by J. A. Jance
“What the hell is she doing here?” Quentin demanded. “I said I’d take you to the cave. Bringing someone else along wasn’t part of the bargain, especially not her.”
Quentin didn’t like being around his sister. Lani was almost as weird as that old Indian hag named Rita who used to take care of her when she was little. Lani had funny ways about her, ways of knowing things that she maybe shouldn’t have, just like Rita. If Quentin had been able to, he would have climbed in the backseat right then, just to put some distance between them.
“She’s your sister, isn’t she?” Mitch returned mildly. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I brought her along for the ride.”
“Mitch,” Quentin said, speaking slowly, trying to make his lips and brain work in conjunction, trying to make it sound as though his objection were more general and less personal. “Don’t you understand anything? She may be my stepsister, but she’s also an Indian. Once the tribe hears about my pots, they’ll raise all kinds of hell.”
“Lani’s not going to say anything to anybody, are you, Lani?”
Once again, Vega’s warning fingers caressed the top of her leg. Dreading his viselike grip, Lani flinched under the pressure of his hand and shook her head.
“No,” she said at once. “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”
The turnoff to Coleman Road was coming up fast. Mitch Johnson switched on his signal. “Now what?”
“Go about half a mile up. There’s a road off to the left. A few yards beyond that, there’s a wash off to the right. Turn there.”
“Up the wash?”
“Right,” Quentin said, grateful that his tongue and lips seemed to be working better now, although he felt like hell. This was one of the worst hangovers he’d ever encountered.
“Before we turn off, though,” he continued, “you’ll need to stop and let me drive. The trail isn’t marked. You won’t know where to go.”
Mitch glanced dubiously across the seat. “You’re sure you can drive?”
“What do you think I am, drunk or something?” Quentin asked irritably.
“Definitely or something,” Mitch Johnson whispered under his breath.
Lani sat quietly between the two men—between her brother and the man Quentin had just called Mitch. At least she now knew what the M stood for in Vega’s signature. Mitch.
As the Bronco’s heavy-duty tires whined down the pavement, Lani looked up at the shadow of mountain looming above them. Ioligam’s stately dark flanks were silhouetted against a starry sky.
They were going after pots. If they had been found here on the reservation, they were actually Tohono O’othham pots that might have been hidden inside the mountain for hundreds of years. Perhaps they had remained hidden from view in one of the sacred caves on I’itoi’s second favorite mountain.
She remembered once listening to Davy and Brian Fellows talking about the day Tommy and Quentin Walker had found a big limestone cave out on the reservation.
“They didn’t go inside, did they?” Lani had asked.
Davy shrugged. “Of course they did.”
“But that’s against the rules,” Lani had objected indignantly. “Nobody’s supposed to go inside those caves. They’re sacred. You should have stopped them.”
Davy and Brian had both laughed at her. “What’s so funny?” she had demanded. “Why are you two laughing?”
“Fortunately, you’re much too young to remember growing up with Quentin and Tommy. When we were all kids, those two were a pair of holy terrors. As far as they were concerned, rules were made to be broken.”
“So what happened?”
“As far as I know, they went there just that once,” Brian said. “It wasn’t long after that when Tommy ran away. If Quentin went back out to the reservation to go exploring the cave by himself, he never mentioned it.”
“If they went inside the cave, maybe that’s what happened to Tommy.”
“What?” Brian asked.
“Maybe I’itoi got him,” Lani said.
Brian shook his head. When he spoke, the laughter had gone out of his voice. “Don’t ever say anything about this to your dad,” he said seriously, “but from the rumors I heard, I’d say drug-dealing is what got Tommy. What I’ve never been able to understand is why it didn’t get Quentin, too.”
As they turned up Coleman Road, Lani felt a growing certainty that the place where they were going was the same cave Brian and Davy had talked about. Off to the left was the dirt track that led off to Rattlesnake Skull charco, the place they used to go every year to redecorate the shrine dedicated to Nana Dahd’s murdered granddaughter.
