by J. A. Jance
As soon as Gabe Ortiz’s Crown Victoria headed down the road, Brandon Walker returned to his woodpile. A reincarnated Andrew Carlisle? That was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. Still, there was one point upon which Brandon Walker fully agreed with Fat Crack Ortiz—writing Shadow of Death had been a dangerous undertaking.
Four years earlier, on the day the letter arrived from Andrew Carlisle, Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd had already been together for seventeen years. They had come through the trials and tribulations of raising children and stepchildren. Together they had survived the long-term agonies of writing and publishing books and dealt with the complexities and hard work of running for public office. There had been difficulties, of course, but always there had been room for compromise—right up to the arrival of that damned letter. And from that time since, it seemed to him they had been locked in a downward spiral.
That was Brandon’s perception, that things had been hunky-dory before the letter and had gone to hell in a hand-basket afterward, although in actual fact everything wasn’t absolutely perfect beforehand. They had already lost Tommy by then, and Quentin had already been sent to prison on the drunk-driving charge. But still…
The letter, ticking like a time bomb, had come to the house as part of a packet of publisher-forwarded fan mail. Diana had opened the envelope and read the oddly printed, handwritten letter herself before handing it to her husband.
MY DEAR MS. WALKER,
AFTER ALL THESE YEARS IT MAY SURPRISE YOU TO HEAR FROM ME AGAIN. FURTHER, IT MAY COME AS NEWS TO YOU TO KNOW THAT I HAVE RECENTLY BEEN DIAGNOSED AS SUFFERING FROM AN INEVITABLY FATAL DISEASE (AIDS). I AM WRITING TO YOU AT THIS TIME TO SEE IF YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN WORKING WITH ME ON A BOOK PROJECT THAT WOULD CHRONICLE THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT BROUGHT ME TO THIS UNFORTUNATE PASS.
I HAVE ALREADY ASSEMBLED A GOOD DEAL OF INVALUABLE MATERIAL FOR SUCH A PROJECT, BUT I AM OFFENDED BY THE RULES CURRENTLY IN EFFECT THAT MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR CONVICTED CRIMINALS TO REAP ANY KIND OF FINANCIAL REWARDS FROM RECOUNTING THEIR NEFARIOUS DEEDS, INCLUDING WRITING BOOKS ABOUT SAME. BECAUSE SOMEONE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MAKE AN HONEST BUCK OUT OF SUCH AN UNDERTAKING, I AM WILLING TO TURN THE ENTIRE IDEA, ALONG WITH MY ACCUMULATED MATERIAL, OVER TO A CAPABLE WRITER—WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED—TO DO WITH AS HE OR SHE MAY CHOOSE.
YOU ARE UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO WRITE SUCH A BOOK, AND I BELIEVE THAT OUR TWO DIVERGING POINTS OF VIEW ON THE SAME STORY WOULD MAKE FOR COMPELLING READING, EVEN IF WE BOTH KNOW, GOING INTO THE PROJECT, EXACTLY HOW IT WILL ALL TURN OUT.
DURING MY YEARS OF INCARCERATION HERE IN FLORENCE, I HAVE FOLLOWED YOUR FLOURISHING (PARDON THE UNINTENTIONAL ALLITERATION) CAREER WITH MORE THAN CASUAL INTEREST. THIS HAS BEEN DIFFICULT AT TIMES SINCE IT TAKES TIME FOR NONFICTION WORK TO BE TRANSLATED INTO EITHER “TALKING BOOKS” OR BRAILLE. (AS A RELATIVE “LATECOMER” TO THE WORLD OF BLINDNESS, BRAILLE CONTINUES TO BE SLOW-GOING AND CUMBERSOME FOR ME.)
THE MATERIAL I NOW HAVE IN MY POSSESSION IS IN THE FORM OF TYPED NOTES AND TAPES. I THINK, THOUGH, SHOULD YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON THIS PROJECT, THAT A SERIES OF FACE-TO-FACE INTERVIEWS WOULD BE THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY OF KICKING THINGS OFF.
