Queen of the Night

Nine

Highway 86, West of Tucson

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 9:00 p.m.

74º Fahrenheit

Driving back to Tucson, Jonathan could not believe how anything could have gone so completely wrong in such a short time. He had waited around long enough to let his mother and her husband enjoy their last meal. After all, even guys on death row got to have that. Then, just after eight-thirty, he had walked up and found his mother and her husband sitting there enjoying their oddball evening tête-à-tête. He hadn’t said anything. He didn’t have to.

Startled, she had looked at him as soon as he stepped into the circle of light. There had been a gasp of recognition. Then, smiling, she had stood up and taken two steps toward him, holding out both of her hands in greeting-like she was surprised but glad to see him. Like she was actually welcoming him! How dare she!

“Why, Jonathan,” she had said. “However did you find us way out here?” Then she had turned to her husband, to Jack. “No, wait,” she said to him. “You did this, didn’t you? It’s the rest of the surprise!”

Surprise my ass! Jonathan had thought. He had answered that phony smile of hers just the way he had intended to-with a nine-millimeter slug right in the middle of her forehead. The sling on his arm had half concealed the weapon, so she had never seen it coming. She was still smiling that sappy, stupid smile of hers as she went down, knocking over the chair she had been sitting on and taking the cloth-covered table with her as she fell. He saw the glassware and dishes tumble off the table and shatter, but he didn’t hear them.

“What the hell…?” Jack had roared.

Jonathan heard that even as the gunshot reverberated in his ears. Bent on fighting back, the old man had erupted out of his seat, but then Jonathan shot him, too. He liked doing it just that way-two shots and two kills, no wasted bullets.

For a time-a few seconds, anyway-he had stood there examining the scene and enjoying the moment. He had done what he had set out to do. He felt no regret, only a sense of accomplishment. He had put the witch down; both witches, as a matter of fact. Two women who had made his life hell on earth. Now they had both paid the price for every unkind word and every slight. They were gone. Done.

He smelled smoke. One of the fallen candles had set fire to the tablecloth. The last thing he needed was for a brush fire to attract attention. Quickly he stomped the fire out before it could spread. But then, to his horror, Jonathan heard the sound of voices, a man and a woman talking and laughing and coming closer.

He realized that while his ears were out of commission from the gunshots, a vehicle must have arrived without him noticing. Whose was it? Who was coming and what were they doing here? Surely no one else had been invited to Jack and Abby’s little party. The table had been set for two. There had been only the two chairs.

Jonathan moved to the middle of the luminarias’ path and stood there waiting for the new arrivals to round the curve. At last a couple, an Indian man and woman, appeared in front of him. The man was leading the way while the woman followed.

The man stopped, looked questioningly at Jonathan, and frowned. “Who are you?” he asked. “Where’s Jack?”

As far as Jonathan was concerned, the two of them had no business being there, but what was he supposed to do, let them go? Let them turn around and walk away? Like that was going to happen!

So he shot them, too, one after the other. He hit the man full-on. The woman turned and tried to run but he shot her in the back. As they went down, just like that, Jonathan was thankful for all the hours and weeks he had spent shooting at the target range. This was the payoff.

He stood for a while after that with his heart pounding. For some reason, shooting the two strangers seemed far worse than shooting his own mother. After all, she deserved it. They did not, but in realizing the enormity of what he had done, a certain level of self-preservation kicked in as well. He needed to do something that would throw the investigation off his trail long enough for him to get over the border and into the interior of Mexico. If he could make it that far and connect up with the money he had sent on ahead, he’d be fine.

He needed to do something that would make this incident look like something other than what it was. When he saw his mother’s purse, it came to him. Robbery. That should do the trick.

Jonathan had had the foresight to bring along some latex gloves. Donning a pair, he walked to the bodies one by one. Carrying his weapon in one hand in case anyone else showed up, he collected his mother’s purse and the men’s wallets. Just for good measure, he took their jewelry and cell phones as well. Jack’s simple gold wedding band wasn’t impressive, and neither was the small diamond on his mother’s finger. Ditto went for the Indian guy’s immense turquoise ring and the engagement ring, still in a jeweler’s box in his jeans. Taken together, the whole stack didn’t amount to much, but he pocketed it all.

When he reached the Indian woman, she wasn’t quite dead. “Help me,” she moaned. “Please.”