“We shouldn’t go there,” Lani said softly, unable to keep herself from issuing the warning. Even someone as cruel as Mitch Vega deserved to be warned away from danger.
“See there?” Quentin yelped angrily, glaring at her. “I knew you shouldn’t have brought her.”
“Shut up, Lani,” Mitch said.
Lani closed her eyes and tried to hear Rita’s words. Listen to me and do exactly as I say.
Alvin Miller was a talented guy who was able to do his work in a seemingly focused fashion, all the while carrying on a reasonably intelligent conversation with whoever happened to be within earshot.
In this case, as he carried his gear into Brandon and Diana Walker’s house in Gates Pass, Brandon was giving Alvin an earful. He had responded to former Sheriff Walker’s call for help without asking for any specific details on the situation. Now, though, Brandon was venting his frustration over the way Detective Ford Myers was—or rather was not—handling the disappearance of Brandon’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Lani.
Other than having been one once, Alvin wasn’t especially wise to the ways of teenagers. Nonetheless, he did see some merit to Detective Ford’s inclination to go slow and not push panic buttons. Although Alvin sympathized with his former boss, he could see that the whole thing might very well turn out to be nothing but a headstrong teenager pulling a stunt on her too-trusting parents. After all, armed or not, most missing kids did turn up back home eventually.
So Alvin listened and nodded. Betweentimes, he went to work. “What all would you like me to check for prints?” he asked.
“Lani’s bicycle,” Brandon answered. “That’s outside in the carport. There’s a pair of rubber-handled tongs in the kitchen sink. And back in my study, somebody went to the trouble of breaking up a couple thousand bucks’ worth of custom-framing.”
For comparison purposes, Alvin took prints from both Brandon and Diana Walker as well as prints from places in the daughter’s room that would most likely prove to belong to Lani herself. He packed up the tongs, the bicycle, and the better part of the picture-frame display. Alvin knew he’d be better off dusting those in the privacy of his lab. What he couldn’t take back to the department with him was the house itself and furniture that was too big to move.
“Where did you say you kept the key to the gun cabinet?”
“In the desk.” Brandon had been following Alvin from room to room, watching the process with intent interest. As Alvin settled down to dust the desktop, Brandon left the room. The print—one with a distinctive diagonal slash across the face of it—leaped out at Alvin the moment he delicately brushed the graphite across the smooth oak surface.
Alvin Miller could barely believe his eyes. He knew he had seen that same print, or else one very much like it, on the wallet Dan Leggett had brought in earlier and on several of the bones in the detective’s boxed collection. For a moment, Alvin was too flustered to know what to do.
He was here in Brandon Walker’s home collecting prints as an unofficial favor to an old friend. The problem was, if he was right, if this print and the other one were identical, then Alvin Miller had stumbled across something that would link the newly discovered bones with the break-in here at the Gates Pass house. Not only that, connecting those two sets of dots could put him in the middle of a potentially career-killing cross fire between two dueling detectives—Dan Legge
tt and Ford Myers.
In addition, if Lani Walker was somehow involved in an assault and a possible homicide, the chances of her disappearance being nothing but ordinary teenaged rebellion went way down. Whatever was going on with her was most likely a whole lot more serious than that. The same went for Brandon Walker’s missing .357.
Feeling as though he’d just blundered into a hive of killer bees, Alvin considered his next move. For the time being, saying anything to Brandon Walker was out, certainly until Alvin actually had a chance to compare those two distinctive prints. In the meantime, he took several more reasonably good prints off the desktop and drawer.
“Getting any good ones?” Brandon Walker asked, reappearing in the door to his study.
“Some,” Alvin Miller allowed, “but my pager just went off.” That was an outright lie, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “I’ll stop here for now. I’ll come back tomorrow sometime. Just don’t touch anything until I do. The stuff I’ve already picked up I’ll work on in the lab.”
