from his lab were always in demand.
It was almost noon before Alvin was finally satisfied enough with the second set of prints to put them into the machine for copying and transmitting. While the computer did its stuff, he walked back to his desk to retrieve a now-dead-cold cup of coffee. He had taken a single sip when Sally called him back.
“Hey, Mr. Miller,” she called. “Come look at this.”
Being referred to as Mr. Miller made Alvin feel old, but the excitement in Sally’s voice was unmistakable. “Must be a hit, then,” he said. “Whose is it?”
Wordlessly Carol handed him the printout. Alvin read it through.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “We’d better get Detective Fellows on the horn right away.”
Delia Chavez stood outside, patting balls of dough into tortillas and then tossing them onto a wood-fire- heated griddle. Her sister-in-law waited while the dough cooked, then turned them deftly with her fingers, let them cook on the other side, and then tossed them onto a waxed-paper-covered table to cool. Delia’s tortilla-making deficit had been corrected first by her aunt Julia and later by her mother-in-law after Delia’s return to the reservation.
She had come home grateful to have a job that allowed her to leave D.C. and Philip’s betrayal far behind. But coming back to Arizona did something else-it brought her face-to-face with her father and his betrayal of her mother all those years earlier.
As far as Delia could see, Eddie was nothing but a worthless drunk; so was her father. Still bristling with anger at Philip, Delia had been more than ready to write both of them off. Then, when a seriously injured Manny was sent home from Tucson a virtually helpless cripple, Delia had no choice but to take charge of her father’s life. She looked after him because she had to-because she was his daughter and there was no one else to do it.
“You shouldn’t be so angry with him, you know,” Aunt Julia said one day. She had come into Sells from Little Tucson and was patiently instructing Delia’s clumsy computer-savvy fingers in the fine art of patting popover dough while Manny Chavez, visiting on his paid caregiver’s day off, dozed in his wheelchair in the next room.
“You really need to forgive him,” Aunt Julia continued. “Blaming your father for everything that happened is only hurting you and no one else. You’re very smart, ni ma’i-niece, and a lawyer besides. Everything you learned in school should have taught you that it’s wrong to see only one side of things.”
Julia, Delia’s mother’s aunt, was the last person Delia expected to leap to Manny’s defense.
“What other side is there?” Delia shot back angrily. “It is his fault. He’s the one who beat my mother up. I saw him do it. If it’s not his fault, whose is it, my mother’s?”
“No,” Julia said. “It wasn’t Ellie’s fault, either. She was too young to know what was what.”
“Whose, then?” Delia persisted.
“If you want someone to blame,” Aunt Julia said, “you should probably look to your grandmother, to my sister Guadalupe.”
“Come on,” Delia objected. “She died so long ago, I don’t even remember her. How could you blame any of this on her?”
“Guadalupe knew what your mother was like. We all did, from the time she was little. It was wrong of my sister to arrange a marriage with Manny. Girls like that don’t make good wives.”
“Girls like what?” Delia demanded. “You mean girls like me-ones who are smart the way my mother was or who want to go to school to better themselves?”
“No,” Aunt Julia said softly. “I mean girls who like girls.”
That conversation had proved to be a watershed for Delia Cachora. For the first time she could see that the tragedy of her father’s life wasn’t so different from her own. Manny had married Ellie Francisco expecting one thing and had gotten another in the same way Delia’s marriage to Philip had turned out to be far different from her own expectations.
From then on, Delia was able to be kinder to her father and far more patient in her dealings with him. Eventually she was able to forgive both her parents for the unwitting mistakes they had made along the way. She never forgave Philip, though. Unlike Manny Chavez and Ellie Francisco when they married, Philip Cachora had known exactly what he was doing.
J. A. Jance
Day of the Dead
Twenty
But even with all the Indian mother’s care, her baby seemed to grow smaller and smaller. When the cold days came, she slept more and more and smiled less often. And the mother, in those days, never smiled at all. She was afraid.
Then one morning, the parents found that their baby was not breathing.
So the mother wrapped the little one in her brightest blankets. And the father called for his neighbors to help him. The parents and their friends carried the baby to the mountains, where the dead are put in their rock homes.
They did not need much brush or many stones to cover such a little thing.
Now a good Indian does not show how he feels. Especially if one is sad, it must not be shown. Great Spirit- I’itoi-who is the Spirit of Goodness and Elder Brother of the Tohono O’odham-manages everything. So to feel very bad about anything is to oppose the Spirit of Goodness.
But this mother had eaten nothing all that day. In her throat there was something big and hard which she could not swallow. As she went up the mountain with her friends, she kept stumbling. And this worried her husband. He was afraid she would let the water come in her eyes.
PeeWee had gone home and Brian was at his desk trying to sort through his impressions of the LaGrange interview when his phone rang. “Brian? Glad you answered the phone.”
Alvin Miller wasn’t a great one for using proper titles, and Brian recognized his voice. “What’s up?”
“AFIS just got a hit on one of the prints from yesterday’s crime scene. I can fax it up to you or-”
“Hold on,” Brian said. “I’ll be right there.”
He wasn’t right there. The elevator took forever. “What have you got?” he asked as soon as Sally Carmichael unlocked the lab door for him to enter. “Is it the victim? Do we have a name?”
“Slow down,” Alvin said. “One thing at a time. I’ve requested detailed information on the case in question. It should arrive in the next several minutes. AFIS only sends out an abbreviated version, but from what I’ve learned so far, the matching print was a single one found on the inside of a garbage bag containing dismembered human remains. It was found three years ago near a rest area along Interstate 8 on the far side of Gila Bend, halfway to the California border.”
“Human remains?” Brian repeated. “What kind of human remains?”
“An unidentified female, thirteen to fifteen years of age.”
“The case is still open?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you saying it’s possible the victim here is actually the perpetrator in that other case?”
“I doubt that,” Miller said. “I think it’s more likely that you’ve stumbled into a serial homicide case. LaGrange may be involved, but I’m guessing so is somebody else. If I were you, I’d look for other cases with the same MO.”
So Brian did just that. He went back up to his cubicle and logged on to the VICAP system. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the brainchild of longtime L.A. homicide detective Pierce Brooks, was created back in the seventies, when the only way of finding similar crimes and perpetrators was to pore through mountains of newspaper files. Computers changed all that.
He keyed in the few details he knew: female victim, twelve to twenty years old, dismembered body. A few moments later, as he scrolled through the results of his search, what chilled him was the number of unsolved crimes that matched those criteria-forty-one in all, stretching through more than three decades. At the very end of the list, the earliest case in the database leaped out at him-Roseanne Orozco.
That was the name Brandon Walker had mentioned that morning as they dug Fat Crack’s grave, the victim he had called the Girl in the Box. The coincidence was too much to ignore. It was highly unlikely that Erik LaGrange had already been a serial killer as a five-year-old. Still, Brian’s instincts told him there had to be a connection. To find it,
