by J. A. Jance
All Brian could do was stand on his brake and try to avoid the flying wreckage that spun skyward in a whirlwind of chunks of metal and glass along with a storm of highway grit and dust. In the instant the car flew past him, he could see that the air bags had deployed, but that was all he could see.
From that moment on, things seemed to happen in slow motion. Before the Accord stopped moving, coming to rest halfway in the freeway’s right-hand lane and facing the wrong way, Brian had stopped his Crown Victoria in the middle of the on-ramp, slammed it into park, yanked on the hazard lights, and erupted out of the vehicle. He vaulted over the remains of the shattered guardrail and slid down the steep shoulder, drawing his weapon as he went. Behind him he heard a cacophony of sirens as the Tucson PD units hit their lights and sirens.
He saw a woman scramble out of the driver’s side of the Honda. “Get down,” he shouted at her. “On the ground.”
If she heard him, she ignored him. Rather than getting down, she stood there for several seconds, struggling to open the Accord’s back door. When it wouldn’t cooperate, she simply threw herself through what Brian realized must have been a broken rear window. And he knew, then, too, what she was doing: Virginia Torres was going after her baby.
Then, also in slow motion and moving as if in a daze, a man clambered out of the passenger side of the wrecked vehicle. Brian saw the figure first and then the telling details—the sling, the gun. Brian’s first thought was that he would try to grab the woman or the baby and use them as human shields. That may have been what he had in mind, but for some reason the rear door wouldn’t open and the window on that side hadn’t shattered.
“On the ground!” Brian shouted again. “Drop your weapon.”
Jonathan Southard looked up. Brian recognized the man’s bloodied face from the driver’s license photo. He seemed surprised to see Brian standing there, but he didn’t get on the ground and he didn’t drop his weapon. Just then the first Tucson PD officer arrived on the scene as well. He, too, had his weapon drawn.
“Drop your weapon.” The arriving officer issued the same orders Brian had given. “Get on the ground.”
Jonathan Southard did neither. He stood stock-still for a moment, as if assessing the situation and his opposition. Then, without checking for traffic, he turned and sprinted into the speeding freeway traffic.
Brian Fellows made as if to follow, but then he saw the woman again. She had managed to wrestle the child out of the vehicle. Now she stood there holding the baby and frozen in place, staring in horror back at the freeway.
Brian heard the bellowing horn of an approaching semi. He knew as soon as he heard it that it was coming too fast. He heard the thump of engaging air brakes and smelled the smoke from scorching tires. The woman was terrified and too dumbstruck to move. Brian wasn’t. He leaped forward, grabbed the woman’s arm and propelled her up the bank to safety. Then something smashed into him from behind. After that he knew nothing.
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 2:10 p.m.
89º Fahrenheit
Kath Fellows left the store parking lot and went home. She unloaded the car, put away her groceries, and waited for Brian to call. She didn’t want to call him. If he was involved in some sort of emergency situation, the last thing he needed was the distraction of a ringing telephone. First ten minutes went by without any word. Then twenty. Then thirty. With each passing minute she grew more and more anxious. She was sure something was wrong—terribly wrong.
Finally, unable to wait any longer, she put in a call to Brian’s office. She managed to bluff her way through to an emergency operator, but what she was told didn’t help. “Sorry, Ms. Fellows. It’s a chaotic scene right now. There are injuries. We don’t know who or how bad.”
As soon as Kath heard those words, she knew that she had to go see for herself. She didn’t want Amy and Annie to know how worried she was, but she didn’t want to take them with her, either. She called their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Harper, and asked for help.
“Of course,” Estelle said. “Just let me turn off the ball game. I’ll be right there.”
Kath was standing by the front door with her purse in one hand and the car keys in the other when Estelle rang the doorbell.
“Okay,” she announced as she let the woman into the house. “I’m going out for a while, girls,” she called over her shoulder. “You listen to Mrs. Harper and do whatever she says.”
