by J. A. Jance
She had finished the first shelf and was ready to start on the next when she saw it sitting there, waiting—Understanding Woman’s basket, not the crude one from the leather case upstairs, but the original one with its fine, straight seams and smooth, silky weave, the basket that had been taken from Dancing Quail’s bedroll years before.
With trembling fingers, she took it in her hands and pried open the tight-fitting lid. Not only was the basket there, so were all of the things that had been inside, the sacred gifts her grandmother had given her, except for the missing geode. One at a time, Dancing Quail touched each precious item—the jagged piece of pottery with its etched turtle still clearly visible, the seashell her grandfather had brought back from the ocean, and the eagle feather Dancing Quail’s father had brought to his own mother when he was still a boy.
They were all there and all perfectly safe, as though they had been waiting for Dancing Quail to find them. As she put each item back inside and carefully closed the lid, she felt Understanding Woman’s spirit close beside her, guiding her.
Brandon swung by Tucson Medical Center on his way back through town. Nothing had changed with Toby Walker. Louella refused her son’s offer of a ride home.
“I’ve got to be going then, Mom,” he said.
“Going?” Louella asked vaguely. “Where?”
“I’m working,” he lied. “I’m on a case.”
“Oh,” she said distractedly. “You go on then. I’ll be fine.”
“What did the doctor say?” he asked gently.
Louella’s eyes filled with sudden tears. “That it’s up to me,” she said, “and I don’t want it to be. I want somebody else to make the decision, God or someone, just not me.”
She fell sobbing into Brandon’s arms. He held her for several long minutes. Louella didn’t ask her son to make the decision for her, and he didn’t offer. It wasn’t his place. “We’ll just have to wait and see then, won’t we?” he said.
Louella gulped and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Wait and see.”
Brandon left the hospital and drove to Gate’s Pass. He had waited to contact Diana, hoping to have some definite news about Carlisle’s whereabouts before he told her anything. Once he talked to Mallory, there wasn’t time to reach her before leaving for Picacho Peak to meet Detective Farrell.
Driving to Diana’s house now, he worried about what he would say. He didn’t want to alarm her unduly, but he was worried. If Andrew Carlisle was responsible for Margie Danielson’s savage murder, and by now both detectives were fairly certain he was, that meant the man had somehow slipped over some critical edge. There was no telling who would be next.
A snippet of radio intruded into his thoughts, giving the first sketchy reports of a stabbing victim found dead that morning in a downtown Tucson hotel room. At least he wouldn’t be called out on that case, Walker thought. The Santa Rita was well inside the city limits, so the county would have nothing to do with it. He switched off the radio and kept on driving.
Brandon heard the dog bark from inside the house as soon as he turned off the blacktop. Oh’o, as Diana called him, was a monster of an animal, a rangy, ugly specimen whose teeth could inflict real damage. Right that moment, however, Brandon Walker smiled at the dog’s menacing presence. If Andrew Carlisle decided to try coming after Diana Ladd, he’d have to get past the dog first. In a fair fight, Brandon would have put money on the dog any day.
He half expected the door to open, but it didn’t. Remaining out of sight, Diana spoke to him through a partially opened window. “Who is it?”
“Brandon Walker. Is it safe to get out of the car?”
“It’s safe,” she called back. “Bone’s with me.”
Brandon waited outside while she unlatched a series of locks. That seemed strange. He didn’t remember seeing multiple locks on the door before, but of course they might have been there without his noticing. When the door opened, Bone sat directly behind Diana with Davy hanging on the huge dog’s neck. “May I come in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He stepped over the threshold. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said urgently. “In private.”
Diana Ladd stared up at him, her eyes fixed in turn on every aspect of his face as though examining him in minute detail. “Davy,” she said, without looking away, “take Bone out back and throw the ball for a while. I’ll call you in a few minutes.”
The child left the room, shoulders sagging, head drooping, with the dog following dutifully behind. “What do you want to talk to me about?” she asked.
All his careful plans for telling her flew out the window. “Andrew Carlisle,” he replied. “He’s out.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m wearing this.”
A raw recruit would have been drummed out of the academy for making such a mistake. It wasn’t until she touched it with her hand that he noticed the gun and holster strapped to her hip. And not just any gun, either—a gigantic .45 Colt single-action revolver.
“Jesus H. Christ, woman! Is that thing loaded?”
“It certainly is,” she told him calmly. “And I’m fully prepared to use it.”
15
DIANA USHERED BRANDON into the house and showed him to a seat on the couch. The detective still worried about the gun.
“You shouldn’t do this, you know,” he said.
“Do what, wear a gun, protect myself? Why not?”
“For one thing, if somebody gets shot with that thing, chances are it won’t be Andrew Carlisle. In an armed confrontation with crooks, amateurs tend to shoot themselves, not the other way around. For another, it’s 1975. We’re not still living in the Wild West, you know.”
“Somebody forgot to tell the woman at Picacho Peak,” Diana returned.
“You know about that, too?”
“The reservation grapevine is pretty thorough.”
