Dance of the Bones

by J. A. Jance

  Brandon recognized that Warden Edward Huffman was a conscientious man doing a difficult job, and it seemed likely that Huffman saw Diana and Brandon for what they were, too—­a pair of heartbroken parents who, having failed at the task of saving their offspring from himself, were now doing the best they could to see him through to the other side. Maybe Huffman also related to the irony of Brandon’s position—­that of a former sheriff who had been as helpless at raising his own son as any other father on the planet. For whatever reason, on Brandon and Diana’s weekly and finally daily visits, they had been granted a kind of latitude to come and go that most prison visitors were denied.

  It had been years now since Quentin died, but Huffman’s name and phone numbers remained in Brandon’s contacts list. Still parked outside Amanda Wasser’s condo, Brandon located the record. Then, since it was Saturday, he dialed the warden’s cell phone first.

  “Huffman,” the man answered.

  “Brandon Walker here.

  “Long time no see. What’s up?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “I understand John Lassiter has asked to see me, but I don’t want to drive all the way up there if I’m not on the approved visitor list.”

  “Let me check. I’ll get back to you. Is this number all right?”

  “It’ll work.”

  While Brandon waited for a return call, he thumbed through his fraying spiral notebook. Yes, he had an iPad. Yes, he used it occasionally, but when he needed to remember something and take notes, he still gravitated toward pen and paper. Glancing at the pages from his interview with Amanda, he underlined the passage about the second homicide—­that of Kenneth Mangum/Myers.

  Closing his eyes, he was just able to remember the guy, sitting on the witness stand and swearing that John Lassiter had loved Amos Warren like a father and would never have done anything to harm him. Of the witnesses who were called to testify, Mangum was the only one who had failed to be present during the knock-­down, drag-­out fight in El Barrio, for the very good reason that Ken had been in the county jail at the time doing a six-­month stretch on a third DUI conviction.

  Mangum had made an impassioned defense for his friend, but the jury had considered the source and had most likely disregarded his testimony completely when it came time to render their verdict.

  Brandon’s cell phone rang, with Huffman’s name showing on the caller ID screen. “I couldn’t do this for every inmate, but in all these years, Lassiter’s got no bad-conduct problems. I’ve put your name on the list. When are you coming?”

  “Today, if that’s possible,” Brandon said. “And one more thing. I’d really appreciate it if I could use an interview room rather than the ordinary visitation room. I’ve got some materials I’d like John to go over, and it’ll be easier if we could pass them back and forth across a table.”

  “Whatever you’re bringing in will have to go through security, and you’ll need to have someone from the prison sit in on the interview, but I don’t have a problem with your using a room. What time should we expect you?”

  “I’m leaving right now. Should take me a little less than two hours.”

  “I’ll be sure the room is ready when you get here.”

  “Thanks,” Brandon said.

  “You’re welcome,” Huffman replied, “and say hello to your lovely wife.”

  When the call ended, Brandon turned back to his contact list, found Ralph Ames’s number, and dialed it.

  “Hey, Brandon,” Ralph said when he answered. “What’s up?”

  “A guy who’s in prison doing life without, a guy I arrested years ago, has contacted me asking for us to look into that case. Even though he’s served decades for the crime, he still claims he didn’t do it. A group named Justice for All has worked out a time-­served deal if he pleads guilty to second degree, but he turned that down. Says he won’t take a plea for something he didn’t do.”

  “You’re the guy who arrested him in the first place, and now he’s asking for your help? That’s a little unusual.”

  “It’s the first time it’s happened to me,” Brandon agreed, “and I have no idea how he knew of my connection to TLC. Still, I’d like to take a look at it. The thing is, I’ve just been informed that there’s another unsolved case—­at least I think it’s unsolved—­that may or may not be related to this one. One of the witnesses from this case, someone who testified on the defendant’s behalf, was murdered in Seattle sometime back in the eighties. Isn’t there someone you’ve been telling me about, a friend of yours from up there, that you’ve been trying to recruit for TLC?”

  “Indeed there is,” Ralph replied. “His name’s J. P. Beaumont. He’s a good friend with way too much time on his hands at the moment. He worked for Seattle PD for years and was on a statewide Special Homicide Investigation Team for a number of years after that. Special Homicide was disbanded a ­couple of months ago. I’ve been trying to bring him on board, and I’ve been getting nowhere fast.”

  “You say he was working for Seattle PD in the eighties?”

  “Around then, but I’m not sure of the exact dates.”

  “The eighties are about the right time frame. Would you mind giving him a call to see if he’d be willing to take a look at the case in question?”

  “I have a better idea,” Ralph replied. “Beau and I are pals. He can tell me no six ways to Sunday and never blink an eye. I suspect he’ll have a lot tougher time saying no to a request for help from a complete stranger. Why don’t you call him directly?”

  “You don’t think he’ll mind?”

  “If he does, have him take it up with me. I’ll text you his contact card.”

  Brandon’s message signal dinged thirty seconds later with Beaumont’s contact card. No work phone was listed, only a home number and a cell. Since it was the weekend, Brandon opted for the home number. The phone rang six times before the voice-­mail prompt came on.

