Kiss of the Bees w-2

by J. A. Jance

  For the first time in the whole process, Lani Walker’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank you,” she said.

  Diana met Brandon at the door when he came home from the hospital late that evening. “Is Quentin going to make it?”

  Brandon paused long enough to hang his keys up on the Peg-Board. “Probably,” he said.

  “And the bones?”

  Brandon sank down beside the table and Diana brought him a glass of iced tea. “I called Dr. Sam,” he said. “He ran the dental profile through his computer. The bones they found at Rattlesnake Skull belong to Tommy, all right.”

  Dr. Sam was short for Swaminathan Narayanamurty, a professor of biometrics at the University of Arizona. Together Dr. Sam and Brandon Walker had come up with the idea of amassing a database of dental records on reported Missing Persons from all over the country. Brandon Walker’s effective lobbying before a national meeting of the Law Enforcement and Security Administrators had enabled Dr. Sam to gain some key seed money funding years earlier. That initial grant had grown into a demonstration project.

  During the election campaign, Bill Forsythe had brought that project up, implying that Brandon’s interest in the project had been based on personal necessity because of his own son’s unexplained disappearance rather than on sound law enforcement practices. Personal or not, the connection had been strong enough that on this warm summer Sunday, Dr. Sam had been only too happy to interrupt a week-long stay in a cabin on Mount Lemmon to run the profile of the skull Dan Leggett had retrieved from Rattlesnake Skull Charco.

  “Detective Leggett says he thinks Quentin was in the process of moving the bones out of the cave for fear Johnson would see them, when Manny Chavez stumbled into the area. Quentin must have panicked and attacked the man.”

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said. “About Quentin and Tommy.”

  “Don’t be sorry about Tommy,” Brandon told her. “At least we know now that it was over quickly for him, that he didn’t suffer. It’s closure, Di. It’s something I’ve lain awake nights worrying about for years.”

  The doorbell rang. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Brandon grumbled irritably. “Who can that be now?”

  A moment later, a sunburned Candace Waverly appeared in the kitchen doorway. “It’s Detective Leggett,” she said. “He was wondering if he could see you two for a few minutes.”

  Wearily, Brandon rubbed his whisker-stubbled chin. “Sure,” he said. “Send him on in.”

  “Sorry to bother you,” the detective said, placing a worn Hartmann briefcase on the kitchen table. “I know you’ve both had a terrible two days of it, but I wanted to stop by and show you some of this before I turn it over to the property folks.”

  Opening the case, he pulled out a pair of latex gloves. While he was putting them on, Diana glanced at the loose piece of paper—a faxed copy of a mug shot—that lay fully exposed in the open briefcase. A sharp intake of breath caused both men to look at her with some concern as all color drained from her face.

  “Diana, what’s the matter?” Brandon demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  Diana’s hand trembled as she reached out and picked up the paper. “It’s him,” she moaned. “Dear God in heaven, it is him!”

  The paper fluttered out of Diana’s hand. Brandon caught it in midair and studied it himself. “That’s Mitch Johnson, all right,” he said.

  “It may be Mitch Johnson, but it’s Monty Lazarus, too,” Diana whispered. “He looked older and he wore a red wig, but I’d recognize him anywhere.”

  “Monty Lazarus!” Brandon repeated. “The reporter who interviewed you?”

  “Yes.”

  Confused, Detective Leggett looked from husband to wife. “Who the hell is Monty Lazarus?” he asked.

  Brandon put both hands protectively on Diana’s shoulders before he answered. “The publicity department at Diana’s New York publisher set her up to do an in-depth interview yesterday with someone named Monty Lazarus who was supposedly a stringer with several important magazines. Except it turns out he isn’t a stringer at all. He isn’t even a writer. He’s Mitch Johnson, ex-con, somebody who vowed that he’d get me one day for sending him up.”

  Leggett shook his head. “It’s actually worse than that,” he said. “These are documents I’ve just now removed from Mitch Johnson’s motor home out on Coleman Road.”

  Saying that, he handed Diana Walker a pair of gloves and a pair of manuscript boxes. One was packed to overflowing while the other was less than half-full.

