Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  Nineteen

  Brandon dropped Emma at the hospital’s front entrance. By the time he had parked and come inside, Emma was seated at a desk where a young Tohono O’odham clerk sat before a keyboard.

  Brandon’s first instinct was to go to Emma and offer moral support. After a moment’s thought, however, he decided against it. Emma’s request would be better received without a Mil-gahn man peering over her shoulder. Brandon stationed himself by the door and tried to look unobtrusive. Not that it worked. Every person who went in or out gave him a serious once-over.

  Emma’s conversation was too soft-spoken for eavesdropping. Each time Emma spoke, the young woman would type briskly away. Then, after a frowning pause, she would shake her head. Brandon didn’t have to hear what was being said to understand that.

  Brandon was reconsidering his decision to stay out of it when the clerk typed in yet another request. This time, after the pause, she smiled and nodded. Seconds later, she reached over to a printer and removed several pieces of paper. After stapling them together, she handed them to Emma, who studied them briefly and stuffed them into her purse. She rose to her feet. With a nod of thanks, Emma swung her walker around and headed for the door.

  Brandon leaped to open the door as Emma approached. “You got it?” he asked.

  Looking at him, she shook her head almost imperceptibly, but she didn’t answer aloud until they were outside the building.

  “She’s wrong,” Emma said as she stamped along, banging her walker on the sidewalk.

  “But I thought she gave you something,” Brandon began. “I saw her hand you—”

  “She says there’s no record of anyone named Roseanne Orozco ever being admitted to the hospital,” Emma said fiercely. “She said it was so long ago that maybe they lost the records, but it’s not true. She found my record. It shows I was in the hospital three times—once when Andrea was born, once when Roseanne was born, and fifteen years ago for my hysterectomy.”

  Brandon helped Emma up onto the Suburban’s running board. While she settled in, he stashed the walker behind the front seat. Once he was behind the wheel, he realized Emma was staring at him intently.

  “Andrea’s right,” she said, nodding. “It was somebody at the hospital.”

  “We don’t know that,” Brandon cautioned. “Just because the records are missing…”

  But Emma Orozco wasn’t listening. “I could never understand it,” she said. “They told me Roseanne was pregnant when she died, but I could never understand how that was possible. If she’d had a boyfriend, I would have known about him, or Andrea would have. But Roseanne didn’t talk, Mr. Walker. Not to anyone. Not even to me or to her father.”

  Brandon had switched on the ignition. Rather than pulling out of the parking lot, he sat with the engine idling while the air-conditioning gradually came on.

  “But there were all those rumors,” Emma added after a long pause.

  “What rumors?”

  “People said some of the doctors at the hospital…” Emma’s voice faded away.

  “Some of the doctors what?” Brandon asked.

  “Did bad. You know, that they messed with their patients.”

  “What do you mean, messed with?” Brandon asked. “As in molested them?”

  Emma nodded. “But it was a long time after Roseanne was gone. I wondered if it could have had something to do with her, but my husband…” She stopped and shrugged.

  Brandon remembered what Andrea had said about the sins white men committed on the reservation going unpunished. This was clearly another case in point, and he understood where Emma was going.

  “Since everyone but you seemed to have forgotten all about Roseanne, your husband didn’t want you causing trouble and bringing it back up, right?”

  Emma nodded again. “I shouldn’t have listened to Henry,” she said.

  Brandon considered his next words carefully. “Mrs. Orozco…” he began.

  “Emma,” she corrected.

  Brandon knew that being granted first-name status was a gift, and he accepted it as such. “Emma,” he said, “I must caution you. This is all theoretical. We may be going nowhere with this. Still, it’s a place to start. Given all that, are you sure you can’t remember the name of Roseanne’s doctor?”

  Emma shook her head. “No,” she said. “He was young, but all the doctors were young back then. I don’t remember any of their names. They came for a few years and then left. Something about paying off college loans.”

