Dance of the Bones

by J. A. Jance

  He grabbed his tray and tried to use that as a shield, but the tray only managed to deflect the blow. The shiv plunged first into his side and then into his chest. His chair tipped over, spilling him out of it. He was lying on the floor on his side, looking up and waiting for the next blow, when Sam used his own tray to hammer the side of the attacker’s head. The little man’s swing was powerful enough to knock the offender unconscious. The shiv fell from the attacker’s hand. He toppled over and landed heavily on Jason’s too-­still body.

  Through the din and the milling feet around him, John caught sight of someone else on the floor. It was the young Indian kid—­the Tohono O’odham. There was a gaping hole in his neck. He was trying to breathe, but John knew it was no use. He was about to drown in his own blood.

  He’s dead, John Lassiter thought as his brain finally registered the pain in his own body and the blood pouring onto his hand. And so am I, but at least I’m out of here.

  Then his world went black.

  CUTTING THROUGH THE TAPE WAS a long, difficult process. Several times Tim whimpered and jumped reflexively, telling Gabe that the knife had cut into his friend’s flesh rather than simply into the tape. But at last, with a satisfying snip, the tape gave way. A moment later, Tim used his newly freed hand to peel the tape from his mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know he’d come after you. I didn’t think he’d come after any of us.”

  Gabe’s muffled reply sent Tim’s fingers in search of the tape on Gabe’s face as well.

  “Who?” Gabe asked when he, too, was able to speak.

  Tim was already fumbling for the knife. “Henry Rojas,” he answered. “I saw him kill Carlos and Paul. I ran. I thought I’d be able to get away, but he caught me anyway. He said he’d shoot me if I didn’t tell him where the jar was. I thought he was kidding. Why would you shoot someone over a jar of peanut butter?”

  “It’s peanut butter full of diamonds,” Gabe answered.

  “Diamonds?” Tim asked. “Are you kidding?”

  “No,” Gabe said, “diamonds for sure.”

  The blade of the knife slipped. Gabe felt it slice into the side of his arm. A trickle of blood meandered away from the cut. He winced but managed to stifle the cry that rose in his throat. After all, hadn’t he just done the same thing to Tim’s arm?

  “How did he get all three of you?”

  “Carlos had already gone to town. He told Paul that he was going to talk to the big boss and ask her for more money. He said that he didn’t know where she lived but that someone was going to meet him and take him to her.”

  “The big boss is a woman?” Gabe asked.

  “I think so,” Tim answered. “I know Carlos was scared of her. He told us before he left that we should put the jar in a safe place. That’s when I brought it over to you even though I knew you were busy last night. I worried about what your parents would say, but then they weren’t home, either. So I left the bag on your porch and went home.

  “Paul and I played video games for a while, waiting up for Carlos to come back. Finally I got tired and went to bed. I was sleeping when something poked me in the arm.”

  “A needle?” Gabe asked, biting his lip when the tip of the blade bit into his arm again.

  “It was a needle. How did you know?”

  “Because he used the same stuff on me,” Gabe said. “It’s like you’re paralyzed or passed out or something.”

  “Yes, all of a sudden it was like I couldn’t move. He picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, carried me outside, and threw me into the back of his Border Patrol SUV. Paul was already there. He wasn’t moving, either. And just like that, I was out.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I woke up when we turned off the highway onto Coleman Road. By then he had put tie wraps around my wrists and around Paul’s, too. I could see that Paul was already awake. Henry stopped the car in the road by a charco.”

  “Rattlesnake Skull,” Gabe supplied. The knife cut through the last of the tape on Gabe’s right wrist. It was a huge relief to finally be able to move his arm. “Close the knife and give it to me,” he said. “I’ll cut my left hand loose and then work on your right. But first I need your phone.”

  It took some maneuvering for Gabe to wrestle the phone out Tim’s pocket. When he did, it wouldn’t turn on. The battery was dead. Hiding his disappointment, he got back to the task at hand.

