Kiss of the Bees

Until it was time for you to come into your own.”

Davy watched Lani’s face. He expected her to brighten—to be his little sister again, delighted by some unexpected surprise. Instead, she frowned. He reached out to her, but she drew away from him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I have killed an enemy,” she said. “I will need to undergo e lihmhun in order to be purified. While I am here alone for sixteen days, I’ll have plenty of time to make my own medicine basket. There are only two things from Nana Dahd’s basket that I would like to have—the scalp bundle and that single broken piece of Understanding Woman’s pottery. The rest of it should go to you, Davy, to Nana Dahd’s little Olhoni.”

Davy Ladd ducked his head to hide his tears. “Thank you,” he said.

The first glimpse Brandon Walker had of his future daughter-in-law, Candace Waverly, she was on her hands and knees, huddled close to Quentin Walker’s badly injured body. With her face close to his, she was comforting him as best she could while they waited for the med-evac helicopter to show up and fly him off the mountain.

Brandon Walker and Brock Kendall had left the charco and were heading for Gates Pass when the call came telling them that Lani had been found. The Pima County dispatcher reported that Lani was all right but that Brandon’s son, Quentin, had been severely injured.

When it came time to climb Ioligam, the months of woodcutting served Brandon Walker well. He might have been fifty-five years old and considered over the hill by some, but he scampered up the steep mountainside without breaking a sweat, leaving Brock Kendall in the dust.

“Who are you?” Brandon demanded, looking down at the young woman crouched beside Quentin. He immediately assumed that she was somehow connected to the injured man. “And what the hell has this son of a bitch done to his sister?”

“You must be Mr. Walker,” Candace said.

Brandon nodded.

“I’m Candace Waverly,” she said. “Your son David’s fiancee. Quentin wanted me to give you a message. He said to tell you that he didn’t kill Tommy. He said it was an accident, that Tommy fell in a hole in the cave. By the time Quentin was finally able to get him out, Tommy was dead. Quentin didn’t tell anyone what really happened because he was sure people would think it was all his fault.”

“Tommy?” a winded Brock Kendall gasped as he finally reached the limestone outcropping. “I thought we were here about Lani. What’s this about Tommy?”

All the way out from Tucson, Brandon Walker had agonized over how he would treat his son, over what he would say. As a father, how could he forgive Quentin for hurting Lani? And now there was responsibility for Tommy as well?

Brandon’s legs folded under him. He dropped to the ground and buried his face in his hands. This was too much—way too much. More than he could stand.

“Dear God in heaven, Quentin,” Brandon Walker sobbed. “How could you do it? How could you?”

“Take it easy, Mr. Walker,” Brian Fellows murmured, appearing out of nowhere and placing a comforting hand on Brandon’s heaving shoulder. “Quentin didn’t do it. He didn’t take Lani, and he didn’t hurt her.”

Brandon quieted almost instantly. “He didn’t? Who did then? Who’s responsible for all this?”

“The man’s name is Mitch Johnson,” Brian answered.

“Mitch Johnson!” Brandon exclaimed. It took only seconds for the name to register. “The guy I put away years ago for shooting up those illegals?”

“That’s the one.”

“Where is the son of a bitch? I’ll kill him myself.”

“You don’t have to,” Brian said softly. “I think Lani already did it for you.”

Pima County Detective Dan Leggett was used to calling the shots when it came to conducting interviews. He would have preferred talking to Lani Walker in the air-conditioned splendor of the visiting FBI agent’s Lincoln Town Car, but the medicine man—the one Brandon Walker called Fat Crack—refused to let the girl come down off the mountain. Ioligam was well inside reservation boundaries. The road where the Town Car was parked was not. Short of escorting Lani down to the car at gunpoint, Leggett wasn’t going to get her to leave.

And so the detective took himself up the mountain to her. He found Lani and Fat Crack sitting together off to one side of the entrance to the cave. Lani was still wrapped in a blanket, as though the increasing heat of the day still hadn’t penetrated to the chilled marrow of her bones. She sat watching in somber silence while several deputies trudged down the mountainside lugging the stretcher holding the crushed earthly remains of one Mitch Johnson.

Detective Leggett was still mildly irritated with Mr. Tribal Chairman, Gabe Ortiz. After all, it was the medicine man’s message, sent via his wife, that had pulled Brandon Walker, Brock Kendall, and a number of other operatives off on an early-morning wild-goose chase to Rattlesnake Skull Charco. As a police officer, Leggett didn’t put much stock in medicine men even if Ortiz’s prediction of where they would eventually find Lani Walker had been off target by a mere mile or two.

“If you’d excuse us for a little while,” Detective Leggett said to Gabe Ortiz, “I’ll need to ask Miss Walker a few questions now.”

Lani motioned for Gabe to stay where he was. “I’d like Mr. Ortiz to stay,” she said.

“If Mr. Ortiz were your attorney, of course, he’d be welcome to stay, but I’m afraid regulations don’t make any provisions for medicine men . . .”

“I’m not an attorney, but I am the tribal chairman and this is tribal land,” Gabe Ortiz said with quiet but unmistakable authority. “I am here as Lani’s elder and as her spiritual adviser. Since this is my jurisdiction, if she wants me to stay, I stay.”

Leggett may not have been much of an advocate of ethnic diversity when it came to medicine men, but the words “tribal chairman” struck a responsive chord.