Authors: J. A. Jance
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 Leggett 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.
“At six o’clock sharp, I’m going to be on the phone to the department, raising hell. Ford Myers may not be the one who comes out here to take the Missing Persons report, but someone sure as hell will be, or I’ll know the reason why!”
Diana glanced at her watch. It was ten of one. “Maybe we should go to bed. Even if we can’t sleep, it would probably do our bodies some good if we lay down for a while.”
Brandon looked at Diana. Other than having kicked off her shoes, she was still wearing the dress she had worn to the banquet, but she looked bedraggled. Her hair had come adrift. Brandon was startled by the dark shadows under her eyes and by the bone-weary strain showing around the corners of her mouth.
“You’re right,” he said quickly, standing up and helping her to rise as well. “If there’s a phone call, we can take it in the bedroom just as easily as we can take it here.”
They walked into the bedroom together. Brandon stripped to his shorts while Diana undressed and hung up her dress. The bed was still in disarray as a result of their afternoon lovemaking. As Brandon set about straightening the covers, a plastic cassette tape slid out from under Diana’s pillow.
“What’s this?” he asked, picking it up. Other than the manufacturer’s label, there was no marking on it of any kind. “Did you leave this tape here, Di?” he asked.
Diana, dressed in a nightgown, came out of her walk-in closet. “What tape?” she asked.
“This one,” Brandon said, holding it up so she could see it. “I found it under your pillow.”
Diana Ladd Walker swayed on her feet and groped for the door-jamb to keep from falling. Her face turned deathly pale. “Where did that come from?” she whispered.
“I told you. I found it under your pillow. Maybe it’s a message from Lani.”
“No,” Diana said. Shivering, she looked at the tape and shook her head. “No, it isn’t.”
But Brandon’s mind was made up. “She probably decided to leave us a tape instead of a note,” he said.
Tape in hand, Brandon was already on his way to the living room, headed for the stereo deck with the built-in cassette player. Diana came after him. “It’s not from Lani, Brandon. Don’t play it.”
The brittle note of warning in her voice was enough to cause him to turn and look at her in alarm. “Why not?” he asked.
“Don’t play it,” she said again. “Please don’t.”
Brandon looked at his wife impatiently. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked.
“The tape isn’t from Lani,” Diana said. “It’s from Andrew Carlisle. I know it is.”
Disgusted and impatient, Brandon turned to the stereo. As he inserted the tape into the player, he glanced back at his wife. “You and Fat Crack,” he said. “Dead men don’t do tapes. How could he?”
Hunching her shoulders and doubling over as if in pain, Diana Walker sank down on the couch. “Brandon, listen to me. It is from Carlisle. You don’t want to play it.”
“Diana, if there’s a chance this is going to help us locate Lani, of course we’re going to play it,” he said.
As the sound filled the room, they both recognized Lani’s voice almost at once, but it was muffled and difficult to understand, as if it had been recorded from a great distance. Pressing the remote volume control, Brandon turned it up several notches.
“What was that?” he said, frowning with concentration. “Didn’t it sound as though she said something about Quentin?”