She couldn’t believe those frightened, despairing words came from the lips of the man she loved, from the mouth of Garrison Walther Ladd, III, someone who always had a ready answer for everything.
It had been a terrible week for Diana, a debilitating, virtually sleepless week. She alternated between bouts of fury and bleak despair over what was wrong with her husband, all the while battling her own recalcitrant body, which seemed determined to throw off every morsel of food she attempted to put in her mouth.
Gary spent the week in front of the TV set, watching everything from news to soap operas to game shows with almost catatonic concentration. He ate a bite or two of the food she brought him and sipped the iced tea or coffee, but he barely spoke to her, barely moved. With every passing moment, her sense of foreboding grew more overpowering, until she wanted to scream at the very sight of him.
Once, while he slept, she went out and examined the pickup in minute detail, looking for a clue as to what might have happened. She dreaded finding evidence that he had been in an accident, maybe a hit-and-run, but the combat scars on the Ford’s battered body were all old, rusted-over wounds. In a way, finding nothing made Diana feel worse. What was the matter? she asked herself. What had panicked her otherwise self-assured husband to the point that he couldn’t leave the house?
On Tuesday morning, Andrew Carlisle called to find out why Gary had missed class the previous day. Diana put her husband on the phone despite his desperately signaled hand motions to the contrary. He stammered some lame excuse about food poisoning that didn’t sound at all plausible to Diana and probably not to Andrew Carlisle, either. Gary promised faithfully that he’d be in class the next day, but Wednesday came and went without him moving from the couch other than to visit the bathroom.
On Thursday evening, Andrew Carlisle himself showed up at the door. Diana was surprised to see him, amazed that he’d go so far out of his way in an attempt to talk Gary out of his stupor. She didn’t like Andrew Carlisle, but she grudgingly gave the man credit. She wasn’t privy to the conversation that passed between them, but she was grateful that Gary seemed in much better spirits after Carlisle left.
“What did he tell you?” she asked curiously, after the professor drove away.
“That all creative people go through black periods like this,” Gary told her. “He says it’s nothing unusual. It’ll pass.”
On Saturday morning, Diana went to the High Store for groceries. The trading post on top of the hill was abuzz with talk about the murder and the now identified victim, Gina Antone. Diana bought a newspaper and read the ugly story for herself. She was shocked to discover the victim was the granddaughter of someone she knew.
Diana worked at the school and so did Rita Antone-Diana as a classroom teacher and Rita as a cook in the cafeteria, although the two women were only slightly acquainted. Rita was known for striking terror in the hearts of children who came to the garbage cans to dump their lunch trays without first having tried at least one bite of everything on their plate.
Rita, standing guard over the garbage cans like a pugnacious bulldog and waving a huge rubber spatula for emphasis, would order them, “Eat your vegetables.” Usually, the frightened Indian kids complied without a murmur. So did a few cowed Anglo teachers.
By the time Diana got back to Topawa with both the groceries and the newspaper, it was almost noon. She was in the kitchen fixing lunch when Gary turned away from the television cartoons and picked up the paper. She saw his face go ashen. The knuckles on his hands turned white.
He let the paper fall to the floor and began sobbing into his hands. She went to him. Kneeling on the floor in front of him, she begged him to tell her what was wrong. For a long time, he sat weeping with his face buried on her shoulder. The paper lay faceup on the floor with the headlines screaming at her. Without his saying a word, she knew. Terror and revulsion took over. She drew away from him, grabbed up the paper, crumpled it into a wad, and shook it in his face.
“Is it
And he gave her the only answer she ever got from him, an agonized three-word reply that offered no comfort even while she pinned her every hope for both the past and present on it.
“I don’t remember.”
Not, “Of course not!” Not, “How could you say such a thing?” Not, “That’s crazy!” But, “I don’t remember”-a murderous kings
The room reeled around her. Overwhelmed by nausea, she dashed for the bathroom and vomited, while her chicken-noodle soup cooked to blackened charcoal splinters on the kitchen stove.
When Diana came back out to the living room, Gary was gone. She ran to the door in time to see his pickup turning out of the Teachers’ Compound onto the highway, headed for Sells. She could have driven like a demon and caught up with him on the highway, but what would she have done then, forced him off the road?
Behind her, an unearthly howl from the telephone receiver told her that the phone hadn’t been hung up properly. At first, staring after the receding pickup, Diana was unable to respond. Soon a disembodied voice echoed through the house telling her to please hang up and try again. Shaken and too spent to do anything else, she put the phone back on the hook.
Gary left the house, and she never saw him again, not alive anyway, and that last phone call, placed to Andrew Carlisle’s home just before Garrison Ladd fled the house to go to his death, was one of the key pieces of evidence that linked the two men together.
Yes, Diana thought almost seven years later, going into the house in Gates Pass, closing and locking the door behind her, Andrew Carlisle was the invader here, the enemy. He had not yet set foot inside her home, but when he did, he would meet with implacable resistance, to-the-death resistance.
Rita Antone had said so, and so had Diana Ladd.
Detective Geet Farrell of the Pinal County Sheriff’s Department was a cop’s cop, someone who had been in the business a long time, someone who knew his way around people. Everyone in the Arizona law-enforcement community was familiar with the problems in the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. At first Farrell was worried that Brandon Walker might be one of Sheriff DuShane’s bad guys.
“You dragged me all the way down here with some cockamamy story, so tell me, who is this character?” Farrell asked, leaning back in the booth, eyeing Brandon Walker speculatively.
“His name is Andrew Carlisle,” Walker answered. “Formerly Professor Andrew Carlisle of the University of Arizona.”
Years earlier, the professor’s case had been notorious, statewide. Farrell remembered it well. “If it’s the same case I’m thinking about, he got himself a pretty slick plea-bargain.”
“That’s the one,” Walker nodded. “The other guy, his student and co-conspirator, committed suicide rather than go to jail.”
“Tell me about the bite.”
“Like I said on the phone. One nipple was completely severed, and the key piece of evidence that could have been matched to a bite impression, the thing that would have determined once and for all who was responsible, disappeared off the face of the earth.”
Farrell nodded. “You boys have a man-sized hole in your evidence room down there. Somebody ought to plug that son of a bitch.” Both men knew Farrell was referring to DuShane himself and not some mythical hole.
“They ought to,” Walker agreed, “but that’s easier said than done.”
“What makes you think Carlisle’s my man?” Farrell asked.
“He was released from Florence at noon on Friday, put on the bus for Tucson. My guess is that he never made it that far.”
“How’d you know about Margie Danielson’s nipple?” Farrell asked. The Pinal County detective didn’t play games. He had already made a favorable judgment call about the quality of his Pima County colleague.
“From two Indians,” Walker answered, “an old one, a medicine man, and a younger one, too. At least I think the younger one is a medicine man. They’d heard you’d arrested an Indian.”
“Arrested but not charged,” Farrell agreed, “but how’d they know about that?”
“They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. They were also the ones who came up with a possible connection between this case and the old one. They came to town this morning and asked me to find out whether or not Andrew Carlisle was out of prison.”