“And fast. Andrew Carlisle was the first thing I was coming to tell you, and Picacho Peak was the second. I’ve just come from there. I met with the detective on that case. His name’s Farrell, Detective G. T. Farrell from Pinal County. He’s a real pro. I’ve already pointed him in Carlisle’s direction.”
“I suppose that’s only fair,” Diana responded sarcastically, “since you’re the one who helped Carlisle get off in the first place.”
Diana Ladd’s remark cut through Brandon Walker’s usually even-tempered demeanor. “I didn’t help him, goddammit!” Brandon Walker snapped. The hard edge of anger in his voice surprised them both.
“How old were you seven years ago?” he demanded roughly.
“Twenty-four.”
“I was a little older than that, but I wasn’t much wiser. When I told you to trust the system, I meant it, because I still did, too. I was young and idealistic and ignorant. I thought being a cop was one way to save the world. So get off your cross, Diana. You weren’t the only one who got screwed. So did I.”
Diana Ladd was taken aback by this outburst. In the brief silence that followed, Davy and Bone edged back into the room.
“I’m hot,” the boy said. “Can I have something to drink?”
His request offered Diana an escape from Brandon Walker’s unexpected anger. “Sure,” she said lightly, getting up. “The tea should be ready by now. Would you like some, Detective Walker?”
He nodded. “That’ll be fine.”
After she left the room, Walker sat there shaking his head, ashamed of himself for lashing out at her. What she’d said hadn’t been any worse than what he’d told himself time and again during the intervening years. Diana Ladd didn’t have a corner on the Let’s-beat-up-Brandon-Walker market. He could do a pretty damn good job of that all by himself.
With effort, the detective turned his attention to the boy who sat on the floor absently petting the dog. Davy seemed decidedly less friendly than he had been the day before. Wondering why, Brandon made a stab at conversation. “How’s the head?” he asked.
“It’s okay, I guess,” Davy muttered.
“Does it still hurt?”
“Not much. Will my hair grow back? Where they shaved it, I mean.”
“It’ll take a few weeks, but it’ll grow. Have the barber give you a crew cut. It won’t show so much then.”
“Mom cuts my hair,” Davy said. “To save money. I don’t think she knows how to do crew cuts.”
Brandon glanced toward the swinging kitchen door. It seemed to be taking Diana an inordinately long time to bring the tea.
“Did you know my daddy?” Davy asked.
It was a jarring change of subject. “No,” Walker replied. “I never met him.”
“Was my father a killer?”
Brandon found the unvarnished directness of the boy’s questions unnerving. “Why are you asking me?” he hedged.
“Everybody says my daddy was a killer,” Davy answered matter-of-factly. “They call me Killer’s Child. I want to know what happened to him. I’m six. That’s old enough to know what really happened.”
Brandon Walker realized too late that he’d been sucked into an emotional mine field. “What did your mother tell you?” he asked.
“That my daddy was afraid he was going to get into trouble about Gina Antone, and so he killed himself.”
“That’s right.” At least Diana had told her son that much.
“Mom said you were the detective. Did you arrest him?”
“No,” Brandon said. “By the time I got to the house, your father was already gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Out to the desert.”
“To kill himself? That’s where he did it, isn’t it? In the desert?”
“Yes.”
Davy turned his immense blue eyes full on the detective’s face. “Why didn’t you get there sooner?” he demanded. “Why didn’t you hurry and stop him? That way, I could have met him before he died. I could have talked to him just once.”
Your father was a scumbag, Walker wanted to say, looking at the wide-eyed boy. Garrison Ladd didn’t deserve a son like you. Instead, he said, “I did the best I could, Davy. We all did.”
It is said that long ago in a small village lived a very beautiful young woman who was the daughter of a powerful medicine man. She was so beautiful that all the young men of the village liked to look at her. This made her father so angry that he made her stay in the house. If she went out, he scolded her. Whenever he found the young men of the village trying to spy on her, he scolded them, too.
In those days, Wind Man spent much of his time in that same village. One day, the young men of the village went to Wind Man and teased him and said that since he was strong enough and clever enough, he should catch the girl when she came out to get water and take her up in the air so they could all see her. At first Wind Man refused, saying that it would be wrong to do this and make her father angry, but the young men begged and pleaded, and at last that is what happened.
When the girl came out of her house to get water, all the young men in the village were watching. Holding her in his arms, Wind Man took her high up into the air, very gently carrying her around and around. Her long hair was loosened. It fell down and wrapped itself around her until it touched the ground. Then it caught up the nearby leaves and dust and carried them back into the air with her.
And that is the story of the very first Whirlwind there ever was on the desert.
Brandon Walker remembered the whirlwinds.
A fierce wind was kicking up a line of them and propelling them across the desert floor as he drove south toward Topawa for the second time. The first trip had been the day before to notify the victim’s grandmother that Gina Antone was dead. The second time he returned to Topawa, he was looking for Gina’s killer.
Walker was called in on the case as soon as it was determined that the water hole in which the body had been found was in the county rather than on reservation land. A dead Indian wasn’t high on Sheriff DuShane’s list of priorities. As a result, Walker wasn’t assigned in a very timely fashion.
