Kiss of the Bees

He stood there observing the Bounder and the vast tract of empty desert around it. He was almost sorry to leave this place. It had been good to him, had allowed the creative juices to flow. But it was time. He had other places to go, other fish to fry, including the stupid-ass second lieutenant from Asheville, North Carolina, who had led his platoon into a Vietcong trap and permanently fucked up Mitch’s knee.

Like it or not, it was almost time to abandon the desert. Mitch had already called his landlord to say he was moving and had notified the power company, telling them to shut off the juice as of Wednesday. His would be a planned exit. There would be no question about him deciding to leave after all the shit hit the fan.

If anyone had seen him standing there, they might have thought he was simply admiring the landscape. What he was really doing was seeing how long he could keep from opening the door. Would she be awake or not? Her reaction to the drug had been so pronounced that he worried now that she might still be groggy. That would be too bad. The moment she saw his face, he wanted her to know. Anything less than that wouldn’t be enough.

It had been fun toying with Diana without her having the foggiest idea of what was really going on. But with Lani it was different. Diana had said she was a smart girl, and Mitch Johnson desperately wanted that to be so. He wanted her to be smart enough to realize what was happening. To Mitch’s way of thinking, knowing in advance, foreseeing the possibilities and dreading them, were the only things that would place Lani Walker any higher on the evolutionary ladder than the dumb little bird he had crushed in his fist years earlier.

Finally, taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and put his key in the Bounder’s custom-made dead bolt. Then he opened the door and stepped inside.

“Honey, I’m home,” he called as he pulled the door shut behind him.

While Candace was in the bathroom getting ready to go to dinner, Davy paced the room. It wasn’t just the ring. It was everything. There was a hole in the pit of his stomach. His palms were wet. Sweat was already soaking through his clean shirt. And the only thing he could think of was that something was wrong—terribly wrong—at home.

Finally, feeling numb, he picked up the phone and dialed. His mother answered, sounding annoyed or sleepy, he couldn’t tell which.

“Is Lani there?” he asked.

“She’s not home from work yet,” Diana said. “And she’s supposed to go straight from work to a concert with Jessica Carpenter. Why, is something wrong?”

“No,” Davy mumbled. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

“What about?” Diana asked. “You sound worried.”

David Ladd’s mind raced, trying to find a plausible reason for calling that had nothing to do with what he was feeling. “It’s a secret,” he said, as inspiration struck. “It’s about your anniversary present. But that’s all right. I can talk to her tomorrow.”

“Give me your number,” Diana said. “I’ll leave her a note in case she does come home before the concert.”

Blushing to the roots of his light-blond hair, David Garrison Ladd looked down at the phone on the nightstand and read his mother the number of the Ritz Carlton in Chicago, Illinois. He put down the phone praying fervently that Lani wouldn’t stop by the house before the concert.

“Who was that?” Candace asked when she came out of the bathroom. “I thought I heard you talking to someone on the phone.”

“I just called home to give the folks a progress report,” he lied. “My mother worries about me, and I wanted her to know that everything is fine.”

Deputy Fellows was used to working on his own. After Kath Kelly left, it took some time for him to get his mind back on the job, but eventually he did. He made plaster casts of what footprints he found. He combed the area again, looking for clues. And three separate times he retraced the path of the dirt track from the place where the attack had taken place to the spot where Kath Kelly had found the injured man lying in the dirt.

It was a long way. Almost a hundred yards. The question was why the killer would drag his victim anywhere at all? Eventually the answer became clear. The attack had been a reaction to being discovered rather than a premeditated crime. As such, the attacker didn’t view himself as a killer. Rather than finish his victim off, he had simply dragged the injured man away, and hopefully out of view, expecting nature to take its course.

That meant that the real crime and also the key to the attacker’s real intentions and identity had something to do with the digging back on the edge of the charco. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Brian went back to his truck, took a long drink from the last of his water, and collected his shovel. At four-ten, he started to dig.

Digging is a solitary occupation done with an implement that has changed little from ancient times to modern. The act of shoving a sharp spade into the dirt and then extracting a heaping shovel leaves plenty of time for reflection.

With the scattered remains of Gina Antone’s shrine mere feet away from him, pieces of Brian Fellows’s own life intruded into his thoughts about the case he was working on. Most people would have said that Brian came from a “troubled background.” He had found respite from his half-brothers’ constant taunting only at school and during those precious hours when he had managed to escape Janie’s chaotic household to spend time at the Walker place in Gates Pass.

As Davy Ladd’s faithful shadow, Brian had been welcome in places where he never would have been able to venture otherwise. He had walked, wide-eyed, into the dimly lit adobe hut where a blind medicine man named Looks At Nothing had lain confined to a narrow cot. The blind man had been sick, dying of a lingering cough, but he had nonetheless continued to smoke his strange-smelling cigarettes, lighting them one after another, with a cigarette lighter that somehow never once burned his fingers.

Those Tohono O’othham people—Rita, Looks At Nothing, Fat Crack, all of them—had been unfailingly kind to little Brian Fellows in a way his own family—mother, stepbrothers, and successive “daddies”—never had.

And now, as he worked in the hot sun with his shovel, he felt as though he was protected somehow from the restless spirits that Davy Ladd had once told him inhabited this place. He had barely come to that conclusion when his shovel bit into something hard. Not wanting to break it, he tossed his shovel aside and then got down on his knees to dig in the sand by hand.

Almost immediately, his hand closed around something long and smooth and straight. When he pulled