WHATEVER YOUR DECISION, PLEASE LET ME KNOW AS SOON AS POSSIBLE IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT WITH THIS DISEASE TIME MAY BE FAR MORE LIMITED THAN EITHER ONE OF US NOW SUSPECTS.
REGARDS,
ANDREW PHILIP CARLISLE
Just holding the wretched letter in his hand had made Brandon Walker feel somehow contaminated. And angry.
“Send this thing back by return mail and tell him to shove it up his ass,” he had growled, handing the letter back to Diana. “Where does that son of a bitch get off and how come he has your address?”
“Andrew Carlisle always had my address,” Diana reminded her husband. “Our address,” she corrected. “We haven’t moved, you know, not since it happened.”
“Did he send it here directly?”
“No, it came in a packet from my publisher in New York.”
“If you want me to, I’ll call the warden and tell him not to let Carlisle send you any more letters, whether they go to New York first or not.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Diana had said.
“You’ll tell him not to write again?” Brandon asked.
“I said I’d handle it.”
Looking at his wife’s determined expression, Brandon suddenly understood her intention. “You’re not going to write back, are you?”
Diana stood there for a moment gazing down at the letter and not answering.
“Well?” Brandon insisted impatiently. “Are you?”
“I might,” she said.
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Because he’s right, you know. It could be one hell of a good book. Usually it takes at least two books to tell both sides of any given story. This would have both in one. Not only that, my agent and my editor both told me years ago that anytime I was ready to write a book about what happened, Sterling, Moffit, and Dodd would jump at the chance to publish it.”
“No,” Brandon said.
“What do you mean, no?”
“Just what I said. N-O. Absolutely not. I don’t want you anywhere near that crackpot. I don’t want you writing to him. I don’t want you interviewing him. I don’t want you writing about him. Forget it.”
“Wait a minute,” Diana objected. “You can’t tell me what I can and what I can’t write.”
“But it could be dangerous for you,” Brandon said.
“Being sheriff can be dangerous, too,” she told him. “What happens when it’s time for the next election and you have to decide whether or not to run for office again?”
“What about it?”
“What if I told you to forget it? What if I told you that you couldn’t run for office because I said your being sheriff worried me too much? What if you couldn’t run because I refused to give my permission? What then?”
“Diana,” Brandon said, realizing too late that he had stepped off a cliff into forbidden territory. “It’s not the same thing.”
“It isn’t? What’s so different about it?”
“That’s politics…”
“And I don’t know anything about politics, right?”
“Diana, I—”
“Listen, Brandon Walker. I know as much or more about politics as you do about writing and publishing. And if I have the good sense to stay out of your business, I’ll thank you to have the good sense to stay out of mine.”
“But you’ll be putting yourself at risk,” Brandon ventured. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because there are questions I still don’t have answers for,” Diana had replied. “I’m the only one who can ask those questions, and Andrew Carlisle is the only one who can provide the answers.”
“But why stir it all up again?”
“Because I paid a hell of a price,” Diana responded. “Because more than anyone else in the whole world, I’ve earned the right to have those damn answers. All of them.”
She had left then, stalked off to her office. Within weeks—lightning speed in the world of publishing contract negotiations—the contract had come through for Shadow of Death, although the book hadn’t had that name then. The original working title had been A Private War.
And it had been, in more ways than one. From then on, things had never been quite the same between Brandon and Diana.
Diana heard the whine of the chain saw as soon as she pulled into the carport alongside the house and switched off the Suburban’s engine. Hearing the sound, she gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes.
“Damn,” she muttered. “He’s at it again.”
Shaking her head, Diana hurried into the house, determined to change both her clothes and her attitude. The literary tea was over, thank God. It had been murder—just the kind of stultifying ordeal Brandon had predicted it would be. Listening to the saw, Diana realized that it would have been nice if she herself had been given a choice of working on the woodpile or dealing wi
th Edith Gailbraith, the sharp-tongued wife of the former head of the university’s English Department. Compared to Edith, the tangled pile of mesquite and creosote held a certain straightforward appeal.
Edith, social daggers at the ready, had been the first one to inquire after Brandon. “How’s your poor husband faring these days now that he lost the election?” she had asked.
