Day of the Dead bw-3

by J. A. Jance

“I don’t have one,” Brandon Walker said. “Turned mine in when I retired.”

  Brian was already unbuttoning his shirt. “Take mine,” he said. “I’ll pick up my other one when I go back to the department.”

  “But…” Brandon began.

  “No buts,” Brian told him. “If I let you go without a vest and something happens to you, Diana will kill me, and I wouldn’t blame her.”

  Gayle Stryker was at her desk, talking to her private banker and moving funds around when Larry stumbled into her office. His face was red, his tie askew. His white shirt was spotted with what looked like a spray of coffee. He was hyperventilating. “I’ve gotta talk to you,” he gasped.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said into the phone, and then put down the receiver. “Larry, what’s the matter? You look like hell. Don’t you know there are reporters out there?”

  “Brandon Walker’s the matter,” Larry stammered. “I just talked to him. I swear, he knows all about Roseanne Orozco. Yes, I saw the media people camped out outside the front lobby. Why the hell do you think I came in through the delivery door? What are we going to do?”

  “I handed Denise a written statement to give to the press. If you want to read it…”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about that,” Larry interrupted impatiently. “What are we going to do about Brandon Walker?”

  “Come on, Larry.” Gayle kept her demeanor calm. Larry was upset, and she didn’t want to make things worse. “What do you mean, Walker knows about Roseanne? What did he say?”

  “He came right out and asked me if I was the father of her child. How could he possibly know to ask me that? Nobody else ever figured it out. Why would he?”

  “You’re right,” Gayle said. “This does sound serious.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I think it’s time we headed south,” she said quietly.

  “Permanently?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I was just on the phone checking the money situation. We’ll be fine. If we leave now-today-by the time anyone figures it out, it’ll be too late. Once we’re across the border, we’re home free. There are no legal problems in Mexico that can’t be fixed with the right amount of money put into the right hands.”

  “But what about the house? What if someone goes through it and comes across the room in the basement? I’ve cleaned it as well as possible, but there’s always a chance…”

  “I’ll take care of the house, Larry,” she assured him. “You know very well that it’s always been my intention to take care of the house. Is there anything you want from there, anything you want to take along with us?”

  He paused and seemed to consider. “No,” he answered at last. “There’s nothing I want.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll call for a jet to take us to Cabo. By contract we have to give them eight hours’ advance notice, but they may well have a plane available to pick us up sooner than that. I have some errands to run, then I’ll head out to the ranch and take care of things there. You hold down the fort here, but keep a low profile. Don’t talk to the media. Don’t grant any interviews.”

  For several long seconds, Larry appeared to be seized with indecision. Gayle was afraid he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  Finally he nodded. “All right.” Then, making what seemed to be a supreme effort to pull himself together, he added, “You’re sure you won’t need my help out at the ranch?”

  She smiled at him then. Things always worked more smoothly when she was the one who came up with the plan and all Larry had to do was follow orders.

  “I can handle it,” she said.

  “But you will be careful,” he cautioned. “That stuff can be very dangerous.”

  “You know me,” she said. “I’m always careful.”

  J. A. Jance

  Day of the Dead

  Twenty-Seven

  Feeling all his sixty-plus years, Larry left Gayle’s office and went to his own. He shut the door and locked it. Then he called out to reception and said he was not to be disturbed.

  He hadn’t exactly told Gayle the truth. He did want something from the house. If he had known he was leaving today, he would have brought his notebooks to work. They would have fit in his briefcase. Now, because he hadn’t wanted to admit to Gayle that the notebooks even existed, he was faced with the prospect of leaving them behind. If Gayle destroyed them along with the rest of the house, fine, but if anyone happened to stumble across them…

  In terms of treasure, Larry’s prize didn’t amount to much-a series of cheap photo albums he’d picked up from Walgreens over the years. What he valued was the collection of photos he kept inside-dated Polaroid shots of each of his girls, pictures that graphically chronicled each of their individual journeys. When he was between girls-as he was now-he often consoled himself by revisiting his past exploits. Browsing through the pictures was a balm to him, but in someone else’s hands…Regardless of what he had told Gayle, he had to go get them. If she caught him there, he’d make up some excuse, but the notebooks had to be in his personal possession when he stepped onto the jet.