“Sure thing, Al,” Brandon Walker said. “I appreciate it.”
Alvin Miller drove straight back to the department. There, after simply eyeballing the two dusted prints, he picked up the phone and dialed Dan Leggett’s home phone number. “Who’s calling?” Leggett’s wife asked in a tone that indicated she wasn’t pleased with this work-related, late Saturday-evening phone call.
“It’s Alvin Miller. Tell him I’m calling about the prints.”
“So there were some?” Leggett asked, coming on the phone. “Did you get a hit?”
“Not yet. I haven’t had a chance to run them yet, but there’s a problem.”
“What kind of problem?” Dan Leggett asked.
“How well do you get along with Detective Myers?”
“He’s a jerk, why?”
“Because I’ve got a match between one of your prints and prints on a case he’s working. Actually, a case he hasn’t quite gotten around to working on yet.”
“This is beginning to sound complicated.”
“It is. The matching print came from the top of the desk in Brandon Walker’s study in his home office. Somebody broke into the place, smashed up some of his stuff, and stole a gun. But the real kicker is that Lani Walker, Sheriff Walker’s sixteen-year-old daughter, is among the missing and has been since early this morning. Myers refused to take the MP report because of the twenty-four-hour wait. Claimed it was probably just kid bullshit. But with the matching print . . .”
“You think her disappearance may be linked to our assault case from this afternoon?”
“Don’t you?” Alvin asked. “It’s sure as hell linked to your bones and wallet.”
Detective Leggett considered for a moment. “So how did you get dragged into all this? Into the Walker thing, I mean?”
“Myers told Brandon Walker that the soonest anybody could come check for prints was Monday, and Walker called to see if I could do it any earlier. I couldn’t very well turn the man down, now could I?”
“Ford Myers is going to be ripped when he finds out,” Leggett said. “He’ll be gunning for you.”
Alvin Miller laughed. “That’s nothing new. He already is.”
“So what are you going to do with the prints you have?”
“Get them ready, scan them into the computer, and run them.”
“Tonight? How long will it take you?”
“An hour or so to get them ready. After that, it’s just a matter of waiting for the computer to do its thing. Do you want me to give you a call later on if I get a hit?”
“You’d better,” Dan Leggett said. “But do me one favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t tell Ford Myers until I give you the word.”
“Don’t worry,” Alvin Miller said. “Why should I? After all, he isn’t expecting fingerprint results before Monday morning. Do you want me to call you there and let you know what I find?”
“Don’t bother. I’m heading back out.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back over to the hospital to see if Brian Fellows has had a chance to talk to Mr. Chavez.”
A few yards beyond the turnoff to the Rattlesnake Skull charco, Mitch swung the wheel sharply to the right. Pulling over to the side, he stopped. “Time to switch into four-wheel drive,” he said.
Quentin reached for the door handle. “How’d you know this was it?” he asked.
“I can see your tracks heading off across the wash, dummy,” Mitch Johnson replied. “And if I can see them, so can the rest of the world.”
Lani was dismayed to see that once on his feet, Quentin could barely stand upright. She stayed in the car while Quentin struggled with the hubs. Finally Mitch ordered Quentin back into the truck, the backseat this time.
“You come with me,” he said to Lani. Once she was on her feet, he handed her a branch he had broken off a nearby mesquite. “I want you to follow behind the truck,” he said. “Brush out the tire tracks, and yours, too. Do you understand?”
Lani nodded.
“And if you do anything off the wall, if you try to run, not only will I shoot your brother with his father’s own gun, I’ll come get you, too. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
Lani watched Mitch climb back into the truck, knowing that he was wrong about that. Quentin Walker was Brandon Walker’s son, her father’s son, but as far as Lani was concerned, Davy Ladd was her only brother. Still, she couldn’t stand the thought that some action of hers, even an action that might save her own life, could cost Quentin his. She didn’t like him much and she owed him nothing. And had she turned and fled into the desert right then, she might very well have managed to hide well enough and long enough to get away.
