Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  She returned moments later carrying a bag of equipment. “I’ve been through the training,” she said as she knelt next to Brandon’s still body, “but I’ve never used one of these things in the field before.”

  “Let’s hope it works,” Brian Fellows told her. “Let’s hope to God it works!”

  Thirty

  Then, after a time, the woman heard someone speaking very, very softly. She knew without looking that it was I’itoi—Elder Brother—who was speaking to her.

  I’itoi said: The babies are here, my sister. They are the babies who have left their mothers, just as your baby has left you, to live with me. These tiny brown curled leaves are the cradles in which the little ones go to sleep when they are tired. These babies who have left their mothers are very happy with me. And they do not like you to feel as you do. That is why they are crying now in their tiny brown leaf-cradles. Are you different from all the mothers?”

  And the woman raised her head from her hands and smiled. And from all around her came the sound of babies laughing.

  Then the woman took her own brown cradle blanket and went back to the village.

  She found the neighbor women busy in her home. The ground was swept and cleaned. The fire was burning under the cooking olla.

  A friend called out to her not to go too close to the fire; the smoke would make her eyes bad. But an old Indian woman who looked at her sharply said, “She has talked to I’itoi.”

  And always after this the woman’s eyes seemed to be looking a great way off. Sometimes you see eyes like that, big and quiet but looking beyond—farther and farther. Then you will know, that person has talked to I’itoi.

  When Brandon Walker finally opened his eyes, it took time for him to make sense of his surroundings. He was alone in a dimly lit room that seemed to be filled with a collection of humming medical equipment. Pinned to the pillow beside him was a cord with a button on it, a call button, he reasoned.

  He was about to push it when Diana came into the room. Her hair was pulled back in a ragged ponytail. She wore no makeup. Her face was lined with weariness. She looked more haggard than he had ever seen her, but when she saw him looking up at her, her face brightened while her eyes glistened with sudden tears.

  “You’re awake,” she said, reaching for his hand and gripping it tightly in her own, squeezing it until his knuckles ground together.

  Brandon tried to speak, but something prevented it.

  “It’s the tube,” she explained. “You can’t talk until they take it out.”

  He freed his hand from hers and then made a writing motion. Diana searched until she found pencil and paper. When she handed it to him, he scrawled a single question mark onto the paper.

  “You had a heart attack,” she said. “Brian found you—Brian and a DPS officer named Cassie Downs, who happened to have a defibrillator in her patrol car. She managed to get your heart going again. Fortunately, there was a helicopter there to pick up someone from the gravel-truck accident. The woman in the Honda didn’t make it. The medevac chopper picked you up instead and brought you here.”

  Brandon took the paper from Diana’s hand. He pointed to the question mark a second time.

  “You mean, where’s ‘here’?” she asked.

  Brandon nodded impatiently.

  “You’re at Tucson Medical Center,” she said. “You’ve had triple bypass surgery. Damn Dr. Browder, anyway. He was always going on about your hip and your knee. Why the hell didn’t he say something about your heart?” With that, Diana Ladd burst into tears.

  The next time Brandon opened his eyes, he was in a different room altogether. Through drawn blinds he could tell that it was daylight outside. When he felt his face, the tube was gone. Minutes later, the door swung open. Brandon expected Diana or Lani to appear at his bedside. Instead, Brian Fellows sank silently onto the chair beside the bed.

  “I’m awake,” Brandon said, causing Brian to jump. “And thirsty as hell. Is there any water around here?”

  A water glass with a straw in it sat on the table. Brian had spent years caring for his invalid mother. With a practiced hand, he helped Brandon take a drink. “Not too much,” he cautioned.

  “Where am I?”

  “ICU,” Brian replied. “Family visitors only,” he said. “Diana told them I’m family.” He turned away, sniffled briefly, and wiped his eyes before turning back.

  Brandon reached out and grasped the younger man’s hand. “You always have been,” he said.

  They were both quiet for a few seconds, until Brandon let go. “What happened?” he asked.

  “You had a heart attack.”

  “Not to me,” Brandon Walker said gruffly. “The Strykers.”

  “They’re dead,” Brian said. “Both of them. Gayle had a private jet reserved to fly to Mexico that night. From what we’ve been able to learn, she was leaving on her own, but Larry must have figured out what she was up to, and she shot him. If it hadn’t been for you sitting on Larry Stryker’s butt, chances are one or both of them might have gotten away.”

  “Are you saying they were both involved in Roseanne Orozco’s murder?”

  Brian Fellows sighed heavily and nodded. “That and a whole lot more,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but not now. Later. When you’re better.”