  “You might want to take a look at these, Mrs. Walker, but put on gloves before you do it. Fingerprints and all. Meantime, Brandon, there’s something I need to show you out in the car.”

  Brandon Walker followed Leggett out to the driveway where the detective popped the trunk on his Ford Taurus. There, illuminated in the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun, lay Mitch Johnson’s awful charcoal nude of Dolores Lanita Walker.

  “Where did this god-awful thing come from?” Brandon choked.

  “From Mitch Johnson’s motor home,” Kendall answered. “I smuggled it out. Along with this one, too.” He took out a second sketch, one of Quentin Walker. “Neither one of these is on any of the evidence lists. I brought them here so you’d have a chance to get rid of them.”

  “Thank you, Dan,” Brandon Walker said gratefully. “I’ll take care of them right away.”

  With Brandon carrying Lani’s picture by the corners, holding it as though it were the rancid carcass of some long-dead thing, and with Dan Leggett lugging the sketch of Quentin, the two men walked into the backyard. There Brandon grabbed an armload of chopped firewood from his never-ending stack and threw several branches into the barbecue grill. Minutes later, the two offending pictures had been reduced to a pile of paper-thin ashes.

  “That’s that,” Brandon said, dusting soot from his hands and onto his pant legs.

  “There are two other pictures,” Dan Leggett said quietly.

  “Of Lani and Quentin?”

  “No,” Leggett said somberly. “If there are others of them, we haven’t found them yet. The two pictures I’m talking about are of someone else. They’re titled ‘Before’ and ‘After.’ ”

  “They’re both of the same man,” Leggett replied. “Before and after a murder. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, the victim will turn out to be Mitch Johnson’s ex-wife’s second husband. That big-time developer who got carved up down in Nogales a few months back.”

  “Larry Wraike?” Brandon Walker croaked in surprise. “But I thought a prostitute did that.”

  “So did everybody else,” Leggett replied. “Me included.”

  The two men went back inside. In the kitchen they found Diana sifting through a stack of papers. Her haunted eyes met Brandon’s the moment he stepped into the room.

  “Fat Crack was right,” she said. “The danger did come from my book.”

  “What do you mean?” Brandon asked.

  “Some of this is Andrew Carlisle’s personal diary, Brandon,” she told him, holding back the single detail that some of the passages had been addressed directly to her, that even back in 1988, Carlisle had intended that someday Diana Ladd Walker would read what he had written.

  “Carlisle and Mitch Johnson were cellmates for years up in Florence,” Diana continued. “It’s all here in black and white. It started the first day when I went to Florence to interview Carlisle for the book. That’s when Carlisle found out Quentin was up there, too. They targeted him that very day, Brandon. They set him up, and that’s what this whole thing is about—revenge. Andrew Carlisle was still after me and Mitch Johnson was after you. Lani was the perfect way to get to us both. And that’s not all.”

  “Not all?” Brandon echoed. “How could there be more?”

  “This,” Diana said. She held up what seemed to be the title page of a manuscript.

  “What is it?” Brandon asked.

  “Do you remember when Garrison died I told you the manuscript he was working on disappeared?”

  Br
andon nodded.

  “This is it,” Diana said. “I recognized the typeface from his old Smith-Corona the moment I saw it. It’s called A Death Before Dying. It’s supposedly a work of fiction about a college instructor—a handsome man—presumably happily married to a lovely wife. Gary didn’t have sense enough to change things very much. The husband taught freshman English; the wife was an elementary school teacher.”

  “So?” Brandon asked a little impatiently. “I’ve heard you say yourself that first novels are always autobiographical.”

  Diana nodded. “They are, and there was an ugly secret running just below the surface of this one. All the while the teacher thinks she’s happily married, the husband is carrying on with another professor—a male professor. Believe me, it’s a very special relationship to which the young wife proves to be an unyielding obstacle.”

  “You’re saying Garrison and Carlisle had something going, something sexual?”

  Diana nodded. “I think so,” she said.

  “That would make sense then,” Brandon said. “It would certainly explain some of the hold Carlisle wielded over the man.”