Jonathan thought about putting her out of her misery with another bullet to her head, just to end her suffering, but he decided against it. If someone had heard the shots earlier, they might still be listening and trying to decide where they were coming from. He couldn’t risk another. Besides, it was a shame to waste a bullet if he didn’t have to.

Like his mother, the Indian woman had carried her purse with her when she got out of the car-even in the middle of the desert.

Why do women do that? Jonathan had wondered as he leaned down to pick it up.

He stood in front of Jack Tennant’s Lexus and sorted through the purses and wallets. Then, leaving the empty husks of belongings behind, he walked away. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t need to hurry. They were dead. They weren’t going anywhere. With any kind of luck it would be hours or even days before someone found them.

Once in his own vehicle, Jonathan drove back out to the road, where he was relieved to see no oncoming traffic visible in either direction. He had been holding his breath as he approached the highway. Now he let it go. When he breathed back in, even he couldn’t ignore the rank stench in the minivan. He had practically lived it in for days, waking and sleeping. The floorboards were covered with the empty wrappers and boxes and cups of the fast food that had sustained him during this long hunting excursion. Now that it was over, however, he needed to find a room, get himself cleaned up, and then make his getaway. He rolled down the window and let in some of the chill night air.

There was still nothing from Thousand Oaks. The story he had spun about taking his family on vacation must have worked. Must still be working.

Once Jonathan managed to get across the border, he figured he’d be home free.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

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

67º Fahrenheit

By the time Dan saw Angie again, she had been changed into a hospital gown and settled in a bed. The bedside tray had been stocked with food-cheese and crackers, tapioca pudding, and a dish full of cubes of red Jell-O-the kind Dan had always tried to stick to the ceiling in the school cafeteria. Bozo might have been the current family clown, but he certainly wasn’t the only one.

As Dan watched Angie mow her way through the food, he realized that he had skipped his ham sandwich. As a consequence, so had Bozo.

“Is that any good?” he asked.

Angie looked at him, smiled, nodded, and popped another Jell-O cube into her mouth. “Where’s my mommy?” she asked.

Dan had lied to her before and let her believe the less hurtful fiction that her mother was still sleeping. It seemed to Dan that someone else should be the one to give Angie Enos the bad news-the definitive, once-and-for-all answer about what had happened to her mother. Dan was a complete stranger-an innocent passerby. It wasn’t fair for that difficult job to be left up to him. Where were Angie’s grandparents? Shouldn’t they be the ones to do this? Or what about some beloved aunt or uncle? Shouldn’t someone with more of a claim on Angie and her future perform this difficult task?

But right then, at that precise moment in Angie’s hospital room, Daniel Pardee was the only person available.

He didn’t answer for several moments. How can I explain something like that? he wondered. What words can I use and how much will she be able to understand?

Dan had seen the information listed on Angie’s tribal enrollment card. Her birthday was in November. That made her four and a half years old. As far as he knew, the movie version of Bambi wasn’t shown in theaters anymore, but maybe Delphina had rented the video.

Finally he decided that the best thing to do was to tell the truth. That was how Gramps had always dealt with tough things-by saying straight out whatever was going on rather than by beating around the bush or trying to fudge what needed to be said.

“Angie,” Dan said gently, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Your mommy is dead.”

Angie’s enormous eyes welled with tears. “I thought she was asleep.”

Dan shook his head. “I know,” he said. “But she wasn’t.”

For a long time, Angie sat there quietly, staring at him through her tears.

“My dog died,” she said finally. “He ran out into the road and got run over by a truck. Mommy said that dying meant he wouldn’t be back. Does that mean my mommy won’t be back?”

“That’s correct,” Dan said. “She won’t be.”

“Not ever?”

“Not ever.”

“Is she in heaven? Mommy says that when people die, they go to heaven.”

“I’m sure that’s where she is,” Dan said with a conviction he didn’t necessarily feel. For his own part, Dan Pardee had stopped believing in heaven and hell a long time ago.

Angie put down her spoon and pushed the food tray away. “I’m not hungry,” she said.

Dan carried the tray across the room and put it on a dresser. “Of course you’re not.”

“Who’ll take care of me, then?” Angie asked. “Donald?”

Which meant Dan had to deliver the next blow as well. “Angie, Donald’s dead, too. Just like your mommy.”

“Who, then?” Angie asked.

Dan shrugged. “Do you have a grandpa and grandma? Maybe they’ll look after you.”

“Grandpa’s sick,” Angie said.

“What about your father?” Dan asked. The name Joaquin Enos was also listed on Angie’s enrollment card. “You have a father, don’t you?”

