Queen of the Night

J. A. Jance

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Here’s a sneak preview of J. A. Jance’s new novel

About the Author

By J. A. Jance

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

THEY SAY IT happened long ago that a young woman of the Tohono O’odham, the Desert People, fell in love with a Yaqui warrior, a Hiakim, and went to live with him and his people, far to the South. Every evening, her mother, Old White- Haired Woman, would go outside by herself and listen. After a while her daughter’s spirit would speak to her from her new home far away. One day Old White-Haired Woman heard nothing, so she went to find her husband.

“Our daughter is ill,” Old White-Haired Woman told him. “I must go to her.”

“But the Hiakim live far from here,” he said, “and you are a bent old woman. How will you get there?”

“I will ask I’itoi, the Spirit of Goodness, to help me.”

Elder Brother heard the woman’s plea. He sent Coyote, Ban, to guide Old White-Haired Woman’s steps on her long journey, and he sent the Ali Chu Chum O’odham, the Little People—the animals and birds—to help her along the way. When she was thirsty, Ban led her to water. When she was hungry, the Birds, U’u Whig, brought her seeds and beans to eat.

After weeks of traveling, Old White-Haired Woman finally reached the land of the Hiakim. There she learned that her daughter was sick and dying.

“Please take my son home to our people,” Old White-Haired Woman’s daughter begged. “If you don’t, his father’s people will turn him into a warrior.”

You must understand, nawoj, my friend, that from the time the Tohono O’odham emerged from the center of the earth, they have always been a peace-loving people. So one night, when the Hiakim were busy feasting, Old White-Haired Woman loaded the baby into her burden basket and set off for the North. When the Yaqui learned she was gone, they sent a band of warriors after her to bring the baby back.

Old White-Haired Woman walked and walked. She was almost back to the land of the Desert People when the Yaqui warriors spotted her. I’itoi saw she was not going to complete her journey, so he called a flock of shashani, black birds, who flew into the eyes of the Yaqui and blinded them. While the warriors were busy fighting shashani, I’itoi took Old White-Haired Woman into a wash and hid her.

By then the old grandmother was very tired and lame from all her walking and carrying.

“You stay here,” Elder Brother told her. “I will carry the baby back to your people, but while you sit here resting, you will be changed. Because of your bravery, your feet will become roots. Your tired old body will turn into branches. Each year, for one night only, you will become the most beautiful plant on the earth, a flower the Milgahn, the whites, call the night-blooming cereus, the Queen of the Night.”

And it happened just that way. Old White-Haired Woman turned into a plant the Indians call ho’ok-wah’o, which means Witch’s Tongs. But on that one night in early summer when a beautiful scent fills the desert air, the Tohono O’odham know that they are breathing in kok’oi ’uw, Ghost Scent, and they remember a brave old woman who saved her grandson and brought him home.

Each year after that, on the night the flowers bloomed, the Tohono O’odham would gather around while Brought Back Child told the story of his brave grandmother, Old White-Haired Woman, and that, nawoj, my friend, is the same story I have just told you.

San Diego, California

Saturday, March 21, 1959, Midnight

58º Fahrenheit

Long after everyone else had left the beach and returned to the hotel, and long after the bonfire died down to coals, Ursula Brinker sat there in the sand and marveled over what had happened. What she had allowed to happen.

When June Lennox had invited Sully to come along to San Diego for spring break, she had known the moment she said yes that she was saying yes to more than just a fun trip from Tempe, Arizona, to California. The insistent tug had been there all along, for as long as Sully could remember. From the time she was in kindergarten, she had been interested in girls, not boys, and that hadn’t changed. Not later in grade school when the other girls started drooling over boys, and not later in high school, either.

But she had kept the secret. For one thing, she knew how much her parents would disapprove if Sully ever admitted to them or to anyone else what she had long suspected— that she was a lesbian. She didn’t go around advertising it or wearing mannish clothing. People said she was “cute,” and she was—cute and smart and talented. She didn’t know exactly what would happen to her if people figured out who she really was, but it probably wouldn’t be good. She did a good job of keeping up appearances, so no one guessed that the girl who had been valedictorian of her class and who had been voted most likely to succeed was actually queer “as a three-dollar bill.” That was what some of the boys said about people like that—people like her. And she was afraid that by talking about it, what she was feeling right now would be snatched away from her, like a mirage melting into the desert.

She had kept the secret until now. Until today. With June. And she was afraid, if she left the beach and went back to the hotel room with everyone else and spoke about it, if she gave that newfound happiness a name, it might disappear forever as well.

The beach was deserted. When she heard the sand- muffled footsteps behind her, she thought it might be June. But it wasn’t.

“Hello,” she said. “When did you get here?”

He didn’t answer that question. “What you did was wrong,” he said. “Did you think you could keep it a secret? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“It just happened,” she said. “We didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“But you did,” he said. “More than you know.”

He fell on her then. Had anyone been walking past on the beach, they wouldn’t have paid much attention. Just another young couple carried away with necking; people who hadn’t gotten themselves a room, and probably should have.

But in the early hours of that morning, what was happening there by the dwindling fire wasn’t an act of love. It was something else altogether. When the rough embrace finally ended, the man stood up and walked away. He walked into the water and sluiced away the blood.

As for Sully Brinker? She did not walk away. The brainy cheerleader, the girl who had it all—money, brains, and looks—the girl once voted most likely to succeed would not succeed at anything because she was lying dead in the sand—dead at age twenty-one—and her parents’ lives would never be the same.

Los Angeles, California

Saturday, October 28, 1978, 11:20 P.M.

63º Fahrenheit

As the quarrel escalated, four-year-old Danny Pardee cowered in his bed. He covered his head with his pillow and tried not to listen, but the pillow didn’t help. He could still hear the voices raging back and forth: his father’s voice and his mother’s. Turning on the TV set might have helped, but if his father came into the bedroom and found the set on when it wasn’t supposed to be, Danny knew what would happen. First the belt would come off and, after that, the beating.

Danny knew how much that belt hurt, so he lay there and willed himself not to listen. He tried to fill his head with the words to one of the songs he had learned at preschool: “You put your right foot in; you put your right foot out. You put your right foot in, and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.”

He was about to go on to the second verse when he heard something that sounded like a firecracker—or four firecrackers in a row, even though it wasn’t the Fourth of July.

Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam.

After that there was nothing. No other sound. Not his mother’s voice and not his father’s, either. An eerie silence settled over the house. First it filled Danny’s ears and then his heart.

Finally the bedroom door creaked open. Danny knew his father was standing in the doorway, staring down at him, so he kept both eyes shut—shut but not too tightly shut. That would give it away. He didn’t move. He barely breathed. At last, after the door finally clicked closed, he opened his eyes and let out his breath.

He listened to the silence, welcoming it. The room wasn’t completely dark. Streetlights in the parking lot made the room a hazy gray, and there was a sliver of light under the doorway. Soon that went away. Knowing that his father had probably left to go to a bar and drink some more, Danny was able to relax. As the tension left his body, he fell into a deep sleep, slumbering so peacefully that he never heard the sirens of the arriving cop cars or of the useless ambulance that arrived far too late. Danny had no idea that the gunshot victim, his mother, was dead long before the ambulance got there.

Much later, at least it seemed much later to him, someone—a stranger in a uniform—gently shook him awake. The cop wrapped the tangled sheet around Danny and lifted him from the bed.

“Come on, little guy,” he said huskily. “Let’s get you out of here.”

Thousand Oaks, California

Monday, June 1, 2009, 11:45 P.M.

60º Fahrenheit

It was late, well after eleven, as Jonathan sat in the study of his soon-to-be-former McMansion and stared at his so-called wall of honor. The plaques and citations he saw there—his Manager of the Year award, along with all the others that acknowledged his years of exemplary service, were relics from another time and place—from another life. They were the currency and language of some other existence, where the rules as he had once known them no longer applied.

What had happened on Wall Street had trickled down to Main Street. As a result, his banking career was over. His job was gone. His house would be gone soon, and so would his family. He wasn’t supposed to know about the boyfriend Esther had waiting in the wings, but he did. He also knew what she was really waiting for—the money from his 401(k). She wanted that, too, and she wanted it now.

Esther came in then—barged in, really—without knocking. The fact that he might want a little privacy was as foreign a concept as the paltry career trophies still hanging on his walls. She stood there staring at him, hands on her hips.

“You changed the password on the account,” she said accusingly.

“The account I changed the password on isn’t a joint account,” he told her mildly. “It’s mine.”

“We’re still married,” she pointed out. “What’s yours is mine.”

And, of course, that was the way it had always been. He worked. She stayed home and saw to it that they lived beyond their means, which had been considerable when he’d still had a good job. The problem was he no longer had that job, but she was still living the same way. As far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. For him everything had changed. Esther had gone right on spending money like it was water, but now the well had finally run dry. There was no job and no way to get a job. Banks didn’t like having bankers with overdue bills and credit scores in the basement.

“I signed the form when you asked me to so we could both get the money,” she said. “I want my fair share.”

He knew there was nothing about this that was fair. It was the same stunt his mother had pulled on his father, making him cough up money that she had never earned. Well, maybe the scenario wasn’t exactly the same. As far as he knew, his mother hadn’t screwed around on his father, but Jonathan had vowed it wouldn’t happen to him—would never happen to him. Yet here it was happening—and then some.

“It may be in an individual account, but that money is a joint asset,” Esther declared. “You don’t get to have it all.”

She was screaming at him now. He could hear her and so could anyone else in the neighborhood. He was glad they lived at the end of the cul-de-sac—with previously foreclosed houses on either side. It was a neighborhood where living beyond your means went with the territory.

“By the time my lawyer finishes wiping the floor with you, you’ll be lucky to be living in a homeless shelter,” she added. “As for seeing the kids? Forget about it. That’s not going to happen. I’ll see to it.”

With that, she spun around as if to leave. Then, changing her mind, she grabbed the closest thing she could reach, which turned out to be the wooden plaque with the bronze Manager of the Year faceplate, and heaved it at him. The sharp corner of the wood caught him full in the forehead—well, part of his very tall comb-over forehead—and it hurt like hell. It bled like hell.

As blood leaked into his eye and ran down his cheek, all the things he had stifled through the years came to a head. He had reached the end of his rope, the point beyond which he had nothing left to lose.

Opening the top drawer of his desk, he removed the gun—a gun he had purchased with every intention of turning it on himself. Then, rising to his feet, he hurried out of the room, intent on using it on someone else.

His whole body sizzled in a fit of unreasoning hatred. If that had been all there was to it, any defense attorney worthy of the name could have gotten him off on a plea of temporary insanity, because in that moment he was insane—legally insane. He knew nothing about the difference between right and wrong. All he knew was that he had taken all he could take. More than he could take.

The difficulty is that this was only the start of Jonathan Southard’s problems. Everything that happened after that was entirely premeditated.

Chapter 1

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 A.M.

76º Fahrenheit

PIMA COUNTY HOMICIDE detective Brian Fellows loved Saturdays, even hot summer Saturdays. Kath, Brian’s wife, usually worked Saturday shifts at her Border Patrol desk job, which meant Brian had the whole day to spend with his girls, six-year-old twins Annie and Amy. They usually started with breakfast, either sharing a plate-sized sticky sweet roll at Gus Balon’s on Twenty-second Street, or downing eye-watering plates of chorizo and eggs at Wag’s on Grant.

After that, they went home to clean house. Brian’s mother had been a much-divorced scatterbrain even before she became an invalid. Brian had learned from an early age that if he wanted a clean house, he’d be the one doing it. It hadn’t killed him, either. He’d turned into a self-sufficient kind of guy and, according to Kath, an excellent catch for a husband.

Brian wanted the same thing for his daughters—for them to be self-sufficient. It didn’t take long on Saturdays to whip their central-area bungalow into shape. In the process, while settling the occasional squabble, being a bit of a tough taskmaster, and hearing about what was going on with the girls, Brian made sure he was a real presence in his daughters’ lives—a real father.

That was something that had been missing in Brian’s childhood—at least as far as his biological father was concerned. His “sperm donor,” as Brian thought of the man who had been MIA in his life from before he was born. He wouldn’t have had any idea about what fathers were supposed to be or do if it hadn’t been for Brandon Walker, his mother’s first husband and the father of Tommy and Quentin, Brian’s older half brothers.

After Brian’s mother’s first divorce, Brandon Walker, then a Pima County homicide detective, had come to the house each weekend and dutifully collected his own sons to take them on noncustodial outings. One of Brian’s first memories was of being left alone on the front steps while Quentin and Tommy went racing off to jump in their father’s car to go somewhere fun—to a movie or the Pima County Fair, or maybe even the Tucson Rodeo—while Brian, bored and lonely, had to fend for himself.

Then one day a miracle happened. After Quentin and Tommy were already in the car, Brandon had gotten back out. He came up the walk and asked Brian if he would like to go along. Brian was beyond excited. Quentin and Tommy had been appalled and had done everything in their power to make Brian miserable, but they did that anyway—even before Brandon had taken pity on him.

From then on, that’s how it was. Whenever Brandon had taken his own boys somewhere, he had taken Brian as well. The man had become a superhero in Brian’s eyes. He had grown up wanting to be just like him, and it was due in no small measure to Brandon Walker’s early kindness that Brian Fellows was the man he was today—a doting father and an experienced cop. And it was why, on Saturday afternoons, after the house was clean, that he never failed to take his girls somewhere to do something fun—to the Randolph Park Zoo or the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Today, as hot as it was, they had already settled on going to a movie at Park Mall.

Brian was on call. Only if someone decided to kill someone tonight would he have to go in to work. Otherwise he would have had his special day with his girls— well, all but one of his girls. That was what made life worth living.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 A.M.

90º Fahrenheit

Brandon Walker knew he was running away. He had the excuse of running to something, but he understood that he was really escaping from something else, something he didn’t want to face. He would face it eventually because he had to, but not yet. He wasn’t ready.

Not that going to see G. T. Farrell was light duty by any means. Stopping by to see someone who was on his way to hospice care wasn’t Brandon’s idea of fun. Sue, Geet’s wife, had called with the bad news. Her husband’s lung cancer had been held at bay for far longer than anyone had thought possible, but now it was back. And winning.

“He’s got a set of files that he had me bring out of storage,” Sue had said in her phone call. “He made me promise that I’d see to it that you got them—you and nobody else.”