“Where are you going?” Amy asked.
“Out,” Kath answered.
“Why can’t we come with you?”
“Because,” she said, then she fled out the door and down the steps.
She drove toward the spot where she’d last heard from Brian—I-10 and Kino. She was half a mile from the intersection when she ran into stopped traffic. She still had a rooftop emergency bubble light in her glove box, one she’d never quite gotten around to taking out of the Odyssey. She retrieved the light, plugged it in, and slapped it on top of her vehicle. Then she threaded her way through the traffic jam until she reached a cop who was directing people away from the freeway.
“Freeway’s closed, ma’am,” the officer said when she reached him. “You’ll have to go around.”
She reached into her purse and pulled out her Border Patrol ID. “I’m off duty,” she said. “They called in all available units.”
The officer barely looked at her ID. He simply stepped aside, motioned Kath onto the on-ramp, and then stopped the car directly behind her.
As soon as she turned onto the ramp, she could see the jumble of traffic ahead of her. There were a good hundred cars or so, stopped here and there, parked at odd angles. Some of them had stopped so suddenly that they had rear-ended the vehicle ahead of them, which meant that there were several fender benders, but at the head of that field of broken and battered automobiles Kath could see a mass of wreckage. At first what she was seeing didn’t make sense. As she inched her way closer, however, she realized that the debris field came from an overturned eighteen-wheeler that had spilled a massive load of construction materials in all directions.
All right, then, Kath thought. Brian’s up there, helping deal with this horrendous wreck. No wonder he couldn’t call me.
When Kath could drive no farther, she stowed the bubble light, left her car parked crookedly on the shoulder, and walked. She could see that the accident had started somewhere just after the I-19 exit ramp. And sure enough, there was Brian’s car—the only one in the collection of cop cars that didn’t have a red flashing lightbar. If Brian’s car was here, that meant he was here somewhere, too.
Kath pulled her phone out of her purse and punched the green button that automatically called the last number dialed. Unfortunately, that turned out to be Mrs. Harper’s number. She ended that call when Estelle Harper’s answering machine came on. Then Kath scrolled through to the next number and dialed that.
The phone rang and rang. It rang six times. Just when Kath expected the call to switch over to voice mail, somebody answered—somebody who wasn’t Brian.
“Hello?”
The voice belonged to a woman. It sounded tentative and uncertain. Kath tried to be all business.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “I’m looking for my husband. What are you doing with his phone?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “I heard the phone ringing. It was right here next to my car. I thought I should answer it.”
“What car?”
“I’m in a Chevrolet Lumina,” the woman said. “It’s blue. We’re stuck on this side of the truck. Thank God Bobby didn’t hit it—the truck, I mean. It was so close I’m still shaking like a leaf.”
By then Kath was shaking, too. She spotted the Lumina. Going up to the window, she flashed her ID and took possession of Brian’s phone. The front of the phone was shattered. The battery cover was missing completely, although the battery was still in place. It was a miracle that the phone worked at all.
Determinedly Kath picked her w
ay forward through the debris field. The broken semi had disgorged hundreds of rolls of roofing and hundreds of packets of shingles. Those were scattered in every direction. When Kath came around the front end of the disabled eighteen-wheeler, two more cops—DPS officers this time—barred her way.
“Sorry, lady,” one of them said. “You’ll have to go back.”
“That’s my husband’s car over there,” she said, pointing at the unmarked patrol car sitting undamaged on the shoulder of the road, with its hazard lights still blinking. “He’s a Pima County homicide detective,” she added. “He was chasing a killer with his arm in a sling.”
“The guy with his arm in the sling jumped out of the wreckage and ran into traffic,” one of the officers replied. “He got nailed by a car going eastbound. He’s already been transported in an ambulance.”
“Under guard?” Kath asked.
“Yes, under guard.”
She peered around at the remaining slew of cop cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, and at a group of EMTs frantically working on somebody who had yet to be transported.
“Anybody else hurt?” she asked.
