Queen of the Night

Six

South of Sells, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:00 p.m.

71º Fahrenheit

Considering the fact that it was a full moon, Dan’s sector seemed surprisingly quiet that night. With the summer rains still weeks away, daytime temperatures were nonetheless intense, especially for people out walking through the Sonora Desert ’s barren wasteland. With no concrete or blacktop to hold the heat, once the sun went down, temperatures plummeted, sometimes as much as thirty degrees. That was when the walkers often set off on their long and treacherous marches north. They tended to walk at night when it was cool and hole up during the heat of the day.

According to the memos sent down by the folks in Homeland Security, supposedly this was all about the war on terror, but in the year and a half Dan had been a Shadow Wolf, he had apprehended zero terrorists and literally hundreds of nonterrorists. The illegals spilled across the border day after day and night after night in a never-ending flood. They came to do backbreaking work in the fields or in the construction industry; in slaughterhouses and in restaurants.

The vast majority of them came with the burning desire to come to the United States and make something of themselves; to grab some small part of the American dream. As for the smugglers? By and large they were in it for themselves alone. They spared no thought and even less sympathy for the lives of the people they put in jeopardy.

Sometimes the illegal immigrants had paid money to be crammed into speeding Suburbans or rental trucks that crashed during high-speed chases and spilled dead and dying people in every direction. Sometimes illegals were taken to overcrowded houses and held as prisoners until their relatives could raise enough additional money to free them. But most of the illegals Dan encountered were the poorest of the poor-the ones who walked, making their way across the border and through the broiling desert, walking on bleeding feet and often dying of thirst in the process.

Several times Dan had come across the bodies of people who had fallen victim to heat and thirst and had been left behind to perish in the desert. Of those, Dan now recalled the three young women he had found dead. All had been in their late teens or early twenties. There was no sign of homicidal violence. All had died of natural causes-if sunstroke and dehydration could be considered natural. One of them had appeared to be five or six months pregnant at the time of her death.

Looking at her, waiting for the medical examiner’s van to find its way there, Dan had been outraged. “What the hell were you thinking?” he had demanded of the lifeless corpse. “What made you think that whatever you’d find here for you and your baby girl was better than what you had at home?”

That case had gotten to him-and still did. He wished he’d found her soon enough to save her and maybe even the unborn child. He still wondered about them from time to time. Where did they come from? Did the baby’s father have even the smallest inkling of what had happened to them? Was he already here in the States somewhere, waiting for them to show up and wondering what had happened to them? Or was he back home in Mexico? Maybe he was a creep and she had run away from home trying to escape from him.

As far as Dan knew, the lifeless victim had never been identified. She had been buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s corner of a Tucson cemetery. Dan had asked to be notified about the burial, and he was. He went to it wearing his full dress uniform. It seemed to him that he owed the poor young woman that much.

There was only one other person in attendance-a woman dressed entirely in black. Catching sight of her, Dan hoped she might be a relative. That hope lasted only until the end of the brief service. As Dan walked away from the grave site, the woman fell into step beside him.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she had demanded.

She was a middle-aged Anglo woman who shook her fist in Dan’s face as she spoke. Fortunately for her, Dan hadn’t brought Bozo along to the cemetery with him.

“I’m the one who found her,” he said. “I came to pay my respects.”

“Respects, my ass,” she retorted. “You guys are the ones out there killing these poor people.”

Dan had simply turned and walked away. Later he had read about an organization of women who made it a point to have a visible presence at the funeral of every illegal who died attempting to cross the border, and not just the ones who died on the reservation, either. They called themselves the WWC-Women Who Care.

The Shadow Wolves had another name for them. They called them witches.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:15 p.m.

69º Fahrenheit

On his way back from The Gate, Dan stopped on the shoulder periodically and scanned the surrounding desert with his night-vision goggles. The temperature had plummeted. When he was outside the truck he was glad to slip on a windbreaker. There was plenty of southbound vehicular traffic heading to the dance at Vamori, but not much northbound. For a change, there was no sign of walkers or of overloaded SUVs, either.

On the far side of Baboquivari, the full moon was turning the sky a lighter shade of gray, but it would take time for the moon itself to gain enough altitude to be visible over the crest of the hulking mountain barrier.