Brandon didn’t have to ask which file because he already knew. Every homicide cop has a case like that, the one that haunts him and won’t let him go, the one where the bad guy got away with murder. For Geet Farrell that case had always been the 1959 murder of Ursula Brinker, a twenty-one-year-old coed who had died while on a spring-break trip to San Diego.

Geet had been a newbie ASU campus cop at the time of her death. Even though the crime had occurred in California, it had rocked the entire university community. Geet had been involved in interviewing Ursula’s friends and relations, including her grieving parents. The case had stayed with him, haunting him the whole time he’d worked as a homicide detective for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department, and through his years of retirement as well. Now that Geet knew it was curtains for him, he wanted to hand Ursula’s unsolved case off to someone else and let his problem be Brandon’s problem.

Fair enough, Brandon thought. If I’m dealing with Geet Farrell’s difficulties, I won’t have to face up to my own.

Geet was a good five years older than Brandon. They had met for the first time as fellow cops decades earlier. In 1975, Brandon Walker had been working Homicide for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and G. T. Farrell had been his Homicide counterpart in neighboring Pinal. Between them they had helped bring down a serial killer named Andrew Philip Carlisle. Partially due to their efforts, Carlisle had been sentenced to life in prison. He had lived out his remaining years in the state prison in Florence, Arizona, where he had finally died.

Brandon Walker had also received a lifelong sentence as a result of that case, only his had been much different. One of Carlisle’s intended victims, the fiercely independent Diana Ladd, had gone against type and consented to become Brandon Walker’s wife. They had been married now for thirty-plus years.

It was hard for Brandon to imagine what his life would have been like if Andrew Carlisle had succeeded in murdering Diana. How would he have survived for all those years if he hadn’t been married to that amazing woman? How would he have existed without Diana and all the complications she had brought into his life, including her son, Davy, and their adopted Tohono O’odham daughter, Lani?

Much later, long after both detectives had been turned out to pasture by their respective law enforcement agencies, Geet by retiring and Brandon by losing a bid for re-election, Geet had been instrumental in the creation of an independent cold case investigative entity called TLC, The Last Chance, an organization founded and funded by Hedda Brinker, Ursula Brinker’s still grieving mother. In an act of seeming charity, Geet had seen to it that his old buddy, former Pima County sheriff Brandon Walker, be invited to sign on with TLC.

That ego-salving invitation, delivered in person by a smooth-talking attorney named Ralph Ames, had come at a time when, as Brandon liked to put it, he had been lower than a snake’s vest pocket. He had accepted Ames’s offer without a moment of hesitation. In the intervening years, Brandon had worked hand in hand with other retired law enforcement and forensic folks who volunteered their skills and expertise to make TLC live up to its case-closing promises. For Brandon, the ability to do that—to continue making a contribution even in retirement—had saved his sanity, if not his life.

All of which meant Brandon owed everything to Geet Farrell. That was why he was making this pilgrimage to Casa Grande late in the morning on what promised to be a scorcher of a Saturday in early June. Of course heat was relative. By July and early August, the hot days of June would seem downright cool in comparison.

Weather aside, Brandon understood that this was going to be a deathbed visit, but he didn’t mind. He hoped that by doing whatever he could to help out, he might be able to even the score with Geet Farrell just a little. After all, this was a debt of gratitude, one Brandon Walker was honor-bound to repay.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:10 P.M.

94º Fahrenheit

Diana Ladd Walker sat in her backyard gazebo next to a bubbling fountain typing into her laptop. It was shady there, but it was still hot and dry. Soon she’d either have to go into the pool for a dip, or else she’d have to retreat to the air-conditioned comfort of the house.

“So how are things working out for you?” Andrew Carlisle asked.

Rendered speechless, Diana stared at the vision that had suddenly materialized over the top of her computer.

Shirtless and hatless, Carlisle sat in full early-afternoon sunlight with his scarred face and sightless eyes staring up into a blazing blue sky. If he hadn’t been blind already, staring at the sun would have made him so.

Examining every aspect of her unwelcome visitor, Diana might have been viewing a close-up shot of someone on Brandon’s new high-defflat-screen TV set. Every detail was astonishingly vivid—from the sparse strands of white hair that sprinkled his sunken chest to the grizzled unshaved beard that dotted his gaunt cheeks and the scarred and rippled skin of his forehead and nose.

I did that, Diana thought, gasping involuntarily at the sight of those horrifying scars. I’m responsible for doing that to a living, breathing human being, back when he was alive.

Which Andrew Carlisle was not. The man sitting across the table from Diana was most definitely not alive. She knew that for certain. He had been alive when he had come to her house years earlier, intent on rape and murder. Before it was over, he had left Diana with his own special trademark—a fierce bite mark that even now still scarred her breast. But Carlisle had underestimated her back then. He hadn’t expected Diana to fight back or to leave him permanently disfigured in the process. All of that had happened long ago—before he had gone to prison for the second time and before he died there. Back in those days there had been no swimming pool or fountain or gazebo in Diana’s walled backyard, and she most certainly hadn’t been working on a laptop.

“We are not having this conversation,” she said to him now.

“Come on, Diana,” he urged. “For old times’ sake. Let bygones be bygones. Tell me, how’s the writing going? What are you working on now?”

She was dealing with some backed-up business correspondence, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

“What I’m working on is none of your business,” she responded.

“Of course it’s my business,” Carlisle insisted. “I’m always interested when one of my students goes on to achieve remarkable success in the publishing world.”

“I was not your student,” Diana told him flatly. “My first husband was your student, remember? I never was. Go away and leave me alone.”

“Give me a break, Diana. I’m still annoyed that Shadow of Death won a Pulitzer. You never would have won that award without me. I was the guy who came up with the idea, and the whole book was all about me. You should have given me more credit.”

“You didn’t deserve more credit,” she said. “You didn’t write it. I did.”

“Oh, well. No matter,” he said with a sigh. “After all, fame is fleeting. I thought you’d be glad to see me. Mitch may drop by a little later, too. And Gary. You’d like to see him again, too, wouldn’t you? Although, come to think of it, maybe not. That self-inflicted bullet left a hell of a hole in his head. Not so much in the front as in the back. Exit-wound damage and all that. I’m sure you know how those work.”

Living or dead, Diana had no desire to see her dead first husband, Garrison Walther Ladd III, nor did she want to see Mitch Johnson, the surrogate killer Carlisle had sent to attack her family in his stead when Carlisle himself could no longer pose a direct threat.

“Shut up,” she said.

Tires crunched on the gravel driveway. Damsel, Diana’s aging nine-year-old mutt, pricked her ears and raised her head at the sound. She had come to Diana and Brandon as a rollicking pound puppy some eight years earlier when her antics had earned her the title of Damn Dog. Now she was a well-behaved grizzled old dog with a nearly white muzzle and a game hip. She stood up and steadied herself for a moment. Then, with an arthritic limp, she hurried over to the side gate, barking in welcome.

“My daughter’s coming,” Diana said. “Go away.”

“Lani is coming here?” Carlisle sounded delighted. “The lovely Lani? Do tell. Wonderful. Maybe she’ll show me her scar.”

“What scar?”

“Oh, I forgot. You don’t know about that.”

“What scar?” Diana insisted.

“Ask her about it if you don’t believe me. I understand Mitch left her a little something to remember him by. Let’s just say it’s a token of my esteem.”

Lani had been sixteen when Mitch Johnson, Andrew Carlisle’s minion, had kidnapped Diana’s daughter.

“What?” Diana asked. “What did he do to her?”

“Why don’t you ask her yourself?” Determinedly, Diana turned her attention back to her laptop. She thought Carlisle would disappear when she did that, but he didn’t. He stayed right there with his face turned in her direction. Since he was blind now, he could no longer stare at her, but the same expression was on his face—the same disparaging smirk he had aimed at her once before, long ago in a courthouse hallway.

“You’re not welcome here,” she told him. “Go away.”

Highway 86, West of Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Eight-year-old Gabriel Ortiz sat up straight in Dr. Lani Walker’s car and seemed to be studying the scenery as it whizzed by outside the windows of the speeding Passat. This was the first time Lani could remember his being tall enough to ride in the front seat. He evidently liked it.

“Where are we going again, Lani Dahd?” he asked.

Dahd was Tohono O’odham for godmother, and that was Lani Walker’s role in Gabe’s young life. She had been there to deliver him in the back of her adoptive mother’s prized Invicta convertible eight years earlier, and she had been there for him ever since, spending as much time with him as possible whenever she was home on breaks—first from medical school and later from her hospital residency in Denver.

She was doing her best to be Gabe’s mentor and to give him the benefit of everything she had learned from the mentors in her life, her own godparents, namely Gabe’s great-aunt, Rita Antone, and his grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz. Of course, those people in turn had learned what they knew from the old people in their own lives, from a blind medicine man called Looks at Nothing, and from Rita’s grand-mother, Oks Amachuda, Understanding Woman.

“We’re going to stop by the house to pick up my mother,” Lani answered. “Then we’re going to a place called Tohono Chul.”

Gabe frowned. “Desert corner?” he asked.

Lani smiled at his correct translation. She was glad he was learning some of his native language, and not just from her, either.

“Not a corner, really,” she corrected. “It’s a botanical garden, devoted to preserving the desert’s native plants.”

“You mean like a zoo but for plants?” Gabe asked.

Lani nodded. “Exactly. There’s a party there tonight. My mother and I are invited, and I thought you should go, too. After all, you’re eight—that’s old enough.”

“What kind of party?” Gabriel asked. “You mean like a birthday party with candles?”

“More like a feast than a birthday party, but with no dancing,” Lani explained.

Gabe shook his head. A feast with no dancing clearly made no sense to him.

“There may be candles,” Lani added, “but they won’t be on a cake. People will be carrying candles around with them so they’ll be able to see in the dark.”

“Why not use flashlights?” he asked.

Lani smiled to herself. Gabe was nothing if not practical. From his perspective, flashlights made more sense than candles. Gabe wanted light, not atmosphere.

“Candles make for a better mood,” she said. Lani waited while Gabe internalized her response. After eight years, Lani was accustomed to answering the boy’s questions, and she did so patiently enough. That was a godmother’s job. As for Gabe’s parents? His father, Leo, was too busy running the family auto repair business, and his mother, Delia Cachora Ortiz, was too busy being the tribal chairman to take time out to provide thoughtful answers to Gabe’s perpetually complicated questions.

Besides, truth be known, Gabe’s city-raised mother probably didn’t know most of those answers herself anyway, at least not the traditional ones—the old ones— Gabe was searching for, the ones he wanted to understand. Delia could probably do a credible job of reciting the meteorological reasons for hot summer days like today when the horizon was dotted with fast-moving whirlwinds, but she didn’t know the vivid stories of Wind-man and Cloud-man, who were the mysterious Tohono O’odham movers and shakers, the entities who stood behind those dancing whirlwinds. Little Gabe Ortiz was always searching for the wisdom and the teachings of the old ways, and those were the ones Lani Walker provided.

“Will there be other Indians there?” Gabe asked now.

“Probably not.”

“Only Anglos and us?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

That was by far Gabe’s favorite question—the one for all seasons and all reasons. “But why does the ocotillo turn green when it rains? But why do rattlesnakes shed their skin? But why does I’itoi live on Ioligam? But why does it thunder when it rains? But why did my grandfather have to die before I was born? But why? But why? But why?”

Although Gabe’s parents were often too preoccupied to answer the curious little boy’s constant questions, Lani never was. He reminded her of Elephant’s Child in that old Rudyard Kipling story, where the baby elephant was forever asking questions of everyone within hearing distance. Gabe, too, was full of “satiable curiosity,” just as Lani had been when she was a child. She, far more than either of Gabe’s parents, understood how and why those questions needed to be answered, just as Nana Dahd and Fat Crack Ortiz had patiently answered those same questions for her.

“Because Tohono Chul is in Tucson,” Lani said firmly. “Not that many Indians live in Tucson these days.”

“Rita used to live in Tucson,” Gabe responded wistfully. “Now she lives with us. Not with us really. She lives next door.”

For a moment Lani thought he was referring to that other Rita, to Lani’s Rita, to Rita Antone, Nana Dahd, the wrinkled old Indian woman who had been godmother to Lani in the same way Lani was godmother to Gabe. Eventually she realized Gabe was referring to his thirteen-year-old cousin Rita Gomez. That Rita, sometimes called Baby Rita, had been named after her great-aunt, Rita Antone, who was Gabe’s great-aunt as well.

There was silence in the car for the next several minutes as Lani considered how the threads of the Ortiz family had frayed, drawn apart, and then seamlessly repaired themselves.

Charlotte Ortiz Gomez, Gabe’s auntie and Baby Rita’s mother, had been estranged from Gabe’s grandparents, Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, for a number of years. During that time Charlotte had lived in Tucson with her jerk of a husband and her daughter. When Fat Crack died, Charlotte had adamantly refused to come to the reservation, not even for her own father’s funeral.

A year or so later, however, when Charlotte’s marriage had ended in divorce, she had come crawling back to the reservation, begging forgiveness. She and Baby Rita had moved into her widowed mother’s mobile home in the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station, where Charlotte had looked after her mother until Wanda’s death two years ago.

“Well?” Gabe prompted. “If there won’t be any Indians there, why do we have to go?”

“Because the Milgahn who are coming tonight want to hear the legend of Old White-Haired Woman,” Lani answered. “Tonight is the one night a year when the night-blooming cereus blossom all over the desert. They have a lot of those plants at Tohono Chul and a lot of people will come to see them. I promised the lady who organizes the party that I would come there to tell the story of Old White-Haired Woman.”

Gabe’s jaw dropped. “But you can’t,” he objected.

It was Lani’s turn to ask. “Can’t what?”

“You can’t tell that story,” Gabe replied. “It’s an I’itoi story,” he added earnestly, “a winter-telling tale. The snakes and lizards are already out. If you tell that story now and one of them hears you, they could hurt you.”

Lani had once asked Gabe’s grandfather, Fat Crack Ortiz, about that very same thing. The old medicine man had been invited to come to a party just like this one for the same reason—to deliver the story at Tohono Chul in honor of that year’s blooms.

“When they asked me to come, I wondered about that,” he said. “So I took the invitation they sent me, I rolled some sacred tobacco, some wiw, and I performed a wustana. By blowing the sacred smoke over the invitation, I knew what I should do.”

