Dance of the Bones

by J. A. Jance

  It turned out Kenny and I had a lot in common. We’d both come from broken and abusive homes; we’d both dropped out of high school our sophomore year. We’d both done time. There’s nothing like spending time in the slammer to give you something to talk about. (laughter) After I got out on good behavior, I couldn’t find work. That’s how I ended up in the camp—­me and plenty of others. Just because you get out of jail doesn’t mean you get your life back.

  S.D.: What did you get sent up for?

  C.H.: I’m sure you’ve got my record right there in front of you.

  S.D.: Tell me anyway.

  C.H.: Domestic violence. Manslaughter. I killed my ex. Ray came home drunk and was beating the crap out of me. He tried to choke me. I kicked him in the balls hard enough that I got loose. He liked to play ball with the guys, and his baseball bat was standing in the corner of the living room, behind the front door. I grabbed that and bashed his skull in.

  We’d both been drinking that night. I had enough cuts and bruises that it should have been considered self-­defense, but I had a worthless defense attorney, and the prosecutor argued that I had hit him more than once after he was down. Which was true. I hit him way more than once.

  Taking a deep breath, I had to stop reading for several long minutes. I couldn’t continue, not when I knew what had happened to Sue much later. I found myself once again reliving her last moments frame by frame, fighting it out with her enraged and fully armed ex-­husband in a battle that had ended with both of them dead.

  Throughout the Calliope Horn interview I read enough between the lines to realize that Sue suspected Kenneth Myers, like Calliope’s first husband, had died as a result of domestic violence. I couldn’t help wondering if she had some inkling at the time—­some premonition—that a similar fate awaited her. Probably not. My problem was that I had no such luxury. The curse of hindsight was slamming into every fiber of my being as I read those bare-­bones questions and answers.

  Finally gathering my roiling emotions, I returned to the text.

  C.H.: Now I get it. That’s what this is all about and why I’m here, isn’t it. You think that just because I bashed Ray’s head in that I killed Kenny, too? Am I a suspect? Do I need a lawyer?

  S.D.: You’re not under arrest, Ms. Horn. You’re free to go anytime you wish. We’re hoping you can help us locate Mr. Myers’s next of kin. So you were both living in the homeless shelter at the time he disappeared?

  C.H.: Yes.

  S.D.: Did Mr. Myers have a beef of any kind with someone from the camp?

  C.H.: No, he didn’t, not at all. I wasn’t the only one who thought he was a good guy. So did everyone else.

  S.D.: Did you have any ex-­boyfriends hanging around at the time?

  C.H.: No, I didn’t. Nothing like that—­no boyfriends of any kind.

  S.D.: At the time Mr. Myers left, did you report him as missing?

  C.H.: No, I didn’t. At first I didn’t worry because he said he was going to Arizona and that he’d be back in a ­couple of weeks after he did whatever it was he had to do.

  S.D.: How was he planning to travel—­by plane? By car?

  C.H.: He didn’t have a car or a driver’s license and he didn’t have money for plane fare. I figured he was going to hitchhike.

  S.D.: At some point, you must have realized that he was gone for good. Why didn’t you report him missing then?

  C.H.: Because the cops would have laughed at me. You can’t go missing from a homeless shelter. Most of the ­people in homeless shelters are already missing from somewhere else. Besides, by then, I’d finally tumbled to the fact that he probably had a girlfriend on the side. I figured he’d hooked up with an old flame and that he’d gone back to Arizona to be with her.

  S.D.: What girlfriend?

  C.H.: I don’t know for sure that she was his girlfriend; I just assumed that’s what she was. A few days after Kenny left town—­after I thought he left town—­one of the guys in the camp, Carl Jacobson, mentioned that he’d seen Kenny with another woman the afternoon of the day he left. Carl claimed he saw them sitting together down by the convention center.

  S.D.: Did Mr. Jacobson describe her to you?

