Kiss of the Bees (39 page)

“I’m hiring Davy Ladd out of a special discretionary fund,” Gabe said. “One that comes straight from my office. The money to pay him won’t be coming out of your budget, it’ll be coming out of mine.”

“In other words, he’s coming, like it or lump it.”

Gabe Ortiz nodded. “I suppose that’s about it,” he said. “But wait until you meet him. He’s an unusual young man. I think you’ll like him.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Delia muttered. She opened the car door. “In fact, I wouldn’t count on that at all.”

Delia started out of the car and would have walked away, but just then a tow truck, red lights flashing, followed by a Law and Order patrol car, pulled up and stopped directly in front of the Crown Victoria. Gabe’s other son, Richard, climbed down from the truck.

“Here they are,” he was saying to the officer piling out of the patrol car.

As Gabe climbed out of the Crown Victoria, he immediately recognized Ira Segundo, a young patrol officer for the
Tohono O’othham
tribal police. “What’s the matter, Ira?” Gabe asked.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Cachora,” Ira said. “Baby told me she might be here with you.”

“I’m Delia Cachora,” she said, stepping forward. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s about your dad,” Ira Segundo said. “There was a problem over off Coleman Road. He’s been hurt.”

A curtain of wariness more than concern settled over Delia’s face. Since she had returned to the reservation, her father and her younger brother, Eddie, had only come to see her to ask for money. “What about him?”

“It happened at a
charco
over by where Rattlesnake Skull used to be—”

“By Rattlesnake Skull?” Gabe Ortiz interrupted.

Ira nodded. “We think maybe there was a fight of some kind. He must be hurt pretty bad. They air-lifted him to TMC.”

“You should be telling my brother this instead of me,” Delia said. “He’s the one who lives with him, but he’s probably off drunk somewhere. I’ll go get my car.”

“No, Delia,” Gabe said. “Get in. I’ll give you a ride.” Gabe Ortiz turned to his son. “Richard, I’m leaving you to take your mother home from the dance when she’s ready to go. Ira, I want you to put on your flashers and lead us into town.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Ortiz,” Ira said.

Still angry, Delia wanted to object, but something about the way Gabe issued the orders stopped her. She did as she was told and climbed back into the Crown Victoria. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” she said, once Gabe was back inside and had started the engine. “It’s my father, and I’m perfectly capable of driving myself.”

Already Gabe was threading his way through the army of parked cars. In the reflected glow of the dashboard lights, Delia was surprised by the grim set of his face.

“You’ve been away from the reservation a long time,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “Have you ever heard of Rattlesnake Skull?”

“Never,” she said. “I gather from what he said that it’s a deserted village.”

They were out of the parking lot now, and the lights on the patrol car were flashing in front of them. “Right,” Gabe said. “It is deserted, but a lot has happened there over the years. Before you go see your father and before you meet Davy Ladd, you should hear about some of it. I’m probably the only one who can tell you.”

When the banquet was finally over, Brandon and Diana Walker drove west across town. The evening had been surprisingly fun, and Diana was still giggling.

“You were absolutely great,” she told Brandon. “I don’t know why you’ve ever been spooked at the idea of talking to little old ladies. You charmed the socks off every one that got within spitting distance of you.”

Brandon grinned. “There’s nothing like a little sex in the afternoon to give a guy’s sagging ego a boost. But it turns out they were a pretty nice bunch of little old ladies . . .”

“And men,” Diana added.

“And a few men,” Brandon corrected. “The difference between the people we met tonight and most people is that the ones at the banquet all think I’m lucky to be able to be retired at age fifty-four. Everybody else thinks I’m either crazy or some kind of laggard.”

“They haven’t seen your woodpile,” Diana said.

Their mood was still light, right up until they drove up to the house in Gates Pass. “Damn it,” Brandon said. “It looks like Lani left every light in the house burning. One of these days she’ll have to pay her own utility bills. It’s going to come as a real shock.”

Brandon hit the automatic door opener and the gate on the side of the house swung open. “She also left her bike in the middle of the damn carport. What on earth is she thinking of?”