Angie simply looked at him and didn’t reply. That in itself was answer enough. The father had never been a factor in the Angelina Enos equation, and he wouldn’t be one now.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dan said. “I know how hard it is not to worry, but someone will look after you, Angie. Right now, you should probably lie down and try to get some sleep. We’ll sort all this out tomorrow morning.”

She reached out and grabbed hold of Dan’s hand. “Will you stay here with me?”

“I will,” he said. “But first I need to go out and feed Bozo and give him some water.” Dan also needed to call in and let Dispatch know that no one was out on patrol in his sector right now. Given the obvious police presence at Komelik, it didn’t seem likely that a major number of illegal entrants would be attempting to use that route tonight. As far as Dan was concerned, his presence at Angie Enos’s bedside was far more pressing.

“You’ll come right back?” Angie asked. “You promise?”

“I promise.”

Telling the lady at the desk that he was just stepping outside for a moment, he hurried over to his Expedition. There he let Bozo out of the SUV long enough for the dog to relieve himself. Then Dan poured a couple of bottles of water into the metal bowl he kept in the back of the luggage compartment. While Bozo lapped up the water, Dan unwrapped the two sandwiches and gave them to the dog. All he reserved for himself were the bags of chips. Then he called Dispatch.

All that took time. When Dan finally made it back to Angie’s room, he expected her to be sleeping. She wasn’t, primarily because by then a night nurse was in the room, taking her vitals.

“I knew you’d come back,” Angie said.

Dan nodded. “I told my boss that you needed Bozo and me to stay here for right now.”

“Bozo is his dog,” Angie explained to the nurse.

Unimpressed by this tidbit of information, the nurse rolled her eyes.

When she left the room, Dan eased his long frame into a chair that didn’t necessarily fit his body, or any human body for that matter. It looked like a chair, but it was the least comfortable specimen of chairness Dan Pardee had ever had the misfortune of encountering. As soon as he settled into it, however, Angie reached out again, took his hand, and fell fast asleep.

Dan sat in almost that same position for the next three hours. He stirred only when his feet went numb or his hand did. And while he sat there, a file drawer he usually kept closed and safely locked away from conscious thought popped open-the file drawer marked “Adam Pardee.”

Safford, Arizona

1979

E ven from prison Adam Pardee had refused to sign over his parental rights. As a consequence, Micah and Maxine Duarte had been forced to go to court to gain custody of their grandson. Fortunately Micah’s boss, a prosperous Safford area dairy farmer, was able to help them find an Anglo attorney who made it possible for the Indian couple to navigate the Anglo legal jungle.

When it was time to enroll Dan in kindergarten, the guardianship issue had been settled to the satisfaction of the courts, perhaps. In the court of public opinion, and more important at Fort Thomas Elementary School, Dan Pardee’s status was still very much in doubt.

Although Micah Duarte soon morphed into Dan’s beloved Gramps, his wife, Maxine, was another matter. She was always kind to Dan-kind but distant. Up until her death five years ago, she had always been Grandmother, never the less formal Grandma. Maxine had looked after Dan and cared for him, but she had seemed incapable of allowing herself to unbend in the presence of her dead daughter’s child. To Dan’s knowledge, his grandparents never discussed Rebecca, or if they did, it certainly wasn’t in Dan’s presence. Maybe part of Maxine’s reticence had to do with the fact that Dan looked so much like his father, although no one had mentioned it at the time. Dan found that out for himself much later while doing Internet searches into his own history.

Even as a child, Dan Pardee had had his father’s eyes. As he grew, he developed his father’s height and long legs, as well as his rangy good looks. All of that meant that Dan didn’t fit in well with the other kids on the San Carlos. He was neither fish nor fowl. He wasn’t Apache enough for some or Anglo enough for others.

And his troubled family history often caused difficulties as well. For one thing, school and Sunday school programs often focused on holidays with traditional “family values.”

Art projects to make greeting cards to celebrate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day didn’t take into account the feelings of a kid whose father had murdered his mother. There weren’t any cards that covered that contingency. When it came time to do a “family history” project for eighth-grade social studies, Dan flunked it fair and square. He wouldn’t answer the questions and didn’t turn in the paper. His teacher was baffled. Gramps was not.

As an eighth grader, Dan hadn’t wanted to know any of that ugly stuff, but while he was sitting in Iraq with time on his hands and computer access, he had made it his business to track down everything the Internet had to offer on Adam and Rebecca Pardee. Surprisingly enough, there was plenty of material available with the click of the mouse.