  And keeping their butts out of Vietnam, Brandon thought. “It doesn’t matter,” he told her. “The hospital should have records of which doctors were there and for how long. Can you tell me exactly when Roseanne went into the hospital?”

  “Early July, right after the rains started,” Emma replied. “Henry and I drove into Tucson to get groceries. When we came home, we got stuck on the far side of the washes over by Ryan Field. It took a couple of hours for the water to go down enough so we could cross. Roseanne was feeling sick. Andrea took her over to the hospital, but they wouldn’t do anything until we signed the papers. When we got home, it was almost too late. Her appendix burst. They told us she might die. Afterward, when she finally got home from the hospital, she was still sick.

  “Did anyone at the hospital show a particular interest in your daughter?” Brandon asked. “We’ve talked about the doctors. What about someone else? An orderly, or maybe a male nurse?”

  “No,” Emma said. “I don’t remember anyone like that at all.”

  “Was there anybody else who expressed an interest in her?” Brandon asked. “Someone from school, for example? Maybe one of her teachers.”

  “After her operation, Roseanne was still sick,” Emma said. “When school started that year, she didn’t go back.”

  Putting the Suburban in reverse, Brandon backed out of the parking place and headed back to Big Fields. For a while they rode in silence. In 1970, the investigators theorized that the father of Roseanne Orozco’s baby might be responsible for her death, but when they learned their prime suspect—Roseanne’s father—wasn’t the baby’s father, they let the investigation slide. Thirty-two years later, there were other tools that hadn’t been invented or even thought of in 1970—tools that were capable of unlocking secrets that were decades old, but using them meant venturing into an emotional minefield.

  They were almost back to Big Fields before Brandon Walker broached the subject. “Where is Roseanne buried?” he asked.

  “Over there,” Emma said, nodding in the direction of a small barbed-wire-enclosed cemetery near the far boundary of the village. “Her father’s there, too. Why?”

  “Do you mind showing me?”

  “No.”

  Brandon parked the vehicle as close as possible to the battered iron gate that marked the cemetery’s entrance. As he retrieved Emma’s walker and helped her down to the ground, a collection of curious children gathered around. While Brandon opened the gate, Emma entered, holding her head high. She threaded unerringly through a collection of sagging crosses and simple headstones. Inside a small separately fenced plot were three headstones—two large ones on either side of a tiny white cross. Henry Orozco’s name was carved into one of the large headstones. Roseanne’s name was carved on the other. The cross between them had no name at all.

  After examining the middle cross, Brandon looked questioningly at Emma. “Roseanne’s baby?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Roseanne couldn’t name her, so we didn’t either. They took the baby for the autopsy and kept it even after we buried Roseanne. When they finally released the baby’s body, we put her here so she could be with her mother.”

  “The baby was a girl,” Brandon said, thinking about what Fat Crack had said about the Tohono O’odham’s lost girls. Roseanne Orozco and her daughter were two of them, right along with Lani and Delia. But that made sense. After all, hadn’t Rita Antone and Fat Crack both taught him that among the Desert People all things in nature go in fo
urs?

  “Yes,” Emma agreed.

  The fact that the baby’s remains had been separated from her mother’s was more than Brandon Walker could have hoped for, but that didn’t make asking the critical questions any easier. He wanted to be diplomatic and kind. Emma Orozco had been hurt enough.

  “Was the baby embalmed?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. No one ever told us.”

  She spoke softly, carefully, but Brandon knew what both the questions and answers cost her. “Do you know about DNA?”

  “You mean like at O.J.’s trial?” Emma returned. “Sure, I know about that.”

  “Yes,” Brandon said. “Like with O.J., but DNA identification techniques have improved greatly since then.”

  “You want to dig up the baby?”

  Emma’s direct approach caught Brandon off-guard. “Yes,” he said. “I’m thinking Law and Order may have been right back then. If we learn who the baby’s father was…”

  “Do what you need to do, Mr. Walker,” Emma Orozco said. “If you need me to sign papers to make it happen, just let me know.”