Diana sighed, dismayed to hear Brandon’s mood change from good to bad in the space of a few yards of driveway. “Stop the car,” she said. “I’ll get out and move the bike out of the way.”

She pushed the bike up to the front of the carport, giving Brandon enough room to park his Nissan next to her Suburban. No doubt the fragile mood of the evening was irretrievably broken. One way or another, children did that to their parents with astounding regularity.

The back door was unlocked, which most likely meant that Lani was home, but that was something else that would annoy her father. When Lani was home alone, she was supposed to keep the front and back doors locked.

Shaking her head, Diana went inside and discovered that Brandon was right. Almost every light in the house was blazing, but the note for Lani that Diana had left on the counter—the Post-it containing Davy’s phone number and telling Lani to call him back—was still on the counter, exactly where Diana had left it.

Through years of mothering teenagers, Diana Ladd Walker had discovered that looking in the sink and checking the most recent set of dirty dishes was usually a good way of getting a handle on who all was home, how long they’d been there, and whether or not they had dragged any visitors into the house with them.

The evidence in the sink this time left Diana puzzled. Other than the pair of champagne glasses she and Brandon had left there earlier in the afternoon, there was nothing but a pair of rubber-handled kitchen tongs. Knowing it wasn’t hers, Diana picked the utensil up and examined it under the light. The gripper part was somewhat scorched. It looked as though it had been used to cook meat of some kind, but there was nothing in the kitchen—no accompanying greasy mess—that gave Diana any hint of what that might have been.

As Diana automatically moved to the phone to check for messages, she could hear Brandon walking through the rest of the house, calling for Lani and switching off lights as he went. When Diana punched in the code, she found there were a total of five messages waiting for her. That bugged her. It was Saturday night. Couldn’t she and Brandon even go out to dinner without having the whole world phone in their absence?

The first message was timed in at three twenty-one. “Lani,” a female voice said. “This is Mrs. Allison from the museum. If you aren’t able to take your shift, you should always call in as soon as possible to let us know. I know tomorrow is scheduled to be your day off. If for some reason you aren’t going to be able to make your next shift on Monday, please call in on Sunday if you can. If I’m not there, leave word on the machine.”

Lani hadn’t made it to work? That didn’t make sense. She had
left
for work. How could it be that she was absent? The next message, at six-eleven, moments after Diana and Brandon had left for the banquet, was from Jessica Carpenter.

“Lani, what are you going to wear? Call me and let me know.”

“That figures,” Diana muttered as she erased that one.

The one after that was more worrisome. “Lani,” Jessica Carpenter said. “I thought you were going to be here by now. Mom has to go someplace after she drops me off, and if we don’t leave in a few minutes, she’ll be late. She says I should leave your ticket at the box office. I’ll put it in an envelope with your name on it.”

The next message, at nine-fifteen, was another one from Davy. “Hi, Mom and Dad. I’m still trying to get hold of Lani, but I guess nobody’s home. Give me a call. Bye.”

The last one was from Jessica once again. “It’s intermission and you’re not here. Are you mad at me or sick, or what? I’ll try calling again when I get home.”

Brandon came back into the kitchen just as Diana was putting down the phone. “Still taking messages?” he said.

“Lani didn’t go to work,” Diana said. “And she didn’t go to the concert, either.”

“Didn’t go to the concert?” Brandon echoed. “Where is she then? I’ve gone through the whole house looking for her.”

“Hang on,” Diana told him. “I’ll call the Carpenters and see if she ever showed up there.”

The phone rang several times and then the answering machine came on. Diana left a message for them to call her as soon as possible. “Nobody’s home,” she told Brandon. “Maybe they’re all still at the concert.”

“But Lani’s bike is here. Where would she be if her bike’s here?”

Brandon looked grim. “Something’s wrong. I’ll go back through the house and check again. Maybe I missed something. Do you have any idea what she wore when she left the house this morning?”

Diana shook her head. “I heard the gate shut, but I didn’t see her leave.”

This time they got as far as Brandon’s study. Before, Brandon had simply reached into the room and switched off the light without bothering to look into the room itself. Barely a step inside the door, he stopped so abruptly that Diana almost collided with him. “What the hell!”

