Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  Brian took a deep breath. “We’ve discovered that there are several other cases with similar MOs, cases that may or may not be related,” he said. “We’re talking about homicides that have been spaced over a long period of time and spread over a wide geographical area but with distinct similarities—most notably with dismembered remains.”

  Brandon Walker sat up straighter. “Cases in addition to Roseanne’s and to this latest one?”

  Brian nodded. “That’s right. At the moment there’s only one case with a definite link. A fingerprint we found in Erik LaGrange’s house matches a print found at the scene of a Yuma County cold case. The print was on the inside of a garbage bag.”

  It was Brandon Walker’s turn to be stunned. “In other words, there’s a chance Stryker’s been doing this ever since Roseanne Orozco died?”

  “Somebody’s been doing it for years,” Brian said grimly. “And he’s been getting away with it.” He picked up the Burger King bag and looked at it with renewed interest. “You say Stryker handled this cup?”

  “Yes. So did I.”

  “Before it goes to the ME’s office, I’ll take it to Al Miller and have him lift some prints. If any of them match the one from Yuma…” He stopped cold.

  “What?” Brandon asked.

  “There were latent prints in that old Orozco file…” the detective said.

  “…that probably haven’t been entered into AFIS,” Brandon finished.

  “They will be soon,” Brian Fellows declared. “If we get a hit, we pick up Stryker and voilà. There you have it—cold case solved.”

  The waitress showed up with Brian’s tea. “Can I take your order?” she asked.

  Brandon waved her away. “There may be a problem with that,” he said, leaning across the table and dropping his voice.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I’ve already blown my cover as far as Stryker is concerned. When I talked to him earlier, I let him know I was onto him about Roseanne. When I brought her up, he almost choked to death on his coffee. I know I shouldn’t have done it, Brian, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to make him squirm and he did, but now I’m afraid he may come after me or Diana or Lani.”

  “Where are they?” Brian asked.

  “Lani and Diana? At home. At least that’s where they were when I left them.”

  “I’ve got a few connections in the Patrol division,” Brian said. “I’ll put in a word for the deputies to keep an eye on your place.”

  Brandon let out his breath in gratitude. “Thanks, Brian. I appreciate it.”

  “But do you really think he’ll come after you?” Brian asked. “If I were Larry Stryker and thought people were closing in, I’d head for the border.”

  “You’re right,” Brandon said. “They have all kinds of connections in Mexico. Once he makes it across the border, we’ve lost him.”

  Brian nodded. “Especially if this turns into a death-penalty case,” he said. “Mexico won’t extradite anybody who’s likely to go on trial for a capital crime.”

  And Lani and Diana won’t ever be safe, Brandon thought. Making up his mind, he stood up and slapped a five-dollar bill down on the table. “Come on.”

  With that, Brandon headed for the patio exit. Brian Fellows padded after him, carrying the Burger King bag. “Where are you going?”

  “Medicos for Mexico.”

  “Why? What we’ve been talking about sounds good to us, but so far it’s pure speculation. We don’t have anything that gives us probable cause.”

  Brandon Walker stopped short. “See there, Brian? That’s the difference between you and me. You’re a cop. Cops have to worry about little details like probable cause, so go get it. Take that damned coffee cup to Alvin Miller and see if he can give you enough probable cause for a warrant. As for me? I’m retired. These days Brandon Walker is nothing but an ordinary private citizen. I have absolutely no intention of arresting the guy—couldn’t do it if I wanted to. So I don’t need probable cause, but I’ll tell you this: I’m going to stick to Larry Stryker like flies on shit. If he makes a move in the direction of Mexico, I’ll be there to slow him down.”

  Brandon was already unlocking the Suburban. “Do you have a gun?” Brian asked.

  Brandon nodded and patted his underarm holster. “Took it out of my gun safe and cleaned it just this morning.”

  “What about a vest?” Brian asked.

  “I don’t have one,” Brandon Walker said. “Turned mine in when I retired.”