At Vamori, Dan turned into the parking lot and made his way through the collection of parked cars in search of any vehicles that didn’t fit in with the pickups and aging minivans that were the preferred mode of reservation transportation. Driving with the window open, he smelled the wood smoke from the cooking fires outside the feast house. A generator roared somewhere in the background, providing electricity to light the dusty dance floor and to power the speakers for the thumping chicken-scratch band.

On his side of the car, Bozo whined. “Smells good, doesn’t it,” Dan told him. “We’ll stop at the next wide spot in the road and have that sandwich.”

That opportunity came a few miles later as they neared Komelik. The turnoff where he had noticed activity earlier seemed to have had several visiting vehicles since he had stopped to look at the tracks on his way south.

That seemed as good a reason and place to stop as any. Leaving Bozo in the vehicle, Dan squatted in the road and examined the new tracks that overlaid the old ones. He could pick out another pair of sedan tracks along with another vehicle, probably an SUV. It was possible that the vehicles might belong to illegal traffickers of some kind, but with the dance going on only a few miles away, it could mean something as harmless as someone stopping off to have a few beers without drawing the attention of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s Law and Order.

“Come on,” he said to Bozo as he opened the door and unfastened the dog’s harness. “We’ll eat later. Let’s go have a look.”

Just then the moon finally crested the mountain, and the desert lit up in a wash of silvery light. Distant strains of music from the dance, mostly a faint drumbeat, traveled on the still night air. Other than that, the night was quiet. Eerily quiet.

Dan could smell something-a flowerlike perfume, although he couldn’t imagine what kind of flower would be blooming way out here in the middle of nowhere. The two things taken together-the strange scent on the air and the silence-struck Dan as odd. Bozo, too, seemed uneasy. He growled softly and the hackles rose on his neck. Attuned to his dog’s every mood, Dan reacted accordingly as the hair on the back of Dan’s neck rose as well.

“What is it, boy?” he asked. In answer, the dog whined again.

“Let’s go see.”

Keeping hold of Bozo’s leash, Dan moved forward. A quarter of a mile into the desert, Dan caught sight of a vehicle, a Chevrolet Blazer with Arizona plates. It sat parked just behind a small white sedan. That meant that the people in the two vehicles were here together. It also meant that if something bad was going on, Dan could be outnumbered two to one or more, although really, Bozo’s presence evened those odds.

Despite the pair of vehicles and the probable number of people, there was no sign of laughter or conversation in the vast moonlit wilderness, and no sign of movement, either. That was another oddity. If people were sitting around drinking beer, there would be talking and laughter and, most likely, cigarette smoke as well.

Dan approached the Blazer warily. The back passenger door was open. Glancing inside, Dan caught sight of a child’s booster seat of some kind and a child’s plastic pinwheel. On the floor were a pair of tiny tennis shoes, but there was no sign of a child.

“There’s a little kid out here somewhere, Boze,” Dan said reassuringly to the dog. “So it’s probably okay.”

But Bozo didn’t act like it was okay. The dog was still on high alert, which meant Dan needed to be on alert as well.

In front of the sedan, Dan caught sight of the first real sign of trouble. Two women’s purses lay open and empty in the ground, with a collection of stuff-lipsticks, papers, photos, ID cards, and credit cards-scattered all around. He also spotted two men’s wallets.

There were two purses and two wallets. That told Dan that he had stumbled on a robbery-a robbery with at least four victims. Was it still in progress? He touched the hood of the sedan. It was still warm, as in daylight warm, but the engine had been off long enough to cool down. That meant that the vehicle had been parked here for some time.

Far more wary now, Dan drew his weapon but kept a tight hold on Bozo’s leash. “Quiet,” he whispered to the dog. “Heel.”

Leaving the debris field and the Blazer behind, dog and man stepped forward again. Ahead of them in the desert he saw a glow that wasn’t moonlight and wasn’t firelight, either. It was possible he was seeing lights from another vehicle-the bad guy’s vehicle-but the light was more diffuse than headlight beams would have been. No, the glow came from some other source, and it wasn’t all in one spot. Parts of it seemed to flicker a little while another part was steady, but there was still no sound at all, nothing but an unnerving silence.

