by J. A. Jance
By then Mitch Johnson wasn’t interested in what the doctor had said or in what Lori wanted, either. He desperately craved the solace her body had to offer. He craved it and he took it. He had barely shoved himself home when his aching need exploded inside her like a burst of Fourth of July fireworks.
Afterward as he drifted in a mellow haze, he realized she was crying. “What’s wrong now?” he asked.
“You raped me.” She didn’t say it loud, but he knew she meant it.
“No, I didn’t,” he said. “You wanted it as much as I did. You were asking for it.”
“You raped me,” she repeated dully. “I told you no and you did it anyway.”
“I did not rape you,” he declared. “How could I? You’re my wife.”
As far as Mitch Johnson was concerned, the subject was closed. In Tucson, Arizona, in 1975, Lori Kiser Johnson didn’t try pressing charges because she knew they wouldn’t stick. What she did do, however, was far more effective. From then on, she never said yes to Mitch again, not when it came to sex. Oh, he did get a piece of tail now and then, but only when he took it. And there was never any response. She lay beneath him whenever he did it, dry and unmoving, letting him inside her because she didn’t seem to have any choice in the matter, but making sure neither one of them enjoyed it.
Considering that turn of events, it was hardly surprising that a few months later Mitch was out in the desert shooting hell out of a bunch of wetbacks. As frustrated as he was, who wouldn’t?
As Mitch turned left on Coleman Road, he saw a huge cloud of dust come roiling up out of the desert about a half mile away. A moment later a helicopter emerged from the cloud and set off toward town. That struck him as odd—worried him a little—but clearly it had nothing to do with him. Two miles down the road, behind a locked gate, the Bounder sat in undisturbed, solitary splendor exactly as he’d left it.
When he stopped the car, he got out and stood for a moment listening. The only sound was the steady thrum of the air conditioner. He had created an extra duct that ran through the storage unit. It was hot, and it wouldn’t have done to have Lani Walker baked to a crisp or suffocated before he had his chance at her.
He stood there observing the Bounder and the vast tract of empty desert around it. He was almost sorry to leave this place. It had been good to him, had allowed the creative juices to flow. But it was time. He had other places to go, other fish to fry, including the stupid-ass second lieutenant from Asheville, North Carolina, who had led his platoon into a Vietcong trap and permanently fucked up Mitch’s knee.
Like it or not, it was almost time to abandon the desert. Mitch had already called his landlord to say he was moving and had notified the power company, telling them to shut off the juice as of Wednesday. His would be a planned exit. There would be no question about him deciding to leave after all the shit hit the fan.
If anyone had seen him standing there, they might have thought he was simply admiring the landscape. What he was really doing was seeing how long he could keep from opening the door. Would she be awake or not? Her reaction to the drug had been so pronounced that he worried now that she might still be groggy. That would be too bad. The moment she saw his face, he wanted her to know. Anything less than that wouldn’t be enough.
It had been fun toying with Diana without her having the foggiest idea of what was really going on. But with Lani it was different. Diana had said she was a smart girl, and Mitch Johnson desperately wanted that to be so. He wanted her to be smart enough to realize what was happening. To Mitch’s way of thinking, knowing in advance, foreseeing the possibilities and dreading them, were the only things that would place Lani Walker any higher on the evolutionary ladder than the dumb little bird he had crushed in his fist years earlier.
Finally, taking a deep breath, he walked up to the door and put his key in the Bounder’s custom-made dead bolt. Then he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Honey, I’m home,” he called as he pulled the door shut behind him.
While Candace was in the bathroom getting ready to go to dinner, Davy paced the room. It wasn’t just the ring. It was everything. There was a hole in the pit of his stomach. His palms were wet. Sweat was already soaking through his clean shirt. And the only thing he could think of was that something was wrong—terribly wrong—at home.
Finally, feeling numb, he picked up the phone and dialed. His mother answered, sounding annoyed or sleepy, he couldn’t tell which.
“Is Lani there?” he asked.
“She’s not home from work yet,” Diana said. “And she’s supposed to go straight from work to a concert with Jessica Carpenter. Why, is something wrong?”
“No,” Davy mumbled. “I just wanted to talk to her.”
“What about?” Diana asked. “You sound worried.”
David Ladd’s mind raced, trying to find a plausible reason for calling that had nothing to do with what he was feeling. “It’s a secret,” he said, as inspiration struck. “It’s about your anniversary present. But that’s all right. I can talk to her tomorrow.”
“Give me your number,” Diana said. “I’ll leave her a note in case she does come home before the concert.”
Blushing to the roots of his light-blond hair, David Garrison Ladd looked down at the phone on the nightstand and read his mother the number of the Ritz Carlton in Chicago, Illinois. He put down the phone praying fervently that Lani wouldn’t stop by the house before the concert.
“Who was that?” Candace asked when she came out of the bathroom. “I thought I heard you talking to someone on the phone.”
“I just called home to give the folks a progress report,” he lied. “My mother worries about me, and I wanted her to know that everything is fine.”
