by J. A. Jance
As the injured ankle began to swell, he loosened the laces, but he didn’t dare remove the boot altogether. He could probably hobble down the trail but only with the boot on. Going barefoot wasn’t an option. Neither was using his cell phone to call for help. That was one of the lessons in self-reliance Grandma had drilled into Erik’s head as a boy: “Don’t call for help too soon. Wait until you really need it.”
Not that she had squandered any time lecturing him about it. Gladys Johnson had taught her grandson self-reliance the old-fashioned way—by example. When her husband, Harold, returned from the Battle of the Bulge a crippled and broken man, Gladys did what had to be done. She found a job as a grocery-store clerk and supported both her husband and her daughter. When the doctor said that the VA hospital in Tucson, Arizona, offered Harold the best chance of recovery, she’d packed up her family and driven there in a ’53 pickup truck, hauling her family’s worldly possessions in the back of the pickup and in the flimsy trailer she’d hitched on behind the truck.
When Gladys and Harold’s daughter died of cancer at age twenty-five and their grieving son-in-law had dropped six-month-old Erik off on Gladys’s doorstep shortly thereafter, saying he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, Gladys had handled that as well. And she had done it all without complaint.
So get yourself up off your butt and start down the damned mountain, Erik told himself that sunny April morning. As Grandma would say: “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
Wanda Ortiz came out to the ramada a few minutes after Brandon Walker drove away with two dozen each of tamales and flour tortillas packed in a foam ice chest.
“It’s getting hot out here,” she said to her husband. “Don’t you want to come inside?”
“No,” Fat Crack replied. “I’m fine.”
Shrugging and more than a little exasperated, Wanda returned to the house, leaving Fat Crack where he was. The chill Gabe Ortiz felt in his bones right then had little to do with the weather. He and Brandon had smoked the Peace Smoke many times over the years. Doing so today had been Fat Crack’s own friendly gift, a way of saying thank you and good-bye. But now that it was over—now that he had given away the medicine pouch and the sacred tobacco, he was left with a terrible sense of neijig—of foreboding.
Fat Crack had grown accustomed to having glimpses into the future. For instance, when Leo and Delia had come to the house to tell them Delia was pregnant, Fat Crack had known at once that the baby would shrivel and die in his mother’s womb. Fat Crack hadn’t told Leo and Delia that dreadful news. He had kept it to himself, just as he also had not betrayed his knowledge that this new baby, another little boy, would thrive and grow up to be tall and strong.
With his old friend Brandon Walker, Fat Crack knew something wasn’t right. Had the medicine man still possessed Looks at Nothing’s precious crystals, even without his eyesight they might have helped him clarify in his own mind exactly what was happening. As it was, he was cursed with a sense that something was wrong without any means of preventing whatever it was from happening.
Fat Crack wondered if his disquiet could have something to do with the very thing he had spoken with Brandon about—the coming conflict between two powerful women, between Delia and Lani. Closing his eyes, Fat Crack remembered the first time he had seen them both, these two women whose power struggle might well divide the Desert People. With Lani it had been the day he and Wanda had picked the little Ant-Bit Child up from the hospital and taken her to the Walkers’ place in Gates Pass. And even as they did it—even as they delivered the little Indian baby into the hands of the Anglos who would be her parents—Fat Crack had been blessed with the unerring sense that he was doing the right thing. With Delia Chavez Cachora Ortiz, things weren’t nearly so clear-cut.
Sister Justine had summoned Gabe Ortiz to Topawa early that long-ago Wednesday morning. He had driven there in the old blue-and-white tow truck that had come with the business when he’d purchased it years earlier. The truck was disturbingly unreliable. There was always a chance the tow truck would need to be towed back to Sells, along with whatever vehicle Fat Crack had been summoned to aid.