  “Beau here,” a male voice said. “You know the drill. At the sound of the tone, leave your name and number. I’ll get back to you.”

  Brandon did as he was told, then he fired up the Escalade and headed for Florence and for what he knew would be an unwelcome trip down memory lane.

  AT THE CRIME SCENE NEAR Rattlesnake Skull village, time slowed to a crawl. There was endless backing and forthing among the various officers about jurisdictional issues and equally endless milling around the crime scene before it was finally time for the FBI interviews.

  Naturally Lani and Leo were separated for that process. Leo and Agent Armstrong sat in Leo’s pickup while Lani and Angelica Howell stayed in the agents’ Suburban. Agent Howell was dismissive and overbearing. Lani had no doubt that Agent Howell saw Lani as a “Native American” woman or maybe even as an “indigenous person” who was bone tired from lack of sleep and worry, who was grimy from sleeping out overnight, and who smelled of woodsmoke. Lani recognized the symptoms. She’d been on the receiving end of that kind of dismissive Anglo arrogance all her life.

  “So you were asleep and awakened to the sound of what you believe was automatic gunfire?” Agent Howell asked, with an audible sneer underlining the word “believe.”

  “It was automatic gunfire,” Lani replied. “Anyone who’s watched television in the last ten years recognizes automatic gunfire when they hear it.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “When I looked at my watch, it said 4:16,” Lani answered, “but that was later, after the second round of gunfire and when the vehicle left the charco and headed back toward the highway.”

  “Where it turned left toward Sells rather than heading into town?”

  “Yes.”

  “What exactly were you doing out here on the mountain?” Agent Howell wanted to know.

  “I was here with my godson, Gabe Ortiz. Leo, the man in the truck, is G
abe’s father. He came out this morning to pick me up. I asked him to stop at the charco on the way back to Sells. That’s when we found the bodies.”

  “You knew there would be bodies there?”

  “I thought there might be.”

  “You said you came here with your godson. Seems like it might be a little cold for an overnight campout at this time of year. Where exactly were you?”

  Lani pointed back to Ioligam. “Up there,” she said. “I can show you if you’d like.”

  “How old is your godson, and where is he?”

  “He’s not quite fourteen. As for where he is right now? He’s at home. We had an argument, and he left.”

  “Left how?”

  “He walked off the mountain and went home.”

  “In the middle of the night? In the dark?”

  “It wasn’t that dark,” Lani said. “There was moonlight. There was starlight. You should try it sometime.”

  Just as Lani had felt the desert go silent after the gunfire, she felt a sudden shift in Agent Howell’s focus. “What kind of an argument?”

  “Do you have a godmother?” Lani asked.

  “A godmother?” Agent Howell asked. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Do you?” Lani persisted.

  “Of course not. My parents didn’t believe in that kind of thing.”

  “Well, we do here,” Lani said. “For the Tohono O’odham, godmothers play an important role. We’re part of the child’s life; if we suspect that child is straying onto the wrong path, godmothers try to offer guidance away from the bad and back to the good.”

  “That’s what was happening with Gabe?”

  Having said that much, Lani had no choice but to continue. “His parents were worried that he was slipping into things he shouldn’t, and they asked me for help. That’s why we came here—­to talk about those things—­and that’s what the argument was about. His parents were worried about some of the kids Gabe was hanging around with who were pulling him away from the old ways.”

  “As I understand it, Gabe’s mother is Delia Cachora Ortiz, the tribal chairwoman?”

  “The tribal chairman,” Lani corrected. “We’re Indians. We don’t have to be politically correct.”

  If Agent Howell noticed the verbal slap, she didn’t acknowledge it. “So you and Gabe argued and he left. What time was that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You knew to the minute when the gunshots happened. I should think you’d remember what time a kid walks off into the wilderness on his own.”

  “Gabe and I came to Ioligam—­”

  “To what?” Agent Howell interrupted.

  “Ioligam. That’s what we call Kitt Peak. In our tradition, it’s a sacred place. I brought Gabe here to have a serious discussion about the old ways, about right and wrong. That means the time I spent with Gabe last night was done on Indian time. It’s time ruled by what’s important—­by day and night, light and dark, the sun and the stars. It has nothing at all to do with hours, minutes, and seconds. As for the shooting? That didn’t happen on Indian time. The shooting was all about your tribe, Agent Howell, and I knew that in the Milgahn world—­the Anglo world—­knowing the exact hour and minute would be important.”

  “So Gabe left,” Agent Howell said. “What did he take with him?”

  “His grandfather’s blanket.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  “No food, no water, no cell phone?”

  “No, none of that.”

  “What about weapons? Did Gabe have any weapons with him?”

  “Wait, is that where this is going? You think Gabe had something to do with what happened here? He left hours before the shooting happened.”

  “You said he’s home now?”

  Lani nodded.

  “Did anyone notice what time he arrived there?”

  “I doubt it. His parents were at the dance at Vamori last night. They didn’t get home until early this morning, just before Leo came to pick us up. They didn’t check Gabe’s room when they got home because they still thought he was up here with me.”