  Unable to sit still, Larry paced back and forth in his office. The incident with Brandon Walker had unnerved him. Eventually he would feel the rush of relief, but right now he was mired in fear. Periodically he glanced out the window. Since Gayle had told him to stay put, he couldn’t leave before she did. Unfortunately, her Lexus remained in its place.

  Hoping for relief, he forced himself to sit down and try to relax. He used the remote to turn on his Bose radio, tuned, as it always was, to KUAT, where they were playing Mozart-his favorite, the Piano Concerto no. 22 in E-flat Major. Lost in the music, he actually managed to doze for a while.

  When he awakened, the news was coming on. The opening item caught Larry’s attention: “Media relations officer Ted Garner has just confirmed that a prisoner found hanging in his Pima County Jail cell last night has died as a result of what the medical examiner’s office is calling self-inflicted injuries. Erik LaGrange, longtime development officer for Tucson-based Medicos for Mexico, was booked into the jail in connection with the death of a teenage girl whose dismembered body was found near Vail on Saturday. In a court appearance yesterday afternoon, LaGrange had pleaded innocent to all charges.”

  The newscaster went on to other topics, but Larry Stryker was no longer listening. Gayle had finished with Erik LaGrange, and now he was dead. Welcome as that outcome might be, it left Larry with a disturbing question rattling around in his head. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked it.

  What happens if she’s ever finished with me?

  Lani woke up late. She poured some coffee and then went looking for her mother. Diana was in her office, fingers flying over her laptop’s keyboard. “Where’s Dad?” Lani asked.

  “Beats me,” Diana said. “He was out of here early. I’m sure it has something to do with the case he’s working on. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” Lani said. “Can I have your car keys? I left a mess in your car last night. I want to take it into town and have it detailed.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Diana said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Please,” Lani said.

  Diana smiled. “Sure,” she said. “You know where to take it?”

  “You still use that same place on South Fourth?”

  “Smitty’s,” Diana said with a nod. “Come pick me up afterward. We’ll have lunch, just us girls.”

  Staring at the bloodstains that now marred the red-and-white imitation-leather seats, Smitty Coltharp plucked fitfully at the end of his foot-long ponytail. “My land, girl,” he said. “Your mama loves this car so much, I’m surprised she didn’t kill you. There’s dust in there an inch thick, and what on earth were you doing in that backseat?”

  “A friend of mine,” Lani said, “a friend of the family, actually-was having a baby.”

  “Whoa!” Smitty said. “Sorry I asked.”

  “Do you think you can clean it?
”

  He shook his head mournfully. “We’ll see,” he said. “But it’s gonna cost you. You go inside out of the sun and sit tight. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.”

  Lani did as she was told. The office came complete with grimy plastic chairs, a scarred wooden desk, and a collection of dog-eared magazines. Next to a coffeepot filled with an inch-thick layer of what could have been year-old coffee sat a newspaper folded to reveal a more-than-half-completed New York Times crossword puzzle. Looking around for the remainder of the paper, she found the rest of the Sun, virtually unread, tossed in a trash can. Glancing at the front page, her eye was drawn to the picture of a man and a woman in the lower right-hand corner.

  Gasping with recognition, Lani almost dropped the paper. The woman’s face was one she knew-the same one that had obliterated Fat Crack’s face in the photo and in Lani’s dream; the same face that had, in seconds, morphed into a featureless skull. Now, just seeing that face smiling at her out of the newspaper photo filled Lani with a terrible dread.

  Who is this woman? Lani wondered. What’s the matter with her?

  Looks at Nothing’s crystals had tried to warn her about this woman. So had Fat Crack in her dream. Trying to quell a rising sense of fear, Lani forced herself to read the article, which told her almost nothing. A murder suspect named Erik LaGrange had attempted suicide in his Pima County Jail cell the previous evening. The man and woman in the photo, Dr. Lawrence and Gayle Stryker, founders of an organization called Medicos for Mexico, had been the suspect’s employers.

