the old legends, the story of Rattlesnake Skull village and the people who haunted that bad place. That portion of the story had been handed down in legend from that time in the far distant past when I’itoi, Elder Brother, first emerged from the center of the earth. But part of it was much newer than the rest. It was Lani’s own story, and she wanted Gabe to hear that as well.

After all, if he was going to be a medicine man in the twenty-first century, Gabe would need to know both.

They say it happened long ago that some Bad People, PaDaj O’odham, people who followed the Spirit of Evil, lived in a village called Ko’oi Koshwa, Rattlesnake Skull. One day marauding Apaches, the ohb, came to Rattlesnake Skull. They killed all the people there except for one young girl who went to live with them.

Later the Tohono O’odham learned that this girl loved one of the Apache warriors. They believed that she had betrayed her people to impress him, and it was because of her that the people of Rattlesnake Skull village died.

This made the Tohono O’odham very angry, so they asked I’itoi to help them find Oks Gagdathag, Betraying Woman. I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, led them to the place where she was hiding. They brought her back to the land of the Tohono O’odham and shut her in one of I’itoi’s sacred caves on Ioligam, the mountain the Milgahn, the whites, call Kitt Peak. There were many ways in and out of the cave. Betraying Woman could have escaped, but she knew that she deserved to be punished, so she stayed there alone until she died.

After that no one went back to live in Rattlesnake Skull because everyone knew it was a Bad Place. One day two Milgahn, white men, were wandering in the desert. They came upon Rattlesnake Skull. While they were there, the men were infected by the spirits of the Bad People. After that, even though they were not ohb, they were s-ohbsgam, Apache-like, and they went around killing people and doing bad things. One of the people they killed was a Tohono O’odham girl named Gina.

There were two of these s-ohbsgam. The first one liked being bad. The other one, a man with a wife and a baby, knew he had done wrong, and he killed himself. The first one would have gotten away, but the wife of his dead friend talked to the judge and so the Apache-like Man went to prison.

After he got out, he started killing people again. One of the people he wanted to kill was the woman who had helped put him in prison, and he came looking for her. When he found her all alone, he thought he had won, but the woman had a friend, an old Indian woman who knew how to sing for power. She sang a powerful song, a war chant. Even though the other woman was Milgahn, the old woman’s song gave her enough courage to fight back. When the man came too close she burned his face with hot fat, and from then on the Bad Man was blind, and he is blind to this day, even though he’s dead.

That, nawoj, my friend, is the story of the Woman Who Fought the S-Ohbsgam.

Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:30 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

The story ended. For a long time after that, Lani and Gabe were silent. She didn’t want to say anything more, but she wondered how much of all that the child understood. He understood it all.

“Is that the man I saw this morning by your mother’s swimming pool?” he asked. “The one who was sitting there talking to your mother-the one you couldn’t see.”

“Yes,” Lani said quietly. “I think so.”

“But why?” Gabe asked. “If he’s dead, why would he come back?”

“I don’t know,” Lani said. “That’s what we have to find out.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

Pima County Detective Brian Fellows hung up the phone and returned to the bedroom. When he switched on the light in the closet, his wife, Kath, groaned and pulled a pillow over her face.

“What time is it?” she grumbled.

“Eleven. Go back to sleep.”

“What’s going on?”

“A quadruple homicide out on the reservation.”

“Great,” she said. “Why is it, when it comes to homicides on the reservation, you’re always William Forsythe’s favorite go-to guy?”

“You know why as well as I do,” Brian answered.

In terms of political correctness, Sheriff William Forsythe was only one very small step beyond the outdated notion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The Tohono O’odham Nation took up a large segment of Pima County’s landmass, but since whatever crime happened there often had to do with Indians or illegal aliens, Sheriff Forsythe was usually only too happy to relegate it to the low end of the priority scale. Sending Brian to work those remote cases was Forsythe’s way of continuing to punish Fellows for his long and close association with Forsythe’s immediate predecessor, Brandon Walker.

