Although Micah Duarte soon morphed into Dan’s beloved Gramps, his wife, Maxine, was another matter. She was always kind to Dan-kind but distant. Up until her death five years ago, she had always been Grandmother, never the less formal Grandma. Maxine had looked after Dan and cared for him, but she had seemed incapable of allowing herself to unbend in the presence of her dead daughter’s child. To Dan’s knowledge, his grandparents never discussed Rebecca, or if they did, it certainly wasn’t in Dan’s presence. Maybe part of Maxine’s reticence had to do with the fact that Dan looked so much like his father, although no one had mentioned it at the time. Dan found that out for himself much later while doing Internet searches into his own history.

Even as a child, Dan Pardee had had his father’s eyes. As he grew, he developed his father’s height and long legs, as well as his rangy good looks. All of that meant that Dan didn’t fit in well with the other kids on the San Carlos. He was neither fish nor fowl. He wasn’t Apache enough for some or Anglo enough for others.

And his troubled family history often caused difficulties as well. For one thing, school and Sunday school programs often focused on holidays with traditional “family values.”

Art projects to make greeting cards to celebrate Mother’s Day or Father’s Day didn’t take into account the feelings of a kid whose father had murdered his mother. There weren’t any cards that covered that contingency. When it came time to do a “family history” project for eighth-grade social studies, Dan flunked it fair and square. He wouldn’t answer the questions and didn’t turn in the paper. His teacher was baffled. Gramps was not.

As an eighth grader, Dan hadn’t wanted to know any of that ugly stuff, but while he was sitting in Iraq with time on his hands and computer access, he had made it his business to track down everything the Internet had to offer on Adam and Rebecca Pardee. Surprisingly enough, there was plenty of material available with the click of the mouse.

For one thing, an enterprising true-crime writer named Michaella Reece had written a book called The Return of the Stuntmen, which was a book about three different Hollywood stuntmen who had gone off to the slammer for one crime or another, only to be welcomed back to the Hollywood fraternity once they had paid their respective debts to society. By the time Dan knew the book existed it was out of print, but he had ordered a used copy from Amazon.

It turned out that the three men had a lot in common in addition to being stuntmen, including a long history of dishing out domestic abuse. They had all murdered women. One, Adam, murdered his wife; the second, his stepmother; the third, his girlfriend. And they all got slaps on the wrist with sentences in the seven-to-ten-year range with time off for good behavior. And they all went straight back to work once they got out of prison. The book had been published several years earlier, however, and Dan wondered how much work stuntmen were getting these days in the face of competition from computer-generated graphics that tossed images around rather than flesh-and-blood people.

In reading the book Dan saw the head-shot photos of his mother once again. Rebecca Duarte Pardee had been beautiful, even with her long dark hair turned into a froth of seventies-style curls. It galled Dan to realize that his father had served his time and been released from prison for his mother’s murder months before Dan graduated from the eighth grade.

Growing up, he often thought about going back to California to confront his father. By the time he was in high school, he had been convinced that, in a physical matchup, his karate training would give him an edge. During his class’s senior trip to Disneyland, Dan went so far as to find Adam Pardee’s name, address, and phone number in the phone book. He had made tentative arrangements to ditch the group the next day and go do just that, but one of the other kids, Frank Warren, had squealed on him, and it didn’t happen. Not then.

But by the time Dan returned home from Iraq, he was ready to see his father. He still had his karate training, but his years in the army had toughened him both mentally and physically far beyond what he’d been as a high school senior.

Because his deployment ended at almost the same time as his second enlistment, he told his grandfather that he’d be staying on in California for a few days with some buddies from L.A. Not that there were any buddies in L.A. He left the airport in a rented red Taurus and drove to the same address he had found ten years earlier, which turned out to be a down-at-the-heels bungalow in a not-so-nice neighborhood in South Pasadena.

It was apparent that in recent years both the neighborhood and the house had fallen on tough times. Knocked-over garbage cans and graffiti-covered fences and walls said that this area was fast becoming a no-man’s-land. Squaring his shoulders, Dan stepped out of the car and walked up the cracked and crumbling sidewalk. The wooden steps creaked under his weight.

If the house is that bad, Dan surmised, then things aren’t going that well for Adam, either.

Dan paused for a moment before he rang the bell, reciting the words he had prepared to say in greeting: “Hello, Adam. I’m Dan, your son. And here’s a little something for killing my mother.” After which he intended to plant his fist in the older man’s face.

Except the person who answered the door wasn’t Adam Pardee. A sallow-faced woman cracked open the door and peered out at him. Her lower lip was split. Her right eye was swollen shut. She was holding an ice pack to a bruise on her battered cheek. Clearly Adam was up to his old tricks.

“Yes?” she said. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The sight of her face hit Dan like a blow. If his mother had lived, this might have been her future and his. Yes, Rebecca had asked her parents for help, but would she have been strong enough to walk away? A lot of domestic-violence victims never did. In fact, maybe that was what had provoked that final confrontation-maybe she had told Adam that she was taking Dan and leaving.

But this woman, this sad-faced woman who was standing in the doorway of Adam’s house, wasn’t responsible for what had happened years in the past. Even if Dan called his father out and beat him to a bloody pulp, Dan knew what would happen eventually. Adam Pardee was a coward and a bully. Once he was able to do so, he would go back to beating the current woman in his life-his wife, girlfriend, whatever. All Dan could do for her was to refuse to be a party to it. In all likelihood she’d be beaten again-that was a given-but it wouldn’t be Dan Pardee’s fault.

“I was looking for an old buddy of mine,” he mumbled quickly, making up the story as he went along. “His name’s John-John Grady.”

“You’re mistaken,” she said. “There’s no one here by that name.”

“Who is it?” an irate male voice shouted from somewhere inside the house. “What do they want?”

Dan recognized the voice and the tone. Both had haunted his dreams for years. “Sorry,” he said to the woman as he backed away from the door. “I must have written the address down wrong.”

She closed the door and latched it. Hearing the sound of his father’s angry voice shouting through another closed door and across the intervening years made Dan’s heart hurt, but he understood that what Adam Pardee did or didn’t do, now or ever, was no longer Dan’s problem. With Micah Duarte’s words about knowing when to walk away echoing in his head, Dan returned to his waiting Taurus. He drove back to LAX, where he caught the first available flight back to Phoenix.

His grandfather picked him up at Sky Harbor. “I thought you were staying in L.A. for a couple of days.”

“I was,” Dan said, “but I changed my mind.”

“And the dog?”

“Bozo’s still in quarantine. Once he clears that, they’ll fly him to Sky Harbor, too.”