Dan knew that whatever had happened was bad. His first move should have been to turn around, return to his Expedition, call in his position, and radio for help. But he also knew that help of any kind was miles away. If there were people here who were being held against their will, he, Dan Pardee, was their only hope. Waiting for backup could take too long.

Walking silently, Dan and Bozo rounded a thick clump of mesquite. Beyond that they caught sight of some of the light source. On either side of a rough path and set about eight feet apart were glowing luminarias. They had been lit for some time. The small candles in the sand-filled paper bags were beginning to sputter and go out. Some of them had already done so.

Dan knew that luminarias were used mostly in celebrations, so this event, whatever it was, had started out as a party of some kind, a party that had gone terribly wrong. Beside him, Bozo strained at his leash. The dog’s ears were pricked forward, his body tense.

Dan knew that perps were often more scared of facing dogs than they were of facing weapons. For one thing, bullets could go astray. Dogs, on the other hand, hardly ever missed their target.

Right now, the only thing Dan and Bozo had going for them was the element of surprise. It was possible that the bad guy was long gone. It was equally possible that he had relieved his victims of some booze in addition to their purses and wallets and was now passed out somewhere nearby. There were plenty of stupid bad guys out there-ones who got drunk or high before they bothered getting away.

Dan had utmost faith in Bozo’s innate sense of what constituted danger and what did not. His response to threats was immediate and unrelenting, complete with biting jaws and snapping teeth, but he posed no peril to people who were harmless. That was part of what made Bozo so valuable. Some dogs can sniff out tumors or sense oncoming seizures. In Iraq, Bozo had demonstrated an uncanny ability to sense danger-to perceive and unmask a potential suicide bomber hiding inside a woman’s burka.

He was doing the same thing now. Kneeling down, Dan released the catch on Bozo’s collar.

“Show me,” he whispered.

Most police dogs are trained to charge forward, barking a warning as they go. Not Bozo. He sprang forward, silent and lethal, and went racing down the candlelit path with Dan behind him in hot pursuit. Unlike the dog’s lightning paws, Dan’s feet made an ungodly noise, enough that he might well waken whomever was sleeping.

So much for surprise, he thought.

Bozo disappeared over a small rise. Before Dan could clear it, he heard a bloodcurdling scream-a child’s scream. Dan topped the rise in time to see movement. A small flash of white raced away from him into the desert, still screaming.

The child, Dan thought. The child from the car seat. A terrified child.

“Down,” he shouted at Bozo. “Leave it!”

The dog dropped to his belly as though he’d been shot. Most of the nearby luminarias had gone out. Dan paused long enough to extract his flashlight from a belt loop. As soon as he turned it on, he saw the first body. A woman, an Indian woman from the looks of her, lay facedown on the path several feet ahead of him. Hurrying to her side, he knelt and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. He could see a small wound in the middle of her back, but under her he could see the pool of blood from an exit wound that had had soaked into the dirt. She hadn’t died immediately, but he knew she had bled out shortly after being shot.

Silence had descended once more. Wherever the terrified child had gone, he or she was quiet now, quiet and hiding. No wonder. Anyone who had witnessed this horror had reason to be petrified, but before Dan went searching for the frightened child, he needed to assess what he was up against.

“Right here,” Dan whispered to Bozo. Once again, man and dog moved forward as one.

Ten feet down the path they came across the next body. This one, an Indian male who looked to be in his early thirties, lay on his back. He’d been shot twice-once in the chest and once in the head. He, too, was dead.

“So the woman was running away and she was shot in the back,” Dan said, explaining what he was seeing to himself as well as to the uncomprehending dog. “This guy here probably was trying to fend off the bad guy.”

The man had been dead for some time-long enough for most of the visible blood to dry. Dan knew that meant there was a good chance that the perpetrator had taken off, but maybe not. Perhaps that was only wishful thinking on his part. Just to be on the safe side, he didn’t holster his weapon. The last of the luminarias burned out, but a steady light still glowed in the distance.