For one thing, an enterprising true-crime writer named Michaella Reece had written a book called The Return of the Stuntmen, which was a book about three different Hollywood stuntmen who had gone off to the slammer for one crime or another, only to be welcomed back to the Hollywood fraternity once they had paid their respective debts to society. By the time Dan knew the book existed it was out of print, but he had ordered a used copy from Amazon.

It turned out that the three men had a lot in common in addition to being stuntmen, including a long history of dishing out domestic abuse. They had all murdered women. One, Adam, murdered his wife; the second, his stepmother; the third, his girlfriend. And they all got slaps on the wrist with sentences in the seven-to-ten-year range with time off for good behavior. And they all went straight back to work once they got out of prison. The book had been published several years earlier, however, and Dan wondered how much work stuntmen were getting these days in the face of competition from computer-generated graphics that tossed images around rather than flesh-and-blood people.

In reading the book Dan saw the head-shot photos of his mother once again. Rebecca Duarte Pardee had been beautiful, even with her long dark hair turned into a froth of seventies-style curls. It galled Dan to realize that his father had served his time and been released from prison for his mother’s murder months before Dan graduated from the eighth grade.

Growing up, he often thought about going back to California to confront his father. By the time he was in high school, he had been convinced that, in a physical matchup, his karate training would give him an edge. During his class’s senior trip to Disneyland, Dan went so far as to find Adam Pardee’s name, address, and phone number in the phone book. He had made tentative arrangements to ditch the group the next day and go do just that, but one of the other kids, Frank Warren, had squealed on him, and it didn’t happen. Not then.

But by the time Dan returned home from Iraq, he was ready to see his father. He still had his karate training, but his years in the army had toughened him both mentally and physically far beyond what he’d been as a high school senior.

Because his deployment ended at almost the same time as his second enlistment, he told his grandfather that he’d be staying on in California for a few days with some buddies from L.A. Not that there were any buddies in L.A. He left the airport in a rented red Taurus and drove to the same address he had found ten years earlier, which turned out to be a down-at-the-heels bungalow in a not-so-nice neighborhood in South Pasadena.

It was apparent that in recent years both the neighborhood and the house had fallen on tough times. Knocked-over garbage cans and graffiti-covered fences and walls said that this area was fast becoming a no-man’s-land. Squaring his shoulders, Dan stepped out of the car and walked up the cracked and crumbling sidewalk. The wooden steps creaked under his weight.

If the house is that bad, Dan surmised, then things aren’t going that well for Adam, either.

Dan paused for a moment before he rang the bell, reciting the words he had prepared to say in greeting: “Hello, Adam. I’m Dan, your son. And here’s a little something for killing my mother.” After which he intended to plant his fist in the older man’s face.

Except the person who answered the door wasn’t Adam Pardee. A sallow-faced woman cracked open the door and peered out at him. Her lower lip was split. Her right eye was swollen shut. She was holding an ice pack to a bruise on her battered cheek. Clearly Adam was up to his old tricks.

“Yes?” she said. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The sight of her face hit Dan like a blow. If his mother had lived, this might have been her future and his. Yes, Rebecca had asked her parents for help, but would she have been strong enough to walk away? A lot of domestic-violence victims never did. In fact, maybe that was what had provoked that final confrontation-maybe she had told Adam that she was taking Dan and leaving.

But this woman, this sad-faced woman who was standing in the doorway of Adam’s house, wasn’t responsible for what had happened years in the past. Even if Dan called his father out and beat him to a bloody pulp, Dan knew what would happen eventually. Adam Pardee was a coward and a bully. Once he was able to do so, he would go back to beating the current woman in his life-his wife, girlfriend, whatever. All Dan could do for her was to refuse to be a party to it. In all likelihood she’d be beaten again-that was a given-but it wouldn’t be Dan Pardee’s fault.

“I was looking for an old buddy of mine,” he mumbled quickly, making up the story as he went along. “His name’s John-John Grady.”

“You’re mistaken,” she said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“Who is it?” an irate male voice shouted from somewhere inside the house. “What do they want?”

Dan recognized the voice and the tone. Both had haunted his dreams for years. “Sorry,” he said to the woman as he backed away from the door. “I must have written the address down wrong.”

