'What the hell is she doing here?' Quentin demanded. 'I said I'd take you to the cave. Bringing someone else along wasn't part of the bargain, especially not her.'
Quentin didn't like being around his sister. Lani was almost as weird as that old Indian hag named Rita who used to take care of her when she was little. Lani had funny ways about her, ways of knowing things that she maybe shouldn't have, just like Rita. If Quentin had been able to, he would have climbed in the backseat right then, just to put some distance between them.
'She's your sister, isn't she?' Mitch returned mildly. 'I didn't think you'd mind if I brought her along for the ride.'
'Mitch,' Quentin said, speaking slowly, trying to make his lips and brain work in conjunction, trying to make it sound as though his objection were more general and less personal. 'Don't you understand anything? She may be my stepsister, but she's also an Indian. Once the tribe hears about my pots, they'll raise all kinds of hell.'
'Lani's not going to say anything to anybody, are you, Lani?'
Once again, Vega's warning fingers caressed the top of her leg. Dreading his viselike grip, Lani flinched under the pressure of his hand and shook her head.
'No,' she said at once. 'I won't tell anybody. I promise.'
The turnoff to Coleman Road was coming up fast. Mitch Johnson switched on his signal. 'Now what?'
'Go about half a mile up. There's a road off to the left. A few yards beyond that, there's a wash off to the right. Turn there.'
'Up the wash?'
'Right,' Quentin said, grateful that his tongue and lips seemed to be working better now, although he felt like hell. This was one of the worst hangovers he'd ever encountered.
'Before we turn off, though,' he continued, 'you'll need to stop and let me drive. The trail isn't marked. You won't know where to go.'
Mitch glanced dubiously across the seat. 'You're sure you can drive?'
'What do you think I am, drunk or something?' Quentin asked irritably.
'Definitely or something,' Mitch Johnson whispered under his breath.
Lani sat quietly between the two men-between her brother and the man Quentin had just called Mitch. At least she now knew what the M stood for in Vega's signature. Mitch.
As the Bronco's heavy-duty tires whined down the pavement, Lani looked up at the shadow of mountain looming above them. Ioligam' s stately dark flanks were silhouetted against a starry sky.
They were going after pots. If they had been found here on the reservation, they were actually Tohono O'othham pots that might have been hidden inside the mountain for hundreds of years. Perhaps they had remained hidden from view in one of the sacred caves on I'itoi' s second favorite mountain.
She remembered once listening to Davy and Brian Fellows talking about the day Tommy and Quentin Walker had found a big limestone cave out on the reservation.
'They didn't go inside, did they?' Lani had asked.
Davy shrugged. 'Of course they did.'
'But that's against the rules,' Lani had objected indignantly. 'Nobody's supposed to go inside those caves. They're sacred. You should have stopped them.'
Davy and Brian had both laughed at her. 'What's so funny?' she had demanded. 'Why are you two laughing?'
'Fortunately, you're much too young to remember growing up with Quentin and Tommy. When we were all kids, those two were a pair of holy terrors. As far as they were concerned, rules were made to be broken.'
'So what happened?'
'As far as I know, they went there just that once,' Brian said. 'It wasn't long after that when Tommy ran away. If Quentin went back out to the reservation to go exploring the cave by himself, he never mentioned it.'
'If they went inside the cave, maybe that's what happened to Tommy.'
'What?' Brian asked.
'Maybe I'itoi got him,' Lani said.
Brian shook his head. When he spoke, the laughter had gone out of his voice. 'Don't ever say anything about this to your dad,' he said seriously, 'but from the rumors I heard, I'd say drug-dealing is what got Tommy. What I've never been able to understand is why it didn't get Quentin, too.'
As they turned up Coleman Road, Lani felt a growing certainty that the place where they were going was the same cave Brian and Davy had talked about. Off to the left was the dirt track that led off to Rattlesnake Skull charco, the place they used to go every year to redecorate the shrine dedicated to Nana Dahd' s murdered granddaughter.
'We shouldn't go there,' Lani said softly, unable to keep herself from issuing the warning. Even someone as cruel as Mitch Vega deserved to be warned away from danger.
'See there?' Quentin yelped angrily, glaring at her. 'I knew you shouldn't have brought her.'
'Shut up, Lani,' Mitch said.
Lani closed her eyes and tried to hear Rita's words. Listen to me and do exactly as I say.
Alvin Miller was a talented guy who was able to do his work in a seemingly focused fashion, all the while carrying on a reasonably intelligent conversation with whoever happened to be within earshot.
In this case, as he carried his gear into Brandon and Diana Walker's house in Gates Pass, Brandon was giving Alvin an earful. He had responded to former Sheriff Walker's call for help without asking for any specific details on the situation. Now, though, Brandon was venting his frustration over the way Detective Ford Myers was-or rather was not — handling the disappearance of Brandon's sixteen-year-old daughter, Lani.
Other than having been one once, Alvin wasn't especially wise to the ways of teenagers. Nonetheless, he did see some merit to Detective Ford's inclination to go slow and not push panic buttons. Although Alvin sympathized with his former boss, he could see that the whole thing might very well turn out to be nothing but a headstrong teenager pulling a stunt on her too-trusting parents. After all, armed or not, most missing kids did turn up back home eventually.
So Alvin listened and nodded. Betweentimes, he went to work. 'What all would you like me to check for prints?' he asked.
'Lani's bicycle,' Brandon answered. 'That's outside in the carport. There's a pair of rubber-handled tongs in the kitchen sink. And back in my study, somebody went to the trouble of breaking up a couple thousand bucks' worth of custom-framing.'
For comparison purposes, Alvin took prints from both Brandon and Diana Walker as well as prints from places in the daughter's room that would most likely prove to belong to Lani herself. He packed up the tongs, the bicycle, and the better part of the picture-frame display. Alvin knew he'd be better off dusting those in the privacy of his lab. What he couldn't take back to the department with him was the house itself and furniture that was too big to move.
'Where did you say you kept the key to the gun cabinet?'
'In the desk.' Brandon had been following Alvin from room to room, watching the process with intent interest. As Alvin settled down to dust the desktop, Brandon left the room. The print-one with a distinctive diagonal slash across the face of it-leaped out at Alvin the moment he delicately brushed the graphite across the smooth oak surface.
Alvin Miller could barely believe his eyes. He knew he had seen that same print, or else one very much like it, on the wallet Dan Leggett had brought in earlier and on several of the bones in the detective's boxed collection. For a moment, Alvin was too flustered to know what to do.
He was here in Brandon Walker's home collecting prints as an unofficial favor to an old friend. The problem was, if he was right, if this print and the other one were identical, then Alvin Miller had stumbled across something that would link the newly discovered bones with the break-in here at the Gates Pass house. Not only that, connecting those two sets of dots could put him in the middle of a potentially career-killing cross fire between two dueling detectives-Dan Leggett and Ford Myers.
In addition, if Lani Walker was somehow involved in an assault and a possible homicide, the chances of her disappearance being nothing but ordinary teenaged rebellion went way down. Whatever was going on with her was most likely a whole lot more serious than that. The same went for Brandon Walker's missing.357.
Feeling as though he'd just blundered into a hive of killer bees, Alvin considered his next move. For the time