“And what was that?” Lani had asked.

“Some of the people have forgotten all about Old White-Haired Woman,” Fat Crack had told her. “Yes, the I’itoi stories are supposed to be winter-telling tales, but on this one night, I’itoi himself doesn’t object to having that story told.”

“The snakes and lizards won’t hurt me,” Lani told Gabe now. “I’itoi doesn’t mind if the story is told on the night the flowers bloom. It’s a good story. People need to remember.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

“Your hair looks great,” Nicole said, looking up at Abigail Tennant over the bubbling pedicure bath. “Is this a special occasion?”

Abby nodded. “Our anniversary,” she said. “Jack and I met five years ago today. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Where’s he taking you?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

“Someplace good, I hope?” Nicole asked.

“It better be,” Abby answered with a smile. “This will be the first night-blooming cereus party I’ve missed in fifteen years.”

When the manicure/pedicure appointment ended, Abby took her time leaving Hush. Not wanting to chip her polish, she waited an extra twenty minutes before making her way out to the parking lot. When she arrived two hours earlier, she had lucked out and found a bit of shade under a mesquite tree. She unlocked the old Mark VIII with its push-button door code and found the temperature inside was hot, but not nearly as hot as it would have been without the shade augmented by the fold-up reflecting sunscreen she had placed on the inside of the windshield.

The car had been beautiful and sporty when she bought it new fifteen years earlier and days before she set off for her new life in Arizona. She had lived through a brutal divorce in Ohio. After thirty years of marriage, Hank Southard had seen fit to trade Abby in on a much younger model, a woman named DeeAnn who was barely half his age and extremely pregnant by the time Hank and Abby’s divorce was finalized. Two days later Hank had trotted off to Nevada where he had made an honest woman of his mistress by way of a quickie Las Vegas wedding.

Abby had never been able to understand how her son, Jonathan, could have come to the completely illogical conclusion that the divorce was all Abby’s fault; that she had, through some action of her own, been the cause of Hank’s betrayal. Because Jonathan was an adult by then, it hadn’t been a question of custody but a question of loyalty, and Jonathan had stuck with his philandering father.

“Sounds like he was just following the money” was the uncompromising way Jack had explained it to Abby some time later. “Kids are like that. They know which side their bread is buttered on. Hank’s pockets probably looked a lot deeper to Jonathan than yours did. Maybe he’ll wise up someday.”

So far that hadn’t happened, but that ego-damaging time was far enough in the past that it no longer hurt Abby quite so much. When she thought about it now, it seemed like someone else’s ancient history.

For one thing, Abby was an entirely different person than she had been then. After being a stay-at-home mom and a dutiful corporate wife for all those years, she had been devastated by the divorce. It had been that much worse when her former husband, his new wife, and their new baby had settled down in a Columbus neighborhood not far from where she and Hank had lived for much of their married lives. In fact their love nest was close enough to Abby’s home that they had occasionally run into people who had been friends of Hank’s and Abby’s back before the divorce. Those supposedly good friends had never failed to mention to Abby that they had run into Hank and DeeAnn buying groceries at Kroger’s or flats of annuals at Lowe’s.

It wasn’t long before Abby found herself stressing that every time she left the house for any reason, she might come around a corner in the grocery store and stumble into them.

She finally decided she had two choices. She could become a recluse and never leave the house again or she could make a change—a drastic change. It took a while, but eventually that’s what Abby did—she bailed. She had heard about Tucson, had read about Tucson. She had come here on a wing and a prayer with few friends and fewer preconceived notions, determined to start over. And she had.

Jack’s comment about following the money notwithstanding, Abby was fairly well fixed. Thanks to the efforts of an amazingly tough and capable divorce attorney, she’d come away from the marriage in reasonably good financial shape. Abby had invested years of her life supporting Hank’s career, and she deserved every penny of whatever settlement came her way. When it was time for Abby to leave town, the divorce settlement had made it possible for her to put Hank and DeeAnn and her previous life in her rearview mirror. Taking a page from Hank’s playbook, Abby decided it would be a brand-new rearview mirror.

Without consulting anyone, she had driven her stodgy old silver Town Car over to the nearest Lincoln dealer, where she had traded it in on the metallic-green Lincoln Mark VIII. She hadn’t agonized over the deal. She hadn’t spent hours in painful negotiations with first the salesman and later the sales manager the way Hank always used to do, making a war out of trying to work the dealership down to the very lowest price. Abby had spotted the make, model, and color she wanted parked on the showroom floor. She had asked the salesman to bring it out so she could test-drive it, and she had driven away with it signed, sealed, and delivered less than two hours later.

Fifteen years after that purchase, the Mark VIII’s metallic-green paint was starting to deteriorate in Tucson’s unrelenting sun—even though the vehicle spent most days and nights safely stowed in a garage and out of direct sunlight. Much to her satisfaction, however, the vehicle still ran perfectly . . . well, almost perfectly. It had less than 25,000 miles on the odometer. It was one of those cars about which one could truly say, “one-owner vehicle—driven to church and museums.” Because that’s mostly where she drove it—to church, to the grocery stores, and to Tohono Chul, a Tucson botanical garden where Abby was a faithful volunteer.

As for Hank? Unfortunately for him, Danielle, the headstrong daughter he had fathered with his new wife, apparently took after her mother, and not necessarily in a good way. She was gorgeous but dumb as a stump. Halfway through high school, her GPA was so low that acceptance at even a third-rate college was questionable. Hank had always been brainy. So had his only son, Jonathan. Hank had zero patience with people who weren’t as smart as he was. Abby understood better than anyone that having to deal with an intellectually deficient off-spring would be driving the man nuts.

Abby still had friends in Columbus, the same ones who, in the old days, had been only too happy to carry tales to her about what Hank and DeeAnn were up to. Now the tables were turned, and those same friends were still happy to carry tales.

It was through them that Abby had heard that her son, Jonathan, Esther (the wife Abby had never met), and the two grandkids she had never seen were living somewhere in the L.A. area, where he worked for a bank. It was also through those same friends that Abby had learned about Danielle Southard’s dismal academic record, which had resulted in her being dropped from the varsity cheerleading squad. There had also been a huge brouhaha when Danielle and several other girls were picked up for shoplifting during what was supposedly a chaperoned sleepover.

Abby had eagerly gobbled up the morsels of news about JonJon, as she still thought of her son. As for Danielle’s unfortunate missteps? Abby tended to gloat a bit about those. She couldn’t help it.

Hank’s getting his just deserts, Abby thought. He’s stuck dealing with a dim-bulb angst-driven teenager with issues. All I have to worry about is having my Mark VIII repainted. Such a deal. Seems fair to me.

Chapter 2

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 6:00 A.M.

69º Fahrenheit

AS JONATHAN SOUTHARD sat in the car, watching and waiting, he was amazed at how cold it had been overnight out here in what was supposed to be the desert, and also at how much his arm hurt. It was feverish and throbbing. That was worrisome.

At the time, it hadn’t seemed like that big a deal. Only a little bite, not a big one. That worthless damn dog had never liked him. As far as he was concerned, the feeling was mutual. Major was Esther’s dog—the kids’ dog. It seemed to him that the beagle was beyond dim, but as stupid as the dog had always seemed, that night Major had somehow read his mind and known what was going to happen. How could that be? It seemed weird.

Esther wouldn’t have had a clue that he had come into the room behind her if the dog hadn’t warned her, springing at him from the back of the couch, growling and with his teeth bared. The ferocity of the unexpected attack had forced Jonathan to dodge away and take a step backward. Major had nailed his wrist before he got quite out of reach, drawing blood and knocking the gun from his hand.

When Esther turned around, she didn’t see the weapon. All she saw was her husband. “No!” she yelled at Major. “Come here!”

The dog listened to her and paused for a moment—a moment that allowed Jonathan to retrieve the gun. Naturally he had shot Major first. Then he shot Esther. Once he could hear again, once his ears stopped reverberating, he stood there with the gun still in his bleeding hand and listened, afraid the kids would wake up and come running to see what had happened.

In all honesty, that was the first time he even thought of the kids. What about them? He could call the cops and turn himself in, but what would happen to Timmy and Suzy then? He seemed to remember setting up a guardianship thing so that if something happened to Esther and him together, the kids would go first to Esther’s sister, Corrine. But what would their lives be like if their mother was dead and their father was in prison for killing her? That might even be worse than growing up as Abby Southard’s no-good, worthless son.

He had decided the next step in that instant. If Timmy and Suzy died in their sleep, he could spare them all that suffering—the suffering of living. And that’s what he did—he shot them while they slept, one bullet each. That way they would never have to wonder if their parents loved them. Then he closed their bedroom doors and left them there. As long as the doors were shut—as long as he didn’t venture back into the living room where Esther lay sprawled on the couch, he didn’t have to remember that they were dead. As far as Jonathan was concerned, they were just sleeping.

He went into the bathroom then and collected the whole set of medication bottles Esther kept there. Antidepressants, sleep aids; whatever bottles he could find that said “Do Not Use with Alcohol.” You name it; Esther had it. He took them down to his study along with a bottle of single-malt Scotch.

He poured a full glass, but sat there thinking before he swallowed that first pill. He remembered seeing a movie called The Bucket List, the one about making sure you did all the things you wanted to do before you died.

He decided right then and there that he would go out with a bang, not the way he had left the bank, slinking out after everyone else had left for the night, carrying the personal possessions from his office in a single disgraceful cardboard box.

Hoping to prove his mother’s dire predictions wrong, he had spent his adult life doing what he was supposed to do all this time, twenty-four/seven. Now he was going to do some of the things he wasn’t supposed to do. He closed the open pill bottles. Then he showered and dressed, packed a suitcase with a week’s worth of clothes, and tossed the collection of pill bottles into the mix. The last thing he did before he walked out the door was set the thermostat down to 65 degrees. Who cared if he ran up the electricity bill? He wouldn’t be the one paying it.

Now, five days later and over five hundred miles away, he sat waiting on a residential street in Tucson, Arizona. He’d been doing that for hours now, shifting periodically in the seat, trying to find a comfortable place to rest his throbbing arm. Then, just when he thought he’d maybe go back to the Circle K and pick up some coffee and take a leak, the garage door on the house he was watching slid open.

As the Lexus backed out into the driveway, Jonathan recognized the guy at the wheel as the man he assumed to be Jack Tennant, Abby’s husband. Jonathan never referred to her as Mother. He refused to give her that much credit. While he watched, Jack loaded a golf pullcart and a bag of clubs into the car. That was interesting. If Jack was going to go play golf, Jonathan wanted to know where he was going, how long he’d be gone, and when he’d be back. That’s what these recon trips were all about—getting the lay of the land.

When Jack headed down the street, Jonathan followed. It was as easy as that.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 12:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

The dream came while Daniel James Pardee was sleeping. In it he was back in Iraq, riding in the Humvee with Bozo, the dog no one else would take, sitting between him and the driver. As in real life, the driver was none too happy when Bozo, panting and grinning that weird doggy grin of his, had scrambled his hundred-plus pounds of dusty German shepherd into the cab along with Dan.

“Oh, jeez!” the driver muttered. “Not him again. That stinking dog’s so stupid he’d rather chase birds than bad guys.”

That was the reason the dog, formerly known as King and now jeeringly referred to as Bozo the Clown, had been passed along to the newest guy in the unit, Corporal Dan Pardee. “Three’s the charm,” the CO in Mosul had told Dan. “Either Bozo wakes up and gets serious about his job, or he’s out of here.”

Dan understood at once that, in military parlance, “out of here” didn’t mean some nice doggy retirement program somewhere. It meant termination. Period. Bozo’s career with the U.S. Army would be over and so would he.

“Yeah, Justin,” Dan told Corporal Justin Clifford, the driver. “You don’t smell so good yourself, so leave Bozo the hell alone. Let’s get moving.”

In the dream Dan knew Justin’s name. In real life he hadn’t known his name until after “the incident” and until after the wounded driver had been shipped out of theater, first to Germany and then to Walter Reed, suffering from second-and third-degree burns over fifty percent of his body. Both in the dream and in real life, however, the Humvee ground into gear and moved to the head of the supply convoy.

The whole thing went to hell about forty-five minutes later when the world exploded just outside the driver’s window. Blinded by smoke and deafened by the concussion, Dan and Bozo had scrambled out through the door on the Humvee’s relatively undamaged passenger side. When Dan’s hearing returned, the only sound he heard were the agonized screams coming from Corporal Clifford, who was still trapped inside the burning vehicle. Dan was turning back to reach for Clifford and try to pull him out when he saw the insurgent.

It was ironic that that was the word news broadcasters always used to refer to the bad guys—insurgents. Dan often wondered what people back home in the U.S. thought that word meant. They probably figured a group of “insurgents” would be made up of hardened old soldiers, believers in the old ways, who would rather die than vote in a free election.

Not true. This one, the guy materializing like a ghost out of the smoke and dust with an AK-47 in his hands, wasn’t old at all. He was a kid—eleven or twelve at most. Whoever had planted the bomb had left this little shit behind, armed to the teeth and lying in wait hoping to ambush anyone who managed to stagger out of the burning wreckage.

Both in real life and in the dream, things slowed down at that point. Corporal Daniel Pardee was faced with two impossible choices. Should he reach inside and try to rescue poor Justin Clifford, or should he leave the other man to die and reach for his M16?

Before he had a chance to do either one, Bozo decided for them both. He slammed into the gun-toting kid from one side, blindsiding him and hitting him with more than a hundred pounds of biting, snapping fury. The kid was knocked to the ground, screeching, while the gun, now useless, went spinning away out of reach.

The whole thing took only a moment. With the kid and his gun out of the equation, Dan turned his full attention back on Clifford. With almost superhuman strength he had managed to haul the injured driver to relative safety. By then, other troops from the convoy were hurrying forward to offer assistance. It took three of them to haul Bozo off the kid and keep the dog from killing him.

When Dan finally got back to the dog, both in the dream and in real life, he was sitting there, panting and grinning that stupid grin of his, except by then the dog’s happy grin didn’t seem nearly so stupid. Dan had stumbled over to him and gratefully buried his face and hands in Bozo’s dusty, smoky fur. It was only when the hand came away bloodied that Dan realized the dog—his dog—had been cut by shrapnel from the explosion, by flying bits of burning metal and shattered glass. Later on Dan figured out that he’d been cut and burned, too. Both of them had been treated for relatively minor injuries, but Dan knew full well that if it hadn’t been for Bozo— that wonderfully zany Bozo—Justin Clifford would have died that day in Mosul.

