Queen of the Night Read online

  By then it was only a matter of minutes before her shift was due to start at midnight. There was no sense in trying to grab a quick nap. Besides, Lani wasn’t sleepy. Her body was still accustomed to the sleep-deprived schedule she had maintained as both an intern and as a resident. Tomorrow, after she got off shift, there would be plenty of time to sleep.

  She fixed a cup of instant coffee—plastic coffee, as her father called it—and then sat at her small kitchen table to drink it. She didn’t worry about leaving Gabe alone. He spent the night with her often enough. He knew that, if there was a problem—any kind of problem—all he had to do was walk across the parking lot to the hospital to find her.

  Lani wished she could take Fat Crack’s deerskin pouch, his huashomi, out of her medicine basket and put it to good use, but there wasn’t enough time for one of the old medicine man’s discerning ceremonies. She needed uninterrupted time to smoke the sacred tobacco, the wiw, or to examine whatever images might be hidden in Fat Crack’s collection of crystals. Those were things that could be done only on Indian time. The hospital ran on Anglo time, with a time clock for punching in and punching out.

  Lani had lived in both the Anglo and Indian worlds all her life, and she was accustomed to the accompanying dichotomy. She was also used to being more than one person at one time. That, too, had been part of her lifelong reality.

  Before her adoption by Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd, Lani had been known as Clemencia Escalante from the village of Nolic. Her biological mother, a teenager more interested in partying than in raising a child, had left her baby in the care of an aging grandmother. Once the older kids in the village had gone off to school, Clemencia, still a toddler, had wandered into an ant bed and had almost died of multiple ant bites. The superstitious Escalantes had regarded Clemencia as a dangerous object and had refused to take her back. Fat Crack’s wife, Wanda, a social worker, had brought the abandoned baby to the attention of her husband’s aunt Rita Antone. It was at Rita’s instigation that Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd had adopted her.

  Lani knew that people on the reservation who knew the story still sometimes referred to her as Kuadagi Ke’d Al, the Ant-Bit Child. Her adoptive parents had given her the name Lanita Dolores after Kulani O’oks, the Tohono O’odham’s greatest medicine woman, the Woman Who Had Been Kissed by the Bees. Nana Dahd, her godmother, had called her Mualig Siakam, Forever Spinning, because, like Whirlwind, Lani had loved to dance. And after she had used Bat Strength in her fatal encounter with Mitch Johnson in the cave under Ioligam—after she had been saved by the timely intervention of bat wings in the darkness of I’itoi’s cave—Lani often called herself Nanakumal Namkam, Bat Meeter.

  But tonight, in the Indian Health Center at Sells, Lani couldn’t be anyone else but Lanita Dolores Walker, M.D.

  Putting her dirty cup in the dishwasher, she left her housing compound apartment and headed for the ER.

  Vamori, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:00 a.m.

  67º Fahrenheit

  Tribal chairman Delia Ortiz’s feet hurt—like crazy. She had been on them all day long. Even though it was Saturday, she had spent most of the day at work in her office at Sells. Now here she was at the dance at Vamori.

  Delia’s husband, Leo, loved the dances for good reason. He and his brother, Richard, played in a chicken-scratch band, and the summer dance at Vamori was one of their favorite gigs, but they had grown up on the reservation. Delia had not.

  She had spent most of her early years as an “in town” Indian, most notably in Tempe and later on the East Coast. Fat Crack Ortiz, a previous tribal chairman, had wooed her back to the Tohono O’odham reservation from Washington, D.C., by offering her the job of tribal attorney. The fact that Fat Crack later became her father-in-law in addition to being her boss was one of the unintended consequences of her acceptance of that position.

  Not long after Fat Crack’s death, Delia herself had been elected tribal chairman. In terms of what was going on at the time, an “in town” Indian was exactly what had been and still was required for the job.

