J Jance - Queen of the Night

Once upon a time the room had been a treasure trove of mementos from Brandon ’s law enforcement days. There had been photos of him meeting various dignitaries, including one of him shaking hands with President Nixon. Nixon may have left office in disgrace, but Brandon still had a soft spot in his heart for the man who had campaigned for office as a “law and order” candidate.

And maybe part of Brandon ’s fondness for Nixon came from his own understanding of disgrace, because a similar fate had befallen Sheriff Brandon Walker. Richard Nixon had been brought low by that pesky group of “plumbers.” Brandon ’s downfall had come about due to his two ne’er-do-well sons, Tommy and Quentin, who had never given their father anything but heartbreak.

And the truth was, Quentin had been more at fault than Tommy ever was. Tommy hadn’t lived long enough to grow into anything worse than an overgrown juvenile delinquent. When he disappeared, Brandon and Diana had assumed he had simply run away. Instead, he had died years earlier while on a grave-robbing expedition out on the reservation. His parents might never have learned the truth about their son’s disappearance if it hadn’t been for Mitch Johnson’s attack on Lani, which had led to the discovery of Tommy’s skeletal remains.

Quentin, on the other hand, had lived long enough to become a genuine criminal. His involvement in a prison-based protection racket had been an important component in Brandon ’s losing his bid for reelection to the office of sheriff. And later on, when Quint was paroled from prison for the second time, things had gotten worse instead of better.

While imprisoned in Florence, Quentin had come under the spell of not one but two crazed killers, both of them sworn enemies of Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd. Diana had helped her friend, Rita Antone, see to it that a former English professor named Andrew Philip Carlisle had gone to prison for the murder of Rita’s granddaughter, Gina. Brandon had done the same thing for a remorseless killer named Mitch Johnson, who liked to go out into the desert and use illegal immigrants for target practice.

Incarcerated together in the Arizona State Prison at Florence, Carlisle and Johnson had hatched a complicated program of revenge against Brandon and Diana. Quentin, most likely without realizing what their real motives were, had somehow been drawn into their vortex. The last time Quentin set foot in his father’s house, he had come there with the newly paroled Mitch Johnson, who was operating as Andrew Carlisle’s proxy. Functioning in a drug-addled stupor, Quentin had vandalized his father’s office, smashing his keepsakes and a lifetime’s worth of mementos. Quentin had done all that without realizing that he and his adopted sister, Lani, were the real targets in Mitch Johnson’s scheme.

In the pitched battle that followed, Lani had managed to save herself, and she had tried to save Quentin as well, but he had been badly injured. Over the next several years, Quentin’s physical condition had deteriorated, step by step, into a situation where he had become hooked on prescription medications and had died as a result of an accidental overdose.

Long before that, though, when Brandon and Diana were still dealing with the immediate crisis, Diana had offered to have the broken plaques and photos repaired and reframed. But Brandon had refused. He was done with all that. Repairing the damage would have hurt more than letting all that stuff go. Instead, Diana had done a makeover, one that included new paint and a new desk and, eventually, more of Diana’s burgeoning collection of baskets.

And that was fine with Brandon, even though collecting baskets was Diana’s passion, not his. He could look at them impassively and not be reminded of what he continued to regard as his greatest failure in life-his sons.

That was one of the reasons the month of June bothered him so much these days-because of Father’s Day. He had done all right with his stepson, Davy, and with Lani, his adopted daughter. And then there was Brian Fellows, Tommy and Quentin’s half brother, who had worshipped Brandon from afar, sopping up the fatherly crumbs Quentin and Tommy had disdained, and who was now one of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department’s senior detectives in his own right.

Taking Lani and Davy and Brian into consideration, maybe Brandon Walker wasn’t a complete failure in the fatherhood department-just where his own biological offspring were concerned.

Even so, remembering Tommy and Quentin was something that hurt him every day-every single day of the year-Father’s Day or not.

Finally, in order to banish the old insecurities, Brandon sat down at the desk and opened the banker’s box. Before he made any effort to contact the woman who had written to Geet, he needed to familiarize himself with as much of the case as possible.

Plucking a pair of reading glasses out of the top desk drawer, he reached into the box, pulled out the first document he found there, and began to read.

Sells, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

79º Fahrenheit

As Dan drove along the highway south of Sells, he examined the occupants of every vehicle he met and every one he passed. Most of the southbound cars were fully occupied with Indians and were headed for the dance. Among the ones coming north, Dan saw nothing out of line. He recognized the vehicles as belonging to people from nearby villages. They were headed into Sells to shop or into Tucson for the same reason.

South of Topawa, the Anglo name of a village called Gogs Mek, or Burnt Dog, the narrow paved road gave way to rough gravel. Here and there, the tan rocky dirt along the roadway was punctuated by ho’ithkam- ironwood trees, kukui u’us- mesquite trees, and low-lying shegoi, greasewood or creosote bushes.

Dan practiced his self-imposed vocabulary lessons as he drove, not because he thought speaking the language would win him acceptance on the reservation but because he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it.

When Micah Duarte had brought him home to San Carlos, Dan had resisted all of his grandfather’s efforts to teach him Apache. Now Dan studied Tohono O’odham on his own. It was a means of seeking forgiveness, not from Gramps. Micah Duarte had never expected or demanded such a thing. No, Dan Pardee was seeking forgiveness for himself from himself. That was a lot more difficult to come by.

He passed the tiny village of Komelik, which, roughly translated, means Low Flat Place. Compared to the mountains jutting up out of the desert to the left of the road, this was low and flat and mostly deserted. After that, every time a set of tire tracks veered off the road and out into the desert, Dan stopped the Expedition, got out of the vehicle and examined the story left behind in the dust and dirt. Months of patient study had allowed him to put many of the resulting tire tracks together with the people who drove individual vehicles.

The track with the half-bald front tire belonged to a vehicle that had been permanently knocked out of alignment when the driver, an old man named James Juan, had struck a cow on the open-range part of the highway near Quijotoa, a bastardization of Giwho Tho’ag, or Burden Basket Mountain. Dan spotted the tracks of a pickup hauling a livestock trailer. That, no doubt, belonged to Thomas Rios, who along with his son successfully ran several head of cattle on a well-managed family plot of land near Komelik.

The tires on the small sedan probably belonged to the Anglo man Dan had seen hanging around on several occasions lately-mostly when he was working day shift. The guy drove a white Lexus-not exactly reservation-style wheels-but he was always alone, always drove the speed limit, and never failed to pass along a friendly wave. One of the other Shadow Wolves had talked to the guy. He was evidently some kind of naturalist doing research in the desert with Thomas Rios’s full knowledge and approval.