J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

Nobody ever once mentioned the word divorce , least of all Iona Dade Cooper.

Brandon Walker slowed the car when they came onto the open-range part of Highway 86. He knew that in the cool of the evening, livestock would be making its nightly way to water and forage. He didn’t want to take any chances.

What was she thinking about, huddled over there against the far door? Was she just worried about her son, or was she thinking about something else-about that time seven years ago when their lives had collided once before, about how he had told her back then that she should trust the system? Diana Ladd had been naive back then. So had he.

Driving along, Brandon himself rehashed the entire case in his head, how Gina Antone-he remembered her name now-was found floating facedown in a retention pond after an all-night rain dance at San Pedro Village. Initial presumption was death by drowning, but subsequent investigation indicated murder. Not only murder, but mutilation and torture as well.

The water hole where the body was found was outside reservation boundaries, so the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was called in on the case. Dead Indians didn’t count for much around Jack DuShane’s Sheriff’s Department. As a result, the case was delegated to the newest kid on the block-Brandon Walker, recently returned from Southeast Asia.

Even a novice like Walker found it simple to follow the trail that led to Garrison Ladd, who had been seen at the dance in the company of both the dead woman and a man named Andrew Carlisle, a professor of creative writing from the University of Arizona. As soon as the long arm of the law threatened to close in on them, Gary Ladd took himself out to the desert and put a bullet through his head, leaving his buddy Carlisle to take the rap for both of them.

Under questioning, Carlisle maintained that the two men were just out to have a little harmless fun. “You know how things get out of hand at rain dances,” he told the investigators. He maintained the girl was already drinking when they picked her up at Three Points. The three of them went to the dance, sat in the circle, and drank the cactus wine. Afterward, at the girl’s insistence, they left the village and stopped off at the water hole to polish off a few beers.

Carlisle claimed that he passed out only to waken later and be unable to find Ladd or the girl anywhere. He made his way back to the pickup and started it up, planning on driving home. He was still so smashed that he didn’t realize Gary Ladd had, for some unaccountable reason, tied a rope around the girl’s neck and fastened the rope to the bumper of the truck.

After driving only a few feet, he was startled to find Ladd, who had passed out in the bed of the truck, pounding frantically on the window, motioning for Carlisle to stop. Too late they hurried back to check on the girl; Gina Antone was already dead.

Still drunk, the men took her back to the water hole and sat there, drinking warm beer and talking about what to do. Carlisle claimed to know nothing at all about what had happened to the girl’s breast. Carlisle took no responsibility for anything else that might have transpired between Gary, Ladd and Gina while he himself was asleep. Carlisle’s claim of drunken innocence galled the detective, but without contradictory testimony, he couldn’t shake the story.

Throughout the questioning process, Carlisle maintained that they put the body in the water, hoping no one would notice for a while, and that when they did, people would assume Gina had drowned. Things didn’t work that way. As soon as the girl’s grandmother reported her missing, the people of San Pedro remembered the two drunk Mil-gahn who had escorted Gina Antone at the dance. Word was passed along, first to the tribal police, and later to Brandon Walker of the Sheriff’s Department.

Much to his dismay, Sheriff DuShane found himself stuck with a solved murder and a very prominent murderer-a University of Arizona professor, no less. Those were complications DuShane hadn’t counted on when he assigned Brandon Walker to the case. Offending the university community didn’t bode well for DuShane’s political future. Several pointed damage-control suggestions were made to Detective Walker advising him to back off. Rather than quitting, Walker renewed his efforts.

He called on Diana Ladd in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide. “What about the bite on Gina’s breast?” a tearful Diana had demanded when he questioned her not only about the suicide, but also in regard to Gina Antone’s death. Word of the grisly mutilation had somehow found its way into newspaper accounts of the murder.

“What about it?” Brandon asked.

“Gary would never do something like that. Never. Isn’t there some way to check it, to do an impression of the bite mark and compare it with Gary’s dental records? They won’t be the same, I know they won’t.”

Of course, the one ghoulishly mutilating bite wasn’t all Gina Antone had suffered, not by any means. There were burns and cuts and signs of innumerable forced entries. But the bite itself could have provided the most telling testimony had Brandon Walker been able to check it, but pertinent information about the bite somehow had disappeared from Gina Antone’s file. For years now, that missing piece of paper had haunted Brandon Walker. Would the outcome have been different had it been found?

There was no way to tell for sure, but without it, Andrew Carlisle’s lawyer managed to plea-bargain the more serious charges down to one of second-degree rape and voluntary manslaughter. The judge on the case, hard-nosed Judge Clarence Barker, took an immediate and intense dislike to Andrew Carlisle. Barker threw the book at Carlisle anyway, handing out eight years. That much of a stretch was a long time for a first-time offender, especially when the perpetrator was an Anglo and the victim was an Indian, but Barker made it stick, and no amount of appealing changed it.

For some reason Brandon Walker could never fathom, during the legal maneuverings, Diana Ladd became Rita Antone’s constant companion and champion. All the while maintaining her own husband’s innocence, she made it her business to see that Andrew Carlisle got what was coming to him. She was outraged by the plea-bargaining arrangement. From her point of view, eight years in Florence was a mere pittance of punishment, almost as good as Carlisle getting off scot-free.

Years later, Walker could see that Gary Ladd hadn’t exactly got off, either. Dead by his own hand, he went to his grave under a cloud, convicted of suicide and innocent of murder and rape only by the narrow technicality of never having come to trial. Walker considered both Ladd and Carlisle guilty as hell. Both were equally despicable, but most of the burden for their crimes had fallen on Diana Ladd’s narrow shoulders.

Justice really was blind, Walker thought humorlessly. Gary Ladd was dead, but his widow was still paying.

Back in the deserted English Department office, standing with his arms crossed, Garrison Walther Ladd leaned against the receptionist’s desk regarding Diana’s fetching backside with considerable interest while she distributed the packets of dittoed material to the various mailboxes. Knowing he was looking at her made her nervous. A deep flush spread up her neck and across her cheeks, not stopping until it reached the roots of her auburn hair.

“You’re serious about what you do, aren’t you?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” After what Garrison Ladd had just told her, what else could he expect?

“Most girls your age are more. . well, lighthearted, I suppose.”

She resented his making small talk. After all, the president was dead. Shouldn’t they be talking about that? “Most girls don’t have to pay their own way,” she returned.