  C.H.: Sort of. He said she was well dressed and classy looking—­definitely not homeless. I didn’t pay that much attention at the time because, you know, I still thought Kenny would be back when he finished doing whatever it was he had to do. Then later, when he still wasn’t back by the end of May, I realized that he was probably gone for good. That’s when I finally made the connection with the woman from the convention center.

  S.D.: Do you know where we can find Mr. Jacobson?

  C.H.: No idea. Homeless ­people come and go. They don’t leave forwarding addresses.

  S.D.: So you don’t know for sure that Mr. Myers and the unidentified woman were involved in a relationship of some kind?

  C.H.: I don’t have proof positive, no, but that’s what I believe.

  S.D.: You said there were two matching pendants—­engraved pendants. If you were both homeless, where did he get the money to buy them and have them engraved?

  C.H.: Beats me. Probably worked as a day laborer somewhere to get it.

  S.D.: You mentioned that Mr. Myers had a drinking problem?

  C.H.: We both did, but by early spring we were working on getting sober. Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. When I realized he was gone for good, I fell off the wagon in a big way. I was furious that he’d left me for someone else and was spending the happily ever after he’d promised me with her. That’s what I always believed until just now when you told me Kenny was dead. All this time I thought he was alive and well and living with someone else instead of me.

  S.D.: Let’s talk about her, then—­that alleged girlfriend. Did Kenneth ever mention other girlfriends by name?

  C.H.: No. We never talked about previous relationships. By mutual agreement those were off-­limits. But once he was gone and once I suspected another woman might have been involved, I started putting things together and wondering if maybe she was someone he’d knocked up and she’d come to him looking for child support.

  S.D.: Did Kenneth ever indicate to you that he had kids?

  C.H.: It never came up and I didn’t ask him. Since I didn’t have kids, I assumed he didn’t, either. By the time I was ready to ask those questions, it was too late. He was gone.

  S.D.: How long did it take for you to figure out that he wasn’t coming back?

  C.H.: For sure by the middle of June. After that, I spent months drinking and got picked up for being drunk and disorderly. The judge ordered me into mandatory treatment. Once I got sober, I realized that since I couldn’t count on anyone else to save my sorry ass, I’d have to do the job myself. If my life was going to have any kind of happy ending, finding it was up to me.

  Someone from AA helped me get into a shelter run by the YWCA. The ­people there helped me find a job and start taking classes. First I got my GED and then I enrolled in college. I have my own studio apartment now, and I’m halfway through my junior year.

  S.D.: What are you studying?

  C.H.: I’m majoring in religious studies. After I graduate, I want to earn a degree in divinity. It’s one thing for ­people in the suburbs to come swanning into some shelter during the holidays to serve turkey dinners and tell themselves that they’re doing their Chris­tian duty. I want to minister to the homeless because I’ve been homeless. I know what it’s like.

  S.D.: Some ­people might think you were operating with a guilty conscience.

  C.H.: Those ­people would be wrong.

  S.D.: When Mr. Myers said he was leaving, he led you to believe that he was expecting to make a score of some kind? That he’d be coming back with enough money for the two of you to move out of the homeless camp?

  C.H.: That’s right.

  S.D.: Is it possible that
he was involved in some kind of illegal activity?

  C.H.: You mean like drug smuggling or something? No, Kenny drank, but he didn’t do drugs, and I never thought he was a crook.

  S.D.: Let me ask you this, Ms. Horn: Did you kill Mr. Myers?

  C.H.: No, absolutely not! I swear. Like I said before, I didn’t even know he was dead until just a little while ago when you told me. I always believed that he had taken off with another woman.

  S.D.: Miss Horn, would you be willing to take a polygraph test?

  C.H.: You mean a lie detector test? Of course. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

  The interview ended there. And that’s when I realized I’d already seen a copy of the results from Calliope Horn’s polygraph test. It had been right there in the evidence box. The results indicated that Calliope Horn had known nothing about Kenneth Myers’s death. She had been telling the truth.