  Those three words finally rang a bell-Medicos for Mexico. That was the volunteer medical organization her mother had suggested Lani work for rather than going with Doctors Without Borders. Lani struggled to remember what her mother had said about the people who had been friends years earlier back when both women were still on the reservation. But why is this woman so dangerous? Lani asked herself. And what does she have to do with me?

  Not able to summon any answers on her own, she picked up Smitty’s phone and called her mother. “Who is Gayle Stryker?” Lani asked when Diana answered.

  “She and her husband are old friends of mine,” Diana said. “You’ve met them, haven’t you?”

  “Not that I remember,” Lani said. “But I saw their picture in the paper this morning.”

  “So did I,” Diana said. “I’m sure they’re really broken up over what’s happened to that nice young man who worked for them.”

  “You knew him?” Lani asked. “The man who was in jail?”

  “I met him a couple of years ago,” Diana said. “At a banquet in the Strykers’ honor.”

  As Lani listened to her mother’s answers, she knew that what Diana was saying wasn’t enough. There was something more. Maybe Diana didn’t even know the problem existed, but Lani had to find out what it was. She tried to frame her questions in a way that would unmask the difficulty.

  “Have you seen them recently?” Lani asked.

  “Not for years,” Diana said. “Your father may have, though. He didn’t say for sure, but I know he was thinking about it.”

  “About seeing the Strykers?”

  “Well, one of them, anyway,” Diana said. “Years ago, Larry Stryker was one of the doctors at the hospital in Sells. He was working there when that girl whose case Dad’s working on was murdered. Dad was going to try to see Larry yesterday to see if he could find out who her attending physician was at the time she was hospitalized.”

  Lani’s body was suddenly strung so tight she could barely breathe. Even without Looks at Nothing’s crystals, before Lani’s eyes the flesh was sloughing off Gayle Stryker’s photograph, leaving behind nothing but a gaping skull.

  “Did he?” she asked, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Do you know if Dad saw him…or her?”

  “I have no idea,” Diana answered. “Things were so hectic yesterday with the funeral and everything, I never got around to asking him. Why do you need to know?”

  “I was just wondering,” Lani answered lamely. “I saw the picture and remembered they were friends of yours.”

  “You’re right,” Diana said. “They are. How’s the car?”

  “Smitty’s working on it,” Lani said.

  “Good,” her mother told her. “If anybody can get those stains out, Smitty’s the guy.”

  Lani put the phone down and then stared out at the traffic going past on South Fourth. All her life she had heard stories about how, on the day Nana Dahd needed Looks at Nothing’s help, she had sent her nephew, Fat Crack Ortiz, to fetch him.

  The Gadsden Purchase of 1852 had divided the ancient lands of the Tohono O’odham, leaving part of the tribe in Mexico and the rest in the United States. S’ab Neid Pi Has, a wiry old medicine man, had lived in a Tohono O’odham village just south of the border. Fat Crack had agreed to go on what he was convinced would be a fool’s errand. He drove as far as The Gate-an unsupervised and unregulated border crossing on the reservation-that allowed tribal members access to friends and relations on either side of the international border.

  Because Looks at Nothing’s village had no telephone access, Fat Crack expected to have to park on the United States side of the border and then hitchhike or walk to the medicine man’s village. Instead, and much to his surprise, he found the blind old man resting in the shade of a mesquite tree patiently awaiting Fat Crack’s arrival. Somehow, without having to be told, he had sensed Nana Dahd’s need of him and had made his way to The Gate fully expecting that someone would arrive to take him to her.

  Lani understood there were mysterious ways of knowing things-just as Fat Crack had known she would someday be a doctor, and as Lani herself knew Fat Crack’s new grandchild, Gabriel, would be a willing student of all the things Nana Dahd and Fat Crack had taught Lani.