No doubt Sheriff Forsythe thought sending Brian to the reservation would tick Detective Fellows off, but like Br’er Rabbit, Brian didn’t mind being thrown into the reservation briar patch. As for Sheriff Forsythe? The guy was a jerk. Brian hoped that someday Forsythe would no longer be an issue. Either the people of Pima County would come to their senses and elect someone else, or Brian would put in his twenty years and then be gone. At this point there was no way to tell which would come first.

Kath sat up in bed and propped the pillow behind her. “Who’s going with you?” she asked.

“Just me,” he said.

“For a homicide with four victims?” she asked. “What is it, some kind of drug war?”

“Maybe,” Brian said, pulling on his shoes. “Dispatch said the victims are two Indians and two Anglos. It was called in by one of your Shadow Wolves guys. Pardee, I think the name is.”

When Kath and Brian met, he had been a lowly deputy with the sheriff’s department while she was a full-fledged Border Patrol officer. For a time after their marriage, they had both enjoyed being out in the field in their respective departments, comparing notes and chasing bad guys, but after the birth of their twins, Amy and Annie, things had changed.

With two little girls counting on them, they no longer thought it such a good idea to have both of them putting themselves in harm’s way on a daily basis. When a spot had opened up in Personnel, Kath had taken off her Kevlar vest, turned in the keys to her patrol car, and chained herself to a desk and a computer.

“With both Anglo and Indian victims, that’ll be a jurisdictional nightmare,” Kath mused.

“You’ve got that right,” Brian agreed.

“Where did it happen?”

“South of Topawa,” he said. “On the way to Vamori.”

“I guess that means you won’t be home for Sunday school and church tomorrow.”

He leaned down to kiss her good-bye. “Probably,” he said.

“All right then,” she said. “If you see Dan Pardee and his wonder dog, Bozo, tell them hello.”

“Bozo? As in the clown?”

“From what I’ve heard, Bozo is anything but funny. Dan was out on patrol and a guy tried to bean him with a rock. Bozo took exception and would have torn the guy limb from limb if Dan hadn’t stopped him. In other words, no fast moves around Bozo.”

“Right,” Brian said. “I’ll do my damnedest not to piss off the dog.”

“Take care,” Kath told him.

Nodding, Brian pocketed his wallet, his badge, and keys. On his way down the hall he popped into the girls’ room and laid a kiss on each of their foreheads. One of Brian Fellows’s rules for living decreed that you had to kiss the people you loved every time you went to work, because one of those times you might not be coming back.

Only after his daughters’ kisses had been properly bestowed did Brian Fellows head out of the house. He took off his Husband and Daddy hats and put on the ones marked Murder and Mayhem. That’s what you had to do in order to do the job-you compartmentalized.

What was work was work. What was home was home, and never the twain should meet.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:45 p.m.

67º Fahrenheit

As Dan carried Angie back toward the Expedition, he could feel her body relaxing. Gradually his jacket warmed her, and her trembling ceased. By the time they got to his vehicle she was dead weight in his arms and sound asleep. There was no question about giving her something to eat or drink. Instead he stretched her out in the backseat. For several long minutes after putting her down, he sat next to her just listening to her breathe. He was glad she was sleeping. It was better for everyone concerned, but most especially for Angie herself, if she didn’t have to see or remember what came next.

Dan had already called for assistance before he’d gone looking for the girl. He had no idea how much time had passed since then, but so far there was no sign of backup, and there was no way to tell how much longer it would take for other units to respond. Once they did, Dan understood that the crime scene would be disrupted. Unlike Dan and his fellow Shadow Wolves, the other officers would be far more accustomed to dealing with pavement and sidewalks than they were with dirt. He doubted that any of them would be capable of Shadow Wolves-type tracking.

Dan may have been the one who found the victims, but he understood that solving this horrific multiple murder was none of his official business. Still, he wanted to know more-wanted to know who had done these terrible things and why. He could have just sat there and waited, listening to Angie breathe, but he didn’t. Slipping Angie’s tiny shoes out of his pocket, he put them on the car seat next to her. Then, after ordering Bozo to stay next to the Expedition, Dan walked back to the Blazer.

