'You might want to take a look at these, Mrs. Walker, but put on gloves before you do it. Fingerprints and all. Meantime, Brandon, there's something I need to show you out in the car.'
Brandon Walker followed Leggett out to the driveway where the detective popped the trunk on his Ford Taurus. There, illuminated in the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun, lay Mitch Johnson's awful charcoal nude of Dolores Lanita Walker.
'Where did this god-awful thing come from?' Brandon choked.
'From Mitch Johnson's motor home,' Kendall answered. 'I smuggled it out. Along with this one, too.' He took out a second sketch, one of Quentin Walker. 'Neither one of these is on any of the evidence lists. I brought them here so you'd have a chance to get rid of them.'
'Thank you, Dan,' Brandon Walker said gratefully. 'I'll take care of them right away.'
With Brandon carrying Lani's picture by the corners, holding it as though it were the rancid carcass of some long-dead thing, and with Dan Leggett lugging the sketch of Quentin, the two men walked into the backyard. There Brandon grabbed an armload of chopped firewood from his never-ending stack and threw several branches into the barbecue grill. Minutes later, the two offending pictures had been reduced to a pile of paper-thin ashes.
'That's that,' Brandon said, dusting soot from his hands and onto his pant legs.
'There are two other pictures,' Dan Leggett said quietly.
'Of Lani and Quentin?'
'No,' Leggett said somberly. 'If there are others of them, we haven't found them yet. The two pictures I'm talking about are of someone else. They're titled 'Before' and 'After.' '
'They're both of the same man,' Leggett replied. 'Before and after a murder. Unless I'm sadly mistaken, the victim will turn out to be Mitch Johnson's ex-wife's second husband. That big-time developer who got carved up down in Nogales a few months back.'
'Larry Wraike?' Brandon Walker croaked in surprise. 'But I thought a prostitute did that.'
'So did everybody else,' Leggett replied. 'Me included.'
The two men went back inside. In the kitchen they found Diana sifting through a stack of papers. Her haunted eyes met Brandon's the moment he stepped into the room.
'Fat Crack was right,' she said. 'The danger did come from my book.'
'What do you mean?' Brandon asked.
'Some of this is Andrew Carlisle's personal diary, Brandon,' she told him, holding back the single detail that some of the passages had been addressed directly to her, that even back in 1988, Carlisle had intended that someday Diana Ladd Walker would read what he had written.
'Carlisle and Mitch Johnson were cellmates for years up in Florence,' Diana continued. 'It's all here in black and white. It started the first day when I went to Florence to interview Carlisle for the book. That's when Carlisle found out Quentin was up there, too. They targeted him that very day, Brandon. They set him up, and that's what this whole thing is about-revenge. Andrew Carlisle was still after me and Mitch Johnson was after you. Lani was the perfect way to get to us both. And that's not all.'
'Not all?' Brandon echoed. 'How could there be more?'
'This,' Diana said. She held up what seemed to be the title page of a manuscript.
'What is it?' Brandon asked.
'Do you remember when Garrison died I told you the manuscript he was working on disappeared?'
Brandon nodded.
'This is it,' Diana said. 'I recognized the typeface from his old Smith-Corona the moment I saw it. It's called A Death Before Dying. It's supposedly a work of fiction about a college instructor-a handsome man-presumably happily married to a lovely wife. Gary didn't have sense enough to change things very much. The husband taught freshman English; the wife was an elementary school teacher.'
'So?' Brandon asked a little impatiently. 'I've heard you say yourself that first novels are always autobiographical.'
Diana nodded. 'They are, and there was an ugly secret running just below the surface of this one. All the while the teacher thinks she's happily married, the husband is carrying on with another professor-a male professor. Believe me, it's a very special relationship to which the young wife proves to be an unyielding obstacle.'
'You're saying Garrison and Carlisle had something going, something sexual?'
Diana nodded. 'I think so,' she said.
'That would make sense then,' Brandon said. 'It would certainly explain some of the hold Carlisle wielded over the man.'
'Some of it,' Diana agreed. 'The kicker is here, though, on the very last page. The last written page because the manuscript is clearly incomplete. The last scene is mostly a dialogue between the two men. They're sitting in a bar, talking. Planning exactly how they're going to unload the inconvenient presence of that meddlesome wife.'
'You?' Brandon asked.
Diana nodded. Her voice sounded far more self-possessed than she felt. 'If I had gone to the dance with them that night,' she said, 'my guess is I would have been the one who died at Rattlesnake Skull Charco, not Gina Antone.'
For sixteen days and nights Lani Walker stayed in the tent Baby and Fat Crack Ortiz had erected for her near the base of Ioligam. She spent her days weaving a rectangular medicine basket. When it was finished, the lid fit perfectly. Lani held it up to the light and studied the final product with no small satisfaction. It was not as well done as one of Nana Dahd' s own baskets, but it would do.
Each evening, about sunset, Gabe Ortiz would arrive by himself, bringing with him an evening meal and the next day's salt-free food. The traditional dictates of the enemy purification process- e lihmhun-specify a period of fasting and of avoiding salted food.
On the final day of her purification exile, with the medicine basket complete, Lani took a flashlight and ventured into Betraying Woman's cave one last time. There, shoved up against the stalagmite behind which she had hidden for hours, Lani found one of her two missing boots. She picked it up and took it with her when she continued on into Oks Gagda' s burial chamber.
This time when Lani entered the earthen-floored chamber, there was a feeling of utter emptiness about it. The spirits- kokoi-that had once inhabited the place were no longer there. Careful not to touch or disturb the decaying bones, Lani placed the shoe beside Betraying Woman's bones as a kind of memorial, then she stepped over to the wall where all the broken pieces of blasted pottery lay in a dusty heap. Kneeling down, Lani picked up one shard of clay after another, examining each in turn, looking for one that would speak to her, the one that was worthy of inclusion in Lani Walker's newly woven medicine basket.
The fragment she finally settled on was all black, inside and out. She chose it because the fine black texture reminded her of the touch of the bat's wings against her skin. Pocketing her treasure, Lani was about to stand up and leave when she caught sight of something else reflected in the glow of the flashlight, something that would have remained completely hidden had she not moved several pieces of the pottery.
When Lani saw the tiny bones, she thought at first that she had discovered the skeleton of a tiny baby. It wasn't, though. When she picked it up and the bones fell apart, she realized that what she had found was the moldering skeleton of a bat's wing.
Awareness made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. I'itoi had given her a sign. Dolores Lanita Walker was Mualig Siakam — Forever Spinning, and Kulani O'oks — Medicine Woman as well. But she was also Nanakumal Namkam — Bat Meeter. Elder Brother had led her to this place and had shown her it was true.
Why not four names?Lani thought with a laugh. After all, all things in nature go in fours.
On that last night, Fat Crack brought along Looks At Nothing's medicine pouch. After Lani and he had eaten, the medicine man drew a circle on the ground, a line that encircled both man and girl. The two of them settled down on the ground inside the circle.
'It's time for your first Peace Smoke,' he told her. 'Davy and Candace flew out of Tucson for Vegas this afternoon. They're supposed to get married tomorrow, but before he left, Davy brought me these. He said they belong to you.'
Opening the medicine pouch, he pulled out two items and handed them to her. She recognized them at once as the treasures from Nana Dahd' s old medicine basket-the piece of pottery with the distinctive turtle design etched into the clay and the precious scalp bundle.
'Thank you,' Lani said. Opening her basket, she put the two additions inside and closed the lid.