At that moment, as if on cue, Dan’s dream ended the same way the firefight had ended—with Bozo. The dog scrambled up onto the bed, whining and licking Dan’s face.

“Go away,” Dan ordered. “Leave me alone.”

From the moment the bomb went off, Bozo was transformed. When it came time to go on patrol, he was dead serious. He paid attention. He obeyed orders. And he seemed to develop almost a sixth sense about the possibility of danger. Twice he had alerted Dan in time for the two of them to dive for cover before bombs exploded rather than after. And if Bozo said someplace was a no-go, Dan paid attention and didn’t go there.

But right now, the dog and the man weren’t working. They were in bed. Bozo immediately understood that his master didn’t mean it, that his order to go away was one that could be disobeyed. As a consequence, he paid no attention and didn’t let up.

The recurring dream came to Dan night after night, or, as now when he was working the night shift, day after day. The nightmare always left him shaken and anxious and drenched in sweat. He wondered if maybe he had cried out in his sleep and that was what caused Bozo to come running.

Dan tried unsuccessfully to dodge away from Bozo by pulling the sweat-soaked covers over his head and turning the other way, but Bozo was relentless. Thumping his tail happily, the dog scrambled to Dan’s other side and burrowed under the covers to join him. After all, it was time for breakfast. According to Bozo’s time calculations, Dan needed to drag his lazy butt out of bed and get moving.

“All right, all right,” Dan grumbled, giving the dog a fond whack on his empty-sounding head. “I’m up. Are you happy?”

In truth the dog was happy, slobbery grin and all.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:15 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Abby turned the key in the ignition and listened as the powerful V-8 engine roared to life. There was maybe the tiniest squeal, as though a fan belt might be slipping a bit, but the motor settled into a steady hum and the air-conditioning came on full blast—blazingly hot at first, but then cooling. While Abby waited a few moments for the steering wheel to be cool enough to touch, she picked up her cell.

Still careful with her newly applied polish, she hit the green send button twice and called Tohono Chul for the first time that afternoon but for the seventh time that day. She wasn’t surprised when she was put on hold. Abby, of all people, understood what Shirley Folgum was up against. Trying to ride herd on that evening’s party was a complicated proposition.

In Tohono Chul’s annual calendar, the celebration of the night-blooming cereus was an enormous undertaking. On that night alone, as many as two thousand people would show up at the park for the festivities, arriving well after dark and not leaving until early the next morning. All of that would have been complicated enough, if it could have been handled in the established way.

Most big recurring nonprofit-style events come with certain unvarying logistics. Worker bees needed to be organized. Invitations have to be issued. Potential attendees need to be given “Save the date” information. Contracts for entertainment and catering need to be arranged. All of those things held true for the night-blooming cereus party. The big difference—and the big complication—came with the reality that no one ever knew exactly when the party would take place. Not until the very last minute.

Despite years of patient analysis and study by any number of very talented botanists, despite countless computer models examining weather data—daytime temperatures, nighttime temperatures, dew points, barometric pressures, and all points in between—no one had yet been able to crack the code as to when exactly the Queen of the Night would deign to make her annual appearance. Scientific study suggested it would happen sometime between the end of May and the middle of July. As a result of this uncertainty, all preparations had to be ironed out well in advance and then put in abeyance but ready for immediate last-minute execution.

It turned out that was how Abby Tennant herself had stumbled into the event for the first time—at the last minute.

Toward the end of her first June in Tucson, Abby had been dreadfully homesick for her friends and relations back home in Ohio. For one thing, the appalling June heat was nothing short of debilitating. She had almost decided to give up and go back home when a new neighbor, Mildred Harrison, had called.

“There’s going to be a special party at Tohono Chul tomorrow night,” Mildred had said. “Would you like to come along as my guest?”

Abby’s new town house in what was billed as an “active adult community” on Tucson’s far northwest side was just down the street from the botanical garden. She had driven past the rock wall entrance numerous times, but she hadn’t ever considered stopping in. Somehow she had never guessed that one of the world’s ten best botanical gardens would be right there, hiding out in the middle of Tucson.

What interesting plants could possibly grow in the desert? Abby had wondered in all her midwestern arrogance. From what she personally had observed, there seemed to be precious few plants of any kind in this desolate outpost of civilization where, even in May, the heat had been more than Abby could tolerate.

“I suppose they’re holding it at night because it’s too hot to have a garden party during the day,” Abby had groused sarcastically.

Mildred had laughed aloud at that. “It’s a party in honor of the night-blooming cereus,” she explained. “It’s the flower on the deer-horn cactus. We call it the Queen of the Night. Tohono Chul has more than eighty plants that are set to bloom this year, and they all blossom at the same time. They open up around sunset and are gone by sunrise the next morning. Someone called just now to let me know that the bloom will be tomorrow night. Are you coming or not?”

Mildred sometimes reminded Abby of her older sister, Stephanie, who was at times a bit overbearing and more than a little outspoken. On this occasion, Abby had dutifully slipped into full little-sister mode.

“I suppose,” she had agreed reluctantly.

The next day she had tried her best to back out of the engagement, but Mildred wouldn’t hear of it. Around nine o’clock that evening, Abby had ridden over to Tohono Chul’s parking lot in Mildred’s aging Pontiac. Arriving in low spirits and with even lower expectations, Abby was surprised to find the parking lot jammed with cars and parking attendants. Along with hordes of other enthusiastic attendees, Abby and Mildred had walked into the park following footpaths that were lit with candles in small paper bags.

“They’re called luminarias,” Mildred explained. “They’re traditional Mexican.”

Abby was astonished when she saw the throngs of people who were there that night. She kept wondering what all the fuss was about—but only until she saw a night-blooming cereus in the flesh. Once she caught sight of that first lush white blossom, Abby Tennant fell in love.

She couldn’t fathom how such a magnificent white flower could burst forth from what appeared to be a skimpy stick of thorny cactus. She was astonished to find that many of the gorgeous blossoms were as big across as one of Abby’s eight-inch pie plates. They reminded her of her next-door neighbor’s prizewinning dahlias back home in Ohio, but these weren’t dahlias, and the heady perfume that drifted away from each flower on the hot summer air was subtle but elegantly sweet, reminiscent of orange blossoms, but not quite the same.

Abby was dumbstruck. “They’re so beautiful!” she had exclaimed.

“Aren’t they,” Mildred said, nodding in agreement. “And now you know why it’s called the Queen of the Night. By the time the sun comes up tomorrow, the blossoms will be gone.”

Abby Tennant’s first encounter with the night-blooming cereus marked the real beginning of her new life, although her name was still Abby Southard back then. She had been so enchanted by seeing the flowers that she had insisted on taking Mildred to lunch at the Tohono Chul Tea Room the very next week. In the confines of the small cool rooms of what had once been a ranch house, Abby began to see the things about Tucson that she had been missing before—the friendliness of the people, Mildred included, for one thing, and the many subtle beauties of the desert for another.

Abby had taken out her own membership at Tohono Chul only a week or so later. Walking the park’s many manicured paths, she gradually acclimated herself to the heat of her new home. She learned to mark the changing seasons by something other than changing leaves. In spring she saw the profusion of yellow flowers on the prickly pear and the fuchsia-colored blossoms of the barrel cactus. In early summer she came to love the bright yellow blooms standing out against the green branches of the springtime paloverde and the dusky pinks and lavenders on the brooding ironwood. She loved watching the birds, especially the brightly colored hummingbirds that hovered around the equally brightly colored flowers.

Somehow, in the process of exploring this desert oasis, Abby Tennant found peace and came to terms with her new home and her new life. By the time of the first snow-fall in Columbus that first year, she was no longer home-sick. When Christmas rolled around and her friends were complaining about the weather, Abby took herself back to the park and volunteered her services.

At first she knew so little that all she could do was work as a stocker and a cashier in the museum shop. Later, once she was better adjusted to the climate, she went through docent training so she could lead tours and speak knowledgeably about the native plants of her newly adopted home. Because of her enduring fascination with the night-blooming cereus, it was a natural progression of her volunteerism that she went from leading daytime tours to working on the annual Queen of the Night party.

Initially she served on the Queen of the Night Committee, but when the complexity of the event outstripped the committee’s groupthink capability, Abby had finally given up and taken charge. When she came on board, there had been a complicated phone-tree system for notifying workers and guests of the impending bloom. Under her direction, phone trees had given way to a more streamlined form of e-mail notices. But after five years of running the show, it was time to pass the reins to someone else, and Shirley Folgum was her handpicked successor.

“So how are things?” Abby asked when Shirley finally came on the line. “Did you hear back from the band?”

“I was talking to the manager when you called. They’ll be here for a sound check no later than five. I told them to come in by way of the loading dock.”

“And the caterer?”

“She’s having trouble locating servers.”

“Don’t worry. She’ll find them. This party is a big deal for her, and we pay her a bundle of money during the summer when there’s not much else going on. She’ll come through. She always does.

“What about the storyteller?” Abby asked.

Abby had come to love the enduring Tohono O’odham legend about the wise old grandmother whose bravery had given rise to the Queen of the Night. Including that story in the annual festivities was one of the ways Abby had put her own distinctive stamp on the party. She insisted that each year some guest of honor would come to the event and recount the story that had struck a chord in her heart. It seemed to Abby that in saving her grand-son, Wise Old Grandmother had saved Abby Tennant as well.

“That’s handled,” Shirley reported. “Dr. Walker and her mother are planning to have lunch in the Tea Room this afternoon before the party starts. Unfortunately, she’s due back at work in the ER at the hospital in Sells by midnight. That means the last scheduled storytelling event can’t be any later than nine.”

“Good,” Abby said. “Earlier is better than later.”

“Are you going to stop by for a last-minute checklist?” Shirley asked.

“No,” Abby said with a laugh. “I don’t think that’s necessary. It sounds as though you have everything under control.”

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:30 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Lani Dahd used her key to unlock the front door of her parents’ house. She stepped inside, with Gabe following close on her heel. He had been here before and was always astonished by the place.

For one thing, the house, built of river rock, was bigger than any of the houses he knew on the reservation. Although the people who lived here were Milgahn, Anglos, the place was full of a rich profusion of baskets—Tohono O’odham baskets. There were yucca and bear-grass baskets on every available surface—on walls and tables and the mantelpiece. Gabe had been told that many of them had been made by his great-aunt Rita.

“How did your parents get so many baskets?” Gabe had asked. “Are they rich?”

Lani Dahd thought about that for a moment before she answered. By reservation standards, the Anglo couple who had adopted her when she was little more than a toddler were rich beyond measure.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose they are.”

“But why?” Gabe asked.

“Because my mother writes books,” Lani answered.

“What about your father?”

“He was a police officer.”

“Why are they so old?” Gabe asked.

Lani’s father was almost seventy. Her mother was in her mid-sixties. In the Anglo world that wasn’t so very old, but on the reservation, where people were often cut down by alcoholism and diabetes in their forties and fifties, that seemed like a very advanced age.

“They just are,” she said.

“Why do they have different names?” Gabe asked. “Mr. Walker and Mrs. Ladd. Aren’t they married?”

“Yes, they’re married,” Lani explained, “but my mother was already writing books by then. It made sense for her to keep her own name instead of changing it to someone else’s.”

This time Gabe was without questions as he followed Lani through the house. While she stopped off in a bathroom, Gabe walked on alone to the sliding door that he knew led to the patio.

Damsel, the household dog, stood outside the sliding door. Gabe opened the door and leaned down to pet the dog. Looking away from Damsel, he saw Mrs. Ladd—an older Milgahn woman with pale skin and silvery hair— sitting in the shade of a little shelter on the far side of the pool. A very ugly blind man was sitting there with her.

Once again the dog demanded Gabe’s attention. When he turned away from Damsel, Lani was stepping through the slider and coming outside. By then the man had disappeared. Gabe hadn’t heard him leave. He glanced around the backyard, looking for him. It seemed curious that he could have left so silently, but the man was nowhere to be seen. He was simply gone.

“Mom,” Lani said, frowning when she noticed her mother’s bathrobe and bare feet. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

“I am dressed,” Diana said. “What’s wrong with a robe?”

“But I thought you were going into town with us—to Tohono Chul. The three of us have a reservation for lunch at the Tea Room, and then tonight there’s the night-blooming cereus party.”

“I can’t,” Diana said. “I’m busy.”

Lani had lived with her adoptive mother’s career as a reality all her life. From an early age she had understood how deadlines worked. When there was something to do with writing that had to be completed by a certain time, her mother was simply unavailable.

“What?” Lani asked. “An emergency copyediting job? How come the deadlines always come from the publisher and never the other way around?”

“Not copyediting,” Diana said. “Something else.”

“Look,” Lani said. “It’s Saturday afternoon. You’ve already worked all morning. Let it go. I talked to Dad. He’s on his way to Casa Grande to see a friend of his. Take a break. Come with us right now. It’ll be fun. The blossoms start opening around eight. I’ll have you back home no later than ten-thirty. You can work all day tomorrow if you need to.”

Diana thought about that for a moment. Finally, making up her mind, she picked up her computer. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go get dressed.”

She stood up and walked into the house, closing the door behind her.

“Who was that man?” Gabe asked.

“What man?”

“The man who was talking to your mother.”

“I didn’t see any man,” Lani said.

“He was right there,” Gabe said, “and then he was gone.”

Lani glanced around the yard. Like Gabe, she saw no one. “Maybe he went out through the gate.”

Gabe shook his head.

“What did he look like? Was he young or old?”

“Old,” Gabe said. “The skin on his face was all lumpy.”

“Like wrinkled?”

“No. Bumpy. Like a popover when you cook it.”

In other tribes, popovers are called fry bread. Flattened pieces of dough are dropped into hot grease. As the dough cooks, the outside surface fills with air and puffs up.

Despite the hot air around her, Lani Walker felt a chill. She knew of only one man whose face had puffed up like a popover when it was covered with hot grease thrown by her mother, but that had happened long before Lani was born. Lani knew about it not only because her brother, who had been there at the time, had told her the story. Lani also knew because she’d seen the photographs in her mother’s book, which had also mentioned that Andrew Philip Carlisle had been dead for years.