He skirted around the outside of it, finding in the process that all four windows were rolled down, so it seemed likely that the vehicle’s AC wasn’t working. Examining the dust just outside the rear passenger door, he saw the set of barefoot tracks Angie had left behind after she had climbed out of the vehicle to go in search of her mother and found her “sleeping.” Remembering the child’s innocent words made Dan’s heart hurt.

He canvassed the scene, trying to suss out who had been the real intended victims of the attack. The several gunshots, he concluded, had been very specific. Druggies and drug smugglers both tended to spray the area with indiscriminate bullets. The gunshots here had been for one purpose only-to kill. They hadn’t been to bluff or to scare someone away.

From the way the tracks told the story, Dan could tell that the Anglo couple had been surprised while they were seated at the table. The Indian couple had arrived later, either during or just after the initial attack. It made sense that, since the two Indians were merely collateral damage, the killer hadn’t bothered to search the Blazer thoroughly enough to spot the little girl watching him from the backseat. The Milgahn man with the gun probably believed he was getting away with this. He had no way of knowing that he had left behind an eyewitness.

The only tire tracks Dan saw in the area were from the Lexus and the Blazer. The ones from the Blazer were clearly the most recent ones. The earlier tracks, including Dan’s, had been obliterated, but the presence of just those two meant that the killer had approached the scene from some other direction.

Dan walked back out to the road. He had a choice of turning north or south. Since south seemed to be closer to the makeshift grotto with its lantern and flowers, that was the way Dan turned. Fifty yards back down the gravel road, he saw where another vehicle had pulled off and stopped. Someone had exited the vehicle there and walked off into the desert.

Dan was reasonably sure the tire tracks he saw here were much like the ones he had seen earlier in the day, ones that had subsequently been obliterated by the arriving Lexus and Blazer. Whoever had done this had followed the Lexus earlier, so he had a reasonably good idea of where to find his victims. Then, instead of driving up and alerting them to his presence, he had maintained the element of surprise by approaching on foot.

Silent, Dan thought. Just like a one-pound stone.

He marked the spot with a crime scene flag that would let the CSIs know to come back here to make tire and footprint casts, although, in Dan’s experience, crime scene investigation wasn’t likely to be a huge priority on the reservation.

He was walking back to the Expedition when two Law and Order officers showed up-Martin Ramon and Damon Mattias. Dan escorted them around the perimeter of the crime scene, telling them what he knew and what he had surmised and pointing out what he thought might be important in terms of evidence.

In the years the Shadow Wolves had been patrolling the reservation, the unit had gained a measure of respect from the locals. When it came to credibility, it helped that Officer Martin Ramon’s older brother, Kevin, was also a member of the Shadow Wolves team.

The two Law and Order patrol officers listened carefully to everything Dan had to say. Both of them jotted copious notes into notebooks. When they approached the second body, Officer Mattias nodded.

“It’s Donald Rios, all right,” he said. “His family lives around here. We should go tell his father.”

The look on Martin Ramon’s face made it clear that going to tell some poor unsuspecting man that his son was dead was the last thing he wanted to do.

“I guess we’d better,” he said. “Oi g hihm.”

It was only after they left to go in search of Thomas Rios that Dan Pardee remembered the sleeping child. Since he hadn’t mentioned her to them before, he didn’t mention her to them now. The fewer people who knew about Angie right then, the better.

Moments after they drove away, headed toward Komelik, an aging Crown Victoria with a full light bar on top arrived at the turnoff. Motioning for the driver to pull over, Dan approached the vehicle.

“Detective Brian Fellows,” the driver said, rolling down his window and displaying his badge. “Pima County Homicide.” He parked his vehicle on the shoulder of the road and scrambled out of it. “You must be Dan Pardee,” he said, offering his hand.

Dan nodded.

“My wife said to tell you hello,” the detective added. “Kath Fellows.”

“Kath as in Personnel?” Dan asked.