  “Some of it,” Diana agreed. “The kicker is here, though, on the very last page. The last written page because the manuscript is clearly incomplete. The last scene is mostly a dialogue between the two men. They’re sitting in a bar, talking. Planning exactly how they’re going to unload the inconvenient presence of that meddlesome wife.”

  “You?” Brandon asked.

  Diana nodded. Her voice sounded far more self-possessed than she felt. “If I had gone to the dance with them that night,” she said, “my guess is I would have been the one who died at Rattlesnake Skull Charco, not Gina Antone.”

  For sixteen days and nights Lani Walker stayed in the tent Baby and Fat Crack Ortiz had erected for her near the base of Ioligam. She spent her days weaving a rectangular medicine basket. When it was finished, the lid fit perfectly. Lani held it up to the light and studied the final product with no small satisfaction. It was not as well done as one of Nana Dahd’s own baskets, but it would do.

  Each evening, about sunset, Gabe Ortiz would arrive by himself, bringing with him an evening meal and the next day’s salt-free food. The traditional dictates of the enemy purification process—e lihmhun—specify a period of fasting and of avoiding salted food.

  On the final day of her purification exile, with the medicine basket complete, Lani took a flashlight and ventured into Betraying Woman’s cave one last time. There, shoved up against the stalagmite behind which she had hidden for hours, Lani found one of her two missing boots. She picked it up and took it with her when she continued on into Oks Gagda’s burial chamber.

  This time when Lani entered the earthen-floored chamber, there was a feeling of utter emptiness about it. The spirits—kokoi—that had once inhabited the place were no longer there. Careful not to touch or disturb the decaying bones, Lani placed the shoe beside Betraying Woman’s bones as a kind of memorial, then she stepped over to the wall where all the broken pieces of blasted pottery lay in a dusty heap. Kneeling down, Lani picked up one shard of clay after another, examining each in turn, looking for one that would speak to her, the one that was worthy of inclusion in Lani Walker’s newly woven medicine basket.

  The fragment she finally settled on was all black, inside and out. She chose it because the fine black texture reminded her of the touch of the bat’s wings against her skin. Pocketing her treasure, Lani was about to stand up and leave when she caught sight of something else reflected in the glow of the flashlight, something that would have remained completely hidden had she not moved several pieces of the pottery.

  When Lani saw the tiny bones, she thought at first that she had discovered the skeleton of a tiny baby. It wasn’t, though. When she picked it up and the bones fell apart, she realized that what she had found was the moldering skeleton of a bat’s wing.

  Awareness made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. I’itoi had given her a sign. Dolores Lanita Walker was Mualig Siakam—Forever Spinning, and Kulani O’oks—Medicine Woman as well. But she was also Nanakumal Namkam—Bat Meeter. Elder Brother had led her to this place and had shown her it was true.

  Why not four names? Lani thought with a laugh. After all, all things in nature go in fours.

  On that last night, Fat Crack brought along Looks At Nothing’s medicine pouch. After Lani and he had eaten, the medicine man drew a circle on the ground, a line that encircled both man and girl. The two of them settled down on the ground inside the circle.

  “It’s time for your first Peace Smoke,” he told her. “Davy and Candace flew out of Tucson for Vegas this afternoon. They’re supposed to get married tomorrow, but before he left, Davy brought me these. He said they belong to you.”

  Opening the medicine pouch, he pulled out two items and handed them to her. She recognized them at once as the treasures from Nana Dahd’s old medicine basket—the piece of pottery with the distinctive turtle design etched into the clay and the precious scalp bundle.

  “Thank you,” Lani said. Opening her basket, she put the two additions inside and closed the lid.

  “What else do you have in there?” Fat Crack asked.

  “Nothing much,” Lani said. “My people-hair charm. A finger from a bat’s wing. And a piece of Betraying Woman’s pottery.”

  “Bring it,” Fat Crack said. “The piece of pottery, I mean. After we have the Peace Smoke, you and I will study the pottery together.”

  Using Looks At Nothing’s old Zippo lighter, Fat Crack carefully lit the wiw. And then, one puff at a time, they smoked the bitter-tasting wild tobacco, passing the lit cigarette back and forth, saying “Nawoj” each time it changed hands.

