Queen of the Night Read online

  “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 reelection, 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-def flat-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 e
arned 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 grandmother, 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. T
hey 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.”