Detective Fellows grinned. “One and the same. Now let’s get down to business. I just got off the phone with the M.E.’s office. They’ll be here eventually, but they’re running into trouble rounding up extra vans. Four victims at one time is more than they can handle. Now show me what we’ve got.”

They set off on Dan’s second guided tour of the crime scene. Detective Fellows was packing a small digital camera, and he used it to take photos of everything, including all visible footprints and tire tracks. Dan could tell from the detective’s reaction that the sheriff’s department wasn’t likely to be doing much in-depth crime scene investigating, either. Whatever Fellows found and whatever Dan showed him would probably be crucial.

Detective Fellows took photos of each of the victims. All of them had been stripped of jewelry and watches. And there was no money to be found among the debris from the wallets and purses.

“So maybe it’s a straight robbery then,” Fellows suggested. “The Indian couple may be married, but I doubt it. The DMV lists Donald Rios as the sole owner of the Blazer.”

And Angie called him Donald, not Daddy, Dan thought.

That probably would have been the time for him to tell Detective Fellows about the existence of that eyewitness, but Dan kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t ready to relinquish Angie to anyone else, and he knew now that the other officer long ago probably hadn’t wanted to let loose of the child he had rescued from another horrific crime scene, either.

While Fellows photographed the last two victims, Dan walked as far as the ironwood tree. By then the last of the luminarias had burned themselves out. Even the light from the battery-powered lantern seemed to be fading. That was bad enough, but when Dan looked inside the tree, he was saddened to see that the huge white flowers, once breathtakingly beautiful, were beginning to shrivel and die as well.

Brian Fellows walked up behind him. “The night-blooming cereus,” he explained. “They bloom once a year for one night only, and then they’re gone. What about brass? Did you see any?”

Dan shook his head. “Not so far,” he replied. “We’ll probably have more luck looking for that in daylight.”

“Maybe,” Fellows said, “but if the guy knew enough to pick up his brass, we might be dealing with a pro.”

“From one of the cartels?” Dan asked.

Fellows nodded in agreement. “Could be,” he said.

That was Dan’s assessment, too. As far as he could see, the killer’s only misstep concerned the child. He had been so caught up in killing the four adults that he had somehow overlooked Angie.

When Dan and Detective Fellows completed their circuit of the crime scene and returned to Dan’s Expedition, Bozo was still lying next to it. He raised his head and gave Brian Fellows an appraising look as they passed. The detective evidently measured up, since the dog immediately returned to resting his head on his paws and with apparent unconcern closed his eyes.

“I assume that has to be Bozo, the only non-Indian Shadow Wolf?” Fellows asked.

Dan nodded. “That’s right.”

“I was warned about him. Kath said I should mind my manners around him.”

“Always a good idea,” Dan agreed.

Just then, Angie stirred inside the car and made a small whimpering sound. The noise was enough to bring both Bozo and Detective Fellows to full attention.

“Who’s that?” the detective asked. “What’s that?”

“A little girl,” Dan said. “Her name is Angie-Angie with no last name. She was in the Blazer. Somehow the killer missed her. I found her wandering around in the desert, barefoot and scared to death.”

“She’s not hurt?”

“Not seriously,” Dan said. “She’s got some cuts and scratches on her face, legs, and feet that probably need to be looked after.”

Brian glanced inside the car. “It looks more serious than that,” he said.

“You mean the blood on her clothes?” Dan asked.

Brian nodded.

“I think most of that came from another victim. Angie stayed with her mother’s body until I showed up.”

“How come she’s still alive?”

“Because when all hell broke loose, she kept quiet,” Dan replied. “That’s what her mother said she should do around bad people. She saw the man with the gun. After he left, she went looking for her mother. She thought her mother was sleeping.”

“You’re saying she saw the guy with the gun?” Brian asked.

Dan nodded. “An Anglo guy with a gun.”

“She saw the shooter but not the shooting?”

Dan nodded.

“Do you think she can identify him?”

Dan shrugged. “Beats me,” he replied. “She’s little. Four… maybe five years old.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Brian Fellows said. “If the bad guy thinks she can identify him, her life won’t be worth a plugged nickel.”

