person of real consequence on the reservation.
“It’s good to see you again, Chairman Ortiz,” he said, extending his hand.
“Yes,” she agreed, “but this isn’t good.” She waved one hand in the general direction of all the crime scene activity. “I don’t like having the drug wars showing up on the reservation. Were the dead people involved in that?”
“Maybe,” Brian said. “But then again, maybe not. Mr. Rios claimed his son wasn’t involved in anything like that, but we’re asking for a warrant to search Donald’s place at Komelik just in case. What can you tell me about Delphina Enos?”
“She’s from Nolic,” Delia said. “She had a baby but the father ran off. She was staying with her parents, but there were some problems there. I helped her get a job in Sells-a job and a place to live.”
“I’ll need a warrant to search her place, too.”
Delia nodded. “Law and Order will get you whatever you need.”
“Good,” Brian said. “We’ll all have to work together on this-the tribe, Pima County, and Border Patrol.”
“All right.”
“Donald Rios’s father gave us a positive ID on his son. Can you do the same for Delphina?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That would be a big help.”
“I’ll do that for you if you’ll do a favor for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Martin told me on the way here that you speak Tohono O’odham. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose you know that I don’t.”
Brian recalled something about that-something about Delia growing up far away from the reservation. “A little,” he said.
“The people in Nolic are old-fashioned,” she said. “I’d like you to go there with me to translate, if necessary. I know my officers could do it, but it might be better…”
Brian Fellows got it. Delphina Enos’s grieving relatives would be so traumatized by the news they probably wouldn’t remember if the information came to them in English or Tohono O’odham or a combination of both. But if officers from Law and Order were on the scene when the notification took place, they’d be more than slightly interested if their fearless leader was anything less than fluent in what should have been her own language.
“Sure,” Brian said easily. “I’ll be glad to go along and help out.”
That was how, two hours later, Detective Brian Fellows found himself sitting in a grim concrete-block house that belonged to Delphina’s parents, Louis and Carmen Escalante.
The house had been built some forty years earlier under a briefly and never completely funded program called TWEP, the Tribal Work Experience Project, which had allowed for the building of the bare bones of any number of houses on the reservation. Some had been successfully completed and improved. This one had not. The yard outside was littered with junk, including several moribund vehicles-two rusty pickups and one broken-down Camaro.
Brian fully expected to conduct the next-of-kin notification out in the yard, but Delia’s presence resulted in their being invited into the hot interior of the house. They walked up a makeshift wheelchair ramp into a sparsely furnished living room. The place was stifling. A decrepit swamp cooler sat perched in one window, but it wasn’t working. At least it wasn’t running.
Brian and Delia were directed to a dilapidated couch. Louis, looking thunderous, sat nearby in his wheelchair. Carmen brought a chair in from the kitchen and seated herself on that while Detective Brian Fellows, speaking in Tohono O’odham, explained that their daughter had been killed in a gun battle south of Topawa.
Louis and Carmen took the terrible news with what Brian thought to be remarkable restraint. Louis listened in silence and nodded.
“What about Angie?” Carmen asked softly. “Is she all right?”
“She’s in the hospital at Sells,” Delia Ortiz said, breaking into the conversation in English. “She’s not seriously injured. She’s got some cuts and scratches. As I understand it, the hospital is keeping her there mostly for observation. You can go pick her up in the morning.”
Carmen nodded in agreement. Her husband was the one who spoke out.
“No!” Louis said forcefully.
Carmen gaped at her husband while Brian, unsure of what was going on, glanced back and forth between them.
“You don’t mean that,” Carmen said. “Angie’s just a baby.”
“I told Delphina not to get mixed up with that boy,” Louis growled. “She did it anyway. Let Joaquin look after her.”
“But he doesn’t even know Angie,” Carmen objected. “Joaquin’s never come around, not once. I heard that he was in jail somewhere.”
Louis shrugged. “Let his parents do it, then. Angie can be their problem, not ours.”
Without another word, Carmen Escalante rose from where she sat, picked up her chair, and disappeared with it into the kitchen. Brian glanced at Delia Ortiz. What he read in her face was absolute contempt for both these people, the husband and the wife. No wonder the tribal chairman had found Delphina Escalante Enos a job to do and a place to live far away from this vindictive excuse for a father and a spineless mother.
“I’m sorry to have to ask you this kind of thing,” Brian said. “If you’d rather I came back later…”
“Ask,” Louis Escalante growled. “What do you want to know?”
“Was your daughter involved in drugs of any kind?”
“I don’t think so,” Louis said. “But you should talk to that man of hers. I’ve heard that about Joaquin Enos. He does all kinds of bad things. His daughter will probably grow up to do the same. Someone else will have to look after her, if they’re brave enough.”
“What do you mean, brave enough?” Brian asked.
Louis shrugged. “She’s alive,” he said, as if that was all that mattered. “If everyone else is dead, why is she still alive?”
“Because the killer didn’t see her,” Brian said.
“Yes,” Louis said, “Kok’oi Chehia.”
“Ghost Girl?” Brian asked.
Louis seemed startled that Brian understood what he had said. He shrugged and looked away.
When the interview was over, Brian drove Delia back to her home in Sells. He knew that at one time she and Leo had lived in the house Delia had inherited from her aunt Julia in Little Tucson, but sometime in the recent past they had moved back into the Ortiz family compound behind the gas station.
Delia directed him to the proper mobile home. Brian pulled up next to it. Rather than getting right out of the vehicle, Delia sat for some time with her hand resting on the door handle.
“Now you know why I gave Delia a job,” she said at last. “She and the baby needed to move out of there.”
Brian nodded. “Yes, I can see that,” he said. “But I’m surprised that the Escalantes won’t take in that poor little girl. She’s their granddaughter, for Pete’s sake. That doesn’t make any sense to me. What happened to her mother isn’t her fault.”
“No, but that’s how the Escalantes work,” Delia added. “Louis was talking about how bad Joaquin Enos is, but they’re not nice people, either.”
Brian knew enough to say nothing more. Instead, he waited for Delia to finish. “Louis is Lani Walker’s uncle,” she said finally. “Her blood uncle.”
Brian Fellows, who knew a lot about Lani Walker’s history, was taken aback. “Are you saying this is the same family, the people who wouldn’t take Lani back after she was bitten by all the ants?”
Delia nodded. “The same family,” she said. “They wouldn’t take Lani back because they thought she was dangerous.”
“And now they’re claiming Ghost Girl is dangerous, too,” Brian muttered. “What will happen to her?”
“We’ll check to see what the father’s family has to say,” Delia told him. “If they don’t want her, either, then I guess CPS will have to step in and decide what to do with her.”
“Angelina Enos is a possible witness to her mother’s murder,” Brian said after a pause. “The only reason she’s