  “Go on,” he urged as he went back to working on the tape. “Tell me what happened.”

  “When Henry got out of the SUV,” Tim continued, “he went around to the tailgate and came up with something that looked like an automatic weapon. While he was out of the car Paul whispered that I should run. I was scared. I didn’t know how I’d be able to do that. I didn’t even know if my legs would work. When Henry opened the door and pulled Paul out, Paul pretended like he was still asleep, but as soon as he was on the ground, he started to struggle and managed to knock the gun out of Henry’s hands.

  “The door was still open. I got out and ran as fast as I could, but running in the dark with my hands tied was hard. Then I remembered that YouTube video we watched, the one about that girl getting loose from a tie wrap by bringing her arms down from over her head. That’s what I did, and it worked.”

  “But he caught you anyway.”

  “He had night-­vision goggles. He followed me from the highway and nailed me later when I showed up on Kitt Peak Road. I knew Carlos and Paul were dead by then, and I thought he was going to shoot me, too. He fired one shot just to scare me. He asked about the peanut butter. I told him I left it in a bag on your porch, but by the time we got there, it was gone. You must have already taken it inside. He had to wait awhile before he could get it, and he told me that if it wasn’t there, I was dead. But I never thought he’d take you, Gabe. Never.”

  Even in the dark, working with a freed right hand was incredibly easier than what he had done before. Soon Tim’s other hand was loose as well.

  “Well, he did,” Gabe said. “And just because he has the diamonds doesn’t mean he won’t kill us anyway.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Henry never thought we’d be able to get loose from the tape, but we did. Now we need to find a way to keep him from killing us.”

  “He has guns,” Tim objected. “All we have is a stupid little knife.”

  “Then we’ll need to make that knife work for us.” When Gabe heard those determined words come out of his mouth, he wondered where they had come from. The person speaking them sounded brave, and if there was one thing Gabe Ortiz knew about himself, it was that he wasn’t brave.

  AFTER I FINISHED GOING THROUGH Amanda Wasser’s digital files, I sat there for a while longer and thought about them. The first order of business, of course, would be to reinterview Calliope Horn. I still have the last phone book the telephone company sent out. It’s so out-of-date now that it’s close to being an antique. A check of that showed no listing for Calliope Horn. That was hardly surprising. The Kenneth Myers homicide was twenty-­five years earlier. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

  Had I still been part of the S.H.I.T., I would have had access to any number of public and private databases and could have used those to track Calliope Horn down on my own. That door was now permanently closed—­officially that is. Unofficially, I still had a single ace up my sleeve: my old pal Todd Hatcher.

  Todd is a smart guy, a forensic economist. They’re the kind of ­people who look into small things and spot coming trends. One of my first interactions with him had come about when he showed up on the attorney general’s doorstep with a dissertation in hand. The paper laid out the long-­term adverse financial implications an aging prison population would have on the state budget. I had it on good authority that Todd still had access to all those highly sensitive databases that were now closed to me. Todd is
also your basic IT genius. In fact, he’s the one who had used off-­the-­books methods to locate a madman’s cell phone, thus allowing me to save Mel Soames’s life mere weeks earlier.

  This wasn’t quite that pressing an issue, but with Mel still out of town, I hoped Todd could help me find Calliope Horn in a timely enough fashion that I could have my interview with her out of the way before Mel came home.

  I called Todd and passed along my request. Next I dialed Brandon Walker. When he answered, I could hear the clatter of dishes and the sounds of ­people talking in the background. “Beaumont here,” I told him. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, I missed lunch, so I stopped off for an early dinner, but I’m done now. Did anything jump out at you?”

  “At the time of the initial investigation here, detectives spoke to Kenneth Myers’s girlfriend, Calliope Horn. She indicated that when she last saw him, he was on his way to Arizona for some reason and that he expected to come home with a sum of money from an undisclosed source—­enough money to get them moved out of a homeless camp and back on their feet.”

  “A score of some kind, maybe?” Brandon asked.