  Brian was already unbuttoning his shirt. “Take mine,” he said. “I’ll pick up my other one when I go back to the department.”

  “But…” Brandon began.

  “No buts,” Brian told him. “If I let you go without a vest and something happens to you, Diana will kill me, and I wouldn’t blame her.”

  Gayle Stryker was at her desk, talking to her private banker and moving funds around when Larry stumbled into her office. His face was red, his tie askew. His white shirt was spotted with what looked like a spray of coffee. He was hyperventilating. “I’ve gotta talk to you,” he gasped.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said into the phone, and then put down the receiver. “Larry, what’s the matter? You look like hell. Don’t you know there are reporters out there?”

  “Brandon Walker’s the matter,” Larry stammered. “I just talked to him. I swear, he knows all about Roseanne Orozco. Yes, I saw the media people camped out outside the front lobby. Why the hell do you think I came in through the delivery door? What are we going to do?”

  “I handed Denise a written statement to give to the press. If you want to read it…”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about that,” Larry interrupted impatiently. “What are we going to do about Brandon Walker?”

  “Come on, Larry.” Gayle kept her demeanor calm. Larry was upset, and she didn’t want to make things worse. “What do you mean, Walker knows about Roseanne? What did he say?”

  “He came right out and asked me if I was the father of her child. How could he possibly know to ask me that? Nobody else ever figured it out. Why would he?”

  “You’re right,” Gayle said. “This does sound serious.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I think it’s time we headed south,” she said quietly.

  “Permanently?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I was just on the phone checking the money situation. We’ll be fine. If we leave now—today—by the time anyone figures it out, it’ll be too late. Once we’re across the border, we’re home free. There are no legal problems in Mexico that can’t be fixed with the right amount of money put into the right hands.”

  “But what about the house? What if someone goes through it and comes across the room in the basement? I’ve cleaned it as well as possible, but there’s always a chance…”

  “I’ll take care of the house, Larry,” she assured him. “You know very well that it’s always been my intention to take care of the house. Is there anything you want from there, anything you want to take along with us?”

  He paused and seemed to consider. “No,” he answered at last. “There’s nothing I want.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll call for a jet to take us to Cabo. By contract we have to give them eight hours’ advance notice, but they may well have a plane available to pick us up sooner than that. I have some errands to run, then I’ll head out to the ranch and take care of things there. You hold down the fort here, but keep a low profile. Don’t talk to the media. Don’t grant any interviews.”

  For several long seconds, Larry appeared to be seized with indecision. Gayle was afraid he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  Finally he nodded. “All right.” Then, making what seemed to be a supreme effort to pull himself together, he added, “You’re sure you won’t need my help out at the ranch?”

  She smiled at him then. Things always worked more smoothly when she was the one who came up with the plan and all Larry had to do was follow orders.r />
  “I can handle it,” she said.

  “But you will be careful,” he cautioned. “That stuff can be very dangerous.”

  “You know me,” she said. “I’m always careful.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Feeling all his sixty-plus years, Larry left Gayle’s office and went to his own. He shut the door and locked it. Then he called out to reception and said he was not to be disturbed.

  He hadn’t exactly told Gayle the truth. He did want something from the house. If he had known he was leaving today, he would have brought his notebooks to work. They would have fit in his briefcase. Now, because he hadn’t wanted to admit to Gayle that the notebooks even existed, he was faced with the prospect of leaving them behind. If Gayle destroyed them along with the rest of the house, fine, but if anyone happened to stumble across them…

  In terms of treasure, Larry’s prize didn’t amount to much—a series of cheap photo albums he’d picked up from Walgreens over the years. What he valued was the collection of photos he kept inside—dated Polaroid shots of each of his girls, pictures that graphically chronicled each of their individual journeys. When he was between girls—as he was now—he often consoled himself by revisiting his past exploits. Browsing through the pictures was a balm to him, but in someone else’s hands…Regardless of what he had told Gayle, he had to go get them. If she caught him there, he’d make up some excuse, but the notebooks had to be in his personal possession when he stepped onto the jet.

