Queen of the Night

by J. A. Jance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “And the dog?”

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

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

  San Diego, California

  Saturday, June 6, 2009, 9:02 p.m.

  59º Fahrenheit

  “Nine-one-one Emergency. What are you reporting?”

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

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

  “Name?” Louise asked.

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

  “Both,” Louise told her.

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

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

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

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

  “This line is for emergency calls only.”

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

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

  “So what’s going on?” Louise asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Sunday, June 7, 2009, 3:10 a.m.

  65º Fahrenheit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Really,” Dan said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why don’t you bring him inside?”

  Dan was astonished. “Into the hospital?”

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

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

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

  “And I’m Dan,” he said. “Dan Pardee.”

  Dan Pardee, the ohb.

  Tucson, Arizona

  Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 p.m.

  73º Fahrenheit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:15 a.m.

  65º Fahrenheit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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