  Diana had told Lani that Davy wouldn’t be able to pick her up at Sky Harbor. Candace and Tyler would be coming in Davy’s stead, but all through the long plane trip, Lani had hoped that either her brother or her dad would be there to pick her up.

  It wasn’t that Lani disliked Candace. It was just that, with Candace’s upscale Midwest background, the two young women had virtually nothing in common—other than their mutual love for Lani’s brother. On that single subject they were in total agreement.

  When she saw Candace and Tyler waving at her from the far side of the security checkpoint, Lani’s heart fell. She had tried without success to sleep on the plane. Now, bone-weary and still mourning, she was faced with riding home with someone who had once thought that Crack was somehow Fat Crack’s last name. Davy and Lani knew the emptiness Fat Crack’s absence would leave in both their lives. Candace had no clue.

  Tyler, waving and grinning, gave every evidence of being delighted to see his auntie—right up until she was close enough to touch. At that point, he buried his head in his mother’s shoulder and screamed bloody murder.

  “How was your flight?” Candace asked, bouncing the child and trying to quiet him.

  “All right,” Lani said. “In terms of post-9/11 air travel, it went as well as possible.”

  “Sorry David couldn’t make it,” Candace said.

  Lani winced. David was so much more formal than Davy, so much more serious. Davy was her brother. Who exactly was David?

  “Gabe’s sons asked him and your dad to come out to some village on the reservation and help dig the grave,” Candace continued as they headed for the luggage carousels. “I don’t know why they have to do things like that by hand. Back home, we had people with machines who dug graves. Nobody had to show up at cemeteries with picks and shovels.”

  Lani didn’t hear the rest of Candace’s complaint. For the remainder of the trip home, Lani was virtually impervious to Tyler’s wails and screeches from his car-seat imprisonment in the back. Her feelings were no longer hurt. She was content.

  Neither Davy Ladd nor Brandon Walker had driven to the airport to pick Lani up and bring her home, but both her father and her brother—the Boy with Two Mothers and Four Fathers—were at Ban Thak, doing what needed to be done.

  And that, nawoj, she thought to herself, is the way things ought to be.

  Alvin Miller was forty years old and had worked for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for more than half his life. He had started out doing an Eagle Scout volunteer project for the Latent Fingerprint Lab as a sixteen-year-old and had been there ever since, becoming the youngest person in the country to achieve full technician qualification with the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With only a few community college credits to his name, all of his experience and most of his education had come the hard way—hands-on.

  Alvin’s unwavering loyalty to Sheriff Walker hadn’t been lost on incoming Sheriff Forsythe. The new administration hadn’t been tough enough to come right out and fire Miller, but Forsythe had done his underhanded best to run Alvin Miller out of Dodge. First he cut the fingerprint lab’s budget and head count, thinking that tactic would persuade Alvin to pack up and go elsewhere. Instead, Alvin had worked more hours himself, many of them off the clock, until even Sheriff Forsythe could see that losing Miller’s expertise would be a serious blow.

  Late the previous evening, a CSI unit had come dragging back to the department with an armload of dishes, silverware, and other items taken from a crime scene related to Saturday’s Vail homicide. The evidence had arrived too late in the shift to be processed on Saturday evening.

  Alvin understood the sacrosanct pecking order inside the department. People with the least amount of seniority and experience were the ones who were stuck manning weekend shifts. Alvin, a lifelong bachelor with no family responsibilities, made it a practice to check in every Sunday morning to make sure whoever was minding the store didn’t need assistance.

  This morning, Sally Carmichael, his newest intern, called Alvin at home before he could call her. She seemed close to hyperventilating.

  “What’s the problem, Sally?” he asked. “You sound upset.”

  “I am upset,” she told him. “I’m here by myself. Tom and Marlene left me a whole pile of stuff to be processed ASAP. Detective Fellows has already called twice, asking if I’ve done any work on it. I told him I’ll try to get to it this afternoon, but I don’t see how—”

  “Don’t worry,” Alvin reassured her. “I’ll come give you a hand.”