Diana had smiled brightly. At least she hoped it was a bright smile. “He’s doing fine,” she said, shying away from adding the qualifying words “for a hermit.” As she had learned in the past few months, being married to a hermit-in-training wasn’t much fun.
“Has he found another job yet?” Edith continued.
“He isn’t looking,” Diana answered with a firm smile. “He doesn’t really need another job. That’s given him some time to look at his options.”
“I’d watch out for him, if I were you,” Edith continued. “Don’t leave him out to pasture too long. American men take it so hard when they stop working. The number who the within months of retirement is just phenomenal. For too many of them, their jobs are their lives. That was certainly the case with my Harry. He mourned for months afterward. I was afraid we were going to end up in divorce court, but he died first. He never did get over it.”
Nothing like a little sweetness and light over tea and cakes, Diana thought, seeing Brandon’s frenetic work on the woodpile through Edith Gailbraith’s prying eyes. And lips. With unerring accuracy, Edith had zeroed in on one of Diana Ladd Walker’s most vulnerable areas of concern. What exactly was going on with Brandon? And would he ever get over it?
Driving up to the house late that afternoon, she still didn’t have any acceptable answers to that question. The only thing she did know for sure was that somehow cutting up the wood was helping him deal with the demons that were eating him alive. Having left Edith behind, it was easy for Diana to go back home to Gates Pass prepared to forgive and forget.
“Go change your clothes and stack some wood, Diana,” she told herself. “It’ll do you a world of good.”
In the master bedroom of their house Diana slipped out of the smart little emerald green silk suit she had worn to the tea. She changed into jeans, boots, and a loose-fitting T-shirt. When she stopped in to pick up a pair of glasses of iced tea, she noticed the two glasses already sitting in the kitchen sink and wondered who had stopped by.
She took two newly filled glasses outside, Brandon, stacking wood now with sweat soaking through his clothing, smiled at her gratefully when she handed him his tea. “I’m from Washington,” she joked. “I’m here to help.”
As a victim of many hit-and-run federal bureaucrats, the quip made Brandon laugh aloud. “Good,” he said. “I’ll take whatever help I can get.”
Without saying anything further, he handed her a piece of chopped log, which she obligingly carried to the stack. They worked together in silence for some time before Brandon somewhat warily broached the subject of the university tea. “How was it?” he asked.
Diana shrugged. “About what you’d expect,” she said. “By holding it at the Arizona Historical Society instead of someplace on campus or at the president’s residence, they managed to make it clear that as far as they’re concerned, I’m still not quite okay.”
“You can’t really blame them for that,” Brandon said. “Andrew Carlisle isn’t exactly one of the U. of A’s more stellar ex-professors. You can hardly expect them to be good sports about what they all have to regard as adverse publicity.”
In writing Shadow of Death, Diana hadn’t glossed over the fact that Andrew Carlisle had used his position as head of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Arizona to lure Diana’s first husband, Garrison Ladd, into playing a part in a brutal torture killing. Members of the local literary community—especially ones in the university’s English Department who had known Andrew Carlisle personally and who still held sway over the university’s creative writing program—were shocked and appalled by his portrayal in the book. They were disgusted that a book one Arizona Daily Sun reviewer had dismissed as nothing more than “a poor-taste exercise in true crime” had gone on to be hailed by national critics and booksellers alike as a masterwork.
“You were absolutely right not to go,” Diana added, bending over and straightening a pile of branches into a manageable armload. “The vultures were out in spades. Several of the women took great pains to tell me that although they never deign to read that kind of thing themselves, they were sure this must be quite good.”
“That’s big of them,” Brandon said. “But it is quite good.”
Diana stopped what she was doing and turned a questioning look on her husband’s tanned, handsome face. “You mean you’ve actually read it?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“While you were off in New York. I didn’t want to be the only person on the block who hadn’t read the damn thing.”
When she had been writing other books, Brandon had read the chapters as they came out of the computer printer. With the manuscript for Shadow of Death he had shown less than no interest. When the galleys came back from New York for correction, she had offered to let him read the book then, but he had said no thanks. He had made his position clear from the beginning, and nothing—not even Diana’s considerable six-figure advance payment—had changed his mind.