She closed the door and latched it. Hearing the sound of his father’s angry voice shouting through another closed door and across the intervening years made Dan’s heart hurt, but he understood that what Adam Pardee did or didn’t do, now or ever, was no longer Dan’s problem. With Micah Duarte’s words about knowing when to walk away echoing in his head, Dan returned to his waiting Taurus. He drove back to LAX, where he caught the first available flight back to Phoenix.

His grandfather picked him up at Sky Harbor. “I thought you were staying in L.A. for a couple of days.”

“I was,” Dan said, “but I changed my mind.”

“And the dog?”

“Bozo’s still in quarantine. Once he clears that, they’ll fly him to Sky Harbor, too.”

“Okay then,” Micah Duarte said. “Let’s go home.”

San Diego, California

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 9:02 p.m.

59º Fahrenheit

“N ine-one-one Emergency. What are you reporting?”

The woman on the other end of the line sounded nervous and uncertain. Louise Maynard was accustomed to that. Ten years into doing the job, Louise was used to prying the necessary information out of whomever was calling.

“It’s my sister,” the woman said shakily.

“Name?” Louise asked.

“My name or my sister’s?” the woman asked.

“Both,” Louise told her.

“My name is Corrine Lapin,” she said. “My sister’s name is Esther, Esther Southard. She lives in Thousand Oaks.”

The caller couldn’t see it, but by then Louise was shaking her head in frustration. “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ve called the emergency communications center in San Diego.”

“I know,” Corrine said. “That’s because I’m in San Diego. Yesterday was my birthday, and Esther didn’t call. She always calls on my birthday. I’m probably just being silly, but I’m worried that something is wrong.”

As far as Louise was concerned, calling because someone has missed your birthday wasn’t exactly like calling 911 to report that your fries at McDonald’s were served cold, but it was close.

“This line is for emergency calls only.”

“But it is an emergency,” Corrine insisted. “I was afraid if I tried calling the Thousand Oaks Police Department that they’d just blow me off.”

Louise understood that Corrine might well be right. After all, all 911 operators weren’t created equal.

“So what’s going on?” Louise asked.

“There’s no answer at Esther’s house,” Corrine said hurriedly. “And I’ve tried calling her cell, too. At first the calls kept going directly to her voice mail. Now it says that her mailbox is full, and she hasn’t called me back.”

“Maybe she’s just busy,” Louise suggested.

The caller immediately rejected that idea. “She sent me a text message on Monday saying that she and her husband were taking the kids and going away for a few days. She said they’d be driving up through Yosemite, but I’m worried something has happened to them. Maybe they’re lying in a ditch somewhere. Esther is like superglued to her iPhone. She doesn’t go anywhere without it.”

Louise had heard lots of wild things in her years as an emergency operator, and she had developed an instinct for what was bogus and what wasn’t. This sounded real.

“Give me your sister’s address,” she said now. “I’ll contact Thousand Oaks PD and have them look into it.”

“Thank you,” Corrine said. “I’m sure everything is fine. Esther will probably be mad at me for pushing panic buttons, but things have been so tough for them lately. Her husband, Jon, lost his job. She was afraid the bank was going to foreclose on their house.”

Nodding, Louise typed that information into her computer as well. The story was sounding more and more plausible by the moment.

“Why don’t you give me your contact information,” she said pleasantly to Corrine. “Just in case the responding officers need to get back in touch with you.”

When Corrine hung up a minute or so later, Louise could hear the relief in her voice, but Louise had a bad feeling about that. She suspected that Corrine Lapin’s relief wouldn’t last very long. Job losses and home foreclosures were up all over California. So were cases of murder and suicide.

With a click of her mouse, Louise passed Corrine’s information along to her 911 counterparts in Thousand Oaks. That done, she knew the situation was out of her hands. Unless a case made it into the local media, Louise never knew about what happened later, and that was just as well.

Not knowing all the gory details was what made it possible for her to do her job. Otherwise she would have been paralyzed every time she took a new call.

Yes, Louise Maynard was far better off not knowing about what had happened to Corrine Lapin’s sister Esther because she had a hunch that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 3:10 a.m.

65º Fahrenheit

Dan heard the thump, thump, thump of the approaching helicopter rotors. The familiar racket was enough to rouse him out of a restless sleep. For a moment he was back in Iraq, reaching for his weapons, bracing for action. Then he realized where he was-in a hospital room in Sells, Arizona, with a little orphaned Indian girl named Angie sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed beside his chair.