  “A score with a woman involved.”

  “What woman?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “Calliope didn’t have a name, but she suspected it might have been an old girlfriend from Arizona. Kenneth apparently was seen in the company of an unidentified woman here in Seattle shortly before he disappeared. I’ve got someone looking for Calliope right now. If I can interview her tomorrow, I will.

  “Since Lassiter was already in prison, he can’t be responsible for Ken’s death, but he might have some idea of who was.”

  “Lassiter pointed me in the direction of someone named Ava,” Brandon said, “Ava Martin Hanover Richland. She was John’s girlfriend at the time of the homicide, and she also testified against Lassiter at both trials. I know she palled around with Ken, too.”

  “That’s a time-­honored way to keep the cops from looking at you,” I told him. “You do everything you can to point the finger at somebody else.”

  “So if you can manage to track down that old girlfriend . . .”

  “Calliope,” I supplied.

  “Ask her if she ever heard Kenneth Mangum Myers mention Ava Martin by name.”

  “Will do,” I said. “I’ll have Todd, a friend of mine who’s a whiz at data mining, look into Ava’s history as well. Could you give me that string of names again?”

  While Brandon was repeating them, there was an audible blip in the line. “Just a sec,” he said. “I have another call coming in. Can you hang on?”

  “Sure.” While he was off the line, I made a note of the list of names. One of the things I’ve learned from Todd Hatcher is that the Internet is no respecter of state lines. Your name is your name. A hit can come from any corner of the country—­or of the world, for that matter.

  After the better part of a minute, Walker came back on the line. “That was Warden Huffman from the state pen,” he said.

  His voice was different. I could tell at once that something was wrong.

  “What’s up?”

  “There was a ‘disturbance’ at the prison a while ago. The guards controlled the situation eventually, and the prison is back under lockdown. Trouble is, two ­people are dead in the incident, and John Lassiter was severely wounded. He’s in critical condition and has been air-­lifted to a trauma center in Mesa.”

  “Somebody tried to take him out the same day you stop by to visit?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”

  “Not to me, either,” Brandon said. “Anyway, I need to go tell Amanda. I asked the warden if anyone had been sent to notify her. Turns out he didn’t even know she existed. She isn’t on Lassiter’s official next-­of-­kin list.”

  “You’ll go see her?” I asked.

  “I will,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  And that’s when I knew Ralph Ames wasn’t wrong about Brandon Walker. A lot of ­people I know—­especially guys like Phil Kramer—­do their best to avoid having to deal with families of victims. Walker had just volunteered to break some awful news to a family member when it wasn’t his job.

  “Good luck with that,” I said, and meant it. “In the meantime, I’ll get cracking on locating Calliope Horn. I’ll also have Todd look into this Ava person. It sounds to me as though TLC has just stumbled on a hornets’ nest.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE WHITE-­WINGED DOVES TOOK OWL to the place and showed him the sleeping girl, but Evil Giantess was awake and on guard. Once night came, Ho’ok O’oks went to sleep. That was when Owl returned. He flew softly back and forth over Shining Falls, who still lay sleeping with Little White Feather crushed in her hand.

  Very gently, Owl fanned Shining Falls with his wings, and slowly—­very slowly—­Shining Falls’s eyes opened. And this is why, nawoj, even to this day, when someone is asleep and cannot wake up, the Elders—­Kekelimai—­fan the sleeping one with owl feathers.

  “I’M THIRSTY,” TIM MOANED IN the darkness. “I’m thirsty and hungry and scared. We’re going to die.”

  Gabe was hungry and thirsty, too, but there was no point in talking about it. He had done his best to explore their prison. He had located the ventilation holes that he had known had to be there. They allowed air in but no light. And he had found the seam where the lid closed over them. He had been able to ease the knife blade along it until he encountered what he supposed was a metal hasp. He withdrew the blade as soon as it touched something hard. The knife was their only weapon, and he didn’t want to damage it. He slipped it into his pocket. As he did so, his fingers encountered the four diamonds that he had put there hours ago—­long before this endless time in the darkness. Gabe couldn’t see them, of course, but just having the stones in his hand somehow made him feel better.