At first neither of the cops replied, but the look they exchanged spoke volumes. As Kath started forward again, one of them reached out to stop her.
“Really, ma’am,” he said. “You probably shouldn’t go there right now . . .” he began.
Kath shook off his hand. “Either arrest me or let me go,” she told him.
He let her go. She reached the clutch of EMTs just in time to see a bloodied human form on a backboard being lifted onto a gurney and then into a waiting ambulance. There was nothing about the battered face or hands that she recognized, but she knew the shoes. Or rather, she knew the one shoe that had survived the impact and had stayed on Brian’s right foot. Her husband was no clotheshorse, but shoes, more specifically ECCO, were his one personal extravagance.
As Kath approached, one of the ambulance attendants tried to muscle her aside. She pushed right back.
“That’s my husband,” she told him determinedly. “Wherever he’s going, I’m going.”
Nodding his reluctant assent, the EMT handed her up into the back of the ambulance. Then he stepped in himself, closed the door, and called, “We’re in.”
With a squawk of the siren and a lurch of tires, the ambulance sped off.
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 4:00 p.m.
93º Fahrenheit
By the time Brandon and Diana neared their home in Gates Pass, Brandon could see that his wife was running on empty. He had suggested they stop in Casa Grande and get something to eat. She had opted for coming straight home. The whole time they’d been in the car she’d been quiet again, quiet and brooding. Since she sure as hell wasn’t talking with him, Brandon couldn’t help wondering if one of those other haunting entities was once again communicating with her.
Pulling into the driveway, Brandon was startled to see a Border Patrol vehicle, a Ford Expedition, parked on the far side of the gate, blocking the way. He was sure the gate at the end of the driveway had been closed when they left the house. No one should have been able to drive inside and park.
“What the hell?” Brandon muttered under his breath. “What’s all this? Wait here,” he said to Diana. “I’ll go check it out.”
Leaving the engine and AC running, Brandon stepped out of the CRV. What had once been a single backyard area had been carved into two separate yards in order to surround the lap pool with a kid-proof fence. Looking over the top of it, Brandon was dismayed to see a young man, a total stranger, splashing around in the pool. A little girl was with him. He would lift her out of the water and then splash her into it, while she alternately shrieked and giggled. Off under the gazebo lay two very wet dogs—Damsel and a huge German shepherd. The dog was a complete stranger, too, as far as Brandon was concerned, but Damsel seemed entirely at home with this arrangement.
The German shepherd caught sight of Brandon at the same moment Brandon saw the dog. He bounded up and came racing toward the gate, barking fiercely and sounding as though he was fully prepared to tear Brandon Walker limb from limb.
“Bozo!” the guy shouted. “No! Down!”
The dog immediately skidded to a stop and ducked down on his belly. He seemed to be under voice control, but Brandon Walker wasn’t taking any chances. He stayed on his side of the gate and made no attempt to open it.
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded of the guy in the pool. “And what do you think you’re doing in my backyard? This is private property. Now get the hell out.”
“Sorry,” the young man said, hefting the little girl onto his hip and making his way over to the steps. “You must be Mr. Walker. I’m Daniel Pardee. This is Angelina Enos. Your daughter is off doing some shopping. She thought she’d be back before you got home.”
“Shopping?” Brandon shot back. “Sure she is. If there’s one thing Lani hates, it’s shopping. Now who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”
The dog—Bozo? Was his name really Bozo?—clearly took exception to Brandon’s tone of voice. He leveled a withering look in Brandon’s direction, a look accompanied by a low-throated growl and the baring of a set of very sharp teeth.
“Dr. Walker tried to call you to let you know that we were stopping by . . .” the man began.
“I was working,” Brandon told him. “I forgot to turn my phone back on, but surely Lani understands we can’t just have strangers dropping in and using our pool without any kind of supervision.”
“She needed to do some power shopping,” Daniel said. “She thought she’d be better off without having us along.”