  With those thoughts in mind, I went on to the other interviews. Calliope Horn’s wasn’t the only one that had been transcribed into what more or less passed for English. Between the time Myers disappeared and the time his remains were found, the encampment had been disbanded and most of the ­people who had lived there had moved on to wherever homeless ­people go when they have to go somewhere else. Only a few of the former residents had ever been identified, to say nothing of located.

  Interviews with the few individuals who had been found, especially ones conducted by Kramer working alone, were easier for me to read than the ones with Sue’s name on them, but they shed little light on the matter beyond the fact that they all agreed Kenny had disappeared sometime in the spring of 1983. Calliope was the only one who had been able to supply an exact date.

  Carl Jacobson, the person who had supposedly witnessed Ken Myers talking to the “ex-­girlfriend” and who might have been able to give a description of her, was one of the MIAs. As a consequence, the closest individual to an eyewitness was never interviewed.

  Turning off my iPad, I could see why the case had gone cold: No murder weapon. No witnesses. No time of death. No actual crime scene. It wasn’t until years later that Mel Soames, using dental records, had linked the Myers homicide up to an Arizona missing persons report on someone named Kenneth Mangum. That report had been filed years earlier by Ken’s mother, who was deceased by the time the cops came calling with the bad news that her son had been murdered decades earlier in Seattle.

  There was no explanation of why he had left Arizona, moved to Seattle, and changed his name. Yes, Ken Mangum had done time in jail on a DUI charge—­presumably the same one that had cost him his driver’s license. That meant that his fingerprints were probably on file somewhere, too, but he’d never been arrested again or linked to any other crimes, and the skeletal remains found at the crime scene hadn’t included fingerprints.

  Mangum/Myers had died in Seattle. That meant solving the homicide was still Seattle’s responsibility. Once the cops there reached out to Arizona law enforcement in an attempt to notify the next of kin, cops in Arizona weren’t required to do anything more. In other words, the unsolved case was now cold twice over in two separate jurisdictions. With that in mind and given Seattle PD’s lack of enthusiasm for solving bum-­bashing cases, I didn’t hold out much hope that it would ever be solved. Not by me, not by Seattle PD, and certainly not by Ralph Ames’s cold case group, TLC.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE WHITE-­WINGED DOVES—­THE O-­OKOKOI—­CIRCLED AROUND until they found Evil Giantess guarding the sick girl who was holding Little White Feather in her hand. The doves knew that there was nothing they could do right then, so they went to a cave on Baboquivari to hold a council and decide what to do.

  None of the O-­okokoi could come up with a plan, but Turtle overheard them talking. He said that the way to help Little White Feather was very simple. Evil Giantess watched Shining Falls all day, but Ho’ok O’oks herself had to sleep at night. Turtle said that the doves must find one of the white-­feathered ­people who was awake at night. Then Turtle suggested that since Owl—­Chukud—­was sleeping in the cave, the doves should ask him for help.

  Since it was the middle of the day, it was hard for the doves to wake Owl. They had to shout at him and pull his feathers, but eventually he opened his eyes and said, “Whoo, Whoo.”

  Then the doves told Owl that one of the White Feathers was in trouble and he must help. After Owl heard the story, he agreed that he would go to Evil Giantess and try to steal away the girl who was holding Little White Feather.

  You see, nawoj, my friend, that Owl, too, had many white feathers. If Ho’ok O’oks had used any of the Black Feather tribe or the Blue Feather tribe when she put Shining Falls to sleep, Owl would not be able to awaken her.

  DURING HIS THREE-­PLUS DECADES IN the Arizona State Prison, John Lassiter had seen any number of wardens come and go. The weak-­kneed ones tended to go sooner than later. Most had been honorable men who did the job to the best of their abilities. Some had been downright corrupt.

  The current one, Warden Edward Huffman, was right at the top of Lassiter’s warden scorecard sheet. He was tough but fair in the way he handed out rewards and punishments. He had demoted or removed guards who were found to be dealing drugs, goodies, or bribes on the side and had done his best to motivate the ones that remained. He had instituted policies that made it easier for impaired prisoners to exist inside the system. He had found ways to stretch the food budget so things that actually resembled real food and vegetables ended up on the dining room serving trays. At his direction, the evening meal, served at the early hour of four P.M. on Saturday afternoon, was usually pot roast—­pot roast with gravy that actually tasted like gravy rather than brown-­colored flour.