  “How is Quentin?” Lani asked.

  “Out of the hospital,” Fat Crack replied. “But he checked himself into a drug and alcohol rehab program.”

  “Will he be better?” Lani asked.

  Fat Crack shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “He has let go of the secret of his brother’s death. Secrets like that can be very bad. They eat at you. Perhaps now, he’ll be able to get better.”

  “Perhaps,” Lani agreed.

  They were quiet again. Far off to the east, flickers of lightning touched the horizon. The summer rains were coming. They would be here soon—by the end of the week at the latest. In a way, Lani was sorry that when the deluges began she would be living back inside the house in Gates Pass with a regular roof over her head rather than a canvas tent.

  Lani Walker wasn’t a smoker—not even of regular cigarettes. By the time the last of the wild tobacco smoke had eddied away into the nighttime air, she felt light-headed.

  “Have you ever heard of divining crystals?” Fat Crack asked. His voice seemed to come to her from very far away.

  “I’ve heard of them,” she said. “But I’ve never seen any.”

  Fat Crack reached into the medicine pouch and pulled out the chamois bag. Untying it, he held open Lani’s hand and poured the four crystals into it.

  “Looks At Nothing said I should keep them until I found a successor worthy of them,” he said. “It was through using these that I knew to look for you near Rattlesnake Skull that morning. Now I want you to try it.”

  “Me?” Lani asked. “But I don’t know what to do.”

  “Take your piece of pottery,” Fat Crack directed. “Look at it for a time through each of the different crystals and tell me what you see.”

  One at a time, holding them up to the firelight, Lani examined the pottery through each of the first three crystals. “I’m not seeing anything,” she said, when she put down the third. “It’s not going to work.”

  “Try the last one,” Fat Crack urged.

  This time, instead of putting the crystal down, Lani continued staring at it for a long time. First a minute passed, and then another. Finally she looked up at him.

  “The Apache warrior—Ohb-s-chu cheggiadkam—came back here looking for his lover, didn’t he? He came looking for
Betraying Woman. Somehow his spirit found its way into Andrew Carlisle.”

  Fat Crack nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “And into Mitch Johnson as well.”

  “And now they’re free?”

  “Yes,” Gabe Ortiz answered. “When you broke Betraying Woman’s pots after all this time, you set all of them free.”

  Gabe reached out. One at a time he picked up each of the four divining crystals and returned them to the bag. When the bag was tied shut, he placed the crystals—chamois bag and all—inside Lani’s medicine basket.

  “They belong to you now, Bat Meeter,” he said with a smile. “They are a gift from Looks At Nothing to you, from one wise old siwani to a young one. Use them well.”

  Acknowledgments

  The author gratefully acknowledges the work of Dean and Lucille Saxton and their invaluable book, Papago/Pima-English Dictionary, and Harold Bell Wright for his wonderfully vivid retelling of Tohono O’othham legends in Long Ago Told. She also expresses her thanks to Special Collections at the University of Arizona Library for making available materials that otherwise would have been impossible to obtain. Without these crucial contributions, this book would not exist.

  Appendix

  A Statement by J.A. Jance

  When Kiss of the Bees starts, twenty years have passed since the end of Hour of the Hunter. Diana Ladd—who desperately wanted to be a writer back then—has just been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Her son, Davy, has grown up and has just graduated from law school. Her husband, a struggling detective in Hour of the Hunter, has spent years as the sheriff of Pima County, but he has recently lost a bid for reelection. And the crazed killer from back then is dead and out of the picture, right? Wrong!

  When it came time to write the sequel to Hour of the Hunter I knew only one piece of the puzzle. Twenty-five years earlier, when I was a school librarian on the reservation, a young girl, a toddler who had been abandoned by her birth parents, almost died after being stung by ants. Her elderly caretaker was deaf as a post and didn’t hear the child screaming. This harrowing tale, one that stuck in my heart and wouldn’t go away, was the only story I was determined to use in the upcoming book, one that still didn’t have a name the night before I was set to start writing it.