  In actual fact, Alvin was more than happy to do it. He still felt a proprietary interest in his AFIS equipment. No matter how well trained his people were, he was never quite as confident of anyone else’s fingerprint enhancements as he was of his own.

  Alvin came in, donned his lab jacket, checked the items in question out of the evidence room, and went to work. The CSI unit had brought in a number of prints they had lifted from the scene, but rather than paying attention to those, Alvin went looking for prints he could process himself from beginning to end. He started with the presumed murder weapon—the machete.

  The evidence log reported that the machete had been found in a kitchen sink, soaking in soapy water. The soap had done some but not all of the work of removing the blood from the joint where the handle and blade came together and from the decorative carvings on the handle itself, but as far as usable fingerprints were concerned, the machete was clean as a whistle.

  The plates and silverware were a gold mine by comparison. Working carefully and humming under his breath, Alvin dusted and retrieved what appeared to him to be two relatively perfect sets of prints. Once he had the prints lifted, he spent the better part of two hours going over each print and enhancing by hand the lines and whorls he found there so that the image fed into the machine would be as clear as possible.

  “Do we have anything to compare these to?” Alvin asked when Sally peered at his work over his shoulder. He spoke without ever looking away from the print he was working on.

  “The suspect’s been booked,” Sally told her boss.

  “That means his prints are already in the system,” Alvin said. “What about the victim’s?”

  “The autopsy’s tomorrow sometime. We won’t have her prints until after that.”

  “Some things can’t be rushed,” Alvin said. “When you entered the suspect’s prints, did you get a hit?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Alvin said. “Run me off a copy of his prints, and I’ll take a look.”

  In a matter of minutes Sally returned. Alvin peered at the paper for only a matter of seconds before making up his mind. “Yup,” he said. “The suspect’s prints are on both sets of dishes. He probably served the meal and cleared up afterward. We’ll put those aside for the time being. The ones we should concentrate on are the unknowns. If they belong to the victim and she’s in the syste
m, we may make a positive ID before the ME does. That would be a huge help to the detectives. The sooner they know who’s dead, the sooner they find out who did it.”

  That was Alvin Miller’s style—work, talk, and teach all at the same time. That was why people who moved on from his lab were always in demand.

  It was almost noon before Alvin was finally satisfied enough with the second set of prints to put them into the machine for copying and transmitting. While the computer did its stuff, he walked back to his desk to retrieve a now-dead-cold cup of coffee. He had taken a single sip when Sally called him back.

  “Hey, Mr. Miller,” she called. “Come look at this.”

  Being referred to as Mr. Miller made Alvin feel old, but the excitement in Sally’s voice was unmistakable. “Must be a hit, then,” he said. “Whose is it?”

  Wordlessly Carol handed him the printout. Alvin read it through.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “We’d better get Detective Fellows on the horn right away.”

  Delia Chavez stood outside, patting balls of dough into tortillas and then tossing them onto a wood-fire-heated griddle. Her sister-in-law waited while the dough cooked, then turned them deftly with her fingers, let them cook on the other side, and then tossed them onto a waxed-paper-covered table to cool. Delia’s tortilla-making deficit had been corrected first by her aunt Julia and later by her mother-in-law after Delia’s return to the reservation.

  She had come home grateful to have a job that allowed her to leave D.C. and Philip’s betrayal far behind. But coming back to Arizona did something else—it brought her face-to-face with her father and his betrayal of her mother all those years earlier.

  As far as Delia could see, Eddie was nothing but a worthless drunk; so was her father. Still bristling with anger at Philip, Delia had been more than ready to write both of them off. Then, when a seriously injured Manny was sent home from Tucson a virtually helpless cripple, Delia had no choice but to take charge of her father’s life. She looked after him because she had to—because she was his daughter and there was no one else to do it.