  John didn’t have many happy memories from his childhood, but pot roast was one of them. Amos Warren had made killer pot roast. When they were out on a scavenging trip, he’d cook it in a cast-­iron Dutch oven, keeping it bubbling for hours over a bed of mesquite coals. When they were in town, he’d use a different Dutch oven, a shiny aluminum one, to cook the roast on top of the stove. Although John watched him do it often enough, he never quite mastered the art of making the stuff, but the cooks at the prison came surprisingly close.

  Even on days when he wasn’t feeling one hundred percent, John still made the effort to go to the dining room for dinner on Saturdays. By the time a tray came to his cell it was usually dead cold. That evening, even though John was physically drained by his long encounter with Brandon Walker earlier in the day, he asked for an attendant to come wheel him to the dining room. He would have preferred having Aubrey do the job, but Aubrey’s shift ended at three. By dinnertime, he was long gone.

  Jason, the kid who came to get him, was a new hire. He was competent enough, but he was young and naive. He also talked a blue streak, chattering away like a magpie. John didn’t pay much attention because he didn’t want to get involved. There was no point. He already knew the guy would be a short-­timer.

  A strict seating hierarchy was maintained in the dining room. The various gangs stuck together, with their members sitting at predetermined tables. The far corner of the room held the tables for inmates who weren’t necessarily affiliated with any of the other groups. It was a form of exile that meant the ­people who sat there were farther away from the food lines and the trash cans than anyone else. They were also farthest from the door.

  John liked to think of his usual table, the most isolated one in the room, as a United Nations of sorts. It certainly wasn’t the safest location, due primarily to the presence of two Anglo child molesters, one older—­a lifer—­and one several decades younger. The two weren’t necessarily friends, but they stuck together to watch each other’s backs. Everyone else maintained a certain distance, because they knew, without having to say so, who was wearing a target and who wasn’t.

  There were several arsonists in the group, including two Korean brothers, twins, who had specialized in burning down
dry cleaning establishments, and a Vietnamese guy who had torched his own nail salon. His ex-­wife, who happened to be inside the salon at the time, perished, which meant her ex-­husband was there for a stretch, twenty-­five to life. In addition, there were several unaffiliated Indians at the table—­a taciturn Hopi, a San Carlos Apache who wasn’t friendly with anyone, and a recently arrived young guy who didn’t talk much but who was most likely, John thought, Tohono O’odham in origin.

  The Vietnamese guy, who went by the name of Sam, was the one with whom John had the most in common. He was the best educated of the bunch and had taken to heart John’s suggestion that he read his way through the encyclopedia as a way of passing the time. He was enthusiastic about it and was already halfway through volume C. Their occasional and mostly brief dinnertime chats often centered on esoteric things the two had learned from their individual courses of study.

  Jason was still chatting away when he parked John’s wheelchair at the end of the table. That was his spot because climbing over the picnic-­style bench seating was impossible for him.

  “Okay,” Jason said. “Gonna go have a smoke. I’ll be back for you in fifteen.”

  The table was generally quiet that evening, but there was nothing out of the ordinary—­nothing that hinted something bad was coming. Jason was back from his smoking break and bending over to release the brake on the chair when all hell broke loose. The melee erupted in the middle of the room and soon spread to all corners. Inmates leaped to their feet while metal trays flew through the air and crashed to the floor. As sirens sounded and guards shouted warnings and orders, tables were overturned.

  Knowing he was trapped in the corner with no way to escape, John watched as two men emerged from the fracas and started toward his table. With everyone else wildly throwing punches and contributing to the general mayhem, those two moved purposefully but almost in slow motion toward the corner. John’s initial assumption was that they were coming for the child molesters. It was only when he saw the shiv slice into Jason’s back that John Lassiter realized, too late, he was the real target.