  Someone tapped on the driver’s window, and Agent Howell buzzed it down. “We’ve got a tentative ID,” Agent Armstrong said. “We need to go. You can finish this later.”

  Agent Howell turned back to Lani. “Do you have a phone number? How can I reach you?”

  “Just call the hospital in Sells,” Lani told her. “Ask for Dr. Walker-­Pardee. They’ll know how to find me.”

  When Lani returned to Leo’s pickup and climbed inside, she saw from the expression on his face that something was wrong. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Jimmy Lewis, one of the Law and Order guys, is a buddy of mine. They know who the victims are.”

  “They’re not illegals?” Lani asked.

  “No,” Leo said, turning the key in the ignition. “They found their driver’s licenses. It’s two of the José brothers, Carlos and Paul.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Lani said.

  Leo nodded. “So was I.”

  Lani thought of the single gunshot she had heard later in the morning, after the initial volleys of shots. “What about Tim?” she asked.

  “There was no sign of him here, but chances are he’s dead, too,” Leo said. “We have to get back to Sells. I want to tell Gabe before anyone else does.”

  BRANDON WAS FINE FOR A while as he headed north on the Catalina Highway. Driving through the bustling business centers of Oro Valley, he couldn’t help but remember when Ina had been on the far edge of the city. That was no longer true. As for Catalina? He remembered that as a sleepy hamlet on a two-­lane road with little more than a bar, a gas station, and a tow-­truck operation. Now it, too, was busy enough to have multiple lanes and multiple traffic lights. Off to the left, between there and I-­10, were numerous housing developments and golf resorts. And off to the right, the ridgelines in the distance teemed with newly constructed cheek-­by-­jowl houses.

  He stopped briefly at the red light that marked the entrance to Saddlebrooke, with a thriving “active adult” community that included thousands of retirement homes and more golf courses. No doubt somewhere up there was the property near Golder Dam that John Lassiter had sold to some “crazy” developer who planned to build houses there. It turned out, Brandon realized, that the developer was having the last laugh.

  It wasn’t until Brandon turned off Catalina Highway and onto Highway 77 that the familiar pall of grief settled over him. His meeting with Amanda Wasser, in which he had learned about her unyielding loyalty to a father she didn’t know, had put Brandon’s troubled relationship with his own sons in an even worse light.

  Tommy had died in his late teens. He and his younger brother, Quentin, had been engaged in the felonious activity of stealing pots from an ancient site in a cavern on the reservation when Tommy had fallen to his death. Wanting to cover up what had really happened, Quentin spent years maintaining that Tommy had simply run away. During that time, before Mitch Johnson’s arrival on the scene had revealed the truth about Tommy’s death, Quentin had drifted ever deeper into the world of boozing and drugging. His coming down with hep C was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and his frequent run-­ins with the law meant that he had finally been given a three-­strikes life sentence.

  On the surface it was easy to theorize that Quentin’s burden of guilt about his brother had been the cause of Quentin’s eventually fatal downward spiral, but every time Brandon had driven Highway 77 from Tucson to Florence—­every time he had gone to the prison to visit Quentin prior to his death—­Brandon had blamed only himself. Today was no exception.

  Brandon hadn’t been able to prevent his divorce from his sons’ mother, Jane, but once that happened, he should have been more actively involved in raising the boys. He should have done more
to set them on the right path. He should have done better. He should have fixed it. Brandon’s sons were both dead while he was still alive. That wasn’t the way life was supposed to work. He grieved for his boys who had died so young and wasted so much of their all-too-short lives.

  Drowning in regret, Brandon wasn’t the least bit surprised to pull into the visitors’ parking lot at the prison and find that the knuckles on his fingers were white from his death grip on the steering wheel. On a sunny Saturday in March, the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence was the very last place in the universe where Brandon Walker wanted to be.

  CHAPTER 17

  EACH SUMMER THE WOMEN FROM the villages would go to the foothills around Baboquivari to gather the fruit from the ­saguaro—­s bahithaj—­from which they make the saguaro wine—­nawait. For many years, when ­people from a certain village went to gather the fruit, they were met by the Evil Giantess—­Ho’ok O’oks—­who lived nearby. You will remember, nawoj, my friend, that Ho’ok O’oks had grown out of the dust balls that once belonged to Nephew-­of-­the-­Sun.

  Ho’ok O’oks was a powerful spirit of evil who could make ­people do just what she wanted. Sometimes she made them give her their best cows. Sometimes she would catch a young child and take it away with her. And although the mothers mourned for their children and pleaded with the Giantess, the children were never returned.

  The Evil Giantess had such a lot of hair that when she shook her head, it was like a cloud. The children were all afraid of her. And so it became a custom for one of the women from the village to stay with the children to keep them safe. But this was not easy to do. There were horses and cattle to be watered and there was wood to be chopped to keep the fires warm to heat the ollas used to cook the cactus fruit before the syrup—­sit’ol—­could be turned into wine. All those things meant the women of the village were always busy.