  Now, studying the photo, Lani’s vision kept the skull eerily superimposed over the woman’s face. In the process Lani suddenly could see something she hadn’t known before. Gayle Stryker was evil-in the same way Andrew Philip Carlisle and Mitch Johnson had been evil. Lani couldn’t quite discern what Gayle Stryker had to do with the Girl in the Box, but she knew it was Fat Crack who had brought Brandon Walker and the dead girl’s mother together. If Fat Crack had been the instrument of drawing Gayle Stryker-this Dangerous Object-into their lives, that meant that I’itoi, Elder Brother himself, was the real moving force behind all their actions.

  Once I’itoi had brought Andrew Carlisle and Mitch Johnson to the reservation for one purpose and one purpose only: so the evil Ohbs could be destroyed. This had to be the same thing. Once again Lani picked up Smitty’s telephone. Wanting to warn her father of this possible danger, she dialed his cell-phone number. When the voice-mail prompt came on, Lani hung up. She couldn’t figure out how to leave that message.

  And so, sitting in Smitty Coltharp’s grimy office waiting for her mother’s Buick to be finished, Lani did what Tohono O’odham siwani s always do. She began to sing under her breath, letting the words flow out, knowing as she did so that she was singing for power. Once the words of protection took wing, she repeated the four stanzas the required four times because, as Fat Crack and Nana Dahd had taught her, all things in nature go in fours.

  Smitty came in a while later. “Car’s ready,” he said. “Good as new.” He examined Lani’s face. “Are you all right?” he asked. “You look upset.”

  “No,” she told him. “I’m fine.”

  But that wasn’t true. Dolores Lanita Walker wasn’t fine at all.

  Once Larry left her office, it took time for Gayle to pull things together. The call to CitationShares was prompt and courteous, but not nearly fast enough to suit her. She waited on the line, drumming a pencil impatiently on her desk while the Owner Services representative checked aircraft availability. Finally the young woman came back on the line.

  “All right, Mrs. Stryker,” she said. “We can have a CJ-1 at the Tucson Airport executive terminal by six P.M. this evening to take you to Cabo San Lucas. You’re famili
ar with the airport facilities there?”

  Gayle breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes,” she said. “We’ve flown in and out of there several times. And a six o’clock departure will be fine.”

  “How many passengers will there be?”

  “Only one this time,” Gayle said. “I’ll be flying by myself. My husband won’t be able to join me until later. He’ll call for a plane once his schedule smooths out.”

  “Will there be any special luggage requirements-golf clubs, that kind of thing?”

  “No,” Gayle said. “This is work, not play. I’ll have several suitcases and briefcases, but no golf equipment.”

  “Any special catering requirements?”

  “I’ll be busy this afternoon, and I’m already missing lunch. How about some cold lobster and a nice Caesar salad to go with the white wine you already have on board.”

  “Will you need us to send a town car to pick you up?”

  “No, I’ll drive myself to the airport, but I will need a pickup at the other end.”

  “What about hotel arrangements?”

  “You’ve got my profile,” Gayle said. “The usual will be just fine.”

  As soon as she was off the phone with CitationShares, Gayle dialed Larry’s extension. Larry came on the line almost immediately. He still sounded upset. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” Gayle said smoothly. “Everything’s fine. The plane is set.”

  “Good. What time?”

  “It’ll be at the Tucson International executive terminal at eight,” she answered.

  “Will there be enough time for you to do what needs to be done?” Larry asked.

  “Plenty of time.” Her answer was confident and reassuring. “Besides, what if we’re a few minutes late? The jet isn’t leaving without us. See you at the airport about a quarter to.”

  As Brian headed back to the department, he called PeeWee from the car. “Where the hell have you been?” Brian’s partner asked irritably. “You walk out for a cup of coffee. Next thing I know, you’ve disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “Trust me, PeeWee, I’m working. I was meeting with an informant.” In the current climate, that was by far the best way to refer to Brandon Walker. Every detective had his own private stable of informants. Partners might share almost everything else, but not informants. “Now I need a favor,” Brian added.