The path rounded a looming clump of mesquite. There Dan found something that made no sense. The remains of a cloth-covered dining table and two chairs lay on the ground surrounded by a scatter of broken glassware, dishes, and silverware. Two still forms lay on either side of the fallen table, forms Dan suspected were also bodies.

Closer examination proved that to be true. These two, presumably Anglos, appeared to be an older couple somewhere in their sixties or maybe seventies. It looked as though the two of them had been seated at the table when they were attacked. The woman lay next to one of the chairs, as though she had been taken by surprise. It appeared to Dan that the man had sprung forward to fend off the attacker and had been shot full in the face.

Dan squatted on his haunches and looked around. These two victims, like the other two, had been dead for some time, even though the coppery smell of blood still lingered in the air, along with that same pervasive scent of flowers.

Bodies and flowers, Dan thought. Like a funeral.

“So where’s the kid?” Dan muttered to Bozo.

Standing up, he looked around, shining the flashlight in every direction. There was no sign of the child, but whoever it was had fled in the direction of the still-glowing light, the steady one, which was now just beyond another low rise.

“Hello,” he called. “I’m a police officer. Border Patrol. Where are you? Let me help you.”

There was no reply, but that was hardly surprising. If the kid had been here earlier and had seen all these people being shot, no wonder he had run away when he caught sight of someone else carrying a drawn weapon.

“Come on,” he said to Bozo. “We’ll look for the kid in a little while. Right now we need to call this in.”

Together they jogged back to the Expedition, where Dan radioed into Dispatch, letting them know what he’d found and giving the location of the crime scene as well as the condition of the four homicide victims.

Seconds later, Paul Jacobs, the night-watch supervisor, came on the line. “Drug deal gone bad?”

“Unlikely,” Dan answered. “Maybe a straight-out robbery.”

“Could it be we’ve got members of rival cartels duking it out?” Jacobs suggested.

“No,” Dan said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know that many elderly Anglo drug dealers. Besides, there’s no sign of a weapon on any of the victims, and no sign of the shooter as well.”

“Should I set up roadblocks?”

“I doubt it,” Dan said. “It’s probably too late for those to do any good. The killer’s back in Tucson by now or else in Mexico.”

“You told Dispatch the victims are both Anglo and Indian?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Two of each.”

“Dispatch is contacting both Law and Order and Pima County?”

“That’s right. There’s a dance at Vamori tonight. Law and Order probably has a presence at that.”

“Is it possible these four people left the dance and came to that location to do some partying?”

“They weren’t together,” Dan said. “There were only two chairs.”

“Chairs?” Jacobs objected. “I thought you said this was out in the middle of the desert.”

“It is. It looks to me like the Anglo couple was having a picnic-at a table with a white cloth and good dishes. I’d say the Indians just happened by. I recognize both vehicles. The Lexus I’ve seen poking around here off and on when I was working day shift. As for the Blazer? I’m pretty sure it belongs to an Indian who lives somewhere around here. I think his father runs cattle in the area.”

“You called in the vehicle information?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “Records has it.”

Bozo whined again, looking off into the desert. Dan’s heart beat hard and fast in his chest. Maybe he was wrong and the killer was still lurking out there somewhere in the dark.

Bozo made as if to head off into the brush. Dan called him back.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Come here.”

“Who are you talking to?” Jacobs wanted to know. “I thought you said there was no one else at the scene.”

“It’s my dog,” Dan said into the radio. “I’ve gotta go.”

He slammed the microphone down. “Bozo,” he ordered. “Right here!”

If the killer was still out there, Dan had the ultimate secret weapon-Bozo. If this turned out to be nothing more than a game of hide-and-seek with a petrified little kid, Dan Pardee could trust Bozo to handle that as well.

Remembering the tiny pair of tennis shoes he had seen on the floorboard of the Blazer, Dan hurried over to the vehicle, collected one of the shoes, and held it out to the dog long enough for Bozo to get the scent.

“Find it,” he ordered.

For the second time that evening, Dan released Bozo’s leash and the dog galloped away from him while his master, Beretta in hand, raced after him.

