J. Jance - Day of the Dead

Brandon settled into a good-looking but relatively uncomfortable chair and wondered if Diana had been right to question his motives. Did he really think Larry Stryker could provide pertinent information about Roseanne Orozco, or was he here to tweak the son of a bitch because he felt like it-because he could and because hassling Stryker would give Brandon a little of his own back?

The receptionist’s voice roused Brandon from his reverie. “Dr. Stryker will see you now,” she said.

Larry Stryker sat at a large rosewood desk. Behind him was a matching wall of built-in bookshelves laden with books. A carefully folded copy of the Wall Street Journal lay in solitary splendor on an expanse of otherwise pristine polished wood. If a computer lurked somewhere in his office, it wasn’t readily visible.

Larry may have been dressed to the nines, but Brandon was startled to see how much he had aged since their last encounter at the Man and Woman of the Year event two years earlier. Stryker no longer sported a full shock of white hair. It was much thinner now. His once strong facial features seemed blurred and blunted in a way that made Brandon suspect an overreliance on drugs or booze. When he stood up to greet his visitor, he seemed thinner as well.

Them’s the breaks, Brandon thought. He’s not that much older than I am, but he’s probably thinking I look older, too.

“Good to see you again, Brandon,” Stryker said heartily. “To what do I owe this honor? How’s the family? We hear about Diana’s success often.”

But not about mine, Brandon thought. Larry Stryker may not have spoken the barb aloud, but Brandon Walker heard it loud and clear.

“Yes,” he replied, maintaining Larry’s phony hail-fellow-well-met tone. “She’s doing great, isn’t she? And everybody else is fine as well.”

“Good, good. Have a seat,” Stryker continued. “And your daughter? Beautiful girl. What’s her name again?”

“Lani.”

“Wasn’t she going to work with us one of these summers?”

“That’s what her mother had in mind,” Brandon said. “Turns out Lani made other plans.”

“Kids do that, don’t they,” Stryker agreed amiably. “Now to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Taking his time, Brandon opened his wallet and extracted one of his TLC business cards. “Actually,” he said, handing the card across the desk, “I’m working a case.”

“A case?” Stryker repeated. “Really? I was under the impression you’d retired. What are you, some kind of private investigator?”

“You might call it that,” Brandon agreed. “I’ve followed your footsteps into the world of nonprofits.”

“A nonprofit private eye?” Stryker asked. He pulled on a pair of reading glasses and examined the card closely. His hands were liberally sprinkled with liver spots. Brandon stole a look at the backs of his own hands. He had a few of those spots, too, but not nearly as many.

“So TLC stands for The Last Chance,” Stryker observed. “What does that mean?”

Brandon nodded. “We’re a voluntary consortium that investigates cold cases-ones law enforcement agencies no longer have the time or resources to handle. Usually we’re called in by grieving relatives who are looking for closure. The case I’m dealing with now is an unsolved homicide that happened out on the reservation more than thirty years ago. The victim was a teenager named Roseanne Orozco. I believe she was a patient at the hospital at Sells shortly before her death. I wondered if you might remember anything about her.”

There was only the smallest of pauses before Lawrence Stryker answered-a pause that wasn’t long enough to encompass more than thirty years of remembering and one punctuated by the involuntary bobbing of Stryker’s prominent Adam’s apple.

“No,” he said, with a frown meant to pass as concentration. “I don’t recall anyone by that name.”

In that one electric moment, all of Brandon’s old hunting instincts came into play. Larry Stryker was lying. The man knew exactly who Roseanne Orozco was, but, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to admit it. Once a lie surfaces in an interrogation, it’s time to push for more information. Even so, a yellow caution light began blinking at the back of Brandon’s head. He was little more than a private citizen, but he was investigating a very real murder-one in which Larry Stryker might well turn out to be a suspect. That being the case, what the hell was Brandon Walker doing questioning him on his own? Good sense dictated that he walk away from the interview. Force of habit kept him where he was.

“Unusual case,” Brandon said casually. “Roseanne was fine as a toddler and she seems to have developed normally right up until she went to kindergarten. She came home from her first day at school and never spoke again-not even to members of her family.”

“Oh, yes,” Stryker said quickly. “I guess I do remember now. The mute girl. She was evaluated countless times. No one could find anything physically wrong with her. There must have been some kind of trauma involved, but I don’t think anyone ever figured out exactly what it was. And now that you mention it, I do remember that, shortly before her death, she was hospitalized for surgery-appendicitis, I believe. Later on she was back in the hospital for tests of some kind. It seems to me that there was a mixup about who was picking her up once she was released. She left the hospital on her own and never made it home. Instead, she turned up dead out along the highway.”

Stryker shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Tragic case all around. I believe her father was suspected of having had something to do with her…her condition.”

“Her pregnancy?” Brandon asked.

Stryker nodded. Brandon was struck by the fact that, although Larry Stryker had first claimed to have no knowledge of Roseanne Orozco, he was now exhibiting almost total recall-one lie compounded by another.

“Yes,” Brandon agreed. “Henry Orozco was a suspect initially, but a blood test eventually proved he wasn’t the baby’s father. Roseanne’s killer was never caught.”

“You’re trying to solve the case after all these years?”

Brandon nodded. “That’s the idea.”

“Why now?”

“Because Roseanne Orozco’s mother still wants to know who killed her daughter.”

“What does any of that have to do with me?” Stryker asked.

It was Brandon’s turn to ask a question. “How long were you out on the reservation?”

“Seven years and a little bit,” Stryker answered. “Why?”

“That’s several years longer than most doctors stay on at Sells, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Stryker answered. “Usually people don’t stay any longer than what it takes to pay off their student loans. Once they’re debt-free, they head for the hills-for the cities, rather.”

“But not you?”

“No. I really liked the people out there, but eventually it just wasn’t practical to stay any longer. Even so, my wife and I came away from the reservation with an abiding interest in taking modern medical services to the impoverished peoples of the world. Under the aegis of Medicos for Mexico, we’ve been doing just that ever since.”

“I know you have,” Brandon agreed. “And it’s very commendable. But getting back to Roseanne Orozco. Now that you remember who she was, do you happen to recall the name of her attending physician?”

“My dear man,” Stryker said. “As you yourself pointed out a little while ago, this all happened many years ago. Of course I don’t remember something as inconsequential as that. There were always three or four doctors on staff at Sells at any given time, all of us living in the hospital housing compound. We traded cases back and forth all the time. It could have been any one of us, or a combination of more than one. I really don’t see what the point is…”