Under the Mother Superior’s watchful eyes Fat Crack examined a derelict 1960 Falcon that was gathering dust in the garage behind the convent. When he emerged from under the hood and self-consciously pulled his sagging Levi’s back up, he realized that someone else had joined them. Even in the shadows, he recognized Ellie Chavez and could see the ugly bruises and cuts that marred her otherwise smooth skin. Beyond Ellie, peering out from behind her mother’s skirt, stood a little girl with enormous brown eyes—Delia. The child observed the proceedings with more than childlike interest, as though she understood that this discussion would impact her life in ways she could not yet fathom.
“Can you make it run?” Sister Justine asked.
Fat Crack rubbed the thin stubble on his chin. “Sure,” he said. “But it’ll cost money.”
“How much?” Sister Justine asked.
Nervously, Fat Crack hiked his pants up again. As Mother Superior of the convent and principal of Topawa Elementary School, Sister Justine was known to drive a hard bargain. “Two hundred, maybe,” he said.
When he said the words, both Delia and her mother gasped aloud. It was a sum that went far beyond their meager ability to pay. Sister Justine was undeterred.
“Two hundred maybe, or two hundred, really?” she asked.
“Two hundred really,” Fat Crack conceded, knowing that if the repairs turned out to be more expensive than that, he’d have to eat the difference.
“How soon can you have it ready?”
“Tomorrow morning?” Fat Crack asked hopefully.
Sister Justine shook her head so forcefully that the stiff material of her veil snapped and crackled like jeans on a clothesline flapping in the wind. “Today,” she insisted. “Registration at ASU ends tomorrow. Ellie has to get registered for school, find a place to live, get the kids enrolled in school and day care and be ready for classes to start on Monday. Tomorrow will be too late.”
“Getting it fixed today would take a miracle,” Fat Crack argued.
But Sister Justine had made up her mind. “You’d better get started, then,” she said. “Miracles don’t grow on trees, you know. They take work and time.”
All that day, while Fat Crack had labored over making the Falcon run, Delia Chavez lingered in the background, watching everything he did. This was long before Fat Crack Ortiz met up with Looks at Nothing, long before the aged medicine man had charged his middle-aged protégé with becoming a medicine man, too. As a consequence, while Fat Crack worked, he had no glimmer about what the future might hold for Delia Chavez. He thought she and her mother would be away from the reservation for a matter of months, not years. He had no idea that he was helping send both of them into an exile that would last almost thirty years. And he had no hint that someday he—Fat Crack Ortiz—would be the one to bring Delia back home to the reservation.
With all that had happened in between, Fat Crack was hard-pressed to know whether or not he had done the right thing. If he hadn’t fixed the Falcon that day, maybe Ellie and Delia never would have gone away in the first place. For sure, everything would have been different.
Brandon Walker took his tamales and tortillas and made his way to Basha’s. When he had first visited the reservation, there had been two trading posts—the High Store, built on a hill, and the Low Store, not on a hill. You could buy milk and sodas and staples at the trading posts, but buying decent meat or finding fresh vegetables with an actual produce manager had been out of the question. This new store in Sells looked like a regular supermarket in Tucson—smaller, but much the same.
He made his way to the produce department and looked around. The selection was different from what he might have expected in town. For instance, Brandon didn’t see any of his personal favorite—eggplant—but what was there seemed reasonably fresh. Across the aisle from the produce was a bank of shelves holding uncooked
beans—navy beans, pinto beans, and the more exotic tepary beans, something that had been a staple in the Tohono O’odham food supply long before the arrival of the Spanish and their lard-laden frijoles.
A middle-aged woman emerged from a back room pushing a cart loaded with cardboard containers of bananas. The striking resemblance between her and Emma Orozco was enough to tell Brandon this was Andrea Tashquinth.
“Mrs. Tashquinth?” he asked, flashing the windowed wallet that identified Brandon Walker as a member of TLC. “Could I speak to you for a moment?”
Andrea Tashquinth eyed him suspiciously. “What about?” she asked.
“Your sister,” he said. “Gabe Ortiz suggested I talk to you. So did your mother.”
“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “I’m working.”