This time, Bozo ran on a trajectory that took them straight from the cars toward the steadily glowing light. Unable to keep pace with the dog, Dan reached the source of the light-a battery-powered lantern sitting under a towering ironwood-just as a barefoot child, a little girl, darted out from beneath the tree, screaming.

“Ban,” she sobbed, racing toward Dan with her arms outstretched. “ Ban! Ban! Ban! Don’t let him eat me!”

Dan managed to reholster his Beretta as the girl threw her body against his knees. He reached down and swung her up to his hip, where she clung to him like a burr.

Dan knew enough Tohono O’odham to realize that she had mistaken Bozo for a coyote.

“Sit,” Dan said to Bozo. To the girl, he added, “Not ban. This is a dog. Gogs. His name is Bozo. He won’t hurt you.”

For this one child at least, Dan Pardee wasn’t ohb. He was her savior. She wrapped her arms around his neck and continued to sob, her tears soaking his shirt. There was blood on her arms and on her legs and feet. No doubt she had cut herself running barefoot through the rocks and brush. She was quaking, whether from fear or cold, he couldn’t tell.

Dan was still standing under the tree holding her when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a hint of movement in the tree above them. He started to reach for his pistol again, but then, looking more closely, he realized that what he had seen was the light from the lantern reflecting off a flower-an immense white flower. An even closer inspection revealed that there were actually dozens of the huge white blooms glowing luminously along the ironwood tree’s sturdy trunk and winding their way up into the branches.

The girl stopped crying abruptly, but her breath still came in hiccups. She was shivering. “That’s a dog?” she asked, pointing at Bozo. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure he’s a dog,” Dan told her reassuringly. He slipped off his windbreaker and wrapped it around her.

“What’s his name again?”

“Bozo.”

“That’s a funny name,” she said.

“He’s a funny dog,” Dan said. “Would you like to pet him?”

He started to kneel down next to Bozo, but the little girl wasn’t totally convinced. Shrinking against him, she resumed her death grip around his neck.

“What about you?” he asked. “Do you have a name?”

She nodded and gave him a tiny shy smile. “Angie.”

“Where’s your mommy, Angie?” he asked.

Still trembling, she took a long shuddery breath. Her eyes were enormous. “Over there,” she said, pointing. “She’s sleeping. She won’t wake up.”

“Did you see what happened?”

Angie shook her head. “I was sleeping. When I woke up, the car wasn’t moving. Donald wasn’t there. Mommy was gone, too, but I saw a man, a Milgahn man, walking away from the car. He was carrying a gun.”

Dan took a deep breath. The investigation into what had happened here had just taken a gigantic step forward. This massacre in the desert had a witness-an eyewitness.

“This man with the gun,” Dan said, “did you know him? Is he someone you had seen before?”

The little girl shook her head somberly.

“No.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

Angie nodded. “A little,” she said. “Mommy always says when Bad People come around, you should be very still so they don’t notice you. That’s what I did. I was quiet, and pretty soon he went away. After a while, I went looking for my mommy. She’s sleeping. So is Donald, and those other people, too.”

“Do you know the other people?”

“I just know Donald,” she said.

“And what were you doing here?”

She shrugged. “We were on our way to the dance, but Donald said there was something he wanted to show us first. He said it was a big surprise and that we’d really like it, but that when we got there we’d have to get out of the car and walk.”

Dan nodded. So the victims had come expecting a surprise. Instead they had unexpectedly driven into an ambush by an armed gunman. With that in mind, it surprised Dan to realize that Angie had been more scared of coyotes than she had been of someone carrying a gun.

“My name is Dan,” he told her now. “Like I said before, this big guy here is my dog.”

“Can I pet him?” Angie asked. Now that she’d been properly introduced to Bozo, she was evidently ready to be friends.

“Sure.” Dan had been holding Angie. The night air was chilly, but Bozo was panting. Dan set the child down next to the dog. Bozo stood still as a statue while the tiny girl wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her bleeding face in the soft fur of his shoulder.

“Bozo and I are here to help you,” Dan said. “Are you hungry?”

Angie nodded.

“Thirsty?”

“Yes.”

“My truck is back over there,” he said. “I have some sandwiches, some chips, and some sodas in a cooler. Would you like one of those?”

