J Jance: Queen of the Night

After Brian’s mother’s first divorce, Brandon Walker, then a Pima County homicide detective, had come to the house each weekend and dutifully collected his own sons to take them on noncustodial outings. One of Brian’s first memories was of being left alone on the front steps while Quentin and Tommy went racing off to jump in their father’s car to go somewhere fun-to a movie or the Pima County Fair, or maybe even the Tucson Rodeo-while Brian, bored and lonely, had to fend for himself.

Then one day a miracle happened. After Quentin and Tommy were already in the car, Brandon had gotten back out. He came up the walk and asked Brian if he would like to go along. Brian was beyond excited. Quentin and Tommy had been appalled and had done everything in their power to make Brian miserable, but they did that anyway-even before Brandon had taken pity on him.

From then on, that’s how it was. Whenever Brandon had taken his own boys somewhere, he had taken Brian as well. The man had become a superhero in Brian’s eyes. He had grown up wanting to be just like him, and it was due in no small measure to Brandon Walker’s early kindness that Brian Fellows was the man he was today-a doting father and an experienced cop. And it was why, on Saturday afternoons, after the house was clean, that he never failed to take his girls somewhere to do something fun-to the Randolph Park Zoo or the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Today, as hot as it was, they had already settled on going to a movie at Park Mall.

Brian was on call. Only if someone decided to kill someone tonight would he have to go in to work. Otherwise he would have had his special day with his girls-well, all but one of his girls. That was what made life worth living.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 a.m.

90º Fahrenheit

Brandon Walker knew he was running away. He had the excuse of running to something, but he understood that he was really escaping from something else, something he didn’t want to face. He would face it eventually because he had to, but not yet. He wasn’t ready.

Not that going to see G. T. Farrell was light duty by any means. Stopping by to see someone who was on his way to hospice care wasn’t Brandon’s idea of fun. Sue, Geet’s wife, had called with the bad news. Her husband’s lung cancer had been held at bay for far longer than anyone had thought possible, but now it was back. And winning.

“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.