J. Jance - Day of the Dead

“Can you make it run?” Sister Justine asked.

Fat Crack rubbed the thin stubble on his chin. “Sure,” he said. “But it’ll cost money.”

“How much?” Sister Justine asked.

Nervously, Fat Crack hiked his pants up again. As Mother Superior of the convent and principal of Topawa Elementary School, Sister Justine was known to drive a hard bargain. “Two hundred, maybe,” he said.

When he said the words, both Delia and her mother gasped aloud. It was a sum that went far beyond their meager ability to pay. Sister Justine was undeterred.

“Two hundred maybe, or two hundred, really?” she asked.

“Two hundred really,” Fat Crack conceded, knowing that if the repairs turned out to be more expensive than that, he’d have to eat the difference.

“How soon can you have it ready?”

“Tomorrow morning?” Fat Crack asked hopefully.

Sister Justine shook her head so forcefully that the stiff material of her veil snapped and crackled like jeans on a clothesline flapping in the wind. “Today,” she insisted. “Registration at ASU ends tomorrow. Ellie has to get registered for school, find a place to live, get the kids enrolled in school and day care and be ready for classes to start on Monday. Tomorrow will be too late.”

“Getting it fixed today would take a miracle,” Fat Crack argued.

But Sister Justine had made up her mind. “You’d better get started, then,” she said. “Miracles don’t grow on trees, you know. They take work and time.”

All that day, while Fat Crack had labored over making the Falcon run, Delia Chavez lingered in the background, watching everything he did. This was long before Fat Crack Ortiz met up with Looks at Nothing, long before the aged medicine man had charged his middle-aged protege with becoming a medicine man, too. As a consequence, while Fat Crack worked, he had no glimmer about what the future might hold for Delia Chavez. He thought she and her mother would be away from the reservation for a matter of months, not years. He had no idea that he was helping send both of them into an exile that would last almost thirty years. And he had no hint that someday he-Fat Crack Ortiz-would be the one to bring Delia back home to the reservation.

With all that had happened in between, Fat Crack was hard-pressed to know whether or not he had done the right thing. If he hadn’t fixed the Falcon that day, maybe Ellie and Delia never would have gone away in the first place. For sure, everything would have been different.

Brandon Walker took his tamales and tortillas and made his way to Basha’s. When he had first visited the reservation, there had been two trading posts-the High Store, built on a hill, and the Low Store, not on a hill. You could buy milk and sodas and staples at the trading posts, but buying decent meat or finding fresh vegetables with an actual produce manager had been out of the question. This new store in Sells looked like a regular supermarket in Tucson-smaller, but much the same.

He made his way to the produce department and looked around. The selection was different from what he might have expected in town. For instance, Brandon didn’t see any of his personal favorite-eggplant-but what was there seemed reasonably fresh. Across the aisle from the produce was a bank of shelves holding uncooked beans-navy beans, pinto beans, and the more exotic tepary beans, something that had been a staple in the Tohono O’odham food supply long before the arrival of the Spanish and their lard-laden frijoles.

A middle-aged woman emerged from a back room pushing a cart loaded with cardboard containers of bananas. The striking resemblance between her and Emma Orozco was enough to tell Brandon this was Andrea Tashquinth.

“Mrs. Tashquinth?” he asked, flashing the windowed wallet that identified Brandon Walker as a member of TLC. “Could I speak to you for a moment?”

Andrea Tashquinth eyed him suspiciously. “What about?” she asked.

“Your sister,” he said. “Gabe Ortiz suggested I talk to you. So did your mother.”

“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “I’m working.”

Brandon hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but this straight-out rejection surprised him. Before he could say anything more, however, Andrea had a sudden change of heart. “I’ll be off at three,” she said. “I’ll talk to you then.”

“Fine,” Brandon told her. “I’ll be waiting right outside.”

As Andrea turned away and began unpacking the boxes of bananas, it occurred to Brandon that Fat Crack might be right. Maybe I’itoi was helping to solve this case after all.

While a records clerk ran background checks on the name Erik LaGrange, Detective Fellows turned back to Sue Lammers. “I’ll have a deputy give you and your dog a ride home,” he said. “If we need anything more, I’ll be in touch.”

“Thank you,” she said gratefully. “I’d appreciate it. I’m still pretty shaky.”

After flagging down a newly arrived deputy to take charge of Sue Lammers and Ranger, Brian headed for the crime scene. On the shoulder of the road, one of the crime techs was making casts of tire tracks. Ten yards off the road, someone else was taking photos. The detective approached the photographer and found a grisly jumble of bloodied body parts spilled out of several black plastic garbage bags. Stumps of a severed arm and leg showed signs of having been hacked apart at the joints. The head, detached at the neck, lay facedown beneath a clump of blooming prickly pear. And on the ribs and tiny breasts of the naked torso were scores of ugly marks that he recognized instantly as scabbed-over cigarette burns.

Brian had been in Homicide long enough to expect to be immune, but seeing not only the wanton slaughter but also signs of long-term torture caused those last few bites of burrito to rise dangerously in his throat.

“It’s pretty rough,” Ruben Gomez remarked as Brian turned away, swallowing hard.

The detective nodded. “Whoever did this wasn’t interested in concealing the body.”

“Just the opposite,” Gomez agreed. “In fact, a freight-train engineer just called in a report on it as well. Dispatch told him we’re already working the problem.”

“Well, well,” a brusque female voice commented from behind them. “Welcome to the dumping ground.”

Brian and Deputy Gomez turned as associate medical examiner Fran Daly arrived on the scene. Dr. Daly was a sturdy woman with an unruly mop of cotton-white hair. Backlit in bright sunlight, her hair resembled a halo, but her vocabulary was distinctly non-angelic. She was known for showing up at crime scenes and autopsies alike in Western shirts, jeans, and various pairs of Tony Lama cowboy boots. Today her somewhat portly middle sported a wide leather belt with a silver buckle the size of a saucer.

“How’s it going, Doc?” Brian asked.

“It was better before I got here,” she said, taking in the scatter of dismembered human flesh without blanching. “Only one body, or more?” she asked.

“Just the one, as far as we can tell,” Brian answered. “Female Hispanic, somewhere in her teens.”

Fran Daly nodded. “Any idea how long she’s been here?”

“The initial call came in a little before noon,” Ruben Gomez told her. “A witness was out walking her dog and saw what she thought was someone illegally dumping garbage.”

“It’s illegal dumping all right,” Dr. Daly agreed. “So it’s not been all that long-an hour and a half or so?”

Brian nodded. “That would be about right.”

His phone rang just then. “This is Shelley in Records,” the caller told him. “I’ve got the info you wanted on Erik LaGrange and for the two phone numbers you asked about. Medicos for Mexico is on East Broadway, just west of Tucson Boulevard. It’s closed on weekends. The second number is a private residence listed under the name of Professor Raymond Rice, who teaches architecture at the U of A. The number for Erik LaGrange has been disconnected, with calls being forwarded to Rice’s number. I also checked with the DMV. I’ve got a driver’s license for Erik LaGrange-not the same address as the one listed for Professor Rice. As far as a vehicle registered to Erik LaGrange? I came up empty there.”