J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Gayle Stryker laughed. “Don’t sound so worried. I’m going to offer you a job. It isn’t exactly an invitation to a beheading.”

But it could just as well have been. Two margaritas-blended with no salt-were waiting on the table when Erik showed up. In order to avoid rousing Dick Mathers’s suspicion, Erik had left his tie and blazer in the car when he arrived at work that morning. He donned them only after pulling into the parking lot across from the restaurant.

Gayle, in a lime-green silk shirt with a pair of matching slacks, was already seated. A discreet glance at her plunging neckline left little to the imagination. She welcomed him to the table with a cordial peck on the cheek.

“So good of you to come,” she murmured in his ear. The look she gave him as she resumed her seat left no doubt in Erik’s mind that the double entendre he thought he’d heard had indeed been intended. Once again, Erik blushed. The bones in his legs turned to mush, and he tumbled into the chair opposite her.

Knowing Dick Mathers disapproved of what he called “boozy lunches” and hoping for something a little less volatile than tequila, Erik started to push the margarita glass away. Gayle pointed a diamond-bedecked finger in his direction and shook it reprovingly.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she warned. “I didn’t come here to drink alone. We’re going to have a lovely lunch and get to know each other. Cheers.” She raised her glass in Erik’s direction and smiled when he followed suit. “Tell me about yourself,” she said after tasting her drink.

Whether it was nerves or not, Erik laid the whole story out on the table. “I’m thirty years old,” he said. “My mother died shortly after I was born. I never met my father. I was raised by my grandmother right here in Tucson. I’m not married, never have been. No children, either.”

Erik felt like a complete idiot. This wasn’t the kind of information he should have blurted out if this really was a job interview, but he was fairly certain a change of employment for him was a long way down on Gayle Stryker’s list of priorities. Her response confirmed his suspicions.

“I see,” she said with a smile. “You’re saying you’re what could be called a blank slate?”

Several weeks earlier Erik had watched The Graduate on Turner Classic Movies. Poor Dustin Hoffman had been putty in Anne Bancroft’s very capable hands. Somehow Erik knew at once that he was headed in the same direction.

“I guess,” he replied uneasily, fingering the stem of his chilled glass.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll have to do something about that now, won’t we.”

They ate lunch. Gayle had two more margaritas while Erik had another as well. When they left the restaurant a little before four, Erik drove off in Gayle Stryker’s silver Lexus, leaving his own battered Volvo sitting forlorn and forgotten in the parking lot.

She directed Erik to El Encanto, a part of town he had visited as a worker bee during top-dollar alumni fund-raising parties. Elegant El Encanto was a long way from the tiny bungalow in a predominantly Hispanic part of the Old Pueblo where Erik had been raised. After meandering aimlessly through the wheels-and-spokes confusion of the subdivision’s streets, they pulled into the gate of a two-story brown stucco mansion. A copper-colored gate opened at the touch of a remote on the Lexus’s visor. So did the garage door. Gayle waited only long enough for the garage door to close behind them before reaching across the seat, pulling Erik toward her, and kissing him in a fashion that was calculated to take his breath away. And did.

“Come on,” she whispered finally. “Let’s go someplace comfortable.”

Paying only the barest attention to his surroundings, he followed her into the house and then up a curved stairway. She began stripping off her clothes as she crossed the threshold into an enormous bedroom and was standing naked before him by the time he had unfastened his belt.

“Come on,” she said impatiently. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Until that afternoon, Erik LaGrange had thought of himself as a reasonably experienced person when it came to sex, but Gayle Stryker had tricks up her discarded sleeve that went far beyond anything he’d ever considered or imagined, and her stamina was unbelievable. When she finally had her fill of him, some two hours later, she got out of bed and showered, leaving Erik lying on the bed, lost in a pink haze and unable to move.

“You’d better get going,” she told him as she toweled herself dry. “You need to go into the office and give them their two-week notice.”

“But…”

“Come on, Erik. You passed the job interview with flying colors. Whatever Dick Mathers is paying you, I’ll double it, and I’ll throw in a company car. Now let’s head out.”

And they did. It was only as he stood in the parking lot struggling with the somewhat balky lock on the Volvo’s driver’s-side door that he wondered for the first time where Dr. Lawrence Stryker had been that afternoon and how Gayle could have been so certain her husband wouldn’t turn up at the house.

It was the first time Erik LaGrange worried and wondered about Larry Stryker’s whereabouts. It wouldn’t be the last.

Seated in his cubicle in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department and working his way through a chorizo burrito, homicide detective Brian Fellows took the call.

“It came in about forty-five minutes ago,” Dispatch told him. “Some hysterical woman called in to say her dog had found an arm-a human arm-on the far side of Vail. I dispatched Patrol. A unit just arrived on the scene. Deputy Gomez says there’s a whole lot more than an arm out there. Looks like a whole body-all of it in pieces. The ME’s office is my next call.”

Brian stood up and flung his jacket over his shoulder. “What about CSI?” he asked.

“I’ll call them, too.”

Brian took a step toward the door, then he looked back longingly at the last third of the burrito still sitting on his desk. It might be a long time before he had another crack at solid food. Sighing, Brian retrieved it, then swallowed a bite as he hurried down the corridor.

He was glad to have something to do besides pushing paper. Weekend day shifts were pretty quiet because most of the bad guys were home nursing the previous night’s booze- or drug-induced hangover or working on the next one. It wasn’t until the sun went down that people beat up or shot one another outside bars and ran one another off the road on their way home.

Out in the parking lot, Brian fired up his Crown Vic and headed for I-10. Budget constraints in Sheriff Bill Forsythe’s office now necessitated that weekend day-shift detectives work alone rather than in pairs-which was all right with Brian. He liked his partner, Hector (PeeWee) Segura, well enough, but he was happy to be on his own for a change. His early years in the department, when he’d been hassled and penalized for his close association with the previous sheriff, had made him something of a departmental loner.

Brian had first known Brandon Walker as the man who came each weekend, rain or shine, to pick up his own sons-Brian’s half brothers-to take them on some noncustodial visit or outing. Brian’s father had disappeared from his life when Brian was only three. For him, there was no such thing as a noncustodial outing. For a long time Brian had been left alone on the porch, watching as Quentin and Tommy rode away for their afternoon treats.

One day Brian’s life changed forever. Instead of leaving the forlorn child moping and alone on the porch, Brandon Walker had opened the car door and invited him to join them. Quentin and Tommy had been outraged by their father’s small kindness, but from then on, Brian had gone along wherever Brandon had taken his own sons. It was hardly surprising that Brian Fellows returned that long-ago generosity by worshiping the ground beneath Brandon Walker’s feet and by following his hero into law enforcement.