  Lani Walker sat on the hardbacked chair in the waiting room, holding tight to Looks at Nothing’s precious crystals. During the past two days, she had spent hours in the waiting room outside the cardiac ICU. It seemed like a lifetime. Lani had learned more than she’d ever wanted to know about what it felt like to be in a hospital waiting room—waiting. With this new, unwanted knowledge, she vowed that someday, when she was the person coming through the door in her surgical scrubs, she would remember how it felt to be one of the people here—sitting in this awful purgatory, trapped somewhere between despair and hope.

  Her mother had been here most of the time, and Davy a lot of it. Brian Fellows, however, off work on what was being termed “administrative leave,” was a constant presence. Through the long, lonely hours, he had—without meaning to, without knowing quite why—spilled his guts to Lani, telling her about Larry Stryker’s appalling notebooks and about the awful toll Gayle and Larry Stryker had taken in their long reign of terror. DNA and a series of long unexamined fingerprint cold-case evidence had now linked the two of them to fourteen separate cases. Unfortunately, the notebooks held pictures of several more girls than that, dead teenage girls who had yet to be identified.

  When he finished, he expected Lani to be as torn up about it as he was. Lani merely nodded. “I knew she was evil,” she said.

  “How did you know?” Brian asked.

  Lani shrugged. “Fat Crack told me,” she said, knowing somehow that it was an answer Brian could understand and accept.

  “But all those poor girls,” Brian continued. The pictures he had seen haunted him in a way nothing else ever had. “Nobody reported them missing,” he said. “No one went looking for them. Once someone really started working the cases, it didn’t take much time to sort it out. Bottom line? Nobody cared.”

  Lani reached out and took Brian’s hand in hers. “That’s not true,” she said. “Somebody did too care about them—you and Dad. Those murdered girls may never have had their day in court, but at least they had their day.”

  “Yes,” Brian Fellows said sadly. “That’s the best we could give them—a day of the dead.”

  When Brandon opened his eyes next, Diana sat dozing in the chair. Knowing how stressed and tired she had to be, he said nothing and let her sleep. Tentatively raising his hand, he managed to reach the water glass on his own. When he did so, he noticed a single red rosebud sitting in a vase.

  Eventually Diana woke up. “Good morning,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ll bet you’re tired.”

  “A little,” she admitted. “How long have you been awake?”

  “Not long,” he fibbed. “Only a few minutes. Thanks for the flower.”

&n
bsp; Diana looked at the rosebud and then back to her husband. “That’s not from me,” she said. “It’s from Emma Orozco. She wanted to say thank you, but only relatives are allowed in the ICU.”

  “If you see her again,” Brandon Walker said, “give her a message for me. Tell Emma both Fat Crack Ortiz and I say she’s welcome.”

  E-book Extras

  More about J. A. Jance’s thrillers

  Mysteries are enduringly popular. I’ve read them all my life, from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, right on through John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Block. Mysteries work as stories with the required beginnings, middles, and ends. Those ends usually entail the bad guy getting caught and/or punished. That’s the rule. If the bad guy doesn’t get it in the end, you may be dealing with literature, and that’s another kettle of fish entirely.

  In mysteries, the reader doesn’t know who the killer is until the end. In thrillers, the reader knows who the bad guy is from the beginning. The only question is how much damage he’s going to do before he gets caught.

  I think many people who become writers do so because they’re ill-suited to having regular jobs. That’s certainly true in my case. And so, after writing nine Detective Beaumont original paperbacks in a row, by 1989 I was beginning to feel as though I had a regular job. When I threatened to knock Beau off in my next book, my editor was aghast. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Remember that first book of yours, the one that was never published?”

  I remembered it well. My first manuscript had been called Hour of the Hunter. It was a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that had taken place in Arizona in 1970, and it was one in which my first husband had played a key role as a witness. The manuscript was universally turned down for good reason. For one thing, in it’s original form it was 1,200 pages long. But even after it was trimmed down by 550 pages to a mere 650, it still didn’t make the cut. Editors said that the stuff that was real was “unbelievable” whereas the parts that were fictional were “fine.”

  My agent finally suggested that I try my hand at fiction, and that’s where J.P. Beaumont stepped into the picture. Between 1985 when Until Proven Guilty was published, though, and 1989 when I was having this conversation with my editor, I’d had an emotional encounter with some of the still-grieving family members from that series of murders in Arizona. Just meeting them one time was enough to convince me that real murders affect real people. I stopped writing true crime on the spot.

  So when my editor suggested that I revisit that original manuscript, I didn’t want to bring up that awful time for that still fractured family. Not only that, the killer was still in prison in Arizona, and I didn’t want to write a book that he could point to and say to his friends in Florence, “Hey, guys, here’s a book about me.”