  The U.S. government has a long ignoble history of cheating Indians and disregarding treaty arrangements. That was still happening. Tribes, including the Tohono O’odham, were still having to file suit against the BIA in order to get monies that were lawfully due them. Now, however, with casino operations changing reservation economics, there was a new wrinkle in Anglo cheating. The casinos belonged to the tribes, but the mostly Anglo operators were slick and accustomed to winning at every game. They were more than prepared to take the tribes to the cleaners the same way they did ordinary gamblers.

  Whenever those kinds of issues needed to be handled, Delia Chavez Cachora Ortiz was up to the task. She brought to the job of tribal chairman qualifications that included a top-flight East Coast education as well as a prestigious cum laude Harvard law degree. Her curriculum vitae was fine when it came to dealing with intractable bureaucrats. There she found she was often able to out-Milgahn the Milgahn.

  Not having grown up on the reservation, however, Delia was less prepared for the day-to-day aspects of doing the job at home—for keeping the peace between the various districts on the reservation; for making sure roads got graded and paved in a timely fashion; for settling disputes over someone picking saguaro fruit in someone else’s traditional territory.

  She had also learned that everything she needed to know to do her job most likely wouldn’t show up in official visits to her office, or on the tribal meeting agenda, either. For that kind of in-depth knowledge and insight she needed to be out in public—mingling with the people, learning their concerns, and familiarizing herself with their age-old antipathies and alliances. The only way for her to do that was to go where the people went, and they went to the dances.

  That meant Delia Ortiz went to the dances, too, not that she liked them much. She didn’t. For one thing there were far too many of them—usually one a week or so. Depending on whether they were summer dances or winter dances, they were either too hot or too cold, and sometimes, like this one at Vamori, the dance was both too hot and too cold in the course of the same night. They were also dusty and loud and they seemed to go on forever, generally lasting from sundown to sunup. But that’s where she had to be, picking up tidbits of gossip while standing in line at the feast house or talking to the old people who, even in the summer, gathered around the fires to keep warm.

  Delia’s mandatory attendance at the all-night dance at Vamori was one of the reasons she had given Lani permission to take Gabe to Tucson for the Queen of the Night party and then, afterward, to spend the night at Lani’s place in the hospital housing compound.

  At events like this Delia found it difficult to juggle the dual requirements of being both a mother and an elected official. Gabe was a naturally curious child with a propensity for getting into mischief. It was impossible for Delia to keep an eye on him all the time while someone was trying to tell her about what was going on in Ali Chuk Shon, Little Tucson, or Hikiwoni Chekshani, Jagged Cut District.

  Delia was standing by one of the cooking fires and talking to a woman whose husband, a diabetic, was having to undergo dialysis three times a week, when Martin Ramon came looking for her. The serious look on the tribal police officer’s face told her something was badly amiss. Delia’s first thought was that something terrible had happened to Gabe. Everyone knew Lani Walker had a lead foot and drove that little Passat of hers far too fast.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “There’s been a shooting,” Officer Ramon told her. “Four people are dead.”

  “Where?” she asked. “Here on the reservation?”

  Martin nodded. “Over by Komelik,” he said.

  Waving good-bye to the woman, Delia excused herself and followed him. “Let me tell Leo,” she told Officer Ramon. “Then, if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, I’ll go there with you.”

  She made her way across the dusty dance floor, dodgi
ng between couples dancing their old-fashioned two-step. When she reached the band, she waited until that song ended.

  “What’s up?” Leo said, smiling as he asked the question.

  “I have to go,” she said. “Something’s wrong at Komelik.”

  Without a word, Leo reached for his car keys and offered them to her.

  “No,” she said. “You and Richard will need the truck to bring home your instruments. When I finish at Komelik, I’ll have one of the officers take me home.”

  She followed Martin Ramon to his patrol car, dreading where she was going and what she was going to see, but incredibly grateful for Leo Ortiz. His automatic reflex of unwavering kindness toward her and toward everyone else was one of the things she treasured about him. And it wasn’t an act, either. He wasn’t one person in public when he wanted to impress people and someone else at home the way her first husband, Philip Cachora, had been.