“He’s not here now,” Lani said. “You must have been mistaken. Come on,” she added. “Oi g hihm.”

Directly translated, that expression means “Let us walk.” In the vernacular of the reservation, it means: “Let’s get in the pickup and go.”

Gabe evidently understood that this was one time when he’d be better off not asking any questions. Without a word of objection and with the dog at his side, he came into the house behind Lani, took a seat on the couch in a room filled with beautiful Tohono O’odham baskets, and waited patiently until it was time to leave.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

While the coffeepot burbled and burped, Dan dished up Bozo’s food—dry dog food along with a dollop of canned food for flavor. Dan couldn’t help but notice that the tinned dog food—beef with gravy—smelled more appetizing than some of the MREs he had encountered during his tour of duty in Iraq.

Our tour of duty, Dan corrected himself mentally as he placed the dish of food in front of the salivating dog. He still remembered his first one-sided conversation with the dog no one had wanted.

“Look,” he had said while Bozo listened to his voice with rapt, prick-eared attention. “Let’s get one thing straight. When we work, we work; when we play, we play, but you’ve got to know the difference.”

“Hey,” one of the guys had said, pointing and laughing. “Looks like Chief here is turning into one of those dog whisperers. Is it possible old Bozo actually understands Apache?”

From the time he was four, Dan had been raised by his grandparents on the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, where Dan had been ridiculed for being half Anglo and half Apache. Back then he had coped with his tormentors by playing class clown, so maybe Bozo had a point. And maybe that’s one of the reasons Dan and Bozo had bonded. Daniel Pardee was in Iraq wearing his country’s uniform and doing his country’s job, but he was sick and tired of the constant jokes about his Apache background. Maybe Bozo was tired of the jokes, too.

“I was just telling him that some of the people around here are jerks,” Dan replied. “I told him he needs to know who his friends are.”

By the time Dan’s deployment neared its end, he had pretty much resigned himself to leaving Bozo behind. By then Bozo’s reputation was such that the other guys were clamoring to take him on. That was when Ruthie’s “Dear John” letter arrived. He and Ruthie Longoria had been childhood sweethearts and had dated exclusively all through high school. The idea that they would marry eventually had been a foregone conclusion, but the ending had been all too typical. Somehow Dan had known what was up before he even opened the envelope. For one thing, she had sent it via snail mail rather than over the Net.

“We’re too young to make this kind of commitment,” she had told him. “We both need to see other people, but we can still be friends.” Yada yada yada.

Sure, like that’s going to happen! It was long after Dan had come back home that he finally learned the truth. Ruthie had already found a new man before she ever cut Dan loose.

Still, at the time he read the letter, he was pissed as hell—more angry than sad—but he was also grateful. He understood that he had dodged a bullet as real as any of the live ammunition on the ground in Iraq. If that was the kind of woman Ruthie Longoria was, he was better off knowing about it before the wedding rather than after—a wedding and honeymoon he’d been dutifully saving money for the whole time he had been in the service.

With that monetary obligation off the table, however, Dan decided to cut his losses. If he couldn’t keep his woman, he would sure as hell keep his dog. So Dan took the money he had set aside to pay for a wedding and paid Bozo’s way home instead. It took all the money he’d had and more besides. His maternal grandfather had helped, and so had Justin Clifford’s family. Finally all the effort paid off. After months of paperwork and red tape and after being locked in quarantine for weeks, Bozo came home—home to Arizona; home to San Carlos; home to being a half-Apache dog.

With the wedding in mind, Dan had lined up a postmilitary job with a rent-a-cop security outfit in Phoenix, but that was because Ruthie loved Phoenix and wanted to live there instead of on the reservation, and that’s exactly where she and her new boyfriend—now husband— had gone to live.

Dan did not love Phoenix—at all. Instead of taking that security job, he went back to the reservation, stayed with Gramps, as he called Micah Duarte, his widowed grandfather, the man who had raised him. Sitting in the quiet of Gramps’s small but tidy house, Dan had tried to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. At age twenty-nine it had seemed that he was too old to go back to college, even though his veteran status would have made that affordable. After the excitement of Iraq, Dan was bored, and so was Bozo. And even though Gramps never said a word, Dan worried that he and his dog were wearing out their welcome.

Then one day two years earlier, when they were eating breakfast at the kitchen table, Gramps put a newspaper in front of him.

“Here,” he said, pointing. “Read this. It sounds like something you’d be good at.”

That article, in the Arizona Sun, told about a special group of Indian trackers, the Shadow Wolves, who worked homeland security on the Tohono O’odham Nation west of Tucson by patrolling the seventy miles of rugged reservation land that lay next to the Mexican border. Members of the elite force came from any number of tribes and were required to be at least one quarter Indian. Dan qualified on that score, with a quarter to the good since he was half Indian and half Anglo. Shadow Wolves needed to be expert trackers, and Dan qualified there, too.

His taciturn grandfather, who had spent all his adult life working on a dairy farm outside of Safford, may not have been long on language skills, but he had taught his grandson how to ride, hunt, and shoot, occasionally doing all three at once.

Micah Duarte counted among his ancestors one of the Apache scouts who had trailed Geronimo into Mexico and had helped negotiate the agreement that had brought him back to the States. In other words, being a tracker was in Daniel’s blood, but Micah Duarte had translated bloodlines into firsthand experience by teaching his grandson everything he knew.

Together Dan and Gramps had hunted deer and javelina, usually with bow and arrow rather than with firearms. Hunting with a bow and arrow required being close to your quarry, and getting that close meant you had to be smart. You had to be able to read the animals’ tracks and know exactly what was going on with them and with their neighbors.

Once, when Dan was in his late teens, he and Gramps had been deer hunting in southeastern Arizona. Toward the end of the day they had spotted a jaguar and followed the big cat back to its lair, not to kill it—just to see it. At the time, Dan had been astonished to learn that jaguars still existed in the States.

“Not many Apaches have done that,” Micah had told Dan later that evening as the two of them sat by their campfire. “I’m not a medicine man, but I think perhaps it is a sign.”

The comment wasn’t said in a boastful way, but the quiet dignity of the statement had somehow infected the impressionable teenager who had cut his teeth watching Star Wars movies and who knew far more about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader than he did about Apache warriors like Geronimo and Victorio or even about his own forebears. That experience more than any other had prompted him to enlist in the army after graduating from high school.

Now, after Iraq, the more Dan read about the Shadow Wolves, the more they intrigued him, especially since they were a part of ICE and the Border Patrol, so his previous work experience in the military would be a point in his favor.

That was the start of it. Dan had applied for the Shadow Wolves, where he had been accepted into the training program and where he had aced every test. The job paid well enough that, even though he was unmarried, he was able to use his VA benefits to buy his first house. It was still a sparsely furnished home on Tucson’s west side, but it came with a spacious fenced backyard where Bozo had the run of the place. Best of all, unlike so much rental property, it didn’t come with a lot of rules, including the dreaded NO PETS ALLOWED prohibition.

Yes, this was a place both Dan and Bozo could call home.

Once on board with the Shadow Wolves, Dan found it easy to prove his worth. He loved the work and he was good at it. As the weeks passed, however, with Dan going off to work and with Bozo staying home, he could see that the dog was growing more and more depressed. Bozo understood work. He knew that Dan was working and he wasn’t, and the dog didn’t like being left behind. Bozo demonstrated the extent of his separation anxiety by chewing up any number of expensive items—shoes, boots, holsters, and drywall—anything that was within easy reach.

Dan knew the dog well enough to understand the problem. He had two choices—either lock the dog in a pen outside and leave him there all day long or else put the dog to work, too. Talking Bozo’s way into Shadow Wolves hadn’t been easy.

“In case you haven’t noticed, Wolves don’t need K-9 units,” Captain Meecham told him. “Period. Besides, as near as I can tell, Bozo is definitely not an Indian.”

Meecham’s bloodlines and face said Kiowa even if his name did not.

“Let me show you what he can do,” Dan had offered. “Wouldn’t it make sense if we knew in advance if a vehicle was carrying illegal drugs as opposed to just illegal aliens? Get yourself a bag of grass from the evidence room and hide it in one of the cars outside in the parking lot. Let’s see how long it takes Bozo to find it.”

Dan had taught Bozo that little trick at their newly purchased, once foreclosed, home in Tucson. As a target, he had salted his own car with a small amount of grass he had taken off one of his neighbors’ junior-high-school-aged kids who was standing on a nearby street corner selling it to his classmates. Dan didn’t arrest the kid because what went on inside the Tucson city limits was outside Dan’s jurisdiction, but he knew he had scared the hell out of that pint-size dealer.

It took Bozo less than five minutes to transform Aaron Meecham into a believer. Once turned loose in the parking lot, Bozo had trotted purposefully up and down the aisles before stopping and vaulting into the back of Aaron’s immense Toyota Tundra and barking wildly at the stainless-steel tool chest where Aaron had hidden the weed.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m impressed. I suppose we can try it for a while, unofficially, that is.”

Aaron had gone back inside then. As Dan walked Bozo through the parking lot and back to his vintage Camaro, the dog alerted two more times—at other vehicles, at coworkers’ cars.

“They’re working here and using weed themselves?” Dan asked the dog. “It’s a good thing Captain Meecham didn’t hang around long enough to see that. If he had, there’d be hell to pay.”

Now, a year after that test run, Bozo rode shotgun in the front seat of Dan’s green-and-white Border Patrol SUV every time Dan went out on patrol. He loved it. So did Dan. Because of the rough terrain and the possibility of high-speed chases, Dan had found a dog harness that allowed him to fasten Bozo’s seat belt and keep him secure.

The dog was almost eight years old now. He had started limping a little again. The vet said that he had developed a bit of arthritis in his left rear leg, the one that had been damaged by the IED, and that maybe it was verging on time for Bozo to retire, but Dan didn’t want to think about that, not yet.

At the moment the two of them worked four ten-hour shifts a week. They went on duty at 8:00 P.M. and were off again at 6:00 A.M.

Dan was glad to have Bozo’s company through the long boring hours of patrolling and to have him there as backup during the occasional confrontation. Even the fiercest thug tended to give it up when faced with Bozo’s snarling countenance. And if one of them ever fought back and harmed the dog? Dan wasn’t sure what he’d do, but he didn’t think it would be inside the regulations.

While Bozo finished eating, Dan took his coffee, settled down in his one good chair, and turned on the TV. Punching the clicker, he paused briefly at CNN to pick up the headlines, and then moved over to his DVR to watch ESPN’s coverage of last night’s Padres game.

And that was how Dan Pardee spent a lazy Saturday afternoon, drinking coffee and watching the Great American Pastime with his faithful companion at his side.

Life didn’t get any better than that.

Chapter 3

Casa Grande, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 1:00 P.M.

96º Fahrenheit

SUE AND GEET Farrell had lived in the same three bedroom ranch-style home in one of Casa Grande’s older sections for as long as Brandon had known them. As he drove down the broad flat avenue that June afternoon, Brandon could tell that the neighborhood had seen better days. The street was lined with dead and dying palm trees. It took water to keep palm trees alive, and these days people were cutting back on water bills.

In front of Geet’s house four wilting palms still clung stubbornly to life, but the yard around them was a weedy, parched wasteland. Not xeriscaped—just dead. As for the house itself? The composition roof appeared to be close to the end of its lifetime, and the whole place could have used a coat of paint except for the peeling trim around the windows, which needed scraping and several coats. A wheelchair-accessible van with handicapped plates sat forlornly in the driveway as silent testimony to the losing battle being waged inside the house. Brandon parked next to it.

At the front door a sign over the doorbell button asked visitors to abstain from ringing it and to come around to the kitchen door so as not to disturb the patient. When Sue answered Brandon’s light knock, he was shocked by how worn and tired she looked. She was dressed in nothing but an oversize T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs. With her hair lank and loose and with her face devoid of makeup, she looked like hell. Geet may have been the one who was dying, but Sue Farrell was also paying a terrible price.

“How’re you doing?” he asked, giving her a hug.

“Not all that well,” she admitted.

“Why?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

She shrugged and shook her head. “It’s tough. Everybody leads you to think that hospice is this really great thing, that once you accept it, life just smooths out and everything is peachy keen. What a load of crap! The hospice people are here a couple of times a week, and I’m grateful for that, but when Geet was in the hospital, he had round-the-clock nursing. Here at home, it’s up to me twenty-four/seven. People offer to help out from time to time, but it’s mostly my problem.”

“Is there anything I can do to help today?” Brandon asked.

Sue thought about that for a moment. “He’s asleep right now. I gave him some pain meds a little while ago. If you could sit here with him long enough for me to go to the grocery store and to pick up some prescriptions from Walgreens . . .”

Brandon’s heart ached for her. Sue Farrell needed to run away, too. Looking at her haggard face, he caught a glimpse of his own possible future.

“Of course,” he said. “Not a problem. Take your time. Do whatever you need to do. In fact, if you want to kick up your heels and go visit a friend or see a movie, that’ll be fine, too. I’ll be happy to look after Geet for you. It’s the least I can do.”

Sue’s eyes filled with tears. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Where is he?”

“In the living room,” Sue said. “We moved most of the furniture out and set it up as a hospital room. I hope it’s not too warm for you. He’s so cold that we keep the thermostat set at eighty-five.”

“That’s not a problem, either,” Brandon replied. “Now that I’ve given up jackets and neckties in favor of Hawaiian shirts, the heat doesn’t bother me.”

Sue led Brandon into the small living room, where the blinds were down. The only light in the room came from the bright colors of a flat-screen television set over the fireplace where, in sound-muted silence, Speedvision was showing practice runs for Sunday’s NASCAR race.

Most of the room was taken up with sickroom equipment—a hospital bed, a walker, a wheelchair, an oxygen tank, a side table covered with medication, a power lifter to help get Geet in and out of bed, and a rolling portable potty. Everything there was designed to make the patient’s life livable, while at the same time stripping him of the last bit of dignity.

Other than the television set, the only piece of living room furniture that remained was a long cloth-covered sofa. Apologizing for the mess, Sue hastily stripped a sheet and pillow from that and carried them away to another room. No wonder she looked tired. Exhausted. That couch was probably where she was sleeping, or not sleeping, during her unending shift at Geet’s bedside.

