fine.”
He gave Detloff the fax number, but as soon as the line was clear, he punched redial. When he reached the Yuma County Sheriff’s Department, he asked to speak to the fingerprint lab.
“Deborah Howard,” a woman answered.
“My name is Detective Brian Fellows with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department…”
“You wouldn’t happen to be calling about that AFIS hit, are you?” she interrupted.
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“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