Sidestepping him, Diana was able to see into the room herself. A fine spray of shattered glass covered most of the floor. In the center of the glass lay several broken picture frames. Looking beyond that, Diana saw that the wall behind Brandon’s desk—his Wall of Honor as he had called it—was empty. All his service plaques, his civic honors—including his Tucson Citizen of the Year and the Detective of the Year award—the one he’d received from
Parade Magazine
for cracking a dead illegal alien case years before—were all on the floor, smashed beyond recognition.

“Oh, Brandon!” Diana wailed. “What a mess. I’ll go get the broom—”

“Don’t touch anything and don’t come into the room any farther until we get a handle on exactly what’s happened here. It looks to me as though whoever it was broke into my gun case, too.”

Diana’s stomach sank to her knees. She had to fight off the sudden urge to vomit. “What about Lani . . .”

Brandon turned toward her, the muscles working across his tightened jaw. “Let’s don’t hit panic buttons,” he advised. “The first thing we should do is call the department and have them send somebody out to investigate.” Walking back to the kitchen, he picked up the phone. “Did you notice anything else out of place?” he asked as he dialed. After all those years with the department, the number of the direct line into Dispatch was still embedded in his brain as well as his dialing finger.

Diana thought for a minute. “Only that set of tongs over there in the sink. It looks as though somebody used it to cook meat or something, but I can’t tell what.”

Alicia Duarte was fairly new to Dispatch, but she had been around the department long enough that Brandon Walker’s name still carried a good deal of weight. Her initial response was to offer to send out a deputy.

“A deputy will be fine,” Brandon told her. “But I think we’re going to need a detective too. There’s a good chance that our daughter has disappeared as well, and the two incidents are most likely related.”

“Sure thing, Sheriff Walker,” Alicia said, honoring him with the title even though it was no longer his. “I’ll get right on it.”

Brandon put down the phone and then walked over to wrap his arms around Diana. “You heard what I said. Someone is on the way, although it’ll take time for them to get here.”

“What if we’ve lost her?” Diana asked in a small voice. “What if Lani’s gone for good?”

“She isn’t,” Brandon returned fiercely. It wasn’t so much that he believed she wasn’t lost. It was just that when it came to his precious Lani, believing anything else was unthinkable.

*    *    *

Brandon’s initial reluctance about adopting Clemencia Escalante disappeared within days of the child’s noisy entry into the Walker household. He was captivated by her in every way, and the reverse was also true. It wasn’t long before his daily return from work was cause for an ecstatic greeting on Clemencia’s part. When he was home, she padded around at his heels, following him everywhere, always underfoot no matter where he was or what he was doing.

When it came time to work on turning their temporary appointment as foster parents into permanent adoptive ones, Brandon had forged through the reams of paperwork with cheerful determination. Later, during caseworker interviews, he was charming and enthusiastic. But when the time came to drive out to Sells to appear before the tribal court for a hearing on finalizing the adoption, he was as nervous as he had been on the day he and Diana Ladd married.

“What if they turn us down after all this?” he asked, standing in front of the mirror and reknotting his tie for a third time. “What if we have to give her back? I couldn’t stand to lose her now, not after all this.”

“Wanda seems to think it’ll go through as long as we have Rita in our corner.”

The four of them rode out to Sells together. Rita and the baby sat in the backseat—Clemencia sleeping in her car seat and Rita sitting stolidly with her arms folded across her lap. She said very little, but everything about her exuded serene confidence. They found Fat Crack waiting for them in the small gravel parking lot outside the tribal courtroom. While Brandon and Diana unloaded the baby and her gear, Rita turned to her nephew.

“Did you do it?” she asked Fat Crack, speaking to him in the language of the
Tohono O’othham
. “Did you look at her picture through the divining crystals?”

“
Heu’u
—yes,” Fat Crack said.

“And what did you see?”

“I saw this child, the one you call Forever Spinning, wearing a white coat and carrying a feather, a seagull feather.”

“See there?” Rita said, her face dissolving into a smile. “I told you, didn’t I? She will be both.”