Brandon hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but this straight-out rejection surprised him. Before he could say anything more, however, Andrea had a sudden change of heart. “I’ll be off at three,” she said. “I’ll talk to you then.”
“Fine,” Brandon told her. “I’ll be waiting right outside.”
As Andrea turned away and began unpacking the boxes of bananas, it occurred to Brandon that Fat Crack might be right. Maybe I’itoi was helping to solve this case after all.
While a records clerk ran background checks on the name Erik LaGrange, Detective Fellows turned back to Sue Lammers. “I’ll have a deputy give you and your dog a ride home,” he said. “If we need anything more, I’ll be in touch.”
“Thank you,” she said gratefully. “I’d appreciate it. I’m still pretty shaky.”
After flagging down a newly arrived deputy to take charge of Sue Lammers and Ranger, Brian headed for the crime scene. On the shoulder of the road, one of the crime techs was making casts of tire tracks. Ten yards off the road, someone else was taking photos. The detective approached the photographer and found a grisly jumble of bloodied body parts spilled out of several black plastic garbage bags. Stumps of a severed arm and leg showed signs of having been hacked apart at the joints. The head, detached at the neck, lay facedown beneath a clump of blooming prickly pear. And on the ribs and tiny breasts of the naked torso were scores of ugly marks that he recognized instantly as scabbed-over cigarette burns.
Brian had been in Homicide long enough to expect to be immune, but seeing not only the wanton slaughter but also signs of long-term torture caused those last few bites of burrito to rise dangerously in his throat.
“It’s pretty rough,” Ruben Gomez remarked as Brian turned away, swallowing hard.
The detective nodded. “Whoever did this wasn’t interested in concealing the body.”
“Just the opposite,” Gomez agreed. “In fact, a freight-train engineer just called in a report on it as well. Dispatch told him we’re already working the problem.”
“Well, well,” a brusque female voice commented from behind them. “Welcome to the dumping ground.”
Brian and Deputy Gomez turned as associate medical examiner Fran Daly arrived on the scene. Dr. Daly was a sturdy woman with an unruly mop of cotton-white hair. Backlit in bright sunlight, her hair resembled a halo, but her vocabulary was distinctly non-angelic. She was known for showing up at crime scenes and autopsies alike in Western shirts, jeans, and various pairs of Tony Lama cowboy boots. Today her somewhat portly middle sported a wide leather belt with a silver buckle the size of a saucer.
“How’s it going, Doc?” Brian asked.
“It was better before I got here,” she said, taking in the scatter of dismembered human flesh without blanching. “Only one body, or more?” she asked.
“Just the one, as far as we can tell,” Brian answered. “Female Hispanic, somewhere in her teens.”
Fran Daly nodded. “Any idea how long she’s been here?”
“The initial call came in a little before noon,” Ruben Gomez told her. “A witness was out walking her dog and saw what she thought was someone illegally dumping garbage.”
“It’s illegal dumping all right,” Dr. Daly agreed. “So it’s not been all that long—an hour and a half or so?”
Brian nodded. “That would be about right.”
His phone rang just then. “This is Shelley in Records,” the caller told him. “I’ve got the info you wanted on Erik LaGrange and for the two phone numbers you asked about. Medicos for Mexico is on East Broadway, just west of Tucson Boulevard. It’s closed on weekends. The second number is a private residence listed under the name of Professor Raymond Rice, who teaches architecture at the U of A. The number for Erik LaGrange has been disconnected, with calls being forwarded to Rice’s number. I also checked with the DMV. I’ve got a driver’s license for Erik LaGrange—not the same address as the one listed for Professor Rice. As far as a vehicle registered to Erik LaGrange? I came up empty there.”
“So he’s got no priors.”
“Not even a parking ticket, as far as I can find.”
“Good work, Shelley,” Brian told her. “Now give me that address again.”
Erik limped down the mountain with his injured ankle screaming at every step. As much as it hurt, Erik was forced to concede that maybe the ankle was broken. Damn! he muttered to himself. Just what I need.