As the sound of the arriving helicopter jarred him awake, he forced his stiff body upright and sprinted toward the door and down the hall. Bozo was fearless about almost everything but not about helicopters. Suicide bombers didn’t scare him. Exploding IEDs didn’t bother him, either. His sensitive nose was able to sort out the presence of explosives, so he knew they were there and he was able to warn Dan.

Helicopters, on the other hand, could drop out of the sky toward them with no advance warning. One had done so when they’d been out on patrol. It was brought down by a handheld missile launcher, and it had fallen to earth only a few yards from where Dan and Bozo had been on patrol, killing both crew members on board.

As Dan bounded out the front door of the hospital, he saw the medevac helicopter landing in a far corner of the parking lot. He could also hear Bozo. Confined in the Expedition, the dog was on full alert and barking frantically. As Dan made for his vehicle, he caught sight of a patient being wheeled toward the helicopter.

Dan opened the door and Bozo leaped out, crashing into Dan in the process and almost knocking him over. The dog continued to bark, warning everyone within hearing range of what he perceived as a dire threat.

“It’s okay, Bozo,” Dan said, catching the dog by his collar, holding him, and calming the terrified animal as best he could. “It’s not going to hurt you.”

Bozo remained unconvinced. He continued to bark until the helicopter took off once more, disappearing into the moonlit distance.

While a pair of orderlies walked the empty gurney back into the hospital, Dr. Walker came across the lot.

“Bozo, I presume?” she asked. “He sounds pretty fierce.”

“That’s Bozo sounding scared as opposed to sounding fierce,” Dan told her. “He’s frightened of helicopters.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” Dan said.

Dr. Walker didn’t ask why Bozo was scared of helicopters, and Dan didn’t go into it. He was afraid he was going to get a lecture on all the noise. This was a hospital zone, after all.

“You left him out here in the car?” she asked.

“He’s fine,” Dan said. “He would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the helicopter.”

Bozo had quieted now. As Dan went to get the water bowl and a couple more bottles of water, Dr. Walker reached out and patted the dog’s head.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “The helicopter, I mean. We had a snakebite victim. We managed to get him stabilized enough to have him transported to the Phoenix Indian Medical Center.”

Dan Pardee knew all about the Indian Medical Center in Phoenix. It was where his grandmother, Maxine Duarte, had died. While undergoing chemo, she had developed a raging infection and had died of it with so little warning that Micah, at work in Safford, hadn’t been able to make it to the hospital in time.

“You’re staying the whole night?” Dr. Walker asked.

Dan nodded. “I told Angie about her mother,” he said. “I also told her that I’d stay with her until someone comes to pick her up later this morning.”

Bozo finished drinking the water, then walked over to one of the back tires to raise his leg.

“You’re sleeping on one of those god-awful chairs in Angie’s room?” Dr. Walker asked.

Dan nodded. “Not the best,” he agreed, “but I’ve slept in worse places.”

“I’ll see if I can get them to find a roll-away for that room. What about Bozo?”

“Now that the helicopter is gone and he’s had a drink, he’ll be fine.”

“Why don’t you bring him inside?”

Dan was astonished. “Into the hospital?”

“Sure,” Dr. Walker said with a grin, her white teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Didn’t you tell me Bozo is a certified therapy dog?”

“Dr. Walker,” he began, “I said no such thing.”

“Just bring his water dish along,” she said. “You’re welcome to call me Lani.”

“And I’m Dan,” he said. “Dan Pardee.”

Dan Pardee, the ohb.

Tucson, Arizona

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

73º Fahrenheit

Jonathan was careful to pay close attention to the speed limit as he drove into town. His heart skipped a beat when he saw flashing lights west of Three Points, but then he remembered the Border Patrol checkpoint. He drove up to it and stopped briefly before being waved through with no difficulty and no questions asked.

Back in Tucson proper, he made his way to one of the freeway hotels near downtown. Jonathan was from California. It made no sense to him that you’d have all the freeway entrances and exits blocked for miles. Few travelers seemed to have made their way to the nearly deserted businesses close to downtown. When he pulled into the Los Amigos Motel, the parking lot was almost empty, and the bored night clerk was more than happy to take cash for the room as opposed to a credit card.

Jonathan’s arm was giving him fits again. Once inside the room, he gulped down another dose of antibiotics and then made his way into the shower. The guy at Urgent Care had told him to keep the bandage dry, so he covered his bandaged arm with a hotel laundry bag and then held his right hand out of the shower as best he could. It felt good to let the hot water sluice over him even though washing his hair and scrubbing his body using only his left hand to grip the tiny bar of soap felt very strange.