  Unable to sit still, Larry paced back and forth in his office. The incident with Brandon Walker had unnerved him. Eventually he would feel the rush of relief, but right now he was mired in fear. Periodically he glanced out the window. Since Gayle had told him to stay put, he couldn’t leave before she did. Unfortunately, her Lexus remained in its place.

  Hoping for relief, he forced himself to sit down and try to relax. He used the remote to turn on his Bose radio, tuned, as it always was, to KUAT, where they were playing Mozart—his favorite, the Piano Concerto no. 22 in E-flat Major. Lost in the music, he actually managed to doze for a while.

  When he awakened, the news was coming on. The opening item caught Larry’s attention: “Media relations officer Ted Garner has just confirmed that a prisoner found hanging in his Pima County Jail cell last night has died as a result of what the medical examiner’s office is calling self-inflicted injuries. Erik LaGrange, longtime development officer for Tucson-based Medicos for Mexico, was booked into the jail in connection with the death of a teenage girl whose dismembered body was found near Vail on Saturday. In a court appearance yesterday afternoon, LaGrange had pleaded innocent to all charges.”

  The newscaster went on to other topics, but Larry Stryker was no longer listening. Gayle had finished with Erik LaGrange, and now he was dead. Welcome as that outcome might be, it left Larry with a disturbing question rattling around in his head. It wasn’t the first time he’d asked it.

  What happens if she’s ever finished with me?

  Lani woke up late. She poured some coffee and then went looking for her mother. Diana was in her office, fingers flying over her laptop’s keyboard. “Where’s Dad?” Lani asked.

  “Beats me,” Diana said. “He was out of here early. I’m sure it has something to do with the case he’s working on. How are you feeling?”

  “Fine,” Lani said. “Can I have your car keys? I left a mess in your car last night. I want to take it into town and have it detailed.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Diana said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Please,” Lani said.

  Diana smiled. “Sure,” she said. “You know where to take it?”

  “You still use that same place on South Fourth?”

  “Smitty’s,” Diana said with a nod. “Come pick me up afterward. We’ll have lunch, just us girls.”

  Staring at the bloodstains that now marred the red-and-white imitation-leather seats, Smitty Coltharp plucked fitfully at the end of his foot-long ponytail. “My land, girl,” he said. “Your mama loves this car so much, I’m surprised she didn’t kill you. There’s dust in there an inch thick, and what on earth were you doing in that backseat?”

  “A friend of mine,” Lani said, “a friend of the family, actually—was having a baby.”

  “Whoa!” Smitty said. “Sorry I asked.”

  “Do you think you can clean it?”

  He shook his head mournfully. “We’ll see,” he said. “But it’s gonna cost you. You go inside out of the sun and sit tight. I’ll let you know when I’m finished.”

  Lani did as she was told. The office came complete with grimy plastic chairs, a scarred wooden desk, and a collection of dog-eared magazines. Next to a coffeepot filled with an inch-thick layer of what could have been year-old coffee sat a newspaper folded to reveal a more-than-half-completed New York Times crossword puzzle. Looking around for the remainder of the paper, she found the rest of the Sun, virtually unread, tossed in a trash can. Glancing at the front page, her eye was drawn to the picture of a man and a woman in the lower right-hand corner.

  Gasping with recognition, Lani almost dropped the paper. The woman’s face was one she knew—the same one that had obliterated Fat Crack’s face in the photo and in Lani’s dream; the same face that had, in seconds, morphed into a featureless skull. Now, just seeing that face smiling at her out of the newspaper photo filled Lani with a terrible dread.

  Who is this woman? Lani wondered. What’s the matter with her?

  Looks at Nothing’s crystals had tried to warn her about this woman. So had Fat Crack in her dream. Trying to quell a rising sense of fear, Lani forced herself to read the article, which told her almost nothing. A murder suspect named Erik LaGrange had attempted suicide in his Pima County Jail cell the previous evening. The man and woman in the photo, Dr. Lawrence and Gayle Stryker, founders of an organization called Medicos for Mexico, had been the suspect’s employers.