After Sue left the room, Brandon took a seat on the newly cleared couch. Geet was snoring quietly. He seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Sue appeared to be the one who needed some rest.

G. T. Farrell had always been a big man, a hearty man. Now he was a shadow of that former self. The hands that lay on top of his covers looked bony and frail. His hair had gone sparse and stark-white. The gray pallor of his sagging skin told Brandon that the man wouldn’t last long. For Sue’s sake, Brandon found himself hoping the battle wouldn’t last much longer.

Brandon remembered too well his own recovery from bypass surgery several years earlier. He had hated it. He had hated being weak and needy, and he had hated the trouble he had put Diana through. No doubt Geet felt the same way, and Diana would, too, if it came to that.

When it comes to that, Brandon thought.

When Sue emerged from the bedroom, she had changed into a turquoise-colored pair of shorts with a matching shirt. She had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and had dabbed on some makeup. She wasn’t one hundred percent, but she was decidedly better than she had been when she first answered the door. She was also carrying a banker’s box.

“This is the case Geet wants to turn over to you,” she said, setting the box down next to him on the couch. “While you’re just sitting here you might want to go through it.”

“Sure,” Brandon said easily, but he didn’t mean it.

This was Geet Farrell’s case to pass along, not his wife’s. Brandon Walker had no intention of opening the box and looking inside it until Geet himself had given the goahead. The poor man might be dying, but Geet deserved that much respect, that much self-determination.

Sue gathered her purse and car keys and then stood uncertainly by her husband’s bed, as if reluctant to leave.

“Give me your cell number,” Brandon said gently. “I’ll call if anything happens, but you need a break.”

Sue nodded gratefully and gave him the number. She also gave him some instructions about Geet’s pain meds. Then she rushed out the back door before she had a chance to change her mind.

In the silence her departure left behind, Brandon sat there watching the silent race cars speed around and around an oval track, but he didn’t really pay attention. He was far too preoccupied with real life—his own real life.

For months now there had been little warning signals that things weren’t quite right. Brandon’s history with his father should have set the alarm bells ringing, but denial is an interesting thing. He hadn’t discussed his concerns with Diana. By mutual agreement, it was off the table. He also hadn’t mentioned it to the kids, Davy and Lani. But now the jig was up, and Brandon would have to deal with it and discuss it.

Earlier that week, he’d come back to the house from a meeting and found Diana in despair.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I just talked to Pam,” Diana said. “They hate the book.”

Pam Fender was Diana’s longtime agent.

“Who hates the book?” Brandon asked. “And what book are we talking about?”

“Everyone hates the book,” Diana said bleakly. “Do Not Go Softly, the manuscript I just turned in. Cameron hates it and so does Edward. They’re turning it down.”

Cameron Crowell was Diana’s longtime editor in New York. Edward Renthal was her publisher and Cameron’s boss.

“They can’t turn it down,” Brandon objected. “They bought it. They paid for it.”

“They paid an advance on delivery and acceptance,” Diana corrected. “If they don’t accept the book, they may want their money back.”

Brandon had been thunderstruck. “How could that be?” he had asked. “And why?”

“They say it’s not up to my usual standard.”

Over the years, Brandon and Diana had developed a system that called for Brandon to read the manuscripts only when they were finished. That way, Diana had a pair of fresh eyes looking for typos in the material before sending it off to her agent and to her editor. Brandon had read Do Not Go Softly. He hadn’t liked it much, but he figured that was just one man’s opinion.

“Can’t you fix it, rewrite it or something? What does Pam say about all this?”

“She’s asking them to hire someone else to do the rewrite.”

“You mean like a ghostwriter?”

“That way they’ll still be able to use my name on the book, and we’ll be able to keep part of the advance. She’s hoping to get them to take the remaining advance from upcoming royalty checks.”

Shadow of Death, the book Diana had written about her experience with a serial killer named Andrew Carlisle, had won her her first Pulitzer. Considered a classic now, right up there with In Cold Blood, the book was still in print and still earning royalties.

“How do you feel about that?” he had asked.

Diana shrugged. “It means I’m over,” she said. “Washed up. Finished. I’m going to go down to Pima College and sign up for a pottery class.”

Brandon got it. He and Diana had lived their married lives in a world that was half Anglo and half Indian. Rita Antone, Diana’s housekeeper and nanny, had brought the Tohono O’odham people, traditions, and belief systems into their home right along with her beautifully crafted baskets. Some of those beliefs had to do with aging. Among the Desert People there came a time when old women were only good for making pots or baskets, and weaving baskets had never been Diana’s long suit.

For the past several days, while Brandon had been grappling with the financial fallout from all this, Diana had gone into Tucson and signed up for a pottery-making class at Pima Community College.

The idea that she would simply turn her back on the problem had jolted him. It wasn’t like her just to give up like that. That was a wake-up call for him, that things had progressed further than he’d been willing to admit.

Financially they’d be fine. Their house was fully paid for. Thank God, their kids were both through school. Yes, the economic downturn had hurt them, but much of the money they had set aside over the years was still there. Pam was still hoping to find an acceptable ghostwriter who might allow them to finagle the deal to keep a portion of the advance and of the royalties. That idea, however, was contingent on Diana’s being willing to go out on the road to promote the book as though it were her own.

At first hearing that idea had sounded like a good deal, but Brandon wondered if it would work. By the time the pub date rolled around, would Diana be in any condition to deal with the rigors of a national tour or go out and do signings and interviews? Especially interviews.

Geet’s eyes blinked open. He looked around in dismay for a moment, then focused on Brandon.

“Hey there,” he said. “I must have dozed off. How long have you been here?”

“Not long,” Brandon replied. “Just a couple of minutes.”

In actual fact, it had been over an hour. One silent set of auto-racing laps had morphed into another, but Brandon had been too preoccupied to pay any attention to the muted announcer’s narrative, which scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

“Where’s Sue?” Geet’s voice was whispery and hoarse, as though he needed to clear his throat but couldn’t. His breath came in short, tortured gasps.

“She went out to run some errands.”

“Good. She hardly ever gets out these days,” Geet said. “This is real hard on her.”

It’s hard on you, too, Brandon thought. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “Water? A soda?”

Geet shook his head. “Did Sue give you the box?”

Brandon patted it. “It’s right here.” He made as if to take the cover off, but Geet stopped him.

“Don’t look at the contents now,” Geet said. “You can do that later.” He spoke in short sentences, as though anything longer was too much effort. “Right now we need to talk.”

He punched a button that raised the head of the bed. Then he opened a drawer in the bedside table and took out a stack of envelopes. From the looks of them, most appeared to be greeting card envelopes. One was not. That was the one Geet handed to Brandon. There was no return address in the upper left-hand corner.

“I’ve been working Ursula Brinker’s murder all my adult life,” he said. “She was a kid when she got murdered. I had just signed on to my first law enforcement job. I was a campus cop at ASU. Ursula died in California—on a beach in San Diego during spring break. ASU was a real community in those days—a smaller community. She was a cute girl—an outstanding student—and everybody took it hard.”

Brandon nodded. He knew it was true. He also knew much of this history, but he let Geet tell the story his own way.

“When Ursula’s mother won that huge Mega Millions jackpot of lottery money and wanted to start The Last Chance, she came looking for me. Hedda Brinker wanted to help others, but bottom line, she wanted to help herself.”

Geet paused for a spasm of coughing. Brandon waited until it passed. Geet took a sip of water before he continued.

“So I’ve been working Ursula’s murder all along,” he said.

“Any leads?” Brandon asked.

“When it came to ‘alternate lifestyles’ in 1959, you could just as well have been from another planet.”

“What are you saying?” Brandon asked. “That Ursula was a lesbian?”

“I don’t know that for sure. I’ve heard hints about it here and there, but nothing definitive. I’ve spoken to all the girls who went to San Diego on that spring-break trip, all but one, her best friend, June Lennox. Holmes is her married name. I’ve known where she lived for a long time, but she would never agree to speak to me before this.”

That caused another spasm of coughing.

Brandon understood the issue. As a TLC operative without being a sworn police officer, Geet would have had no way of compelling a reluctant witness to cooperate.

“And you couldn’t force the issue,” Brandon said.

Geet nodded. “The letter came two months ago, just as I was going in for another round of surgery.”

“You want me to read it?”

“Please.”

The note on a single sheet of paper was brief:

Dear Mr. Farrell,

It’s time we talked. Please give me a call so we can arrange to meet.

Sincerely,

June Lennox Holmes

The 520 prefix on the phone number listed below her name meant that it was located somewhere in southern Arizona—or that it was a cell phone that had been purchased in southern Arizona.

“Did you talk to her?” Brandon asked as he folded the note and returned it to the envelope.

Geet shook his head. “I’ve been too sick,” he said. “I thought that eventually I’d bounce back and be well enough to follow up myself. At least I hoped I would be, but that’s not going to happen. This time there doesn’t seem to be any bounce, and I need some answers, Brandon. I couldn’t find them for Hedda, but maybe you can find them for me.”

Opening the top of the brimming evidence box, Brandon put the envelope inside, then closed it again.

“So you’ll do it?” Geet asked.

“I’ll do my best,” Brandon said.

“Don’t take too long,” Geet cautioned. “I don’t have much time, but don’t say anything about that to Sue. She doesn’t know how bad it is.”

Yes, she does, Brandon thought. She knows, and so do you. Maybe it’s time the two of you talked about it.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 2:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

“Who was your company?” Lani Dahd asked her mother, as they left the house in Gates Pass and headed into Tucson. Mrs. Ladd was in the passenger seat, while Gabe had moved to the back and was listening to the conversation.

“What company?” Mrs. Ladd returned.

“I don’t know,” Lani said. “Gabe told me there was a man sitting and talking to you when we got to the house.”

Frowning, Mrs. Ladd turned and looked questioningly at Gabe. Her eyes were a startling shade of blue, like the color of the blue jays that sometimes strutted around the yard. Her skin was surprisingly pale. Her silvery hair had been pulled back with a turquoise-studded comb.

“No one was there,” Mrs. Ladd said after a long moment, turning back to Lani. “Just me. Gabe must have been mistaken.”

Gabe was shocked. He wasn’t mistaken. He had seen the man with his own eyes, and he was telling the truth. Lani Dahd and his parents always said it was important to tell the truth, no matter what. And he did. So why was it okay for Mrs. Ladd to lie and say that the man wasn’t there when he had been?

Now that Gabe thought about that man again, the one who wasn’t there, he realized one more thing about him. The man sitting across from Mrs. Ladd at her patio table was blind. He had to be. He had been sitting there staring up into the sky, looking directly at the sun. He couldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been blind already.

Gabe started to voice his objection and to insist once again that the man really had been there, but then Mrs. Ladd suddenly changed the subject.

“I’m going to sell the car,” she announced.

“The Invicta?” Lani asked.

Invicta? What was that? Gabe knew the makes and models of lots of cars because they came through his father’s auto-repair shop every day, but he had never heard of a car by that name. Maybe it was some brand-new car that people on the reservation didn’t have yet. They mostly liked pickups. Invicta didn’t sound like a pickup.

“But you love that car,” Lani objected. “Why on earth would you sell it?”

“Do you want it?” Mrs. Ladd asked.

“No,” Lani said. “On my salary, I could never afford to keep it in gas. Maybe Davy would like it.”

Gabe knew that Davy was Lani’s older brother. Gabe also knew that Davy and his wife were getting a divorce.

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Ladd said. “He’s already got two cars as it is.”

“You still haven’t said why you’re getting rid of it,” Lani insisted.

“I need the space in the garage,” Mrs. Ladd said. “I want to turn that part of it into a studio. Do you know where I can get a pottery wheel?”

“A studio?” Lani repeated. “And a pottery wheel? Why would you want one of those?”

“Why do you think?” Mrs. Ladd said impatiently. “To make pots.”

Gabe knew lots of old women who made pots. Well, maybe not lots, but several. That’s what the Tohono O’odham said women were supposed to do when they got too old to do anything else—they were supposed to make pots. It seemed to him that Mrs. Ladd, with her white hair and pale skin, was already that old. As a result, Gabe didn’t find the possibility of her making pots nearly as odd as her daughter did.

“Are you kidding?” Lani asked. “You’ve never done that before. Ever. Why would you start making pots now?”

“Yes, I did make pots once,” Mrs. Ladd replied. “Back in Joseph. There were lots of artists there. Some of them even came to the high school and taught classes.”

Gabe had no idea where Joseph was. It sounded far away. Maybe it was up by Phoenix.

“Does Dad know about this?” Lani asked with a frown.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ladd said. “I told him.” As the two women in the front seat fell silent, Gabe found himself drifting. He wondered if it was hard for Lani to be an Indian with Milgahn parents. It seemed to him that it made sense to have two parents that were the same kind—from the same tribe.

As they headed north on Silverbell toward Ina, the steady movement of the car and the accompanying silence got to be too much for him. Gabe’s eyes fell shut, his chin dropped to his chest, and he fell asleep.

In his dream the man was there again, just as he had been earlier, sitting beside Mrs. Ladd’s bright blue swimming pool. Only this time, something was different. Gabe wasn’t alone on the patio. Lani Dahd was there with him.

And then the man spoke. “Why, I’ll be,” he said, turning his empty eyes away from the sun and toward the spot on the patio where Gabe and Lani stood side by side. “If it isn’t Lani! Come over here and have a seat. I was hoping you’d drop by.”

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 5:00 P.M.

94º Fahrenheit

Delphina Escalante Enos stood in line at Bashas’ while Rosemary Sixkiller ran the cartload of groceries through the register. Delphina’s four-year-old daughter, Angelina, sat in the child seat of the cart clutching an open box of animal crackers. She munched them carefully, always biting off the heads first.

“You sure look happy,” Rosemary observed.

Rosemary and Delphina had been school classmates, first at Indian Oasis Elementary and later at Baboquivari High School. Rosemary had graduated. Delphina had not. Pregnant at age fifteen, she had dropped out of school to have the baby. Then, when Angie was only two months old, Joaquin Enos, the baby’s father, had run off to take up with someone else. For the better part of three years, Delphina and the baby had stayed on with Delphina’s parents in Nolic, but her father was ill now— with diabetes—and having a busy baby underfoot was too hard on everyone.