Out of the shower, he lay on the bed and used Jack Tennant’s phone to call Aero Mexico. They had a flight leaving for Cancún at eleven-thirty the next morning.

“Do you wish to make a reservation?” the reservations clerk wanted to know.

“I’m not sure if I can make this work. I won’t know until tomorrow morning. Does it look overbooked?”

“Not at all,” the clerk told him. “I’m sure there will still be empty seats tomorrow.”

“Good,” he told her. “I’ll book the reservation when I’m sure I can get away.”

Relieved, Jonathan set the phone’s alarm clock function to awaken him at eight, then closed his phone and stretched out full length on the bed. After living in the minivan for several days, even a bad bed was a big improvement.

He knew that guilty consciences were supposed to keep you awake, but he didn’t feel guilty. He had done what had needed to be done for a very long time. Now he was worn out. Within moments he fell sound asleep and slept like a baby.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:15 a.m.

65º Fahrenheit

Brian Fellows was sitting in his Crown Victoria and grabbing a drink of water when Delia Ortiz herself appeared on the scene. Brian hadn’t seen the woman for years, not since her father-in-law’s funeral, but he recognized her as soon as she got out of Martin Ramon’s patrol car. Brian also knew that in the intervening years she had become a person of real consequence on the reservation.

“It’s good to see you again, Chairman Ortiz,” he said, extending his hand.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but this isn’t good.” She waved one hand in the general direction of all the crime scene activity. “I don’t like having the drug wars showing up on the reservation. Were the dead people involved in that?”

“Maybe,” Brian said. “But then again, maybe not. Mr. Rios claimed his son wasn’t involved in anything like that, but we’re asking for a warrant to search Donald’s place at Komelik just in case. What can you tell me about Delphina Enos?”

“She’s from Nolic,” Delia said. “She had a baby but the father ran off. She was staying with her parents, but there were some problems there. I helped her get a job in Sells-a job and a place to live.”

“I’ll need a warrant to search her place, too.”

Delia nodded. “Law and Order will get you whatever you need.”

“Good,” Brian said. “We’ll all have to work together on this-the tribe, Pima County, and Border Patrol.”

“All right.”

“Donald Rios’s father gave us a positive ID on his son. Can you do the same for Delphina?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That would be a big help.”

“I’ll do that for you if you’ll do a favor for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Martin told me on the way here that you speak Tohono O’odham. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you know that I don’t.”

Brian recalled something about that-something about Delia growing up far away from the reservation. “A little,” he said.

“The people in Nolic are old-fashioned,” she said. “I’d like you to go there with me to translate, if necessary. I know my officers could do it, but it might be better…”

Brian Fellows got it. Delphina Enos’s grieving relatives would be so traumatized by the news they probably wouldn’t remember if the information came to them in English or Tohono O’odham or a combination of both. But if officers from Law and Order were on the scene when the notification took place, they’d be more than slightly interested if their fearless leader was anything less than fluent in what should have been her own language.

“Sure,” Brian said easily. “I’ll be glad to go along and help out.”

That was how, two hours later, Detective Brian Fellows found himself sitting in a grim concrete-block house that belonged to Delphina’s parents, Louis and Carmen Escalante.

The house had been built some forty years earlier under a briefly and never completely funded program called TWEP, the Tribal Work Experience Project, which had allowed for the building of the bare bones of any number of houses on the reservation. Some had been successfully completed and improved. This one had not. The yard outside was littered with junk, including several moribund vehicles-two rusty pickups and one broken-down Camaro.

Brian fully expected to conduct the next-of-kin notification out in the yard, but Delia’s presence resulted in their being invited into the hot interior of the house. They walked up a makeshift wheelchair ramp into a sparsely furnished living room. The place was stifling. A decrepit swamp cooler sat perched in one window, but it wasn’t working. At least it wasn’t running.

Brian and Delia were directed to a dilapidated couch. Louis, looking thunderous, sat nearby in his wheelchair. Carmen brought a chair in from the kitchen and seated herself on that while Detective Brian Fellows, speaking in Tohono O’odham, explained that their daughter had been killed in a gun battle south of Topawa.

Louis and Carmen took the terrible news with what Brian thought to be remarkable restraint. Louis listened in silence and nodded.

“What about Angie?” Carmen asked softly. “Is she all right?”