“I’m not supposed to drink Cokes,” she said, frowning, “but sometimes I do. Will you wake my mommy?”

“I’ll try,” he said. It was a lie, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “First let me get you back to my truck. Since you’re barefoot, I’ll carry you.”

Without a word, she let go of Bozo’s neck and held out her arms to him. He lifted her up and carried her back the way they had come rather than back past the two vehicles and the four bloodied victims. As they walked, Angie’s face rested in the crook of his neck. He was glad she didn’t look up at his face right then because she would have seen he was crying, too.

He had been in a scene similar to this one once before; only back then, Dan Pardee had been the child, and someone else-some other uniformed police officer-had been carrying a no-longer-innocent child away from a room filled with unimaginable carnage.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:30 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

As they drove back to the house in Gates Pass, Gabe fell asleep in the backseat. Lani was grateful for the break from his never-ending questions. It let her concentrate on worrying about her mother.

For much of the day, Diana had been strangely silent, and Lani didn’t know what to make of her mother’s odd behavior.

Lani had been back home for only a few months now, and she was living in the hospital housing compound out at Sells rather than at home with her parents in her old room. Since returning to the Tucson area, Lani had noticed that her parents had changed while she’d been away in Denver doing her residency. She supposed that part of the changes had to do with their getting older, but then so had she. She wasn’t the same person she had been when she graduated from high school or even when she had gotten her premed degree from the University of North Dakota. Since she had changed, it made no sense that she should expect her parents to remain the same.

“You should get married,” Diana said now.

“Married?” Lani repeated, nearly driving off the narrow road in surprise.

That was the last thing she expected her mother to say. Lani had been focused on her career-on becoming the best possible physician she could learn to be and on bringing those skills back to her own people, where native-born doctors were in short supply and where doctors who were Tohono O’odham were completely nonexistent. But the question itself shocked Lani. She was still mulling a possible answer when her mother continued.

“Yes, married,” Diana said. “I want to live long enough to have another grandchild.”

She and Brandon Walker already had one grandson. Davy and Candace’s son Tyler was nine now. As far as Lani was concerned, he was a spoiled brat and obnoxious besides. He hadn’t had the benefit of being raised by Nana Dahd, and it showed. There was something to be said for the old traditions in which the aunts and uncles supplied the discipline, but Candace had made it clear to all concerned that help with her son in that regard would not be welcome.

“We barely see Tyler as it is,” Diana said. “And the minute the divorce is final, no matter what the custody agreement says, what’s-her-name is going to take him back to Chicago to her parents, and we won’t get to see him at all.”

What’s-her-name? Lani wondered, repeating her mother’s phrase. Davy and Candace have been married for more than ten years, and Mom can’t remember her name? What’s going on?

That’s what she thought, but it wasn’t what she said aloud. “Davy is an attorney,” Lani replied. “He’s not going to let that happen.”

“The problem with Davy is that he’s a nice guy,” her mother corrected. “His wife’s been walking all over him for years. That’s not going to change, so you should get married.”

Lani couldn’t see how one thing automatically led to the other, but she decided that it was better to treat the whole discussion as a joke rather than be distressed by what she couldn’t help but regard as an invasion of her privacy.

“I’ll think about it,” Lani said, laughing. “But don’t hold your breath. I don’t see many prospects for matrimony walking into my life any time soon.”

She hoped that was enough to put the discussion to bed. Unfortunately, the next topic of conversation was even worse.

“What did Mitch Johnson do to you?” Diana asked.

“Mitch Johnson?” Lani repeated. “Why bring him up after all these years?”

“Tell me,” Diana urged. “He must have done something to you. What?”

“You know what he did to me,” Lani answered. “He kidnapped me and tried to kill me.”

That was the obvious part. Drugging her, kidnapping her, and torturing her when Lani was sixteen years old had been yet another move in Andrew Carlisle’s and Mitch Johnson’s ongoing war with Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. The ultimate goal had been to rob them of everything they held most dear-their children. Mitch had planned to kill both Lani and Brandon ’s son Quentin.

In this conversation, Lani knew exactly what Diana really wanted to know. It was one of Lani’s darkest secrets. Fat Crack had known about it, but as far as she knew, he was the only one.