  At one of his gallery openings or when he had been wooing some well-heeled art fancier, Philip had been smooth as glass, Mr. Charm himself. The rough edges had all turned up at home where he had been a lying creep of a drug user and unfaithful to Delia besides. Leo’s life was an open book to her and to everyone else as well.

  “Four people?” Delia asked Martin Ramon after she strapped herself into the seat. “Indians?”

  “Two are,” he answered. “We’ve got a positive ID on one of them. Thomas Rios from Komelik identified his son Donald. We think the woman is Donald’s girlfriend, Delphina Enos.”

  “That new clerk from Nolic?” Delia asked. “The one with the little girl. Is she all right?”

  “The little girl is hurt but not that bad,” Martin answered. “Mostly cuts on her feet and on her face. She was found walking barefoot in the desert.”

  “By herself?”

  Martin nodded grimly. “One of the Border Patrol’s Shadow Wolves found her—a guy by the name of Dan Pardee. He found the four bodies first and then located the little girl a while later. My understanding is that he’s taking her to the hospital in Sells right now so she can be checked out.”

  “What about the other two victims?”

  “They’re both Anglos from Tucson. Thomas Rios says he gave the man permission for them to be on his land. They came to look at the deer-horn cactus, the Queen of the Night, which was supposed to bloom tonight.”

  “What happened?” Delia asked. “Did the Anglos end up having some kind of beef with Thomas Rios’s son and the fight ended up in a shoot-out?”

  “No,” Martin said. “That’s not it at all. For one thing, we didn’t find any weapons at the scene. That means someone else is the shooter. It looks like cash and jewelry are missing from the victims’ wallets and purses, so it may be a simple case of robbery. It could also be some kind of drug deal gone bad, although when we talked to Mr. Rios, he said his son wasn’t involved in any of that bad stuff.”

  “Maybe these poor people stumbled upon someone else’s drug deal.”

  Officer Ramon nodded. “That could be. Four people who were all in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Damn, Delia thought. Something else to give the Nation a bad name and make tourists run in the other direction.

  Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:10 a.m.

  67º Fahrenheit

  The first contingent of medical examiner vans arrived on the scene shortly after midnight. Fran Daly herself, Pima County’s most recent chief medical examiner, stepped out of the passenger side of the first-arriving vehicle.

  When the previous M.E. had taken his retirement and left the premises, his longtime assistant, Fran Daly, had finally received a much-deserved promotion. A former rodeo rider, she was an odd woman and tough as nails. Even roused from sleep in the middle of the night and with her curly white hair standing on end like so many unruly cotton balls, she still managed to be all business. She was at ease with herself and others. She was also at ease with the job she had to do. Once on the ground, she looked around, shivered, and then reached back inside the van’s front seat to retrieve a windbreaker.

  Detective Fellows, the only Pima County investigator on the scene, took Fran in hand and led her around the crime scene, following the same careful pathway Dan Pardee had used.

  “We’ve positively identified one victim,” Brian told Fran. “Donald Rios’s father came by a little while ago.”

  “Good,” Fran said. “No next-of-kin notification for one of them then. Who are the others?”

  “Two of them appear to be an Anglo couple from Tucson, tentatively identified as Jack and Abigail Tennant.”

  “And the Indian woman?”

  “She’s believed to be Donald’s girlfriend, Delphina Enos. She was currently living in Sells, but she’s originally from a village called Nolic. A child we believe to be Delphina’s daughter was found wandering barefoot around the crime scene. She’s being transported to the hospital at Sells.”

  “Life-threatening injuries?” Fran asked.

  Brian shook his head. “Minor injuries,” he replied. “Traumatized by what happened, of course, but she doesn’t appear to be physically hurt. Instead of calling for an ambulance, we got the booster seat out of the Blazer and put it in the back of Dan Pardee’s Expedition. He’s the guy who’s taking her to the hospital.”