The body was discovered by a pair of city-slicker hunters out shooting coyotes mostly for the hell of it, and only incidentally for the bounty paid for each stinking coyote carcass. The two men found the girl floating facedown in the muddy pond and had called the sheriff’s office to report it only after getting back to town. Walker theorized that some of their hunting may have been on reservation land and they hadn’t wanted to call attention to either the body or themselves until after the dead coyotes were well away from Papago boundaries.
A deputy was dispatched to the scene. Not realizing that the fence with the cattle guard took him onto the reservation and the second took him back off, he left the girl where he found her and reported that it was up to the Papago Tribal Police. Only after all jurisdictional dust settled was Brandon Walker assigned the case. By then, someone had already collected the body. He went to the scene accompanied by a tribal officer named Tony Listo and discovered the crime scene area so picked-over that there was nothing left to find.
Tony pointed Brandon in the direction of the charco, but he himself was reluctant to leave his pickup. “This is a bad place,” he said. “People don’t like to come here.”
That hadn’t stopped the great white hunters, Walker thought. “You mean Indians don’t like to come here?”
“Yes,” Listo nodded. “They sure don’t.”
“You’re saying the girl wouldn’t have come here on her own?” Brandon Walker asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Listo replied.
This short exchange happened prior to the autopsy, while speculation was still rife that the young woman was nothing but a drunk who had fallen in the water and drowned. Later, after the autopsy, the rope burns on her neck and wrists among other injuries had more than borne out Listo’s initial theory. Gina Antone hadn’t gone to the water hole because she had wanted to but because she was forced. The other things that happened to her weren’t by choice, either.
Walker left the charco. Following the Indian police officer’s directions, he made his way first to Sells and then south to an Indian village called Topawa where the dead woman’s grandmother lived in an adobe shack behind a small mission church. He went to the rough wooden door and knocked, but no one answered. He was about to leave when a vintage GMC creaked into the yard behind him. A wide-bodied old woman stepped out.
He waited by the door. “Are you Rita Antone?” he asked.
She nodded. He held out his card, which she looked at but did not take.
“I’m with the Sheriff’s Department,” he said. “I came to talk to you about your granddaughter.”
“I know,” the old lady said. “My nephew already told me.”
Silent now, Brandon and the boy waited until Diana returned to the living room bearing a tray laden with glasses of iced tea and a plate of freshly made tuna sandwiches.
“We have to eat to keep up our strength,” she said.
The air of false gaiety in her tone grated on Brandon’s nerves. She still wore the gun. Who the hell was she trying to kid, Brandon wondered—him, her child, or, more likely, herself?
“I heard you two talking,” she said, placing the tray on the table in front of the couch. “What about?”
Davy shot the detective a quick, meaningful look. “I asked him if my hair would grow back,” Davy replied. “You know, the part they shaved off. He said yes.”
Brandon Walker was impressed. The kid was a talented liar. They had indeed talked about Davy’s hair growing back, but they had talked about a lot of other things besides. Walker was surprised that Davy didn’t mention any of them. Something was going on between the boy and his mother, an undercurrent, a tension that had been missing when he had seen them on Friday and Saturday.
“How long will it take?” Diana asked, chewing a bite of sandwich and falling completely for Davy’s lie of omission.
It took a moment for Brandon to reorient himself to the conversation. “To grow out his hair? A few weeks,” he said. “Not much longer
than that. A crew cut would help.”
“I don’t do crew cuts,” Diana said. “I don’t have clippers.”
And that was the end of that. Davy took his sandwich, tea, and dog, and melted ghostlike into another room, leaving the two grown-ups in another moment of awkward silence.
“I can’t get over how you’ve changed,” Brandon said, still thinking about the gun. “Since that first time I met you, I mean.”
“Murder and suicide do that to you,” she responded. “They make you grow up quick. You’re never the same afterward. No matter how hard you try, you can never be the same.”
After watching Gary drive off and hanging up the phone, Diana stumbled blindly back to the couch and sat there for what seemed like hours, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Briefly, she thought about jumping in the car, driving into town, and looking for him, but where would she go?
Gary had mentioned lots of places where he and Andrew Carlisle hung out together, lowbrow places where Andrew said you could see slices of real life—the Tally Ho, the Green Dolphin, the Golden Nugget, the Grant Road Tavern, the Shanty. She knew the names of the bars, the joints, but she hadn’t been to any of them personally and couldn’t bear the humiliation of going now, of trailing after him, of being just another foolish, hapless wife asking jaded, snickering bartenders if they had seen her drunk of a husband.
Because Gary was drinking more now, she finally admitted to herself, just like her father, and she she, just like Iona, continued to stand by him for no apparent reason. She could see now that she should have stayed in Eugene, should never have agreed to come to this terrible place where she would be without resources and where he would fall under the spell of that man.
That man—Andrew Carlisle. It was easy to blame all of Gary’s shortcomings on Andrew Carlisle. Diana saw the professor as a sort of evil Pied Piper, as someone who had cast a terrible spell over her husband’s psyche and bent it to his own purposes.