“This particular dog is no longer sleeping,” Brandon said.

“What did Ollie Glassman want?”

“He says Lassiter asked to see me. He wants TLC to find Amos Warren’s real killer.”

“Sounds like O. J. Simpson,” Diana said.

Brandon laughed aloud at that. “We’ve been married so long it’s no wonder that you and I are on the same wavelength. That’s exactly what I told Glassman—­just like O.J.”

CHAPTER 3

FOR A LONG TIME AFTER Tash returned, things went well. Because of the clouds, it wasn’t too hot. Rain, Juk, returned. The Tohono O’odham planted their fields and the crops grew, and every morning and evening, Sun’s niece and nephew kicked the dust balls. In a village near the Coyote Mountains lived a woman who braided the grass mats upon which the Desert ­People sleep. This Braiding Woman, Hihgtpag O’oks, was a fast worker. She could weave as many as four large mats in a single day.

One day while Braiding Womanwas working, Nephew-­of-­the-­Sun kicked his red ball so hard that it rolled onto the mat the woman was weaving. The woman quickly picked up the ball and hid it in her dress. When Nephew-­of-­the-­Sun came looking for it, the woman claimed she hadn’t seen it. He said that was very strange since he had seen it land on her mat, and some of the dust was still there.

Hihgtpag O’oks—­Braiding Woman—­still claimed that she hadn’t seen it. After a while Nephew-­of-­the-­Sun grew very angry. “If you keep it, something very bad will happen to you, because the red dust ball belongs to Tash.” After that the nephew went away.

Braiding Woman was very frightened. She called Nephew-­of-­the-­Sun to come back for the ball, but when he did, she couldn’t find it.

On the eighth day after this, around noon when it is very hot and all the animals are sleeping, Braiding Woman became very sleepy. That was strange because she always worked through the day without needing to rest. She asked Cricket—­Chukugshuad—­to sing to her to keep her awake. Cricket tried, but it was no use. Braiding Woman had to sleep.

AVA RICHLAND, WITH THE REMAINS of her blended scotch in hand, sat in solitary splendor in her lushly appointed living room and gazed serenely out through floor-­to-­ceiling windows at the sunset over the Tucson panorama. From their home, situated on the last buildable lot, high in the Catalinas, she could see almost the whole of the city, stretching for the better part of twenty miles in any direction. Their property line bordered Forest Ser­vice land, with the sheer cliffs of the mountain rising skyward less than fifty yards beyond that.

“I built there because of the view,” Harold, the man who would be her husband, had bragged back when he and Ava had first met. “Best view in town. No one can ever top it. I made sure of that.”

Of course, the view would have been better if it hadn’t been for those pesky Dark Sky ­people. Ava had no patience for what she regarded as a bunch of wild-­eyed activists who thought it was so much more important to keep the skies dark for the astronomers at Kitt Peak than it was to have adequate lighting on the city’s streets. Especially now, with the arrival of cataracts—­particularly the one in her right eye—­she was of the opinion that seeing to drive down the street was far more important that seeing what was happening on Mars.

Ava glanced at her diamond-­encrusted Datejust Rolex, one that had once belonged to Alvira, Harold’s first wife, and saw that it was just now seven. In recent years, she would have been at the University of Arizona campus, rubbing shoulders with all the other Tucson VIPs at the Authors’ Dinner for the Tucson Festival of Books. Her good friend Matilda Glassman had always made sure that Ava and Harold were seated at a table with one of the big-­name visiting authors.

Ava tended to enjoy those dinners, even if Harold despised them. She had made her way up from some very straitened circumstances, and Ava still got a charge out of being seen in public, where she and Harold were regarded as one of the city’s luminary ­couples. She liked being photographed at charity events, even if her place in the limelight was due to the size of Harold’s donations. As far as Ava was concerned, ­people like Matty Glassman were welcome to hustle around and do the actual work.

This year’s Authors’ Dinner was going on without either one of them. They’d had tickets, and Harold had suggested that she go without him, but because she knew that Harold’s son and daughter-­in-­law, Jack and Susan, would be there too, Ava had declined. She made it sound to Harold as though she couldn’t bear to go without him. The truth was, she didn’t want to be in the same room—­even a ballroom—­with Jack and Susan. Ava disliked the ­couple, and she knew the feeling was mutual. If she showed up without Harold, Susan was bound to stop by Ava’s table long enough to make some catty remark about it being such a shame that poor Harold was once again left to his own devices.

Of course, neither Jack nor Susan ever offered to drop by and stay with “poor Harold.” And the man wasn’t exactly on his own, either, since his live-­in attendant—­what was her name again?—­was just a few steps away, at the call of a pager.

Ava could see that Harold was growing frailer by the day, and that was a problem. If Harold died—­make that when Harold died—­Ava needed to have her exit strategy completely in place. That was one thing she’d always prided herself on having—­an exit strategy. No matter what the circumstances, she was always prepared for the moment when she’d be forced to abandon ship.

Ten years earlier, when she’d nailed Harold, Ava had thought she’d finally found a ship she wouldn’t have to abandon. True, Alvira hadn’t been entirely cold in her grave before Ava made her move. But Harold was considered a great catch. If she hadn’t gone after him when she did, someone else certainly would have.

Harold was at the top of the heap in Tucson at the time, and not just in terms of housing. He was tall, handsome, and rich, and he hadn’t yet had either of his two debilitating strokes. Through a series of strategic marriages and at least one tactically brilliant divorce, Ava had been lucky enough to position herself on the fringes of Harold’s circle of friends. Younger than most of the other women in the group, she’d had beauty on her side, to say nothing of a sexual appetite Harold was determined to satisfy. He hadn’t been quite up to that task, but Ava was discreet about it. What the poor man didn’t know about his inadequacies couldn’t hurt him.

Ava had taken up with a somewhat older man, thirty years and counting, fully expecting that after putting in some time reveling in his lavish lifestyle, she’d be left to live out her days as a well-­heeled widow. Harold had redone his will shortly after he and Ava married. His kids weren’t left out in the cold by any means, but neither was Ava. A short time later, however, his busybody son, Jack—­a lawyer himself—­had seen to it that the will was rewritten. This time the house and most of Harold’s assets were locked up in a complicated marital trust that didn’t exactly turn Ava into a pauper, but it meant putting a trustee—­who just happened to be one of Jack’s best buds—­in charge of her purse strings. The trust meant Ava wouldn’t be able to make a move on any of those assets—­including unloading that huge house in which she had a life tenancy, or even their getaway condo in San Carlos, Mexico—­without the trustee’s explicit, written permission. As far as Ava was concerned, that was the last straw. She had stopped playing Mother-­May-­I a long damned time ago!