Realizing she had to do better for her child, Delphina had earned her GED and had managed to get a job doing filing for the tribe. It was at work where she had met Donald Rios, a man who hailed from Komelik Village and who was also on the tribal council. His family had land and cattle.

By reservation standards, the Rios family was wellto-do. Their family compound consisted of four mobile homes set around a central courtyard—a concrete central courtyard. They also had their own well—one that was deep enough to work even in the dead of summer. That was unusual, too. Most of the time a well would belong to an entire village rather than to a single family. But it wasn’t just Donald’s comfortable circumstances that made him so appealing to Delphina.

Donald was everything that Joaquin Enos had never been. Donald was kind and caring. He had a job that he went to every day. He was responsible, and he loved Delphina and her baby to distraction. He never came to see Delphina without bringing something for Angie—a toy or a book or a packet of stickers.

He was someone Delphina was comfortable with. That made far more sense to her than the fact that his family might have money. All his relatives—parents, brothers, and sisters—were reputable, churchgoing people—Presbyterians. As far as Delphina’s own family was concerned, there were plenty of skeletons in those closets—people who had done bad and who were no longer mentioned at family gatherings.

But the other thing the Rios family had going for them was a strong connection to the old ways. Maybe it was just because they lived so close to I’itoi’s home on Baboquivari that they held to many of the old traditions. Delphina loved hearing Donald talk about his beloved old grandmother and how she had told him stories—the traditional I’itoi stories—when he was a little kid. Delphina liked to think that some time when it wasn’t summer, he would tell those same stories to Angie, so she would know them, too.

Right then, though, standing in the checkout line in Bashas’, Delphina beamed at Rosemary’s comment. The clerk’s assessment was true. Delphina Escalante Enos was happy—really happy—for the first time in her whole life.

“Donald is taking us to the dance at Vamori tonight,” she admitted shyly, ducking her head as she spoke. “Both of us,” she added, nodding in Angie’s direction. “He was hinting around that there’s something he wants to show us before we go to the dance.”

“It’s a full moon,” Rosemary said. “Maybe he’ll give you a ring.”

Delphina nodded, but she didn’t say anything aloud. An engagement ring was just what she wanted.

When Donald had stopped by her office on Friday afternoon, he had been teasing Delphina, trying to make her blush. He had told the other girls in the office, the ones Delphina worked with, that he had something special he wanted to show her on their way to the dance. After he left the office the girls had been talking, and they all seemed to think the same thing. Since Donald and Delphina had been going out for a couple of months, it made sense that it would be time for him to give her a ring.

“He’s a nice guy,” Rosemary said. “He comes in here a lot to buy food from the deli. I don’t think he’s a very good cook.”

“I can cook,” Delphina declared. “If we got married, he could buy the groceries and I would cook.”

“Sounds like a good deal to me,” Rosemary said.

They were quiet for a few moments while Rosemary packed Delphina’s groceries into her cloth bags and then loaded them back into the shopping cart. By then Angelina was done with her box of animal crackers and wanted another one.

“No,” Delphina said, shushing her whiny four-yearold. Then she turned back to Rosemary. “Are you coming to the dance, too?” Delphina asked when that job was finished.

The feast and dance at Vamori were always good ones, the best ones of the summer, people said, with plenty of food at the feast house and with a band playing chickenscratch music from sunset to sunrise.

“I guess,” Rosemary said. “At nine. After I get off work, if I’m not too tired.”

Delphina took her groceries out to the parking lot and loaded them into the back of a battered old Dodge Ram pickup. Then she strapped Angie into her booster seat.

The truck wasn’t much, but she was grateful to have it. Before Leo Ortiz, over at the gas station, sold it to her, she and Angie had been forced to walk back and forth to work and to the grocery store from their decrepit mobile home on the road to Big Fields. Walking there wasn’t bad in the morning when it was cool, but after a long day at work, coming home in the afternoon heat had been hard, especially when Delphina had groceries to carry or when Angie was too tired to walk. Sometimes other people would give them rides, but most of the time they walked.

The pickup truck was something else Donald had done for Delphina. He was the one who made that happen. He and Leo Ortiz, the man who ran the garage in Sells, were good friends. Someone’s old truck had broken down and been towed into Leo’s garage. When Leo gave the owner the bad news about how much a new engine would cost, the guy had walked away—without bothering to pay for the towing.

Pickups were always in demand on the reservation, so Leo had gone ahead and put a new engine in the vehicle. He was getting ready to sell it when Donald asked if he would sell it to Delphina—on time. All she had to pay was one hundred dollars a month, and that’s what she was doing. In another year, the truck would be all hers. In the meantime, because she hadn’t been able to buy insurance, she drove it only on the reservation, not in town.

By the time Delphina and Angie got home, the place was like an oven. She turned on the swamp cooler while she put away the groceries, then went into the bedroom— the coolest room in the house. Without having to be told, Angie had gone there to take a nap. After a moment’s thought, Delphina joined her.

That’s what you do the day before an all-night dance, Delphina thought as she drifted off. You sleep in the afternoon so you don’t get too tired.

Much later, when Delphina woke up, she remembered the wonderful dream that had come to her while she was sleeping. In it, she and Donald were very old people who had been married for a long, long time. They were old but content.

And on that June afternoon, the thought of that made Delphina Escalante very happy. It seemed to her that with Donald Rios in her life, her future looked bright. Things were finally changing for the better.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

Jack Tennant counted his lucky stars that Abby had zero interest in golf. She wasn’t interested in playing, didn’t care where he played or with whom, and she never asked questions about his rounds. Oh, he volunteered information on occasion, but only bits and pieces here and there. Today he’d had plenty to do during his very busy morning, none of which involved golf, but he had a properly filled out scorecard ready and waiting.

“I broke a hundred today,” he told Abby proudly when she came in from her trip to the beauty shop that day. Abby insisted on calling the place she went a spa. It seemed like a beauty shop to Jack. As far as he could tell, the difference between the two meant that a spa was more expensive.

“Did you?” she asked. “In all this heat?”

“Yup.” He grinned, tossing the phony scorecard in her direction. “Today Ralph, Wally, and Roy didn’t stand a chance. I took all three of them to the cleaners. But you’re right. It was hot as blue blazes out there. By the time I got home I needed a shower in the worst way.”

Ralph, Wally, and Roy were Jack’s usual golf partners. It was easy for him to beat them since they didn’t exist anywhere except as names on bogus scorecards he had gathered from various public courses around town. He called them his Phantom Foursome. As far as Abby knew, he played golf with them at least three rounds a week, usually with very early tee times.

Those faux golf games came in handy on days like today, when Jack had needed several hours that were entirely his own. If you figured on two hours coming and going, four and a half hours to play, on a slow day, and another hour or so for lunch or a beer afterward, that’s how much time it took to be part of a foursome, which Jack was not.

Oh, he liked golf well enough, but he wasn’t into groups, not anymore. He’d cultivated a couple of good golf buddies once upon a time, long ago, but one of them had died of melanoma and another had put a bullet through his head. These days when Jack played golf, he tended to show up at various public courses without a reservation. He’d go out as a single attached with some other group. He played well enough to hold his head up, but he resisted being invited to play again. He preferred playing on his own, except for occasional times when he needed his imaginary pals to provide suitable cover. The fact that Abby never showed any interest in meeting them made it that much better.

He was about to ask how party preparations were going when Abby’s cell phone rang. “It’s Shirley again,” Abby told him, glancing at the telephone readout. “She has a terrible case of opening-night jitters.”

“She’ll do fine,” Jack said reassuringly.

“That’s what I told her.”

While Abby spoke to Shirley, Jack turned his phone back on. On golf mornings—even pretend golf mornings—he always turned his own phone off completely. On golf courses, Jack couldn’t tolerate playing with guys who held up everybody else by gabbing on their cell phones. “Just leave me a message, if you need to,” he had told Abby. “I’ll turn the phone back on once we finish our round and call you back as soon as I can.”

“Everything under control, I hope?” he asked when Abby ended the call.

She nodded. “I think so. At least I hope so. They’re just used to having me around to run the show.”

“And you will be again,” Jack said, giving her a quick kiss in passing. “But today’s our anniversary, and we’re going to celebrate in style. Right now, though, I’m going outside to have a smoke. I won’t ask if you’d care to join me,” he added with a grin. “I know better.”

“Oh, Jack,” she said, wagging a finger at him in mock disapproval. “You really should give up that nasty habit.”

“Why?” he returned with a sly grin. “I have no intention of living forever. Do you?”

“Well, no,” she said.

“See there?” he asked. “I’m determined to enjoy the time I’m here, and I really like cigars.”

“All right, then,” she said resignedly. “Go smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. Would you like me to mix up a batch of Bloody Marys while you’re gone?”

“Please,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”

Outside, in the shaded ramada Abby referred to as his “smoking room,” Jack Tennant sat on a chaise longue and thought about the rest of the day. It had taken him months of time and plenty of effort to put his plan in place. Now it was.

Two days ago, when he told Abby that he had scheduled an event that would preempt her being able to attend the annual party at Tohono Chul, he had worried that there might be a major blowback from her. That certainly would have been the case with his first wife, the departed and not much lamented Irene. If he had presented her with a last-minute change of plans that would have disrupted something on Irene’s calendar, all hell would have broken loose.

With Abby, however, that hadn’t happened. That was one of the things Jack appreciated about this second-timearound marriage. Abby was flexible where Irene was not. And she actually liked surprises. Irene had hated them. Once Abby learned there was a conflict, she had simply brought Shirley to the plate as her party-supervising pinch hitter. No fuss, no muss.

Blowing a cloud of smoke in the air, Jack gave himself a silent pat on the back. He felt slightly guilty that Abby had gone to the trouble and expense of having her hair and nails done. In fact, she had hinted that Fleming’s would do very nicely for dinner, but the truth was, where Jack was planning on taking her, no one was likely to notice her hair and nails—no one at all.

Yes, he thought. This is going to blow her socks right off.

Chapter 4

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:00 P.M.

93º Fahrenheit

JONATHAN HAD FOLLOWED Jack Tennant all day long. Early that morning, thinking his mother’s husband was on his way to a golf date, he had been surprised when, rather than stopping off at a nearby golf course, the man had headed out of town. Jonathan was new to Tucson. As the city limits fell behind them, he assumed they were heading for some upscale resort. When they crossed into the reservation, he was even more convinced. There was probably a casino somewhere up ahead—a casino with a golf course.

Jonathan was careful to stay well back of Tennant’s vehicle. For as long as he and Esther had owned the minivan, he had despised the silver color, but today, driving through the waves of heat on the blacktop, he knew that the vehicle was almost invisible from any distance away. It got hairy when they entered a small community named Sells. Worried that his target might turn off or stop, Jonathan closed the gap for a while, but once Tennant turned onto a secondary road heading south from Sells, it was possible to increase the distance again.

When Tennant went bouncing off onto a narrow dirt track, Jonathan drove a little farther before he, too, pulled over and stopped. Unsure where the dirt track would lead and worried about getting stuck, he simply waited. Fifteen minutes later, a cloud of dust told him Tennant was once again on the move. He came out of the brush and turned north. The fact that the Lexus had come and gone with no apparent difficulty made it seem likely that Jonathan would be able to do the same.

And he did, following Jack Tennant’s tracks off into the desert where a small turnaround had been carved out of the brush. Stepping out into the blazing heat, Jonathan followed a series of footprints that beat a faint path into the brush. To his amazement, the trail was lined with a series of unlit luminarias. The pathway led to a small clearing where a table and two chairs had been set up as if in wait for some kind of dining experience. An unlit candelabrum sat in the center of the table, and place settings for two, including napkins, silverware, and glasses, had been carefully laid out on either side of the table.

Jonathan found this both fascinating and puzzling. He would have stayed longer to explore, but he wanted to get back on the road and follow Jack Tennant wherever else he might be going. Back in the moving Caravan, he disregarded the OPEN RANGE signs and roared down the road at speeds well over eighty miles per hour. Before he reached Sells, Tennant’s Lexus was once again in clear view.

It took over an hour to make it back to Tucson. Jack stopped off at what appeared to be an upscale shopping center and did some grocery shopping before he returned to the house. By then Jonathan’s arm was on fire. On the way back to the Tennants’ town home, Jonathan spotted an Urgent Care facility.

Better one of those than an ER, he thought.

Once he saw Jack Tennant pull into the garage and park next to his wife’s aging green Lincoln, Jonathan went back to Urgent Care to have someone look at his arm.

They did more than look. With a doc in a box supervising the procedure, a physician’s assistant and a nurse lanced the wound, cleaned it, and then put the arm in a sling. They also gave Jonathan a prescription for a course of antibiotics. He gave the Urgent Care folks Jack Tennant’s name and a phony social security number. When he went to the closest Walgreens to have the prescription filled, he wasn’t at all surprised to find that they had Jack Tennant’s name on file in their pharmacy.

“Do you want to leave this on express pay?” the clerk asked.

“Sure,” Jonathan said. Sitting waiting for the prescription to be filled, it pleased him to think that his mother’s husband’s Medicare account would be billed for Jonathan’s medications. He also doubted anyone would catch on to the switch for a very long time, if ever.

With his prescription in hand, Jonathan headed back to his observation post. On the way, though, he stopped at Sonic and stocked up on fast food. He didn’t know how long he’d have to wait before he found out what was going on, but if Jack and Abby Tennant were planning on an intimate dinner date out in the desert, Jonathan was determined that there would be at least one uninvited guest in attendance.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:30 P.M.

92º Fahrenheit

When Jack finished smoking his cigar, he went back inside the house. In the family room he found a tray loaded with drinks laid out on the counter in the wet bar. On it were glasses, a pitcher of premixed Bloody Marys, a bucket of ice, a bottle of Tabasco sauce, and a plate of celery sticks for stirring, as well as a dish of salted peanuts. The peanuts were for Jack. He loved them. The Tabasco sauce allowed them to season each drink to taste. Abby liked her Bloody Marys spicy enough that sweat would pop out on her forehead as she drank them. Jack preferred a somewhat milder recipe.

Jack found Abby sitting on the couch with her newly polished toes tucked up under her. She appeared to be lost in contemplation. He paused long enough to pour his own drink before joining her on the couch.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said, touching her glass with his.

She smiled at him. “Just remembering,” she said. “Thinking about what my life was like five years ago.”