But how would she feel when she heard the report of gunfire, a shot that would come from her father’s own gun, one that would snuff out Quentin’s life? It didn’t matter if he was drugged or just drunk. Either way, he was almost as incapable of defending himself against Mitch as Lani had been earlier.
While Mitch backed up and turned the Bronco to head off across the wash, that was Lani’s dilemma—to run and try to save herself or to stay and try to save Quentin’s life as well as her own. There was a part of her that already knew Mitch’s real intention was to kill them both. He had no reason not to.
The Bronco bounced across the wash and then paused on the far side. “Come on,” Mitch yelled out the window. “Hurry it up.”
The moment Lani Walker heard his voice, shouting at her over the idling rumble of the Bronco, she made up her mind. Brother or not, she would try to be Quentin’s keeper. If they both lived, she might once again be able to tell her parents in person that she loved them. If not, if she and Quentin were both doomed and if seeing her parents again was impossible, then she was determined to leave some word for them, some farewell message. Slipping one hand into the pocket of her jeans, Lani pulled out her precious O’othham basket. Resisting the temptation to press its reassuring presence into her palm once more, she dropped it, allowing it to fall atop the small hump of rocky gravel that formed the shoulder of the road.
If someone happened to find the basket and was good enough to give it to Lani’s parents, then perhaps Diana and Brandon Walker would understand that it was a last loving message sent from Lani to them. If not—even if the carefully woven hair charm came to no other end than to grace Wosho koson’s—Pack Rat’s—burrow—Lani could be assured the sacred symbol of the Tohono O’othham, the maze, would not be defiled by Mitch’s evil Ohb touch. He might manage to claim other trophies, including some ancient Indian pots, but Lani’s basket would never be his.
Fighting back tears, Lani bent herself to her assigned task, wielding the makeshift broom. As she scraped the tire tracks out of the sand, Lani realized that with every stroke she was also erasing any hope that some rescuer might find them in time.
That meant she and Quentin would most likely die. If it came down to a fight between her and
Mitch, there could be little doubt of the outcome. He would win. Lani and Quentin would die, but the terrible pain in her breast told her that in the hands of someone like Mitch Vega, there might be far worse things than death.
That awful knowledge came over Lani in a mind-clearing rush, calming her fears rather than adding to them. Perhaps she would not be able to save either Quentin’s life or her own from this new evil Ohb, but by leaving the basket behind, she had at least saved that.
As long as those few strands of black and yellow hair stayed woven together, then some remnant of Lani’s own life would remain as well, for she had woven her own spirit into that basket—her own spirit and Jessica’s and Nana Dahd’s as well.
No matter what he did, Mitch would never be able to touch that.
For some time after Alvin Miller left, Brandon and Diana simply sat in the living room together, sharing many of the same thoughts, but for minutes at a time, neither of them spoke.
“Should we call Fat Crack?” Diana asked at last.
“I don’t see what good that would do,” Brandon said.
“But what if . . .”
“If what?”
Diana paused for a moment before she answered. “What if he’s right and this is what he meant yesterday when he was talking about the evil coming from my book?”
“How could it be?” Brandon returned. “I don’t see how Lani’s disappearance now can have anything to do with Andrew Carlisle showing up here twenty-one years ago.”
“I don’t either,” Diana said. “Forget I even mentioned it.”
Again they were quiet. “What if we’ve lost her forever, Brandon? What if we never see her again?”
Swallowing hard, Brandon Walker leaned back and rested his head on the chair. He had already lived through this agony once when they lost Tommy. It had never occurred to him that he might lose a second child.
“Don’t say that,” he said. “We’ll find her. I know we’ll find her.”
But even as he said the words, Brandon’s own heart was drowning in despair. He had heard those same platitudes spoken by other grieving parents about other missing children, some of whom had never been heard from again.