  “We’re not going to die,” he declared firmly with a confidence he didn’t exactly feel. “We’re not going to.”

  “I could just as well die,” Tim went on. “What’ll happen to me if I live? My mom is sick. My dad is dead, and so are Carlos and Paul. Max is still alive, but he’s in prison. I’ll probably end up in foster care somewhere.”

  Tim’s voice sounded funny—­like his tongue was thick, like he was mumbling rather than talking.

  “What about your aunt and uncle?” Gabe asked. “Couldn’t you go live with them?”

  “I don’t like them,” Tim said. “And they have too many little kids. I’d end up being their babysitter.”

  Moving restlessly in the darkness, Tim’s hand came in contact with the back of Gabe’s fist. Tim’s fingers were hot to the touch, as though he was burning up with a fever. That’s when Gabe realized Tim wasn’t just thirsty—­he was dehydrated, and maybe Tim’s assessment was right. If Henry Rojas didn’t come back for them soon, Tim might die after all.

  Suddenly, without knowing how it happened, Gabe was back in one of those hospital rooms. He had gone to visit an old, old woman, Mrs. Lopez. She was lying in the bed, restless and moaning. The sides of the bed had been put up to keep her from falling. Gabe had reached out to touch her hand and had known in that moment that she was going to die, that this was the last time he would see her.

  How had he known that? Gabe wondered. How had he understood Death was coming?

  Holding his breath, he reached out now and sought Tim’s hand once more. The skin was hot to the touch, but the sense of foreboding and dread Gabe had felt in Mrs. Lopez’s hospital room didn’t descend on him. If Tim was dying, it wasn’t happening right now. It wasn’t happening yet.

  Then, something else came back to Gabe from that same long-­ago hospital room. He had sat down on the floor beside Mrs. Lopez’s bed, close enough that her hand could touch the back of his head through the bed rails. Gabe had sung to her that day, a healing song whose words he could no longer remember. What
he did remember was that as he sang she had quieted. She had stopped thrashing in the bed, had stopped moaning. He had sung the song four times—­for all of nature goes in fours—­and when the song was finished and he left the room, she was sleeping peacefully.

  Maybe that was what was needed right now—­a healing song that would let Tim José fall asleep so he wouldn’t notice how slowly time was passing in the stifling darkness, so he would forget how thirsty he was.

  Without knowing where the words came from—­perhaps from the four stones clutched in his hand—­Gabe Ortiz began to sing.

  We are here, Elder Brother, two boys in a box.

  We are alone in the dark, Spirit of Goodness,

  Hungry and thirsty and asking for help.

  The man who put us here is not a good man.

  He pretends to be good, but he is not.

  There is something in him that is evil,

  I’itoi, something in him that is bad.

  Help us to know what to do, Elder Brother.

  Help us to know what to do.

  You have given us a weapon, Elder Brother,

  A weapon that the bad man didn’t see.

  The weapon was a gift, a knife, that let us

  Cut our bonds, and now we wait,

  Wait for that evil man to return. When he does

  Help us fight him, Elder Brother,

  Help us fight him, that we may live.

  We are two boys in a box who need your help,

  Elder Brother, two boys who need your help.

  Gabe sang the song through four times, and by the time he was done, two things had happened. Tim had fallen asleep, and Gabe himself no longer felt thirsty.

  TODD HATCHER WAS GOOD TO his word. Within twenty minutes of my handing him the joint Calliope Horn/Ava Martin problem, he was back on the phone. “I found her,” he said. “Her name is Calliope Horn-­Grover now—­Reverend Calliope Horn-­Grover. She and her husband, the Reverend Dale Grover, are partners in an outfit called Pastoral Outreach. It specializes in ministering to homeless shelters throughout the Seattle area.”