“You remember that day, too?” he asked.

She nodded. “Every detail,” she said. “I woke up that morning up to my eyelids in party problems. It was the first time I was completely in charge of the bloom party, and I was totally focused on that. For a change I was so busy doing other things that I was finally able to forget how much I hated being divorced. I believe it was the first time that ever happened.”

“And you never saw this coming?” he asked, smiling at her. “You never saw us coming?”

“Never,” she answered. “If I’d had an inkling of how much my life would change that day, I would have been more petrified about that than I was about the party. I might have been too nervous to get out of bed.”

“I don’t think so,” Jack said, shaking his head. “You can’t convince me you were scared of anything. The moment I saw you, I was smitten. I remember telling myself, ‘Wow! There’s one put-together lady. She’s ten feet tall and bulletproof.’ ”

Widowed for more than a year, Jack Tennant had stopped off in Tucson to visit his brother and sister-inlaw as one of the last stops at the end of a year-long solitary road trip, one he told people he had taken in order to find himself.

Five years earlier, he and Irene had been on the brink of divorce when Irene’s doctor had delivered the bad news—a diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Their health plan from his years in the insurance world was a good one, but it was tied to his retirement. Had they divorced, Irene’s situation wouldn’t have been covered.

Because of that, they had stuck it out. Or rather he had stuck it out until the bitter end. And it had been bitter. Irene had told him time and again during that time that if it hadn’t been for the insurance coverage, she would have left him in a heartbeat. Having that thrown in his face while he’d been trying to be a good guy had hurt, and the hurt had been worse every time he heard it.

Once Irene was gone, he had sold the house in California—against everyone’s advice about not making any kind of major decisions too soon after the death of his spouse. In the end it turned out Jack was right and everyone else was wrong. He had unloaded their property in Pasadena for a tidy bundle long before the economic downturn gutted the California real estate market. Then he put the money in the bank, bought himself a brandnew Lexus, and hit the road.

For the better part of the next year he was a vagabond, setting off on a grand-circle tour, visiting places on a whim and as weather permitted, crisscrossing the country and visiting all the interesting and quirky places Irene had never wanted to visit. She was especially opposed to anything resembling a tourist trap, as she called them.

In the course of his travels Jack had put 25,000 miles on his no longer new Lexus. He had motored to Yosemite in California, Ashland and Crater Lake in Oregon, Mount St. Helens and the rain forests of western Washington, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Glacier in Montana, Zion in Utah, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the pristine lakeshore of upper Michigan, Niagara Falls, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and the battlefield at Gettysburg; Washington, D.C.; Charleston, South Carolina; Branson, Missouri; the Alamo in Texas; as well as Albuquerque, Roswell, and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

He had called Zack from Albuquerque, just to say hello. He hadn’t planned on stopping by to see him, but Zack had shamed him into it.

“If you’re on your way back to California, we’re right on the way.”

That wasn’t exactly true since Albuquerque was a lot farther north, but Jack had allowed himself to be persuaded mostly because he wasn’t eager to get back to California. His kids still lived there, but Jack no longer did.

The fateful phone call had taken place toward the end of June. At the time Jack had known nothing about Zack’s and Ruth’s involvement with Tohono Chul. As docents they would have lots to do the night of the bloom party, but they didn’t mention the possibility of a party on the phone when he gave them his ETA. In hindsight he now understood why that was—they hadn’t known exactly when the party would take place because no one knew exactly when the night-blooming cereus would do its thing.

He had driven up to their house at nearly five o’clock on a very hot June afternoon. Zack and Ruth had ushered him and his suitcases into the house. Then, after a little bit of small talk and giving him half an hour to shower and change clothes, they had loaded him into the car to go to the park to, of all things, a flower show.

At least that’s how Jack understood it. Jack Tennant had learned several things about himself during his months of solo traveling. Irene had always loved flowers—all kinds of flowers—but Jack didn’t much care for them. His low opinion about them hadn’t improved, not after visiting the Rose Festival in Portland, Oregon, nor after seeing the autumn leaves in New England and the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. So although Jack had no interest in flowers and wasn’t particularly excited about the one they were raving about, he behaved as a polite guest should and went along for the ride.

Once inside Tohono Chul, Zack had raced off to make sure the luminarias that lined the park’s dirt paths that night stayed lit. Ruth had a job to do, too, in the gift shop, so she handed Jack a glass of punch and introduced him to Abby Southard. Then his sister-in-law had taken off, leaving Jack and Abby chatting.

Not long after that, a rotund old Indian man dressed in boots, jeans, and a splashy black cowboy shirt took to the microphone. For the next half hour he regaled the people in the audience with a story—a Native American legend—about the supposed origin of the flower in question. Since Jack had yet to see a night-blooming cereus with his own eyes, he supposed this was a lot of fuss over nothing.

As this grown-up version of story time ended, one of the volunteers had hurried up to notify Abby Southard that they were about to run out of punch and ice. She had no more than dispatched someone to the nearest grocery store to handle that crisis when a frantic guest had appeared with the disturbing announcement that a rattlesnake seemed to have taken up residence close by one of the blooms.

On the way to the park, Zack had explained that Tohono Chul was devoted to preserving native desert flora. It was only natural, then, that the park would preserve some of the local fauna as well. Without turning a hair, Abby explained to Jack that rattlesnakes were as likely to show up at the Queen of the Night party as people were. Then she used a handheld walkie-talkie to summon a man with a snake-stick to take charge of the offending reptile and move it to a somewhat less traveled part of the park.

Jack had been intrigued. He had never met a woman who could handle both a punch crisis and a rattlesnake crisis at the same time. Irene had been petrified of snakes—and lizards and spiders and bees and wasps. By comparison Abby had seemed downright fearless, and good-humored besides.

“So you have to wrangle both the punch bowl and the rattlesnakes?” he had asked.

“Yup,” she said with a grin. “That’s me all over.”

Fascinated, Jack had spent most of the rest of the evening hanging out with her, and it was with Abby Southard at his side that he had seen his first-ever night-blooming cereus. Truth be told, he wasn’t that impressed—with the flower, that is. Oh, he managed a polite ooh and aah over the size of it and over the smell—which didn’t do that much for him, either, but he could see that Abby was enchanted with the night-blooming cereus, and he was enchanted with her.

He made like the old woman in the Indian legend and put down roots right away. After only two nights in Zack and Ruth’s guest room, he had taken himself off to one of those corporate long-term-stay hotels, the kind that come furnished with everything from sheets and pillows (bad ones) to pots, pans, and dishes.

Zack thought paying rent was a bad idea. He said that if Jack was going to stay around Tucson, he ought to find himself a real condo to buy, maybe one on a golf course. But Jack had no interest in going on a real estate hunt. He had set his sights on some other prey, and Abigail Southard was it. Because she came with a perfectly nice home of her own, he saw no need to fork over money to buy another. He figured two would be able to live as cheaply as one, especially if they had more money in the bank.

Jack Tennant and Abby Southard had met on the twenty-sixth of June and had married on the twenty-sixth of July. Everyone had told them it was stupid to jump into matrimony that way. Zack and Ruth had both disapproved, and so had Abby’s older sister, Stephanie.

“What’s the big rush?” Zack had asked. “I mean, at your age, it’s not as if you knocked her up or something.”

Emmy and Lonnie, Jack’s own forty-something kids, hadn’t much liked the arrangement, either. They had both been invited to the justice of the peace ceremony, and both had declined. Jack suspected that Abby’s son, Jonathan, would have taken much the same position, but he had been estranged from his mother for years—in fact, he hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade. The good news there was that Jack and Abby hadn’t had to deal with Jonathan’s disapproval along with everyone else’s.

All the naysayers were still nay-saying, waiting for the “hurried” marriage to end in disaster. In the process Zack and Ruth Tennant had pretty much removed themselves from Jack and Abby’s circle of friends. They had even gone so far as to sever their connections with Tohono Chul, including resigning their docent positions. Abby had worried about that, but their departure hadn’t fazed Jack.

“So much for what the relatives think,” he had told her with a grin. “If they can’t take a joke, screw ’em. The only thing that matters is what you and I think. By the time we met, both of us were old enough to understand we don’t have all the time in the world. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.”

And they had done so. On the fifth anniversary of their meeting and one month short of their fifth wedding anniversary, the two of them were as happy as they had ever been. They were better matched, too—better matched than Jack had been with Irene, once he retired, and than Abby had ever been with Hank.

Irene hadn’t been that bad initially, he reminded himself. When Jack had been a young hotshot executive, working his way up, she had been a powerhouse. She had been a good mother to his two now grown children. When the kids were little and Jack was putting in the long hours at work, Irene had been the parent who had done most of the child rearing. By the time the kids were out of the house, however, and once Jack retired, he and Irene had discovered that they had nothing in common. Not only had they fallen out of love, they had fallen out of like as well.

For Abby and Jack Tennant, love really was lovelier the second time around. When they were out in public and holding hands, people sometimes said they were cute. That didn’t bother Jack, either. He still felt like a damned newlywed, and he didn’t care who knew it.

Then there was the matter of quiet. The two of them had been sitting there for some time, sipping their drinks in companionable silence while watching several hummingbirds buzzing around the colorful feeder Abby had hung in the mesquite tree outside their front door. It seemed to Jack that Irene had never had a quiet, introspective moment in her life. There were the times when she had given him the silent treatment—sometimes for days on end—but that was always the calm before the storm when some big blowup was brewing. It wasn’t a comfortable silence so much as an ominous one.

During the time Jack had been alone and in the years since he and Abby had been together, Jack had come to relish times like these when simply being in the same room together was enough.

“What time is our reservation?” Abby asked, emerging from her own reverie and breaking into Jack’s.

“We should probably leave around six,” he said. “It’ll take an hour to get there.”

“What should I wear?”

In fact, Jack had already handled that issue. Abby had a jumpsuit that she’d had made to use for outdoor workday events at Tohono Chul. Jack had smuggled that, along with Abby’s pair of hiking boots, into the trunk, along with the packed hamper and cooler. Hiking or work clothes would be far better suited for what he had in mind than some dress-up outfit that would snag on the first bit of mesquite that got in Abby’s way, but telling her that would give the game away. Jack was determined to keep the secret until the very last minute.

“As long as you wear the blindfold,” he said, “you can wear anything you want.”

Abby had one of those beauty-mask things for sleeping, one that would fit over her ears without messing up her hair. He had told her in advance that the blindfold was essential.

“I thought you were kidding about that.”

“Nope,” he said. “Not kidding.”

Abby gave him a kiss and then stood up. “All right,” she said. “I think I’ll go have a little lie-down. A nap would be good for what ails me.”

“Mind if I join you?” Jack asked.

“You’re welcome, as long as you’re there to sleep. No funny business.”

“Of course,” he said, but he had his fingers crossed when he said it.

As he followed Abby back to the bedroom, he suspected she knew that all along.

Casa Grande, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 4:00 P.M.

96º Fahrenheit

Geet was asleep again and Brandon was dozing on the sofa when Sue Farrell came back home. She looked like a new woman. Instead of going to see a movie, she had stopped off for a haircut. She looked altogether better.

“How are things?” she asked anxiously. “I was gone longer than I planned.”

“Once he woke up, we talked for the better part of an hour,” Brandon told her. “After that he went back to sleep.”

She nodded. “An hour of conversation is about as much as he’s good for. Did he ask for more pain meds?”

“No,” Brandon said. “He said they make him too groggy.”

“Being groggy is better than being in pain,” Sue said.

Of course that was a matter of opinion. For right now, Brandon Walker was willing to take Geet Farrell’s word for it over Sue’s.

Brandon lugged the Ursula Brinker evidence box out of the house and loaded it into the back of his Honda CRV. It was a relief to get out of the sickroom—to walk away from the hopelessness and heartbreak that was everywhere in Geet and Sue Farrell’s home. He started the engine. As he waited for the air-conditioning to cool things off enough so he could touch the steering wheel, Brandon thought about checking in with Diana, but then he remembered she wasn’t home. Lani had called last night to invite her mother along to Tohono Chul for lunch, after which they would hang around the park for the major evening do, held each year in honor of the night-blooming cereus.

Brandon had two reasons to be happy about that. Number one: It meant that Diana would be out of the house and doing something fun for a change. Number two: He, Brandon, didn’t have to go along. He’d had tea on occasion at Tohono Chul’s Tea Room, and it wasn’t his kind of place. As for the party? That wasn’t his kind of thing, either. The people there would see to it that Diana was treated as a visiting dignitary, and that was fine, but there were times when Brandon could take only so much of being Mr. Diana Ladd.

Thinking about the Tea Room, however, reminded Brandon that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. It was now almost four o’clock in the afternoon—a very long way past his usual late-morning lunchtime. Once he left Geet and Sue’s neighborhood, he found himself on one of Casa Grande’s larger multi-lane streets. He drove past the first Burger King he saw without even slowing down, choosing instead to pull in at a Mexican food joint called Mi Casa Ricardo.

It was the kind of place Brandon Walker liked—family-owned and unpretentious. He ordered iced tea, a cheese crisp, and carne asada fajitas. He knew he was ordering too much food, but he counted on having some leftovers to take home to Damsel, who firmly believed that restaurant doggie bags had been invented solely for her benefit.

His cell phone rang as he took the first bite of cheese crisp. “How was it?” Ralph Ames asked.

Brandon knew Ralph wasn’t referring to the cheese crisp. Brandon had called Ralph in Seattle as soon as he had received Sue Farrell’s phone call summoning him to Casa Grande.

“Pretty rough,” he said.

“How long do you think he has?” Ames asked.

“Not long,” Brandon answered. “He’s put up a hell of a fight, but we’re down to short strokes. I’d say a couple of weeks at the most. Maybe only days.”

“I had been planning to come down to Arizona the end of next week,” Ralph said. “I’ll see if I can move that up some. I’d like to see him before it’s too late.”

“He gave me the Brinker file,” Brandon said.

“Good,” Ralph said. “I expected that he would. You’re the logical successor on that one. Weeks ago Geet mentioned that he had a new lead. I know he was hoping he’d be able follow up on it himself, but of course—”

“Right,” Brandon said. “The clock wound down before he had a chance. I told him I’d look into it right away. There’s nothing I’d like better than to tell Geet in person that we finally have some answers.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.