That was Dan’s assessment as well-that once the killer learned of Angie’s existence, the child might well become a target. He also worried that if CPS got involved, the situation could be even worse. “Protective” might be CPS’s middle name, but when it came to holding off killers, CPS would be about as useful for Angie as having a “no contact” order is for your run-of-the-mill domestic-violence victim.

The Law and Order patrol car returned, followed by an aging Ford F-100 pickup truck. Both vehicles parked on the shoulder of the road. An older man, slightly stooped and wearing blue jeans with frayed cuffs around a pair of down-at-the-heels cowboy boots, stepped out of the truck. His passenger, a woman of about the same age, stayed where she was.

With Officers Ramon and Mattias flanking him, the old man limped slowly past the Blazer to the spot where the young Indian man lay on his back. The old man looked down at the victim for a long moment, then nodded.

“It’s him,” he said stoically. “That’s my boy.”

Then, without another word and without a hint of a tear, the old man walked back to the pickup. He spoke to the waiting woman in Tohono O’odham. You didn’t need to speak the language to understand the anguish and to hear the quiet dignity those words expressed. Then, leaving the woman to her own grief, Thomas Rios returned to the little group of officers, where Officer Ramon made the official introductions. Dan wasn’t surprised to see that Thomas Rios was someone he already knew.

“There’s a little girl here,” Detective Fellows said to Thomas. “Can you tell us who she is?”

“That’s probably Angie, Delphina Enos’s little girl. Delphina is… was… Donald’s girlfriend. He had bought her a ring. He was going to ask her to marry him.”

“And Ms. Enos lived where?”

“In Sells,” he said. “But her family lives in Nolic. She was a nice girl.”

“To your knowledge did either of these people have any connection to the drug trade?”

Detective Fellows was the one who asked the question. The old Indian examined him with a long piercing look before he replied.

“No,” he said finally. “Not at all. Donald was a good boy-a good man. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink.”

“You know that Donald and Delphina aren’t the only victims here tonight?” Fellows asked.

Thomas Rios nodded. “Yes. Martin told me. An old Milgahn man and woman, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” Fellows said, pointing. “He drove that white Lexus.”

“I knew him,” Thomas said quietly. “He asked me if I would let him look around my land. He was searching for a deer-horn cactus. I told him about this one.” He waved in the direction of the faded lantern and the ironwood tree.

“He wanted to find some to show to his wife,” Rios continued. “He told me yesterday that he’d be bringing her here tonight to see the flowers. It was supposed to be a big surprise.”

It was a surprise, all right, Dan thought.

After that, they walked around to the front of the old man’s pickup. He stood with one boot resting on the bumper and answered the officers’ many questions with a soft-spoken style that was equal parts quiet dignity and unyielding endurance. Listening and watching carried Dan back to that other time, that long-ago time, and to another old Indian man.

Los Angeles, California

October 1978

The next morning Dan had awakened in a strange household, with people he didn’t know. The strangers were kind enough to him. They fed him and gave him clean clothes to wear, but they didn’t answer his many questions. Halloween came and went. Dan didn’t get to go trick-or-treating. His mother had bought him a Spider-Man costume to wear, but that hadn’t come with him the night he had been carried out of the apartment. If anyone ever went back to retrieve it, Dan never saw it.

Dan kept asking where his mother was and when she would come to get him. He noticed that when the woman bothered to answer him at all, she said that she didn’t know, but that someone else, someone who wasn’t Dan’s mother, would come for him soon. His father had told lies all the time. Dan noticed that the woman never looked at him when she said those things, and Dan suspected that she was lying, too.

Dan was only four years old at the time. He wasn’t able to put all his feelings into words, but he finally figured it out, even though no one said so in so many words. He finally came to understand that something terrible had happened to his mother. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe she was sick. He tried not to think about the sounds of his parents quarreling on the far side of his bedroom door. He tried not to think about all those noisy firecrackers exploding out in the living room, but as the long lonely days passed one after another, he finally realized those noisy pops he had heard hadn’t been from firecrackers, not at all.