  “Who’s Dan Pardee, a member of the tribal police?”

  “Pardee’s Border Patrol, a member of the Shadow Wolves unit,” Brian explained. “He’s the one who initially located the crime scene. It appears that the assailant or assailants went through the victims’ purses and wallets and dumped everything they didn’t want out on the ground. Dan looked through what was there and found a couple of ID cards in case he needed some kind of identification in order to have the little girl treated at the hospital in Sells. Cash and jewelry appear to be missing, but everything else was still here.”

  “You said the Indian woman was from somewhere called Nolic?” Fran asked. “Never heard of it. I’m not sure how I’ll manage her next-of-kin notice.”

  “That probably won’t be necessary,” Brian said. “One of the guys from Law and Order went to get Delia Ortiz.”

  “The tribal chairman?” Fran asked.

  Brian nodded. “According to Mr. Rios, Delphina worked for the tribe. Ms. Ortiz should be able to give us a positive ID and some idea about her next of kin. I’m reasonably certain Law and Order will take care of notifying her relatives.”

  “What about the Anglo couple?”

  “As I said, I’ve got their names and a tentative address in Tucson, but that’s about all.”

  “It’s a start,” Fran said.

  Running the beam from a flashlight over the dead woman’s body, she shook her head. “The shooter took this woman down with a single shot,” Fran said. “If he’s that serious about killing people, how come the little kid isn’t dead?”

  “Good question,” Detective Fellows said with a rueful smile. “Maybe they just aren’t making crooks the way they used to.”

  Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

  Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:45 a.m.

  70º Fahrenheit

  Dan had learned that the Tohono O’odham call June Hashani Bahithag Mashath, or Saguaro-Ripening Month. That’s also the month when the Sonoran Desert routinely bakes in an unrelenting dry heat during the day that can turn to a comparatively icy chill at night. That had already happened by the time he turned into the hospital parking lot at Sells. The seventy-degree external temperature reading seemed downright chilly compared to what it had been earlier in the afternoon.

  An ambulance with its lights still flashing was parked in the portico outside the emergency room. Dan steered his Expedition into an almost empty parking lot where his oversize vehicle took up most of what was striped off to be two compact spaces. Then, after rolling down the windows and ordering Bozo to stay, Dan unbelted Angie and carried the sleeping child inside the building.

  She was still wearin
g her bloodied clothing. He set her down carefully on a bench next to the wall. He had rescued a toy—a pink-and-yellow pinwheel—from the backseat of the Blazer. After placing that near her hand, Dan stepped forward for what he expected to be a protracted battle with the emergency-room clerk. The woman glanced at Angie’s sleeping, bloodstained form and then eyed Dan speculatively, as though she was convinced that Dan was responsible for the little girl’s injuries.

  “What happened to her?” the clerk wanted to know.

  “She was running around out in the desert without any shoes,” Dan explained. “She has cuts on her face, feet, and legs.”

  The clerk shrugged and sighed as if this didn’t seem to be something serious enough to merit an emergency-room visit. “All right, then,” she said. “I’ll need to see proof of enrollment.”

  Dan slipped both Delphina’s and Angie’s ID cards out of his shirt pocket and handed them over to the clerk. She studied them carefully for some time. When she finally started typing information into her computer, Dan watched her flying fingers and thought about what else he had found there on the ground, the one item he hadn’t shared with the Pima County investigator—a wallet-size photo of Delphina Enos holding Angie.

  In the picture a smiling Delphina had beamed proudly down at her baby daughter while Angie, dressed in a lacy white dress, smiled back. It was a peaceful photo, a loving photo.

  She’s wearing a baptism dress, Dan had thought the moment he saw the photo. After studying it briefly, he had slipped it into his pocket right along with the two ID cards.

  The clerk finished typing and cleared her throat. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you the father?”

  Dan shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m just the guy who found her.”

  “You’re not a relative, then?”