“I’ll see if I can get them to find a roll-away for that room. What about Bozo?”

“Now that the helicopter is gone and he’s had a drink, he’ll be fine.”

“Why don’t you bring him inside?”

Dan was astonished. “Into the hospital?”

“Sure,” Dr. Walker said with a grin, her white teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Didn’t you tell me Bozo is a certified therapy dog?”

“Dr. Walker,” he began, “I said no such thing.”

“Just bring his water dish along,” she said. “You’re welcome to call me Lani.”

“And I’m Dan,” he said. “Dan Pardee.”

Dan Pardee, the ohb.

Tucson, Arizona

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

73º Fahrenheit

Jonathan was careful to pay close attention to the speed limit as he drove into town. His heart skipped a beat when he saw flashing lights west of Three Points, but then he remembered the Border Patrol checkpoint. He drove up to it and stopped briefly before being waved through with no difficulty and no questions asked.

Back in Tucson proper, he made his way to one of the freeway hotels near downtown. Jonathan was from California. It made no sense to him that you’d have all the freeway entrances and exits blocked for miles. Few travelers seemed to have made their way to the nearly deserted businesses close to downtown. When he pulled into the Los Amigos Motel, the parking lot was almost empty, and the bored night clerk was more than happy to take cash for the room as opposed to a credit card.

Jonathan’s arm was giving him fits again. Once inside the room, he gulped down another dose of antibiotics and then made his way into the shower. The guy at Urgent Care had told him to keep the bandage dry, so he covered his bandaged arm with a hotel laundry bag and then held his right hand out of the shower as best he could. It felt good to let the hot water sluice over him even though washing his hair and scrubbing his body using only his left hand to grip the tiny bar of soap felt very strange.

Out of the shower, he lay on the bed and used Jack Tennant’s phone to call Aero Mexico. They had a flight leaving for Cancún at eleven-thirty the next morning.

“Do you wish to make a reservation?” the reservations clerk wanted to know.

“I’m not sure if I can make this work. I won’t know until tomorrow morning. Does it look overbooked?”

“Not at all,” the clerk told him. “I’m sure there will still be empty seats tomorrow.”

“Good,” he told her. “I’ll book the reservation when I’m sure I can get away.”

Relieved, Jonathan set the phone’s alarm clock function to awaken him at eight, then closed his phone and stretched out full length on the bed. After living in the minivan for several days, even a bad bed was a big improvement.

He knew that guilty consciences were supposed to keep you awake, but he didn’t feel guilty. He had done what had needed to be done for a very long time. Now he was worn out. Within moments he fell sound asleep and slept like a baby.

Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:15 a.m.

65º Fahrenheit

Brian Fellows was sitting in his Crown Victoria and grabbing a drink of water when Delia Ortiz herself appeared on the scene. Brian hadn’t seen the woman for years, not since her father-in-law’s funeral, but he recognized her as soon as she got out of Martin Ramon’s patrol car. Brian also knew that in the intervening years she had become a person of real consequence on the reservation.

“It’s good to see you again, Chairman Ortiz,” he said, extending his hand.

“Yes,” she agreed, “but this isn’t good.” She waved one hand in the general direction of all the crime scene activity. “I don’t like having the drug wars showing up on the reservation. Were the dead people involved in that?”

“Maybe,” Brian said. “But then again, maybe not. Mr. Rios claimed his son wasn’t involved in anything like that, but we’re asking for a warrant to search Donald’s place at Komelik just in case. What can you tell me about Delphina Enos?”

“She’s from Nolic,” Delia said. “She had a baby but the father ran off. She was staying with her parents, but there were some problems there. I helped her get a job in Sells-a job and a place to live.”

“I’ll need a warrant to search her place, too.”

Delia nodded. “Law and Order will get you whatever you need.”

“Good,” Brian said. “We’ll all have to work together on this-the tribe, Pima County, and Border Patrol.”

“All right.”

“Donald Rios’s father gave us a positive ID on his son. Can you do the same for Delphina?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That would be a big help.”

“I’ll do that for you if you’ll do a favor for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Martin told me on the way here that you speak Tohono O’odham. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you know that I don’t.”

Brian recalled something about that-something about Delia growing up far away from the reservation. “A little,” he said.

“The people in Nolic are old-fashioned,” she said. “I’d like you to go there with me to translate, if necessary. I know my officers could do it, but it might be better…”

Brian Fellows got it. Delphina Enos’s grieving relatives would be so traumatized by the news they probably wouldn’t remember if the information came to them in English or Tohono O’odham or a combination of both. But if officers from Law and Order were on the scene when the notification took place, they’d be more than slightly interested if their fearless leader was anything less than fluent in what should have been her own language.

“Sure,” Brian said easily. “I’ll be glad to go along and help out.”

That was how, two hours later, Detective Brian Fellows found himself sitting in a grim concrete-block house that belonged to Delphina’s parents, Louis and Carmen Escalante.

The house had been built some forty years earlier under a briefly and never completely funded program called TWEP, the Tribal Work Experience Project, which had allowed for the building of the bare bones of any number of houses on the reservation. Some had been successfully completed and improved. This one had not. The yard outside was littered with junk, including several moribund vehicles-two rusty pickups and one broken-down Camaro.

Brian fully expected to conduct the next-of-kin notification out in the yard, but Delia’s presence resulted in their being invited into the hot interior of the house. They walked up a makeshift wheelchair ramp into a sparsely furnished living room. The place was stifling. A decrepit swamp cooler sat perched in one window, but it wasn’t working. At least it wasn’t running.

Brian and Delia were directed to a dilapidated couch. Louis, looking thunderous, sat nearby in his wheelchair. Carmen brought a chair in from the kitchen and seated herself on that while Detective Brian Fellows, speaking in Tohono O’odham, explained that their daughter had been killed in a gun battle south of Topawa.

Louis and Carmen took the terrible news with what Brian thought to be remarkable restraint. Louis listened in silence and nodded.

“What about Angie?” Carmen asked softly. “Is she all right?”

“She’s in the hospital at Sells,” Delia Ortiz said, breaking into the conversation in English. “She’s not seriously injured. She’s got some cuts and scratches. As I understand it, the hospital is keeping her there mostly for observation. You can go pick her up in the morning.”

Carmen nodded in agreement. Her husband was the one who spoke out.

“No!” Louis said forcefully.

Carmen gaped at her husband while Brian, unsure of what was going on, glanced back and forth between them.

“You don’t mean that,” Carmen said. “Angie’s just a baby.”

“I told Delphina not to get mixed up with that boy,” Louis growled. “She did it anyway. Let Joaquin look after her.”