Day of the Dead (31 page)

“That’s so cool. It was one of my first cases when I came to work here three years ago, and I was the one who found the print inside the bag. It was the first one I personally enhanced and entered in the system.”

“I was just talking to Lieutenant Detloff—”

“Oh, him,” Deborah said. She didn’t say anything derisive, but she didn’t have to. Her tone of voice said it all. “What’s up with him?”

“I asked him to fax me a copy of that homicide file,” Brian said carefully. “My guess is it’ll be a long time coming.”

“Right,” Deborah agreed. “Don’t hold your breath. Is there any way I can help?”

“Maybe so,” Brian said. “Other than the trash bag, was any other physical evidence found with the victim?”

“Hang on,” Deborah said. “Let me check.” A few minutes later when she came back on the line, she sounded excited. “I just checked with the evidence clerk. A bag of clothing was found near the body. Detloff is a complete ditz. None of the clothing was ever checked for prints.”

“Can you do that?”

“You’d better believe it,” Deborah Howard said. “If I find any, I’ll put them into AFIS right away. And if you’ll give me your numbers, Detective Fellows, I’ll call you with any updates. And if Lieutenant Detloff doesn’t deliver that report in a timely fashion, let me know. I may be nothing but Detloff’s ‘little fingerprint gal,’ but I have plenty of friends in other units in this department. Not going across desks and through channels doesn’t scare me. If Detloff doesn’t send you that report, I will.”

Brian Fellows was smiling when he hung up the phone for the second time. Yes, Detloff was a jackass who had managed to annoy a key member of his own department, leaving her terminally pissed. From where Brian was sitting, that was perfectly fine.

***

When Brandon Walker left
the ME’s office, it was only mid-morning. He knew he and Diana would have to leave the house by one o’clock in order to be in Sells before the funeral, but there was enough time to squeeze in one more stop on his way home.

The Medicos for Mexico office was located on the north side of East Broadway in what had once been an auto dealership. An upscale resale furniture store had taken over the showroom space. Medicos’s suite of offices had been carved out by remodeling the service bays. Brandon parked near the front door and walked into the building.

The receptionist in the spacious lobby turned out to be a young blond woman with a spectacular figure, pouty lips, and no visible signs of body piercing.

“Can I help you?” she asked. Her cool appraising glance was one step short of hostile.

“My name’s Brandon Walker,” he told her. “Is Dr. Stryker in?”

Evidently the former sheriff’s name carried no ink here, either. In response she folded both arms across her chest—not a good sign. “Do you have an appointment?” she demanded.

“No,” Brandon admitted. “No, I don’t.”

“What’s this about?”

“It’s a private matter,” Brandon reassured her carefully. “Larry and I are longtime acquaintances. We’ve met occasionally, on a social basis. I was in the neighborhood this morning and thought I’d drop by. You might tell him I’m Diana Ladd’s husband.”

“One moment,” the receptionist replied skeptically. “I’ll see if he can meet with you.”

The Medicos lobby was accented with huge hunks of original modern art. The artists had probably found their inspiration somewhere in the interior of Mexico. The signatures scrawled in the lower corners hinted that the artists themselves probably hailed from south of the border as well.

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…”

Brandon couldn’t fail to notice that Stryker, who had gone from knowing nothing to knowing virtually everything about Roseanne Orozco, was now unable to recall this final, crucial detail. If he was lying, did that mean he was the killer? The possibility sent a clutch of fear deep in the pit of Brandon’s stomach. Whatever else Larry might be, he was also a “friend of the family.” He knew where Diana and Brandon lived. He knew Lani’s name, and he knew where she lived, too.

With a supreme effort, Brandon kept his tone easy and conversational. “I’m trying to get a sense of what was going on in Roseanne’s life during the months leading up to her death,” Brandon explained carefully. “I’m sure it was a difficult time for her. Is it possible she may have found a way to communicate her troubles to her personal physician, someone she might have expected to help?”

An almost imperceptible change had occurred in Lawrence Stryker’s countenance as the discussion continued. That one brief moment of uncertainty had passed and he was back in control.

“Well,” he answered after a moment’s hesitation. “If you wanted to find out who was assigned to be Roseanne Orozco’s physician, you could drive out to the hospital at Sells and have them check their records. But again, even if you locate her doctor, I doubt he’ll remember much about her, not after all these years.”

“I already checked the records,” Brandon said.

“And?” Again there was a slight waffling—a damning hint of hesitation.

“Nothing,” Brandon said, shrugging. “Roseanne Orozco’s records are missing. There are other records from around that time, but hers are nowhere to be found.”

“Probably a clerical error of some kind,” Larry Stryker said smoothly. “It’s not easy finding decent clerical help anywhere anymore, but particularly out on the reservation. No doubt it’s hiding right in plain sight, but when you’re working with computers, even the smallest misspelling can make a record totally irretrievable.”

“Right,” Brandon agreed. “I know just what you mean. Garbage in and garbage out.” He stood up. “I guess I’d better be going. You’ve been most kind to give me all this time when I didn’t even call ahead for an appointment.”

“No problem,” Larry Stryker said at once. “And no need to stand on ceremony where appointments are concerned. After all, any friend of Gayle’s is a friend of mine.”

It was the last thing Brandon Walker wanted to hear from Larry Stryker about then. If he did turn out to be a killer—the very last thing.

***

After Walker left,
Larry stayed at his desk awash in the familiar rush as adrenaline turned fear to pleasure. Once again he was out there, walking on the edge. It was nothing but a coincidence that ex-Sheriff Walker had shown up asking questions about Roseanne Orozco, still…There was something subtly different about Brandon Walker’s appearance—something that had changed since the night of the Man and Woman of the Year Gala.