Hurt but resigned, Diana had decided he probably never would read it. She hadn’t brought up the subject again.
Now, though, standing there in the searing afternoon heat, cradling a load of branches in her arms, Diana felt some of the months of unresolved anger melt away. “You read it and you liked it?” she asked.
“I didn’t say I liked it,” Brandon answered, moving toward her and looking down into her eyes. “In fact, I hated it—every damned word, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good, because it is. Or should I say, not bad for a girl?” he added with a tentative smile.
The phrase “not bad for a girl” was an old familiar and private joke between them. And hearing those words of praise from Brandon Walker meant far more to Diana than any Pulitzer ever would.
With tears in her eyes, she put down her burden of wood and then let herself be pulled close in a sweaty but welcome embrace. Brandon’s shirt was wet and salty against her cheeks. So were her tears.
“Thank you,” she murmured, smiling up at him. “Thank you so much.”
By mid-afternoon, Mitch Johnson’s errands were run and he was back on the mountain, watching and waiting. The front yard of the Walker place was an unfenced jungle—a snarl of native plants and cactus—ocotillo, saguaro, and long-eared prickly pear—with a driveway curving through it. One part of the drive branched off to the side of the house, where it passed through a wrought-iron gate set in the tall river-rock wall that surrounded both sides and back of the house.
Late in the afternoon what appeared to be an almost new blue-and-silver Suburban drove through an electronically opened gate and into a carport on the side of the house. Mitch watched intently through a pair of binoculars as the woman he had come to know as Diana Ladd Walker stepped out of the vehicle and then stood watching while the gate swung shut behind the vehicle.
She probably believes those bars on that gate mean safety, Mitch thought with a laugh. Safety and security.
“False security, little lady,” he said aloud. “Those bars don’t mean a damned thing, not if somebody opens the gate and lets me in.”
Using binoculars, Mitch observed Diana Ladd Walker’s progress as she made her way into the house. She had to be somewhere around fifty, but even so, he had to admit she was a handsome woman, just as Andy had told him she would be. Her auburn hair was going gray around the temple. From the emerald-green suit she wore, he could see that she had kept her figure. She moved with the confident, self-satisfied grace that comes from doing what you’ve always wanted to do. No wonder Andrew Carlisle had hated Diana Ladd Walker’s guts. So did Mitch.
A few minutes after disappearing int
o the house she reemerged, dressed in work clothes—jeans, a T-shirt, and hat and bringing her husband something cold to drink.
How touching, the watcher on the mountain thought. How sweet! How stupid!
And then, while Brandon and Diana Walker were busy with the wood, the sweet little morsel who was destined to be dessert rode up on her mountain bike. Lani. The three unsuspecting people talked together for several minutes before the girl went inside. Not long after that, toward sunset, Brandon and Diana went inside as well.
In the last three weeks Mitch Johnson had read Shadow of Death from cover to cover three different times, gleaning new bits of information with each repetition. Long before he read the book, Andy had told him that the child Diana and Brandon Walker had adopted was an Indian. What Mitch hadn’t suspected until he saw Lani in the yard and sailing past him on her bicycle was how beautiful she would be.
That was all right. The more beautiful, the better. The more Brandon and Diana Walker loved their daughter, the more losing her would hurt them. After all, Mikey had been an angelic-faced cherub when Mitch went away to prison.
“What’s the worst thing about being in prison?” Andy had asked one time early on, shortly after Mitch Johnson had been moved into the same cell.
Mitch didn’t have to think before he answered. “Losing my son,” he had said at once. “Losing Mikey.”
His wife had raised so much hell that Mitch had finally been forced to sign away his parental rights, clearing the way for Mikey to be adopted by Larry Wraike, Lori Kiser Johnson’s second husband.
“So that’s what we have to do then,” Andy had said determinedly.
This was long before Mitch Johnson had taken Andrew Carlisle’s single-minded plan and made it his own. The conversation had occurred at a time when the possibility of Mitch’s being released from prison seemed so remote as to be nothing more than a fairy tale.
“What is it we have to do?” he had asked.