  Those three words finally rang a bell—Medicos for Mexico. That was the volunteer medical organization her mother had suggested Lani work for rather than going with Doctors Without Borders. Lani struggled to remember what her mother had said about the people who had been friends years earlier back when both women were still on the reservation. But why is this woman so dangerous? Lani asked herself. And what does she have to do with me?

  Not able to summon any answers on her own, she picked up Smitty’s phone and called her mother. “Who is Gayle Stryker?” Lani asked when Diana answered.

  “She and her husband are old friends of mine,” Diana said. “You’ve met them, haven’t you?”

  “Not that I remember,” Lani said. “But I saw their picture in the paper this morning.”

  “So did I,” Diana said. “I’m sure they’re really broken up over what’s happened to that nice young man who worked for them.”

  “You knew him?” Lani asked. “The man who was in jail?”

  “I met him a couple of years ago,” Diana said. “At a banquet in the Strykers’ honor.”

  As Lani listened to her mother’s answers, she knew that what Diana was saying wasn’t enough. There was something more. Maybe Diana didn’t even know the problem existed, but Lani had to find out what it was. She tried to frame her questions in a way that would unmask the difficulty.

  “Have you seen them recently?” Lani asked.

  “Not for years,” Diana said. “Your father may have, though. He didn’t say for sure, but I know he was thinking about it.”

  “About seeing the Strykers?”

  “Well, one of them, anyway,” Diana said. “Years ago, Larry Stryker was one of the doctors at the hospital in Sells. He was working there when that girl whose case Dad’s working on was murdered. Dad was going to try to see Larry yesterday to see if he could find out who her attending physician was at the time she was hospitalized.”

  Lani’s body was suddenly strung so tight she could barely breathe. Even without Looks at Nothing’s crystals, before Lani’s eyes the flesh was sloughing
off Gayle Stryker’s photograph, leaving behind nothing but a gaping skull.

  “Did he?” she asked, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Do you know if Dad saw him…or her?”

  “I have no idea,” Diana answered. “Things were so hectic yesterday with the funeral and everything, I never got around to asking him. Why do you need to know?”

  “I was just wondering,” Lani answered lamely. “I saw the picture and remembered they were friends of yours.”

  “You’re right,” Diana said. “They are. How’s the car?”

  “Smitty’s working on it,” Lani said.

  “Good,” her mother told her. “If anybody can get those stains out, Smitty’s the guy.”

  Lani put the phone down and then stared out at the traffic going past on South Fourth. All her life she had heard stories about how, on the day Nana Dahd needed Looks at Nothing’s help, she had sent her nephew, Fat Crack Ortiz, to fetch him.

  The Gadsden Purchase of 1852 had divided the ancient lands of the Tohono O’odham, leaving part of the tribe in Mexico and the rest in the United States. S’ab Neid Pi Has, a wiry old medicine man, had lived in a Tohono O’odham village just south of the border. Fat Crack had agreed to go on what he was convinced would be a fool’s errand. He drove as far as The Gate—an unsupervised and unregulated border crossing on the reservation—that allowed tribal members access to friends and relations on either side of the international border.

  Because Looks at Nothing’s village had no telephone access, Fat Crack expected to have to park on the United States side of the border and then hitchhike or walk to the medicine man’s village. Instead, and much to his surprise, he found the blind old man resting in the shade of a mesquite tree patiently awaiting Fat Crack’s arrival. Somehow, without having to be told, he had sensed Nana Dahd’s need of him and had made his way to The Gate fully expecting that someone would arrive to take him to her.

  Lani understood there were mysterious ways of knowing things—just as Fat Crack had known she would someday be a doctor, and as Lani herself knew Fat Crack’s new grandchild, Gabriel, would be a willing student of all the things Nana Dahd and Fat Crack had taught Lani.