Dan had seen his father’s gun. Adam Pardee kept it on a high shelf in the closet. He often told Danny that he’d take his belt to him if he ever so much as touched it. Dan knew he could have reached the shelf if he had tried, if he had climbed up on a chair, but he never did. Daniel maybe didn’t believe what the nice woman told him about someone coming to get him, but harsh experience had made him believe in Adam Pardee’s belt.

Then, one morning-several days later, although in Danny’s mind it seemed much longer-the woman had rushed Dan through his cold cereal at breakfast and then had herded him into the bathtub.

“Your grandfather’s coming to get you,” she announced with a cheerful smile. “Isn’t that wonderful!”

It wasn’t wonderful for Dan. He didn’t know his grandfather, had never met him, didn’t know he had one.

“What grandfather?” he asked.

“Why, your mother’s father,” she replied, sounding surprised. “He’s coming all the way from Safford, Arizona, to pick you up and take you home.”

Dan knew that wasn’t right. Home was here in California with his parents, not in Arizona with some stranger. He didn’t even know where Arizona was. It sounded like it was far away.

An hour or so later Dan found himself sitting on the sagging couch in the living room waiting for the doorbell to ring. He was dressed in faded jeans and an equally faded Star Wars T-shirt. The clothing was several sizes too large for him. The remainder of his meager possessions-a toothbrush, a comb, a small tube of toothpaste, and a freshly laundered and neatly folded Spider-Man bedsheet-had been packed into the paper bag that sat on the couch beside him.

When the doorbell rang, he raced to answer it. As soon as he flung the door open and saw who was outside, Dan knew there had to be some mistake.

The wizened, wiry old man standing on the front porch might have been a cowboy straight out of the Old West. He came complete with boots, belt, and a pearl-button Western shirt. That wasn’t so bad. The real problem was that he was an Indian. Dan had seen Indians before-in the movies and on TV. The man’s coal-black straight hair was slicked down and combed back flat on his head. His face was both broad and angular. His skin was brown, much browner than Daniel’s. His eyes were almost black. Dan’s were light brown-almost hazel.

“Daniel?” the old man asked.

All Dan could do was stare and nod wordlessly.

The stranger held out his hand, but Dan backed away from him.

“My name is Micah,” the old man said. “Micah Duarte. Rebecca, your mother, was my daughter. I’ve come to take you home.”

Was. Dan heard the word and understood at once what he had just been told, what the smiling woman hadn’t been willing to tell him. This was like in the movie when Bambi’s father comes to Bambi after hunting season and says, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Leaving the stranger on the porch, Dan walked away from the door, climbed back up on the couch, and clutched his paper bag to his chest. He did his best not to cry.

His father hated it when he cried. “Don’t be a sissy,” Adam Pardee always said. “Only sissies cry.” Dan had cried in the movie when Bambi lost his mother, but he didn’t cry for his own mother, not then, not with that strange Indian man watching him.

The woman bustled in from the kitchen, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel as she approached the man who still waited outside on the porch. He wasn’t smiling. Neither was Dan.

“You must be Mr. Duarte,” she said. “Please do come in. I’m Hilda Romero. I see you two have already met.” She turned to Dan. “Are you ready to go?”

“I don’t want to go,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to stay here. I want to live here.”

Mrs. Romero smiled again. It seemed to him that she was always smiling, but he didn’t believe that, either.

“But Mr. Duarte is family,” she said. “Your real family. He’s going to take you home with him. He’s going to look after you.”

“I don’t want him to,” Dan insisted stubbornly. “I want my mother to look after me.”

Micah Duarte said nothing. He gave only the smallest shake of his head, a gesture that meant exactly what Bambi’s father had meant. Dan’s mother was gone-gone forever. She wasn’t coming back for him, but still Dan didn’t move. He stayed where he was, on the couch.

“We have to go,” Micah Duarte said softly. “Safford is a long way away. My boss would only let me have today off. I drove all night to get here, and I told Maxine we’d be back home tonight.”

