Queen of the Night

by J. A. Jance

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

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

  Brian nodded.

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

  “How come she’s still alive?”

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

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

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

  “She saw the shooter but not the shooting?”

  Dan nodded.

  “Do you think she can identify him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And Ms. Enos lived where?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was a surprise, all right, Dan thought.

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

  Los Angeles, California

  October 1978

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What grandfather?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

  “Daniel?” the old man asked.

  All Dan could do was stare and nod wordlessly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What did you say to him?” Dan asked.

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

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

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

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

  Eight

  Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:30 p.m.

  71º Fahrenheit

  Gabe fell asleep again soon after Lani finished telling him the story. Even though she believed Gabe hadn’t lied when he told her about seeing the image of Andrew Carlisle sitting with her mother, she knew it wasn’t true, not in any real physical sense. The man was dead, after all—he had died in prison years earlier. But she also understood that something about his brooding spirit—his dangerous, ohb-like presence—was once again intruding into the lives of Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. Lani also understood why her mother had vehemently denied seeing him. That was clear enough. Adults who were known to speak to people who weren’t there were usually thought to be crazy.

  On the other hand, children who conducted conversations with imaginary friends were often considered to be bright and creative. Little Gabe O
rtiz certainly qualified as bright and creative, but Lani feared there was far more to this than simply an overly active imagination on his part.

  Gabe hadn’t made up the burned and puckered skin on the ghostly apparition’s face. Lani knew about the panful of hot grease her mother had flung at Andrew Carlisle when he had broken into the house in Gates Pass and attacked her. Lani had seen photos of Carlisle’s face both before and after their life-and-death encounter. The two photos sat side by side in the photo section of Lani’s mother’s prizewinning book, Shadow of Death. One featured a head shot of a handsome but arrogant young man whose smug expression had spoken volumes about his contempt for others. The second pictured the grotesque features of that same face wrecked by mounds of scar tissue and with a pair of sightless eyes staring out at nothing.

  Yes, they were both photos of the same man—the same one Gabe had evidently seen as well, but for Lani the most worrisome part in all of this was something he must have told her mother that had resulted in Diana’s pointed question about Mitch Johnson and what he had done to Lani when he had kidnapped her and held her hostage years earlier.

  Once Mitch Johnson was dead, Lani had gone to great lengths to keep her mother from knowing all of what had happened during that dreadful time, and especially about the welt of puckered scar tissue his red-hot tongs had seared into the flesh of her breast. Now, though, her mother’s question seemed to indicate that she had been given some hints about what had happened that night and about Lani’s carefully guarded secret.

  Lani was convinced that something else was at work here, something sinister. She felt as though she’d been given a warning of some kind—a glimpse into the future that told her something dangerous was coming. She wished once again that there had been time tonight to sit down and discuss it with her father. Or with Fat Crack. The old medicine man would have known what these evil forebodings meant and how one should deal with them.

  The full moon was shining high overhead, and it was close to eleven thirty when Lani and Gabe finally arrived in Sells, sixty miles from Tucson. She drove straight to the hospital housing compound and stumble-walked Gabe into her house and down the hall to her second guest bedroom. Once he was tucked into bed, Lani showered and dressed in a pair of scrubs.