Diana walked up behind Brandon. “Who’s that?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“Apparently our daughter invited some of her friends to stop by and go swimming in our absence,” Brandon said sarcastically.
He was ripped, and he didn’t mind sounding like it.
The little girl slithered off the young man’s leg and went racing back toward the pool, scrambling over the dog in the process. The dog made no move to go after the child, but he still kept a wary eye on Brandon.
“I know your daughter wanted to explain all this to you,” Daniel Pardee began. “I expected her back before now.”
“Who’s that adorable child?” Diana asked over Brandon’s shoulder. “Where did she come from?”
Just then Lani’s Passat came down the driveway. Glancing in the passenger-side window, Brandon could see that the entire vehicle was loaded with boxes. The guy with the kid had evidently been telling the truth about Lani being off on a shopping extravaganza.
“I tried to call,” Lani began, rolling down her window. “I meant to be here by the time you got back.”
Nonetheless, Brandon Walker was furious. It was one thing to have their own grandchildren splashing around in the pool, but to allow a total stranger to bring a child there when no one was home was just asking for trouble, to say nothing of a lawsuit.
Brandon walked over to his daughter’s car. “What were you thinking? You have no business inviting people we don’t know onto your mother’s and my property. Family members are one thing—”
“Angie is family, Dad,” Lani said quietly, stepping out of the car. “She’s mine. Dan agreed to look after her while I went shopping.”
Brandon stopped himself in mid-rant. Was it possible that Lani had had a baby her parents knew nothing about?
“What do you mean, she’s yours?” he croaked.
“It happened this morning. Judge Lawrence issued a court order granting me temporary custody. The problem is, my apartment isn’t exactly child-ready. That’s what I was doing, buying what I’ll need to furnish her room.”
“I don’t understand,” Brandon said. “Why would you be given custody?”
“Her mother, Delphina Enos, was murdered last night,” Lani explained. “Out on the reservation.”
“But why—?”
“Delphina’s maide
n name was Escalante, Dad, from Nolic. I’m sure you remember them. She was my cousin. My birth cousin.”
“But if her mother has been murdered, isn’t there someone besides you who can take her?” Brandon asked. “Her grandparents, maybe, or else an aunt or uncle?”
“No,” Lani said. “There’s no one. No one wants to take her.”
“Wait a minute,” Brandon said as he finally managed to process what she’d been saying. “You mean those Escalantes? The same people who . . . ?”
Lani nodded. “Yes, the very same people who wouldn’t take me back after the ant bites. This is evidently similar. Since Angie wasn’t murdered along with her mother, her blood relatives have taken the position that she’s now a dangerous object. They won’t take her back. Angie’s father is in jail. His parents don’t want her, either.”
For a long moment Brandon looked hard at his daughter and then at the little girl. Even now Angie was sitting on the edge of the pool, kicking happily with both feet and churning up a spray of water that splashed as far as Bozo who, Brandon noted, had not yet broken his master’s down command.
Brandon glanced back at Dan Pardee. The interloper stood there still dripping and wearing a faded bathing suit, a Speedo Brandon was quite sure was one of Davy’s cast-offs. The younger man was barefoot, but he stood poised on the balls of his feet. He seemed to be assessing the situation in the same way his dog was. He also looked more than capable of leaping to Lani’s defense if that kind of protection seemed warranted.
Diana was the one who ended the uncomfortable stare-down between the two men. She walked past her husband as though he didn’t exist. Opening the gate, she walked past Bozo as well, kicking off her sandals as she went. Rolling up her pant legs, she sank down on the pool edge next to the little girl, dropped her feet into the water, and began kicking, too.
“I’m sorry about not letting you know in advance,” Lani continued, speaking to her father and motioning Dan to come join them. “This is Daniel Pardee, Dad. Dan. He’s an officer with the Shadow Wolves unit of the Border Patrol. He’s a friend of mine and of Angie’s. Dan, this is my father, Brandon Walker.”