Dan didn’t know who Maxine was and he didn’t want to.

“But I don’t know you,” Dan objected, practically shouting.

Micah Duarte nodded. “I know,” he said. “Your mother didn’t like being an Indian. She hated it. That’s why she ran away and came here. She was very beautiful. She thought she’d be able to be a movie star.”

He shrugged as if to underscore the futility of his daughter’s empty dream.

Dan, who had never heard anything at all about his mother’s people, was thunderstruck. “My mother isn’t an Indian,” he declared. “She can’t be.”

“She was,” Micah insisted, using that terrible word again, “was” spoken softly and sadly. “She was Apache, and you are, too, Daniel. Come now. We need to go. We can talk along the way.”

He held out his hand. Once again Dan shook his head.

For a moment longer Dan sat there, resisting, but the force behind Micah Duarte’s command was like a physical presence. Finally, as if his feet had minds of their own, they hopped down from the couch and carried him across the room. He stepped out through the door and onto the porch. Then, almost against his will, Dan reached up and took his grandfather’s hand.

Even though Adam Pardee was a stunt man doing pretend tricks for the movies, his hands had always been smooth and soft. That was one of the reasons he always used the belt-on his son and on his wife. He didn’t want anything to damage the looks of his hands; he couldn’t afford to bark or scrape his knuckles.

Micah Duarte’s hands were large and anything but smooth. They were cracked and rough and covered with bumps Dan would later learn were calluses-calluses that came from working long hours with tools and doing hard physical labor. Micah made real stuff happen, and he didn’t care how his hands looked or felt.

Together Daniel and Micah walked across the porch, down the steep steps, and along the short walkway. Outside the yard, a very old pickup was parked next to the sidewalk. Micah walked up to the passenger door, opened it, and gestured for Daniel to get inside.

He didn’t. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “I want my mother,” he said. “Where is she?”

Micah’s eyes misted over. He turned away from the boy’s question and for a long time said nothing. Instead, he walked as far as the front of the truck and planted one booted foot on the front bumper the same way Thomas Rios was doing right now.

“Your mother is dead,” he said at last. He patted the pocket of his shirt. “She sent us a letter. She was afraid your father might do something bad. He was drinking too much and doing other stuff. She wrote to see if Maxine and I would let her come home. We would have, but the letter came too late for us to help her. Since I couldn’t come to get her, I came to get you. Understand?”

D an hadn’t understood all of it right then, not really, but he hadn’t cried, either. Not because Micah Duarte might think he was a sissy. It was because Dan knew enough about Indians to know that they didn’t cry. Ever.

In view of everything his own grandparents had done for him, Daniel Pardee could only hope, for Angie Enos’s sake, that there was someone in her life, someone like Micah and Maxine Duarte, who would step up to the plate, take in a poor motherless child, and lavish her with love and affection.

A silence fell over the small group of men gathered around Thomas Rios’s F-100.

“Anything else?” Detective Fellows asked, glancing questioningly at the other officers.

All three shook their heads. Dan had no additional questions to ask primarily because he hadn’t been paying attention. He had been far away in another place and time. When he came back on track, Detective Fellows was speaking to Thomas Rios in what sounded to Dan like pitch-perfect Tohono O’odham.

The two Law and Order officers seemed surprised by that. Nawoj was the only word Dan was able to pick out from the string of conversation. He knew nawoj meant friend or friendly gift. When Detective Fellows finished speaking, Thomas Rios nodded and the two men shared a brief handshake. After that, the old man got back in his pickup and drove away.

“What did you say to him?” Dan asked.

“That I’m sorry for his loss,” Brian Fellows answered.

“How’d you learn to speak the language?”

“I learned from some friends here on the reservation,” Fellows said with an unassuming shrug, as though it was no big deal. “I had a friend, an Anglo guy named Davy Ladd. He taught me, and so did an Indian lady named Rita Antone and an old medicine man everyone called Fat Crack. The three of them taught me everything I know.”

Now I understand, Dan thought. No wonder he’s the detective they assigned to this case.