J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Baby Fat Crack, older than Leo by two years, remembered Delia from first grade at Indian Oasis School years earlier. Baby was shy and reticent, and his understated way of courting was to learn everything possible about her Saab. Leo solved the problem by making himself indispensable.

Delia’s father, Manny, had been brutally attacked with a shovel. Although the medical community diagnosed his paralysis as a result of spinal-cord damage, Delia’s aunt Julia claimed Manny had been stricken by Staying Sickness, one of a group of ailments specific to the Tohono O’odham people. Manny’s particular strain, Turtle Sickness, resulted from a person’s being rude.

Whatever had caused the paralysis, the result was the same. Manny Chavez was a hopeless invalid in need of constant care and supervision. Delia’s brother, Eddie, spent most of his life timed-out on booze. Consequently, despite Delia’s stormy history with her father, his care fell on her-and, because he volunteered for the task, on Leo Ortiz’s broad shoulders as well. When Delia moved from her aunt’s home into a house in what had formerly been the BIA compound in Sells, Leo was there, moving boxes and furniture and erecting a wooden wheelchair ramp so Manny could come to visit once he was finally released from the rehab facility in Tucson. Leo helped Delia find a suitable caregiver for her father, and he helped transport him back and forth to the hospital for various doctor’s visits.

Leo’s constancy and patient way of dealing with her father and with her was so different from everything Delia knew from Philip that she couldn’t help noticing-and falling in love. When the Saab’s turbo hiccoughed and quit, Baby Fat Crack was the one who installed a replacement. And when the compressor for the air-conditioning went out, Baby fixed that as well, but somehow that all went right over Delia’s head. She was too busy with other concerns. Had Baby come right out and said something, she might have realized how he felt about her. But it wasn’t until after her divorce from Philip was final and she and Leo announced their engagement that the full implication of what had happened hit home-for all three of them.

The night before Leo and Delia’s wedding, Fat Crack brought his two sons together and insisted that they sit down and share the Peace Smoke. Only then had they been able to move on and let bygones be bygones. After losing out on Delia, Baby had finally found himself a suitable bride. He and Christine already had one child-a little girl-with another on the way. Now, as the two sons labored together digging their father’s grave, Fat Crack’s spirit was still the glue that held them together-not only his sons, but his sons’ children as well.

Brandon dropped Diana off outside Wanda’s mobile home in Sells and then headed for Ban Thak. He arrived at the cemetery just after Davy and just before Brian. Brandon knew he was late. Baby and Leo had already dug down to knee level. Leo was down in the hole whaling away with a pickax while Baby stood on the surface leaning on a shovel.

He wiped his dusty hand off on his jeans before accepting Brandon’s proffered handshake. “Thanks for having us,” Brandon said.

Baby nodded. “Grab a shovel,” he said. “We’ll take turns.”

The younger men worked faster, and although Brandon shoveled steadily and was a little winded, he had nonetheless accomplished almost as much when his turn was over. Standing on the sidelines, catching his breath and listening to the others joke and tease, he remembered what Fat Crack had told him once-that as a young child, Looks at Nothing had told Rita Antone she would be a bridge between the Anglo world and the Tohono O’odham. And it was true. Years after Rita’s death, here were five men of different generations and races-Rita’s great-nephews, Brandon Walker and his Mil-gahn sons, who weren’t really his sons at all-working together in a blending of harmony and friendship that would have been unthinkable years earlier.

“Why so late?” Leo asked Brian. “Were you hanging around with that cute red-haired wife of yours?”

“I overslept,” Brian admitted. “I was out late last night working a case and didn’t set the alarm.”

“What kind of case?” Davy asked.

“I’m sure it’ll be on the news again today if you missed it last night,” Brian said, making conversation. “Some guy hacked a little Mexican girl to pieces and tossed her out in the desert.”

Brandon had stepped over to the fence to take a drink from the cooler, but the words stopped him. “What do you mean, hacked to pieces?” he asked.

Brian put down the pick and came out of the deepening hole while Davy went in to shovel up loosened dirt. Brian wiped his face and neck with a grimy hanky before answering.

“Just that. It was brutal. The murder weapon’s most likely a machete. Her limbs were whacked off at the joints. A woman hiking near Vail yesterday morning found the body in bags strewn along the railroad tracks.”

Brandon Walker’s heart constricted. It was nothing scientific-nothing he could take to court or turn in on a written police report-but instinctively he sensed a connection between this new case and an old one, between this new dead girl and Roseanne Orozco from 1970.

“Why do you ask?” Brian continued.

Brandon Walker knew that his close connection to Brian Fellows had often been a detriment to Brian’s career within the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The passage of time had made most of that go away, and Brandon didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Brian’s future by bringing their relationship back to the fore. He knew that if he and TLC were to solve a case that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department had left hanging, Brian Fellows had better not be anywhere nearby when the shit hit the fan.

“There was another case like that a long time ago, a couple of years after I started working Homicide,” Brandon said carefully. “It happened out here on the reservation. The victim’s name was Roseanne Orozco. A highway worker found the body near Quijotoa. She’d been chopped to pieces and left in an ice chest. People called her the ‘Girl in the Box.’ ”

“I remember hearing about that,” Leo said. “I was just a kid. Grandma always used to tell us if we weren’t good, we’d end up chopped to pieces and in a box the same way she was.”

“Probably no connection,” Brian said. “There wasn’t any ice chest this time. This girl’s body was in garbage bags and left out in the open in the desert. Besides,” he added, “when did that homicide happen?”

“It must have been 1970 or so,” Brandon answered. That wasn’t entirely true. Brandon had gone over his notes with care. He knew exactly when it was, but he wasn’t about to say so. And since this was nothing but a hunch, he wasn’t going to push it.

“There you go,” Brian said. “The suspect we’ve got in custody wouldn’t even have been in kindergarten in 1970. Unless he set out to be a serial killer very early on…”

J. A. Jance

Day of the Dead

Eighteen

They say it happened long ago that an Indian man and his woman loved their baby very, very much.

The mother took very good care of her little one. She kept the baby with her all the time. Even when the woman went to work in the fields, she took her baby with her. She never left her in the care of someone else at home.

The other babies of the village grew strong and fat and cried and pulled things. But this baby never ever cried. All day she lay in her cradle and slept or smiled but never cried.

This Indian mother carefully arranged the ropes for her baby’s nuhkuth, which, in the old days, was the soft cradle all Tohono O’odham mothers used to make to protect their precious babies. Over the ropes she put her softest blankets. She used extra ropes and extra blankets. When she took the baby to the field with her, she was so carefully wrapped that the nuhkuth looked like a big cocoon. And the mother always made sure that wherever she left her baby girl, it was nice and shady.