“So yours is pretty much one of those Horatio Alger stories,” Monty Lazarus offered.
Diana smiled. “You could say so.”
“And do you have children?”
“Yes.”
For the first time in the whole interview, she felt suddenly wary and uneasy. That was stupid, because she had answered all these same questions time and again. She took a deep breath.
“In 1975 I was a widow raising an only son, a six-year-old child. In 1976, Brandon and I married. He had two children, two sons. In 1980 we adopted a fourth child, our daughter, Lani.”
“Four,” Monty Lazarus repeated. “And where are they all now?”
Maybe knowing that question would automatically follow the first one was the source of some of her anxiety. She opted for putting all the cards on the table at once.
“The two older boys were Brandon’s. My one stepson disappeared years ago while he was still in high school.”
“He ran away from home?”
“Yes. At this point, he’s missing and presumed dead. His older brother got himself in trouble and ended up in prison in Florence. I believe he’s out now, but I have no idea where he’s living. We don’t exactly stay in touch. The two younger ones, my son David, and our daughter, Lani, are fine. David just graduated from law school in Chicago, and Lani is a junior at University High School right here in Tucson.”
Monty shook his head sympathetically. “It’s tough,” he said. “Raising kids is always a crapshoot. So it sounds as though you’re running about fifty-fifty in the motherhood department.”
“I guess so,” Diana agreed. Fifty-fifty wasn’t a score she was proud of. She would have liked to do better.
Monty Lazarus glanced down at his watch. “Yikes,” he exclaimed. “We’ve been at this for over an hour. I’ll go flag down a waitress. Can I get you anything? Another glass of wine, maybe?”
Diana shook her head. “I’d better switch to iced tea,” she said. “No sugar, but extra lemon.”
As Monty Lazarus sauntered away, Diana was left mulling his sardonic words about raising kids. Crapshoot. That just about covered it.
Tommy, Brandon’s younger son, had walked out of their lives one summer afternoon between his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Over the years they had gradually come to terms with the idea that Tommy was probably dead—he had to be. The situation with Quentin wasn’t nearly as clear-cut. Diana sometimes thought they would have been better off if Quentin had died as well.
The moment she met Quentin Walker, Diana recognized he was both smart and mean. Even as a ten-year-old, his conversation had shown intermittent flashes of intellectual brilliance. No, lack of brainpower had never been one of Quentin’s problems. Curbing his tongue was, his tongue and his temper. He was manipulative and arrogant, angry and unforgiving. Not only that, by the time he was in high school, he had already developed a severe drinking problem.
Five years earlier, he had been driving drunk. He had crashed his four-wheel-drive pickup into a compact car, a Chevette, killing the woman driver and her two-year-old child. As if that weren’t bad enough, the woman was six months pregnant. The baby was taken alive from his dead mother’s womb, but he, too, had died three days later.
Brandon was still sheriff at the time of the trial, and the whole ordeal had been a nightmare for him. Not that he was responsible. Quentin was an adult and had to deal with his own difficulties. Brandon Walker’s whole life had been committed to law and order, yet here was his son, a repeat drunk-driving offender, who had blithely killed three people. And when the judge had shipped Brandon Walker’s son off to Florence for five years on two counts of vehicular homicide (the dead unborn fetus didn’t count), it had almost broken Brandon’s heart. It had seemed at the time that things couldn’t get any worse. And then they did.
Three years and a half years after he was locked up, shortly after Diana had started work on
The moment Diana caught a glimpse of his face as Brandon stumbled into the house, she knew something was terribly wrong. His face was so gray she initially thought he might be having a heart attack.
“What’s happened?” she had asked, hurrying to his side. “What’s going on?”
Shaking his head, he walked past her proffered embrace, opened the refrigerator door, pulled out a pair of beers—one for each of them. He sank down beside the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands. Concerned, Diana sat down beside him.
“Brandon, tell me. What is it?”
“Quentin,” he groaned. “Quentin again.”
“What’s he done now?”
“He’s hooked up with a gang of extortionists up in Florence,” Brandon answered. “They’ve been operating out of the prison, supposedly accepting bribes on my behalf. It’s a protection racket. They’ve been telling people that if they don’t pay up, something bad is going to happen to their building or business, without any cops being there to take care of things. In other words, if the marks don’t fork over, they don’t get any patrol coverage.”
“But that’s outrageous!” Diana exclaimed. “They’re claiming you’re behind it?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s the whole reason you were elected in the first place,” Diana protested. “To clean things up and put an end to that kind of crap.”
“Right.” Brandon, staring into the depths of his beer bottle, answered without looking Diana in the eye.
“How did you find out?”
