blood leaked into his eye and ran down his cheek, all the things he had stifled through the years came to a head. He had reached the end of his rope, the point beyond which he had nothing left to lose.
Opening the top drawer of his desk, he removed the gun—a gun he had purchased with every intention of turning it on himself. Then, rising to his feet, he hurried out of the room, intent on using it on someone else.
His whole body sizzled in a fit of unreasoning hatred. If that had been all there was to it, any defense attorney worthy of the name could have gotten him off on a plea of temporary insanity, because in that moment he was insane—legally insane. He knew nothing about the difference between right and wrong. All he knew was that he had taken all he could take. More than he could take.
The difficulty is that this was only the start of Jonathan Southard’s problems. Everything that happened after that was entirely premeditated.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 8:00 A.M.
76º Fahrenheit
PIMA COUNTY HOMICIDE detective Brian Fellows loved Saturdays, even hot summer Saturdays. Kath, Brian’s wife, usually worked Saturday shifts at her Border Patrol desk job, which meant Brian had the whole day to spend with his girls, six-year-old twins Annie and Amy. They usually started with breakfast, either sharing a plate-sized sticky sweet roll at Gus Balon’s on Twenty-second Street, or downing eye-watering plates of chorizo and eggs at Wag’s on Grant.
After that, they went home to clean house. Brian’s mother had been a much-divorced scatterbrain even before she became an invalid. Brian had learned from an early age that if he wanted a clean house, he’d be the one doing it. It hadn’t killed him, either. He’d turned into a self-sufficient kind of guy and, according to Kath, an excellent catch for a husband.
Brian wanted the same thing for his daughters—for them to be self-sufficient. It didn’t take long on Saturdays to whip their central-area bungalow into shape. In the process, while settling the occasional squabble, being a bit of a tough taskmaster, and hearing about what was going on with the girls, Brian made sure he was a real presence in his daughters’ lives—a real father.
That was something that had been missing in Brian’s childhood—at least as far as his biological father was concerned. His “sperm donor,” as Brian thought of the man who had been MIA in his life from before he was born. He wouldn’t have had any idea about what fathers were supposed to be or do if it hadn’t been for Brandon Walker, his mother’s first husband and the father of Tommy and Quentin, Brian’s older half brothers.
After Brian’s mother’s first divorce, Brandon Walker, then a Pima County homicide detective, had come to the house each weekend and dutifully collected his own sons to take them on noncustodial outings. One of Brian’s first memories was of being left alone on the front steps while Quentin and Tommy went racing off to jump in their father’s car to go somewhere fun—to a movie or the Pima County Fair, or maybe even the Tucson Rodeo—while Brian, bored and lonely, had to fend for himself.
Then one day a miracle happened. After Quentin and Tommy were already in the car, Brandon had gotten back out. He came up the walk and asked Brian if he would like to go along. Brian was beyond excited. Quentin and Tommy had been appalled and had done everything in their power to make Brian miserable, but they did that anyway—even before Brandon had taken pity on him.
From then on, that’s how it was. Whenever Brandon had taken his own boys somewhere, he had taken Brian as well. The man had become a superhero in Brian’s eyes. He had grown up wanting to be just like him, and it was due in no small measure to Brandon Walker’s early kindness that Brian Fellows was the man he was today—a doting father and an experienced cop. And it was why, on Saturday afternoons, after the house was clean, that he never failed to take his girls somewhere to do something fun—to the Randolph Park Zoo or the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. Today, as hot as it was, they had already settled on going to a movie at Park Mall.
Brian was on call. Only if someone decided to kill someone tonight would he have to go in to work. Otherwise he would have had his special day with his girls— well, all but one of his girls. That was what made life worth living.
Tucson, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 11:00 A.M.
90º Fahrenheit
Brandon Walker knew he was running away. He had the excuse of running to something, but he understood that he was really escaping from something else, something he didn’t want to face. He would face it eventually because he had to, but not yet. He wasn’t ready.
Not that going to see G. T. Farrell was light duty by any means. Stopping by to see someone who was on his way to hospice care wasn’t Brandon’s idea of fun. Sue, Geet’s wife, had called with the bad news. Her husband’s lung cancer had been held at bay for far longer than anyone had thought possible, but now it was back. And winning.
“He’s got a set of files that he had me bring out of storage,” Sue had said in her phone call. “He made me promise that I’d see to it that you got them—you and nobody else.”
Brandon didn’t have to ask which file because he already knew. Every homicide cop has a case like that, the one that haunts him and won’t let him go, the one where the bad guy got away with murder. For Geet Farrell that case had always been the 1959 murder of Ursula Brinker, a twenty-one-year-old coed who had died while on a spring-break trip to San Diego.
Geet had been a newbie ASU campus cop at the time of her death. Even though the crime had occurred in California, it had rocked the entire university community. Geet had been involved in interviewing Ursula’s friends and relations, including her grieving parents. The case had stayed with him, haunting him the whole time he’d worked as a homicide detective for the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department, and through his years of retirement as well. Now that Geet knew it was curtains for him, he wanted to hand Ursula’s unsolved case off to someone else and let his problem be Brandon’s problem.
Fair enough, Brandon thought. If I’m dealing with Geet Farrell’s difficulties, I won’t have to face up to my own.
Geet was a good five years older than Brandon. They had met for the first time as fellow cops decades earlier. In 1975, Brandon Walker had been working Homicide for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, and G. T. Farrell had been his Homicide counterpart in neighboring Pinal. Between them they had helped bring down a serial killer named Andrew Philip Carlisle. Partially due to their efforts, Carlisle had been sentenced to life in prison. He had lived out his remaining years in the state prison in Florence, Arizona, where he had finally died.
Brandon Walker had also received a lifelong sentence as a result of that case, only his had been much different. One of Carlisle’s intended victims, the fiercely independent Diana Ladd, had gone against type and consented to become Brandon Walker’s wife. They had been married now for thirty-plus years.
It was hard for Brandon to imagine what his life would have been like if Andrew Carlisle had succeeded in murdering Diana. How would he have survived for all those years if he hadn’t been married to that amazing woman? How would he have existed without Diana and all the complications she had brought into his life, including her son, Davy, and their adopted Tohono O’odham daughter, Lani?
Much later, long after both detectives had been turned out to pasture