Deputy Fellows was used to working on his own. After Kath Kelly left, it took some time for him to get his mind back on the job, but eventually he did. He made plaster casts of what footprints he found. He combed the area again, looking for clues. And three separate times he retraced the path of the dirt track from the place where the attack had taken place to the spot where Kath Kelly had found the injured man lying in the dirt.
It was a long way. Almost a hundred yards. The question was why the killer would drag his victim anywhere at all? Eventually the answer became clear. The attack had been a reaction to being discovered rather than a premeditated crime. As such, the attacker didn’t view himself as a killer. Rather than finish his victim off, he had simply dragged the injured man away, and hopefully out of view, expecting nature to take its course.
That meant that the real crime and also the key to the attacker’s real intentions and identity had something to do with the digging back on the edge of the charco. At four o’clock in the afternoon, Brian went back to his truck, took a long drink from the last of his water, and collected his shovel. At four-ten, he started to dig.
Digging is a solitary occupation done with an implement that has changed little from ancient times to modern. The act of shoving a sharp spade into the dirt and then extracting a heaping shovel leaves plenty of time for reflection.
With the scattered remains of Gina Antone’s shrine mere feet away from him, pieces of Brian Fellows’s own life intruded into his thoughts about the case he was working on. Most people would have said that Brian came from a “troubled background.” He had found respite from his half-brothers’ constant taunting only at school and during those precious hours when he had managed to escape Janie’s chaotic household to spend time at the Walker place in Gates Pass.
As Davy Ladd’s faithful shadow, Brian had been welcome in places where he never would have been able to venture otherwise. He had walked, wide-eyed, into the dimly lit adobe hut where a blind medicine man named Looks At Nothing had lain confined to a narrow cot. The blind man had been sick, dying of a lingering cough, but he had nonetheless continued to smoke his strange-smelling cigarettes, lighting them one after another, with a cigarette lighter that somehow never once burned his fingers.
Those
Tohono O’othham people—Rita, Looks At Nothing, Fat Crack, all of them—had been unfailingly kind to little Brian Fellows in a way his own family—mother, stepbrothers, and successive “daddies”—never had.
And now, as he worked in the hot sun with his shovel, he felt as though he was protected somehow from the restless spirits that Davy Ladd had once told him inhabited this place. He had barely come to that conclusion when his shovel bit into something hard. Not wanting to break it, he tossed his shovel aside and then got down on his knees to dig in the sand by hand.
Almost immediately, his hand closed around something long and smooth and straight. When he pulled whatever it was free of the dirt, he saw at once that it was a bone. A leg bone of some kind, he thought. Maybe from a weakened cow that had once become trapped in the muddy charco and drowned. He dug some more and was rewarded with another long bone and what looked like a rib of some kind. Up until he found the rib, he kept thinking the bones belonged to an animal. The rib, however, had a very human look to it. Then his hands closed around something round and smooth and hard. The hair rose on the back of his neck. Letting go of the skull, he didn’t even bother to finish pulling it free of its earthen prison.
Instead, he climbed out of the hole, walked back to his Blazer, and called in. Fortunately, the dispatcher on duty earlier had gone home for the day. “Where’ve you been, Fellows? I was about to send someone out looking for you.”
“Great,” Brian said. “If you’re sending somebody, how about a homicide detective? Have him come equipped with shovels and some water—especially the water. I’m about to die of thirst.”
“A homicide detective. Why? What have you got? The last I heard you were working on an assault. Did the guy die?”
“Not as far as I know,” Brian Fellows said. “That guy was still alive when they loaded him into the helicopter. But somebody else out here is dead as a doornail.”
“Dead?” the dispatcher returned. “Who is it?”
“How should I know?” Brian answered. “That’s why I need a homicide detective.”
“I’ll get right on it,” the dispatcher said. This time Deputy Fellows was relatively sure the man meant what he said.
It was about time.
11
So I’itoi gave orders to chase the evil ones to the ocean. When they reached the shore of what is now the Gulf of California, Great Spirit sang a song. As I’itoi sang, the waters were divided and the Bad People rushed in to go to the other side. Then Elder Brother called the waters together again, and many of the PaDaj O’othham—the Bad People—were drowned, but some reached the other side.
Great Spirit again tried to have his good warriors kill those evil ones that had escaped the waters, but the warriors would not. And I’itoi—Spirit of Goodness—felt so ashamed that he made himself small and came back from the other side through the ground, under the water.
Many of his people returned with I’itoi, but some could not, and these were very unhappy, for the PaDaj O’othham who had not been destroyed were increasing.
Then I’itoi’s daughter said she would save these good Indians who were not happy. She took all the children to the seashore, where they sat down and sang together. This is the song that I’itoi’s daughter and A’ali—the Children—sang:
O white birds who cross the water,
O white birds who cross the water,
Help us now to cross the water.
We want to go with you across the water.
Kohkod—the Seagulls—heard the song. They came down and studied I’itoi’s daughter and the children. Then Kohkod flew up and circled around, singing:
Take these feathers that we give you
Take these white feathers that we give you—
Take the feathers floating round you
And do not fear to cross the water.
