“My name is Dan,” he told her now. “Like I said before, this big guy here is my dog.”

“Can I pet him?” Angie asked. Now that she’d been properly introduced to Bozo, she was evidently ready to be friends.

“Sure.” Dan had been holding Angie. The night air was chilly, but Bozo was panting. Dan set the child down next to the dog. Bozo stood still as a statue while the tiny girl wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her bleeding face in the soft fur of his shoulder.

“Bozo and I are here to help you,” Dan said. “Are you hungry?”

Angie nodded.

“Thirsty?”

“Yes.”

“My truck is back over there,” he said. “I have some sandwiches, some chips, and some sodas in a cooler. Would you like one of those?”

“I’m not supposed to drink Cokes,” she said, frowning, “but sometimes I do. Will you wake my mommy?”

“I’ll try,” he said. It was a lie, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “First let me get you back to my truck. Since you’re barefoot, I’ll carry you.”

Without a word, she let go of Bozo’s neck and held out her arms to him. He lifted her up and carried her back the way they had come rather than back past the two vehicles and the four bloodied victims. As they walked, Angie’s face rested in the crook of his neck. He was glad she didn’t look up at his face right then because she would have seen he was crying, too.

He had been in a scene similar to this one once before; only back then, Dan Pardee had been the child, and someone else-some other uniformed police officer-had been carrying a no-longer-innocent child away from a room filled with unimaginable carnage.

Tucson, Arizona

Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:30 p.m.

73º Fahrenheit

As they drove back to the house in Gates Pass, Gabe fell asleep in the backseat. Lani was grateful for the break from his never-ending questions. It let her concentrate on worrying about her mother.

For much of the day, Diana had been strangely silent, and Lani didn’t know what to make of her mother’s odd behavior.

Lani had been back home for only a few months now, and she was living in the hospital housing compound out at Sells rather than at home with her parents in her old room. Since returning to the Tucson area, Lani had noticed that her parents had changed while she’d been away in Denver doing her residency. She supposed that part of the changes had to do with their getting older, but then so had she. She wasn’t the same person she had been when she graduated from high school or even when she had gotten her premed degree from the University of North Dakota. Since she had changed, it made no sense that she should expect her parents to remain the same.

“You should get married,” Diana said now.

“Married?” Lani repeated, nearly driving off the narrow road in surprise.

That was the last thing she expected her mother to say. Lani had been focused on her career-on becoming the best possible physician she could learn to be and on bringing those skills back to her own people, where native-born doctors were in short supply and where doctors who were Tohono O’odham were completely nonexistent. But the question itself shocked Lani. She was still mulling a possible answer when her mother continued.

“Yes, married,” Diana said. “I want to live long enough to have another grandchild.”

She and Brandon Walker already had one grandson. Davy and Candace’s son Tyler was nine now. As far as Lani was concerned, he was a spoiled brat and obnoxious besides. He hadn’t had the benefit of being raised by Nana Dahd, and it showed. There was something to be said for the old traditions in which the aunts and uncles supplied the discipline, but Candace had made it clear to all concerned that help with her son in that regard would not be welcome.

“We barely see Tyler as it is,” Diana said. “And the minute the divorce is final, no matter what the custody agreement says, what’s-her-name is going to take him back to Chicago to her parents, and we won’t get to see him at all.”

What’s-her-name? Lani wondered, repeating her mother’s phrase. Davy and Candace have been married for more than ten years, and Mom can’t remember her name? What’s going on?

That’s what she thought, but it wasn’t what she said aloud. “Davy is an attorney,” Lani replied. “He’s not going to let that happen.”

“The problem with Davy is that he’s a nice guy,” her mother corrected. “His wife’s been walking all over him for years. That’s not going to change, so you should get married.”

Lani couldn’t see how one thing automatically led to the other, but she decided that it was better to treat the whole discussion as a joke rather than be distressed by what she couldn’t help but regard as an invasion of her privacy.

“I’ll think about it,” Lani said, laughing. “But don’t hold your breath. I don’t see many prospects for matrimony walking into my life any time soon.”

She hoped that was enough to put the discussion to bed. Unfortunately, the next topic of conversation was even worse.

“What did Mitch Johnson do to you?” Diana asked.

“Mitch Johnson?” Lani repeated. “Why bring him up after all these years?”

“Tell me,” Diana urged. “He must have done something to you. What?”

“You know what he did to me,” Lani answered. “He kidnapped me and tried to kill me.”

That was the obvious part. Drugging her, kidnapping her, and torturing her when Lani was sixteen years old had been yet another move in Andrew Carlisle’s and Mitch Johnson’s ongoing war with Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker. The ultimate goal had been to rob them of everything they held most dear-their children. Mitch had planned to kill both Lani and Brandon ’s son Quentin.

In this conversation, Lani knew exactly what Diana really wanted to know. It was one of Lani’s darkest secrets. Fat Crack had known about it, but as far as she knew, he was the only one.

Mitch Johnson had burned her. He had heated up kitchen tongs and then he had clamped the red-hot metal on the tender flesh of her breast. She understood that, in performing that particularly barbarous act, Mitch had been functioning as Andrew Carlisle’s instrument and doing his master’s bidding. The scar he had left on Lani’s body mimicked the mark Andrew Carlisle’s teeth had left on her mother during his attack on Diana years before Lani was born. At least two of Carlisle ’s other victims had been defiled in the same fashion.

As a child Lani had seen the scar on her mother’s body, and she hadn’t questioned it. In fact, when Lani was five, in an attempt to be more like her mom, she had gone so far as to use her mother’s concealer to draw a similar pale circle on her own body.

Nana Dahd had been a constant presence in Lani’s young life, and that was the only time she remembered Rita Antone being angry. She had ordered Lani to scrub the offending makeup from her body and never to talk about it, lest someone do the same thing to her.

Years later, when it had happened, when Mitch had burned her in just that way, Lani had been ashamed because she believed she had brought it on herself-that she had somehow attracted this terrible thing and caused it to come to her.

After that, Mitch had taken Lani and a still-drugged Quentin to a limestone cavern under Ioligam, I’itoi’s sacred mountain, which the Anglos call Kitt Peak. Deep in the cavern, Lani had managed to outwit her would-be killer by turning the darkness to her advantage. In a desperate game of hide-and-seek, she had managed to stay tantalizingly out of reach and had fooled him into chasing her into a darkened passageway where he had plunged to his death.

The Tohono O’odham are a peace-loving people who kill only to feed themselves or in self-defense. When a warrior kills an enemy in battle, tradition dictates that he undergo e lihmhun, a sixteen-day-long purification ceremony that includes both fasting and solitude.