Mitch Johnson had burned her. He had heated up kitchen tongs and then he had clamped the red-hot metal on the tender flesh of her breast. She understood that, in performing that particularly barbarous act, Mitch had been functioning as Andrew Carlisle’s instrument and doing his master’s bidding. The scar he had left on Lani’s body mimicked the mark Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother during his attack on Diana years before Lani was born. At least two of Carlisle ’s other victims had been defiled in the same fashion.

As a child Lani had seen the scar on her mother’s body, and she hadn’t questioned it. In fact, when Lani was five, in an attempt to be more like her mom, she had gone so far as to use her mother’s concealer to draw a similar pale circle on her own body.

Nana Dahd had been a constant presence in Lani’s young life, and that was the only time she remembered Rita Antone being angry. She had ordered Lani to scrub the offending makeup from her body and never to talk about it, lest someone do the same thing to her.

Years later, when it had happened, when Mitch had burned her in just that way, Lani had been ashamed because she believed she had brought it on herself-that she had somehow attracted this terrible thing and caused it to come to her.

After that, Mitch had taken Lani and a still-drugged Quentin to a limestone cavern under Ioligam, I’itoi’s sacred mountain, which the Anglos call Kitt Peak. Deep in the cavern, Lani had managed to outwit her would-be killer by turning the darkness to her advantage. In a desperate game of hide-and-seek, she had managed to stay tantalizingly out of reach and had fooled him into chasing her into a darkened passageway where he had plunged to his death.

The Tohono O’odham are a peace-loving people who kill only to feed themselves or in self-defense. When a warrior kills an enemy in battle, tradition dictates that he undergo e lihmhun, a sixteen-day-long purification ceremony that includes both fasting and solitude.

For that whole time, Lani had stayed on the mountain by herself, with Fat Crack Ortiz, tribal chairman and medicine man, as her only companion. Each day he would bring her that day’s single meal of salt-free food. It was to Fat Crack, and only to him, that Lani had confided the full extent of her injuries.

Fat Crack had been a reluctant joiner of the medicine-man circle. Before being tapped to assume that mantle by an old blind medicine man named Looks at Nothing, Fat Crack Ortiz had been blithely living his life as a practicing Christian Scientist. Although he still believed in the tenets of Mary Baker Eddy, he had not inflicted his own beliefs on Lani. Instead, Fat Crack had driven into Tucson, stopped at the nearest Walgreens, and purchased salves and ointments to soothe the burns on her breast.

By the time the sixteen days were up, the wound had healed enough that Lani hadn’t bothered to mention it to either of her parents. She had spent the rest of her high school and college years assiduously avoiding naked showers in PE or dormitories. Her roommates in North Dakota had teased her about being a prude, but the scar, faded now with the help of a scar reducer, was Lani’s secret. Fat Crack had been dead for years. She had told no one else, but now her mother was asking her about it. Why?

They pulled into the driveway outside Brandon and Diana’s home. A motion-activated floodlight came on, illuminating the whole area. Moments later, the porch light came on as well. Lani’s father opened the door.

The silence between mother and daughter had gone on far longer than it should have.

“Well?” Diana insisted.

“Mitch Johnson tried to kill me and he failed,” Lani said. “End of story.”

Except Lani knew that wasn’t the end of the story at all. Something else was going on here. She wished she could sit down with her father and talk to him about it. Between them they might be able to figure out what was happening with Lani’s mother, but that wasn’t possible, not tonight.

Brandon walked over to the passenger side of the Passat, opened the door, and helped his wife out of the vehicle.

“It’s about time you brought her home,” he said, smiling across the now-empty seat in Lani’s direction. “I was about to come looking for you or send out a posse.”

Lani was grateful for his teasing. It gave her exactly what she needed just then-a change of subject.

In the backseat, Gabe’s eyes opened and he sat up straight. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Dropping my mother off,” Lani answered.

“I’m going to sit up front then,” he said.

Lani waited until he had clambered into the front seat and buckled himself in.

“Oi g hihm,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s go.”

“By all means,” Lani said, grateful to escape. “Let’s.”