  I ended up selling Morrow and Avon a book called Hour of the Hunter, but the only thing it has in common with that original manuscript is the title. And, eleven years later, of all my books, it remains my favorite.

  WARNING: I believe my mysteries can be considered PG-13. The thrillers are definitely rated R. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

  More about J. A. Jance

  As a second-grader in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one and was hooked and knew, from that moment on, that I wanted to be a writer.

  The third child in a large family, I was four years younger than my next older sister and four years older then the next younger sibling. Being both too young and too old left me alone in a crowd and helped turn me into an introspective reader and a top student. When I graduated from Bisbee High School in 1962, I received an academic scholarship that made me the first person in my family to attend a four year college. I graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. In 1970 I received my M. Ed. in Library Science. I taught high school English at Tucson’s Pueblo High School for two years and was a K-12 librarian at Indian Oasis School District in Sells, Arizona for five years.

  My ambitions to become a writer were frustrated in college and later, first because the professor who taught creative writing at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls “ought to be teachers or nurses” rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me. My first husband imitated Faulkner and Hemingway primarily by drinking too much and writing too little. Despite the fact that he was allowed in the creative writing program, he never had anything published either prior to or after his death from chronic alcoholism at age forty-two. That didn’t keep him from telling me, however, that there would be only one writer in our family, and he was it.

  My husband made that statement in 1968 after I had received a favorable letter from an editor in New York who was interested in publishing a children’s story I had written. Because I was a newly wed wife who was interested in staying married, I put my writing ambitions on hold. Other than writing poetry in the dark of night when my husband was asleep (see After the Fire), I did nothing more about writing fiction until eleven years later when I was a single, divorced mother with two children and no child support as well as a full time job selling life insurance. My first three books were written between four a.m. and seven a.m.. At seven, I would wake my children and send them off to school. After that, I would get myself ready to go sell life insurance.

  I started writing in the middle of March of 1982. The first book I wrote, a slightly fictionalized version of a series of murders that happened in Tucson in 1970, was never published by anyone. For one thing, it was twelve hundred pages long. Since I was never allowed in the creative writing classes, no one had ever told me there were some things I needed to leave out. For another, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. Myagent finally sat me down and told me that she thought I was a better writer of fiction than I was of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, didn’t I try my hand at a novel?

  The result of that conversation was the first Detective Beaumont book, Until Proven Guilty. Since 1985 when that was published, there have been fourteen more Beau books. My work also includes eight Joanna Brady books set in southeastern Arizona where I grew up. In addition there are two thrillers, Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees that reflect what I learned during the years when I was teaching on the Tohono O’Odham reservation west of Tucson, Arizona.

  The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading of After the Fire at a widowed retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce in 1980 and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I hadn’t quite had my ticket punched and didn’t deserve to be there. After all, the other people there were all still married when their spouses died. I was divorced. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as three grandchildren.

  When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us—his kids and mine as well as the two of us. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money—the Improbable Cause trip to Walt Disney World; the Minor in Possession memorial powder room; the Payment in Kind memorial hot tub. Seven years ago, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and take up golf and oil painting.

  One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that everything—even the bad stuff—is usable. The eighteen years I spent while married to an alcoholic have helped shape the experience and character of Detective J. P. Beaumont. My experiences as a single parent have gone in
to the background for Joanna Brady—including her first tentative steps toward a new life after the devastation of losing her husband in Desert Heat. And then there’s the evil creative writing professor in Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees, but that’s another story.

  Another wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred charge of the storyteller is to beguile the time. I’m thrilled when I hear that someone has used my books to get through some particularly difficult illness either as a patient or as they sit on the sidelines while someone they love is terribly ill. It gratifies me to know that by immersing themselves in my stories, people are able to set their own lives aside and live and walk in someone else’s shoes. It tells me I’m doing a good job at the best job in the world.

  About the Author

  J. A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of the Joanna Brady series, the J. P. Beaumont series, and the novels Hour of the Hunter and Kiss of the Bees. She was born in South Dakota, brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, and now lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

  Also by J. A. Jance

  JOANNA BRADY MYSTERIES

  Desert Heat

  Tombstone Courage

  Shoot/Don’t Shoot

  Dead to Rights

  Skeleton Canyon

  Rattlesnake Crossing

  Outlaw Mountain

  Devil’s Claw

  Paradise Lost

  Partner in Crime

  Exit Wounds

  J. P. BEAUMONT MYSTERIES

  Until Proven Guilty

  Injustice for All

  Trial by Fury

  Taking the Fifth

  Improbable Cause

  A More Perfect Union