J. Jance - Day of the Dead

They were almost back to Big Fields before Brandon Walker broached the subject. “Where is Roseanne buried?” he asked.

“Over there,” Emma said, nodding in the direction of a small barbed-wire-enclosed cemetery near the far boundary of the village. “Her father’s there, too. Why?”

“Do you mind showing me?”

“No.”

Brandon parked the vehicle as close as possible to the battered iron gate that marked the cemetery’s entrance. As he retrieved Emma’s walker and helped her down to the ground, a collection of curious children gathered around. While Brandon opened the gate, Emma entered, holding her head high. She threaded unerringly through a collection of sagging crosses and simple headstones. Inside a small separately fenced plot were three headstones-two large ones on either side of a tiny white cross. Henry Orozco’s name was carved into one of the large headstones. Roseanne’s name was carved on the other. The cross between them had no name at all.

After examining the middle cross, Brandon looked questioningly at Emma. “Roseanne’s baby?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Roseanne couldn’t name her, so we didn’t either. They took the baby for the autopsy and kept it even after we buried Roseanne. When they finally released the baby’s body, we put her here so she could be with her mother.”

“The baby was a girl,” Brandon said, thinking about what Fat Crack had said about the Tohono O’odham’s lost girls. Roseanne Orozco and her daughter were two of them, right along with Lani and Delia. But that made sense. After all, hadn’t Rita Antone and Fat Crack both taught him that among the Desert People all things in nature go in fours?

“Yes,” Emma agreed.

The fact that the baby’s remains had been separated from her mother’s was more than Brandon Walker could have hoped for, but that didn’t make asking the critical questions any easier. He wanted to be diplomatic and kind. Emma Orozco had been hurt enough.

“Was the baby embalmed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. No one ever told us.”

She spoke softly, carefully, but Brandon knew what both the questions and answers cost her. “Do you know about DNA?”

“You mean like at O.J.’s trial?” Emma returned. “Sure, I know about that.”

“Yes,” Brandon said. “Like with O.J., but DNA identification techniques have improved greatly since then.”

“You want to dig up the baby?”

Emma’s direct approach caught Brandon off-guard. “Yes,” he said. “I’m thinking Law and Order may have been right back then. If we learn who the baby’s father was…”

“Do what you need to do, Mr. Walker,” Emma Orozco said. “If you need me to sign papers to make it happen, just let me know.”

Diana had told Lani that Davy wouldn’t be able to pick her up at Sky Harbor. Candace and Tyler would be coming in Davy’s stead, but all through the long plane trip, Lani had hoped that either her brother or her dad would be there to pick her up.

It wasn’t that Lani disliked Candace. It was just that, with Candace’s upscale Midwest background, the two young women had virtually nothing in common-other than their mutual love for Lani’s brother. On that single subject they were in total agreement.

When she saw Candace and Tyler waving at her from the far side of the security checkpoint, Lani’s heart fell. She had tried without success to sleep on the plane. Now, bone-weary and still mourning, she was faced with riding home with someone who had once thought that Crack was somehow Fat Crack’s last name. Davy and Lani knew the emptiness Fat Crack’s absence would leave in both their lives. Candace had no clue.

Tyler, waving and grinning, gave every evidence of being delighted to see his auntie-right up until she was close enough to touch. At that point, he buried his head in his mother’s shoulder and screamed bloody murder.

“How was your flight?” Candace asked, bouncing the child and trying to quiet him.

“All right,” Lani said. “In terms of post-9/11 air travel, it went as well as possible.”

“Sorry David couldn’t make it,” Candace said.

Lani winced. David was so much more formal than Davy, so much more serious. Davy was her brother. Who exactly was David?

“Gabe’s sons asked him and your dad to come out to some village on the reservation and help dig the grave,” Candace continued as they headed for the luggage carousels. “I don’t know why they have to do things like that by hand. Back home, we had people with machines who dug graves. Nobody had to show up at cemeteries with picks and shovels.”

Lani didn’t hear the rest of Candace’s complaint. For the remainder of the trip home, Lani was virtually impervious to Tyler’s wails and screeches from his car-seat imprisonment in the back. Her feelings were no longer hurt. She was content.

Neither Davy Ladd nor Brandon Walker had driven to the airport to pick Lani up and bring her home, but both her father and her brother-the Boy with Two Mothers and Four Fathers-were at Ban Thak, doing what needed to be done.

And that, nawoj, she thought to herself, is the way things ought to be.

Alvin Miller was forty years old and had worked for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for more than half his life. He had started out doing an Eagle Scout volunteer project for the Latent Fingerprint Lab as a sixteen-year-old and had been there ever since, becoming the youngest person in the country to achieve full technician qualification with the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With only a few community college credits to his name, all of his experience and most of his education had come the hard way-hands-on.

Alvin’s unwavering loyalty to Sheriff Walker hadn’t been lost on incoming Sheriff Forsythe. The new administration hadn’t been tough enough to come right out and fire Miller, but Forsythe had done his underhanded best to run Alvin Miller out of Dodge. First he cut the fingerprint lab’s budget and head count, thinking that tactic would persuade Alvin to pack up and go elsewhere. Instead, Alvin had worked more hours himself, many of them off the clock, until even Sheriff Forsythe could see that losing Miller’s expertise would be a serious blow.

Late the previous evening, a CSI unit had come dragging back to the department with an armload of dishes, silverware, and other items taken from a crime scene related to Saturday’s Vail homicide. The evidence had arrived too late in the shift to be processed on Saturday evening.

Alvin understood the sacrosanct pecking order inside the department. People with the least amount of seniority and experience were the ones who were stuck manning weekend shifts. Alvin, a lifelong bachelor with no family responsibilities, made it a practice to check in every Sunday morning to make sure whoever was minding the store didn’t need assistance.

This morning, Sally Carmichael, his newest intern, called Alvin at home before he could call her. She seemed close to hyperventilating.

“What’s the problem, Sally?” he asked. “You sound upset.”

“I am upset,” she told him. “I’m here by myself. Tom and Marlene left me a whole pile of stuff to be processed ASAP. Detective Fellows has already called twice, asking if I’ve done any work on it. I told him I’ll try to get to it this afternoon, but I don’t see how-”

“Don’t worry,” Alvin reassured her. “I’ll come give you a hand.”

In actual fact, Alvin was more than happy to do it. He still felt a proprietary interest in his AFIS equipment. No matter how well trained his people were, he was never quite as confident of anyone else’s fingerprint enhancements as he was of his own.

Alvin came in, donned his lab jacket, checked the items in question out of the evidence room, and went to work. The CSI unit had brought in a number of prints they had lifted from the scene, but rather than paying attention to those, Alvin went looking for prints he could process himself from beginning to end. He started with the presumed murder weapon-the machete.