Day of the Dead (11 page)

“Okay,” Erik heard himself saying. “A quarter to one.”

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.

Brian had joined the department as a deputy while Brandon was still in office. When a new administration came into power sometime later, Brian had more than half expected to be let go. Rather than fire him, Sheriff Forsythe elected to encourage Brian to quit by giving him crappy assignments and letting him work the cars far longer than he should have. Brian had fooled everybody—including himself—by sticking it out, keeping his nose clean, and doing a good job. Now a ten-year veteran, he had finally been promoted to Investigations. As new guys came on board and old guys retired, Brian Fellows’s connections to Sheriff Walker mattered less and less.

Unfortunately, neither of Brandon Walker’s biological sons had turned out to be at all like their father. Natural-born bullies, Tommy and Quentin Walker had reveled in tormenting anyone younger and weaker. On every possible occasion, they had made life miserable for their half brother, Brian, and for their father’s new stepson, Davy Ladd. Later on, as teenagers, Tommy and Quentin had run off the rails entirely and turned into full-fledged juvenile delinquents. Tommy had died at sixteen while engaged in something he’d been forbidden to do. Quentin, tortured by the part he’d played in his older brother’s death, had been in and out of trouble and/or jail ever since. Even now he was back in the slammer on a drug charge, which meant he’d be in prison for the better part of the next ten years.

But waging their joint defensive war against Tommy and Quentin had united Davy Ladd and Brian Fellows in a close childhood friendship that endured to this day. In fact, all of them—Davy Ladd, his wife, Candace, and their two-year-old son, Tyler, along with Brian and his wife, Kath—were expected at the Walkers’ place for dinner late Sunday afternoon—just like a real family.

But between then and now, Brian Fellows had work to do. Someone had been murdered and hacked to pieces in the desert. Like Brandon Walker before him, it was Brian’s job to find out who was dead—and why.

Nine

A
fter a while, I’itoi
woke up. Elder Brother laughed when he looked around and saw all the children sleeping, and he thought about what was hidden in his bag.

I’itoi
called to the children. When they were all awake and watching, he opened his bag and shook it. Out fluttered the big yellow leaves and the spots of sunshine and the brown leaves and the shadows and the tiny white flowers and the small pieces of bright blue sky. They were all alive. They floated in the air for a few moments, and then they danced away into the sunlight. And the children danced after them.

I’itoi
stayed in the shade of the tree and was glad that at last there was something beautiful and gay that would never change and never grow ugly as it grew old.

And this,
nawoj,
my friend, is the story of the birth of
hohokimal—
the butterflies.

***

Speeding east
on I-10, Brian dialed home on his cell phone. When Kath didn’t answer, he left a message. “I’m on a call and headed to Vail,” he said. “It could take time. I’ll let you know when I’ll be home.”

Minutes later, he pulled off the freeway at Vail and headed for the Fast Horse Ranch development. A mile or so beyond the subdivision, he saw the clump of parked vehicles. He pulled in behind a patrol car sitting with its back door open. A woman was inside and a dog—a big German shepherd—lay on the ground nearby, panting and keeping a wary eye on the people milling about. Deputy Ruben Gomez met Brian before he was fully out of the car.

“What’s the deal?” Brian asked.

“It’s pretty bad,” the deputy replied. “Little girl, Hispanic, probably fourteen or fifteen years old. Somebody’s hacked her to pieces and stuffed her in a bunch of garbage bags. The lady in my car, Ms. Lammers—Susan Lammers—was out walking with her dog. The dog ran on ahead and came running back carrying an arm. As soon as she saw it, Ms. Lammers called it in. I found the bags with the rest of the body when I got here.”

“Any ID?” Brian asked.

“Not so far. I didn’t want to foul things up, so I stayed away. Dispatch tells me CSI is on the way.”

“Right,” Brian said. “I’ll go talk to the witness. How’s the dog, friendly or not?”

Ruben cast a cautious glance at the animal. “She says he’s fine, but if I were you, I wouldn’t make any sudden moves.”

Keeping one eye on the dog, Brian moved toward the open door. “Ms. Lammers?” he asked.

A blond-haired woman, red-eyed and still sniffling, peered out of the vehicle at him. “Yes,” she said tentatively. “But please, call me Sue. Mrs. Lammers is my mother-in-law.”

“I’m Detective Fellows,” Brian said, offering his ID. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure,” she said.

As the woman climbed out of the vehicle, Brian estimated her to be in her early forties. She wore a sweatshirt, faded jeans, and hiking boots. “I saw him,” she said, brushing her short hair away with a hand that was still visibly shaking. “I’m sure I saw him.”

“Who?” Brian asked. He opened his notebook.

“The guy. The one who dumped her. He was parked on the shoulder as Ranger and I walked up the power-line road. As we got closer, I think he saw us coming and took off.”

“Which way?” Brian asked.

“He headed back toward Vail. I don’t know where he went after that. The intersection is behind the crest of the hill. I couldn’t see which way he turned.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A pickup of some kind. I wasn’t close enough to see a license or what model it was. Dark-colored. Dark blue or maybe purple. With a matching camper shell.”

“What were you doing?” Brian asked.

“Ranger, my dog, and I were taking a walk.”

“From where?”

“My husband and I have a place down the road. Two miles or so from here. On Fast Horse Ranch.”

Brian looked around. “Is your husband here?”

“He’s at the house. I haven’t called him,” Sue Lammers added after a pause. “We had a fight. I took Ranger out so I could cool off.”

“What time did this happen?”

“You mean what time did I find the body?”

Brian nodded.

“Over an hour ago now,” she told him. “Ranger ran on ahead of me. He does that sometimes, but he’s scared of trains. There was one coming—a big freight train—so Ranger came back. I saw he was carrying something and thought it was a stick.” Her lip trembled. “But it wasn’t a stick at all,” she continued. “It was an arm—a piece of an arm.” Again she paused, swallowing convulsively before going on. “It was still all bloody.”