“I take it that didn’t work out for him all that well?”

“You think?” Alex replied with a laugh. “I’m all for interagency cooperation and all that crap, but not when someone pisses me off. So here’s the deal. I did get those phone numbers added to the warrant, but I don’t have any information back on that just yet. It is Sunday, after all, but when I do get some information, I’ll be calling it in to you. I seem to have lost Detective Abernathy’s number.”

Brian laughed, too. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be glad to pass it along. When I do, Abernathy will go straight up and turn left. A ripple in the force and all that. He’s not going to like it.”

“Good,” Alex Mumford said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

Tucson, Arizona

Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:45 p.m.

88º Fahrenheit

Ginny Torres’s heart was light as she wheeled her grocery-laden shopping cart through Safeway while her three-year-old son, Pepe, babbled happily if unintelligibly in the child’s seat. It was close to naptime, but so far he hadn’t hit the wall.

Ginny generally hated Sundays. There was always more than she could do in one day-laundry, household chores, grocery shopping. She worked five days a week at the AOL call center and one day a week at a hair-care kiosk at Park Place Mall. Not that she wasn’t glad to have both jobs. She was.

They had been living in Safford and doing all right-up until Felix, her husband, had been laid off from his well-paying job with Phelps Dodge. That had come as a big shock to the system. In the end, they’d had no choice but to come limping back home to Tucson, where they were able to live not quite rent-free in one of Felix’s parents’ rentals.

In the process, Ginny had made the leap from stay-at-home mom to major breadwinner. Her call-center job didn’t pay exceptionally high wages, but it did come with medical benefits. With a toddler to worry about, that was huge. Felix, on the other hand, found occasional construction and yard-work jobs. When he wasn’t working one of those, he took care of Pepe. On those occasions when both he and Ginny had to work, Felix’s mother looked after Pepe. That way, at least Ginny and Felix didn’t have to worry about paying for child care.

In other words, things could have been a lot worse, but Ginny did find herself wishing sometimes that Felix didn’t have such an aversion to doing housework-women’s work, as he liked to call it. He could be home all day without seeing any need to pick up the vacuum cleaner, and he could step over or around the mounds of dirty clothes out in the garage without once taking it on himself to start a load of laundry. Felix never fussed when it was time to go to the store for beer, but going to the store for groceries? Never. Grocery shopping was something else that had to wait for Ginny’s precious “day off.”

Today, though, with the exception of two items, she was picking up staples only-laundry detergent, dog food, and canned goods-things that could sit in an overheated car for several hours without coming to grief, because today, after her shopping excursion, she and Pepe weren’t going straight home.

Pepe’s third birthday was on Monday, but they were celebrating it today with tamales and tacos at Felix’s folks’ place. All the cousins would be there for an afternoon of fun in the pool. All Ginny and Pepe had to do was to show up, bringing along the birthday cake and ice cream-those were the only perishables in the cart. That cake was appropriately decorated with tiny plastic replicas of Wall-E and Eva and the ice cream was Pepe’s favorite, all chocolate all the time.

Ginny was looking forward to the party. Her mother-in-law, Amelia, would be in her element, spoiling her husband, her sons, and her grandkids. The children would be busy splashing around in the pool, the men would be out on the patio drinking beer, and the sisters-in-law would sit around the kitchen table drinking iced tea and griping about their husbands, all of whom were cut from the same cloth. To a man, all five of Amelia Torres’s sons were utterly incapable of lifting a finger around the house.

At the checkout stand, the cashier rang up the cake and then smiled at Pepe. “Whose birthday?” she asked.

“Mine!” he announced proudly, thumping his chest.

“And how old are you?” The cashier’s name tag said “Helen.”

It took some maneuvering on his part, but eventually Pepe managed to hold up three fingers.

“Three, really?” Helen asked.

Ginny and Pepe nodded in unison.

“Enjoy him,” Helen said. “They grow up so quickly. Do you need any help out with these?”

On Sunday afternoons, the store wasn’t normally that crowded, but today the open checkout stands all had lines, and the carryout clerks were totally occupied.

“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “I can manage. Don’t bag the cake, but double-bag the ice cream. Otherwise it might melt before we make it to Grandma’s house.”

A few minutes later, Ginny pushed the heavy cart out through the automatic sliding doors. The early-afternoon June heat was like a physical assault. It burned into her face and skin, and she was glad that the interior of her four-year-old and fully paid for Honda came with cloth seats instead of leather. The cloth might be harder to keep clean, especially when something sweet got spilled on it, but at least it didn’t fry your bare skin when you climbed inside.

Pepe was still blabbing away as Ginny angled the shopping cart through the busy parking lot. She had hoped that she would manage to convince him to take a nap before the party, but it was beginning to look as though that wasn’t in the cards.

As Ginny neared the Accord, she pressed the button on the remote. As close as she had to be before the doors unlocked, Ginny was pretty sure she needed to put in a new battery in her remote.

The parking lot was spacious. Even on this busy Sunday afternoon there were still plenty of open stalls, but a dust-covered minivan had parked close enough to her car that both tires were on her side of the designated parking lines. Creep, she thought.

With Pepe still in the cart, Ginny carefully loaded the groceries into the trunk, making sure the cake was properly wedged into a spot where it couldn’t possibly come to grief. The ice cream she set aside to put in the front seat along with her purse in hopes the AC could maybe help keep it from melting before she made it to her in-laws’ place on the far side of I-10. Pepe unfortunately took exception to her plan. He wanted to keep the cake with him, and he launched himself into a nap-deprived temper tantrum.

Once the groceries were loaded, Ginny lifted her son out of the car and then wrestled him, screeching at the top of his lungs, into his booster seat. With him screaming and kicking, Ginny was grateful that this car seat was a lot easier to operate than the backward-facing ones they had used when Pepe was younger. Then, with him properly belted but still howling, Ginny hurried to return the grocery cart to the cart collection point three cars away.

Even at the end of the aisle Ginny could still hear Pepe’s full-fledged screeching. Returning to her vehicle, she edged between the poorly parked minivan and her Honda. She opened the door and prepared to put her purse and the ice cream on the front passenger seat. When she tried to do so, however, she was astonished to see a man, a stranger, sitting there in the passenger seat. Not only was he there, he was holding a gun.

“Don’t make a sound,” he growled at her. “If you do, your baby dies.”

Ginny’s breath caught in her throat. A charge that seemed like electricity shot through her body. Her fingertips tingled. The car keys dropped from her suddenly clumsy hands. The key fob fell to the floorboard inside the car. Her purse and the bagged ice cream landed with a splat on the pavement next to the car.