It was hotter than he expected and he had already consumed the last of his water. Once he reached the trailhead, he could call someone to come pick him up. Not Gayle, though. Not after last night.
They had been lying in bed. They were always lying in bed, either at his house or hers. Given the reality of Tucson’s social milieu and Gayle’s standing in same, there weren’t many places they could go in public without attracting attention. So they stayed home—his home or hers—ate take-out food, and screwed. Much later, one or the other of them would dress and go home.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, tweaking one of the curls of reddish-blond hair on his naked chest. “You’re awfully quiet.”
Erik didn’t want to say what was wrong. They’d been going through a stormy period for the last several weeks. That happened fairly regularly, but things had been better the last couple of days, and he was reluctant to rock the boat. Gayle Stryker didn’t like having her boat rocked.
What was wrong had its origin in a tiny blue envelope that had shown up in Erik’s mail earlier that week—an envelope with a birth announcement inside. Ryan and Brianna Doyle had had a baby, a seven-and-a-half-pound boy they’d named Kyle.
Erik and Ryan had met in fifth grade at Hollinger Elementary, and they’d been friends ever since. Five years earlier, Erik had been best man when Ryan and Brianna were married at St. Philip’s in the Hills. Receiving a birth announcement from a good friend shouldn’t have been an earth-shattering experience, but it was.
Ryan’s wedding had happened only weeks before Erik met up with Gayle Stryker, who promptly took over his life. Gayle became Erik’s life. Since then he’d barely seen Ryan and Brianna. After neglecting them for so long, he was surprised he was still on their Christmas card list, to say nothing of the one for birth announcements. But seeing the picture of the wrinkly-faced, more or less ugly, round-headed baby had brought Erik’s own life home to him in an entirely new way. What the hell am I doing?
In the beginning, once he got over being flattered and utterly dazzled by Gayle’s beauty and attentions, he’d given himself a serious talking-to about the age difference between them. What did it matter if she was almost the same age his mother would have been, had Louise LaGrange lived, that is? Gayle was beautiful, she was rich, and she wanted him. What else counted? Erik had asked her more than once if she ever considered leaving her husband.
She’d laughed and said, “Every day and twice on Sunday,” and let it go at that. She never spoke of getting a divorce. She never spoke of making any changes. She seemed perfectly content with the way things were—as if she didn’t mind if she and Erik went on the same way indefinitely. And they had done exactly that—for more than five years.
Erik wondered sometimes about what would happen if Lawrence Stryk
er croaked. The man was pushing sixty-five. According to Gayle, he had lost all interest in sex, or at least all interest in sex with her. He took medication for high blood pressure, and there had been talk about his needing a pacemaker, although, as far as Erik knew, one had never been installed.
So, if Larry died, what then? Would Erik and Gayle’s affair evolve into a more normal relationship? Or was normal not what Gayle had in mind?
That was how things stood right up until the day that damnable birth announcement arrived. Thirty-something women were supposed to be the ones with biological clocks, but suddenly Erik heard his own clock ticking loud and clear. He was thirty-five; Gayle sixty-two. Having kids had never been part of their equation, but still…Did he want to spend his life with someone almost twice his age? In the little cocoons where they spent their private time together, age didn’t matter, but at work sometimes, there were things that struck him—music playing on someone’s radio, for instance, or someone else cracking a joke—that made him realize he and Gayle came from different generations.
“Where are we going?” Erik said finally.
“Going?” she asked. “Well, now that we’ve had dinner and dessert, I’m going home.”
“Not that,” Erik said. “I mean, where are we going long-term?”
“Does it matter?” Gayle returned. “Seems to me we’re doing just fine. What’s wrong?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to get dressed and go home?” Erik asked. “If we could live together like normal people?”
“Like husband and wife, you mean?”
He nodded. “That, too.”
Gayle’s eyes blazed with immediate fury. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you!”
“No,” Erik said quickly. “Nothing like that. I swear to God.”
“You’re tired of me, then?”
“No. Of course not. You’re wonderful—the best thing that ever happened to me.”