“She’s in the hospital at Sells,” Delia Ortiz said, breaking into the conversation in English. “She’s not seriously injured. She’s got some cuts and scratches. As I understand it, the hospital is keeping her there mostly for observation. You can go pick her up in the morning.”

Carmen nodded in agreement. Her husband was the one who spoke out.

“No!” Louis said forcefully.

Carmen gaped at her husband while Brian, unsure of what was going on, glanced back and forth between them.

“You don’t mean that,” Carmen said. “Angie’s just a baby.”

“I told Delphina not to get mixed up with that boy,” Louis growled. “She did it anyway. Let Joaquin look after her.”

“But he doesn’t even know Angie,” Carmen objected. “Joaquin’s never come around, not once. I heard that he was in jail somewhere.”

Louis shrugged. “Let his parents do it, then. Angie can be their problem, not ours.”

Without another word, Carmen Escalante rose from where she sat, picked up her chair, and disappeared with it into the kitchen. Brian glanced at Delia Ortiz. What he read in her face was absolute contempt for both these people, the husband and the wife. No wonder the tribal chairman had found Delphina Escalante Enos a job to do and a place to live far away from this vindictive excuse for a father and a spineless mother.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you this kind of thing,” Brian said. “If you’d rather I came back later…”

“Ask,” Louis Escalante growled. “What do you want to know?”

“Was your daughter involved in drugs of any kind?”

“I don’t think so,” Louis said. “But you should talk to that man of hers. I’ve heard that about Joaquin Enos. He does all kinds of bad things. His daughter will probably grow up to do the same. Someone else will have to look after her, if they’re brave enough.”

“What do you mean, brave enough?” Brian asked.

Louis shrugged. “She’s alive,” he said, as if that was all that mattered. “If everyone else is dead, why is she still alive?”

“Because the killer didn’t see her,” Brian said.

“Yes,” Louis said, “Kok’oi Chehia.”

“Ghost Girl?” Brian asked.

Louis seemed startled that Brian understood what he had said. He shrugged and looked away.

When the interview was over, Brian drove Delia back to her home in Sells. He knew that at one time she and Leo had lived in the house Delia had inherited from her aunt Julia in Little Tucson, but sometime in the recent past they had moved back into the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station.

Delia directed him to the proper mobile home. Brian pulled up next to it. Rather than getting right out of the vehicle, Delia sat for some time with her hand resting on the door handle.

“Now you know why I gave Delia a job,” she said at last. “She and the baby needed to move out of there.”

Brian nodded. “Yes, I can see that,” he said. “But I’m surprised that the Escalantes won’t take in that poor little girl. She’s their granddaughter, for Pete’s sake. That doesn’t make any sense to me. What happened to her mother isn’t her fault.”

“No, but that’s how the Escalantes work,” Delia added. “Louis was talking about how bad Joaquin Enos is, but they’re not nice people, either.”

Brian knew enough to say nothing more. Instead, he waited for Delia to finish. “Louis is Lani Walker’s uncle,” she said finally. “Her blood uncle.”

Brian Fellows, who knew a lot about Lani Walker’s history, was taken aback. “Are you saying this is the same family, the people who wouldn’t take Lani back after she was bitten by all the ants?”

Delia nodded. “The same family,” she said. “They wouldn’t take Lani back because they thought she was dangerous.”

“And now they’re claiming Ghost Girl is dangerous, too,” Brian muttered. “What will happen to her?”

“We’ll check to see what the father’s family has to say,” Delia told him. “If they don’t want her, either, then I guess CPS will have to step in and decide what to do with her.”

“Angelina Enos is a possible witness to her mother’s murder,” Brian said after a pause. “The only reason she’s alive right now is that the killer doesn’t know she exists. If you place that little girl in state custody, you’ll leave a bureaucratic trail behind her-a paper trail that can be followed or a computer trail that can be hacked. People who want that kind of information know it’s there to be had for a price.

“Whoever killed those four people at Komelik tonight did so in cold blood and without a moment’s hesitation. That means they won’t think twice about coming back to take out an eyewitness, either, even a four-year-old eyewitness, and they’ll do whatever it takes to find her.”

“You think so?” Delia asked.

“Absolutely,” Brian said.

Delia thought about that for a while. Finally she sighed. “All right then, Detective Fellows,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do, and I appreciate your help.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And I hope you catch whoever did this,” she said. “The People need you to catch him.”

Brian Fellows nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I understand.”

And he did.