So the Indians took the white feathers that the seagulls gave them. They bound the feathers round their heads and crossed the water safely. That is why, nawoj, my friend, the Tohono O’othham keep those white feathers—the stoha a’an—very carefully, even to this day.
Candace and David had a beautiful dinner together in the hotel dining room. The champagne Candace ordered was Dom Perignon. “It’s okay,” she said, sending a radiant smile in Davy’s direction over the top of the wine list. “Daddy said we could have whatever we want. It’s on him.”
“Exactly how much did Bridget and Larry’s wedding set your folks back?” David asked once the sommelier left the table. Bridget was Candace’s next older sister. Her wedding had taken place two months before Davy and Candace met.
Candace shivered. “You don’t even want to know,” she said. “It was a complete circus. She had nine attendants.”
David gulped. “Nine?”
“The reception was a sit-down dinner for three hundred at the club. It was awful. ‘Ghastly’ is the word Daddy used. He was a little drunk before it was all over that night. I remember him taking me aside and telling me that night that no matter what, he wasn’t going to go through that again.”
The waiter returned carrying a champagne bucket. Candace winked at Davy. “All Daddy’s doing is making good on that promise.”
The wine was served with all due ceremony. “I finished reading your mother’s book last night,” Candace Waverly said over the top of her glass a few moments later. “You hardly ever talk about that, you know. I remember your saying once that your mother was a writer, but until she won that big prize last month, and until Mom saw her on ‘The Today Show,’ I didn’t know she was an important writer. My dad only reads boring stuff like The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s, but still he’s dying to meet her. So’s Mother.”
“She’ll probably be in Chicago on tour sometime,” David said without enthusiasm. “Maybe she can meet your folks then.”
“What do you think of it?”
“What do I think of what?” David Ladd asked. “Of her going on tour? Of her meeting your parents?”
Candace glared at him in mock exasperation. “No, silly. Of her book.”
In fact, like his stepfather, David Ladd had avoided reading Shadow of Death like the plague, and for many of the same reasons. For the first seven years of his life, Davy had been an only child, the son of a woman obsessed by her dream of becoming a writer. In the beginning, maybe Davy hadn’t had to contend with sibling rivalry as such, but there had always been competition for Diana Ladd Walker’s attention. All his life David had felt as though he was forever relegated to second place, first behind Diana’s typewriter, and then behind Brandon Walker and Lani and a succession of ever smaller computers.
With that foundation, it wasn’t at all surprising that Davy regarded his mother’s increasing success in the world of writing with a certain ambivalence. When it came to Shadow of Death, however, ambivalence turned to active abhorrence. He resented the idea that his mother would have anything at all to do with Andrew Carlisle—with the monster who had single-handedly brought so much destruction on the Ladd family. Andrew Carlisle was the single individual who bore ultimate responsibility for the death and subsequent disgrace of David Ladd’s father, Garrison. Once released from prison, Carlisle had come back to Tucson. In a binge of vengeance, he had brutalized and raped David’s mother while Davy himself remained imprisoned and helpless behind a locked root-cellar door.
Whatever innocuous words Diana Ladd Walker may have used to tell her side of that story, the one thing they couldn’t absolve Davy of was the fact that he hadn’t helped her. After all, what kind of a son wouldn’t save his mother? Whenever David Ladd thought of those long-ago events, it was always with an abiding sense of shame and failure. He had let his mother down, had somehow forsaken her, leaving her defenseless in her hour of need. What could be more shameful than that?
For years Davy had fantasized about that day. In those imagined scenarios, he always emerged from the cellar and did battle with the evil Ohb. In those daydreams, Davy Ladd always fought Andrew Carlisle and won.
&n
bsp; In writing Shadow of Death, Davy doubted his mother had taken his feelings on the subject into account. By reporting what happened in a factual manner—and Diana was always factual—she had no doubt held up Davy’s glaring inadequacy for all the world to see. Everyone who read the book—even Candace—would know about David Garrison Ladd’s terrible failure in the face of that awful crisis.
“I haven’t read it,” he said after a long interval.
Candace looked shocked. “You haven’t? Why not?”
David Ladd thought about that for a minute more before he answered, fearing that just talking about it might be enough to bring on another panic attack and send his heart racing out of control.
“I guess you had to be there,” he said finally. “Maybe my mother doesn’t mind reliving that day, but I do. I don’t ever want to be that scared or that powerless again.”
“But you were just a child when it happened, weren’t you?” Candace objected.
David nodded. “Six, going on seven,” he said.
“See there?” Candace continued. “You’re lucky. Most kids never have a chance to see their parents doing something heroic.”
“Heroic!” David echoed. “Are you serious? Stupid, maybe, but not heroic. She could have had help if she’d wanted to. Brandon Walker wasn’t my stepfather then, but I’m sure he offered to help her, and I’m equally sure she turned him down. The other thing she could have done was pack up and go someplace else until the cops had the guy back under lock and key.”
“Still,” Candace returned, “she did fight him, and she won. He didn’t get away with it; he went to prison. So don’t call your mother stupid, at least not to me. I think she was very brave, not only back then—when it happened—but also now, for talking about it after all these years and bringing it all out in the open.”