Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [101]
The Papago Tribal Police, as they were then called, had been the primary investigative agency. Having played a secondary role, Pima County didn’t have extensive involvement. The Orozco file was painfully thin, but the facts were clear. Roseanne’s dismembered body had been found by highway workers collecting trash along Highway 86 west of Sells. The body had been hacked to pieces and stuffed into a Coleman cooler. An autopsy had revealed that the fifteen-year-old homicide victim had been pregnant at the time of her death. For some reason, Henry Orozco, the girl’s father, was initially considered to be a prime suspect both in terms of Roseanne’s death and as the father of her unborn child. When a blood test excluded him as the baby’s father, he was dropped as an official suspect in the murder investigation as well. Within weeks of Roseanne’s death, new entries in the file ceased completely as the investigation was left to go dormant.
Even so, Brian thought, Brandon remembered her the moment I brought it up. Why? There was no mention of Brandon Walker’s name in the file. His signature didn’t appear on any of the reports. Still, it was a case that stuck with him decades later.
Brian reached for his phone and dialed the Walker place in Gates Pass. Lani answered. “Hi, Brian,” she said. “You missed a great dinner last night.”
“I know,” he said. “Had to work. Sorry. Is your dad around?”
“No. He left a little while ago. Do you have his cell-phone number?”
“I do,” Brian said. “Thanks.” But before he had a chance to dial, PeeWee arrived and settled at his own desk. “What are you up to?” he asked.
Wanting his conversation with Brandon Walker to be private, Brian put down the phone. He had been sorting the faxed case files into two separate stacks: scattered remains versus contained remains. He added Roseanne Orozco’s file to the second stack and passed the piles along to Detective Segura. “Anyone for a serial killer?” he asked.
While PeeWee scanned the material, Brian walked down the hall. Returning minutes later with coffee, he found PeeWee engrossed in the files.
“You may be right about these being related,” PeeWee said, tapping the stack of faxes that dealt with containerized remains. “These may be connected, too, but this one?” He tapped the Orozco file, which he had pushed to one side. “LaGrange is too young for this one, but I’ll check his credit card transactions to see if we can put him in the vicinity for any of the others.”
PeeWee took a thoughtful sip of his coffee. “You picked all this stuff off the computer in a matter of hours. How come you’re the first investigator to make the connection?”
“Because I’m smarter than the average bear?” Brian asked with a laugh. “No, it’s the same old thing. Nobody else found it because nobody else was looking. I’m guessing these are all throwaway kids. They went missing and nobody even bothered to file a missing persons report.”
“And without some relative keeping the heat on…” PeeWee added.
They both knew why active cases went cold. Time passed and nothing happened. With no grieving relatives maintaining pressure, the respective investigative agencies finally stopped looking.
“Somebody’s applying pressure now,” Brian said. “You and me. So let’s get cracking. I’ll call Yuma and talk to the detectives over there. The Vail autopsy is scheduled for ten. Who’s going to do that?”
“I’ll flip you for it,” PeeWee said, tossing a coin in the air. “Heads you go. Tails I do.”
The coin came up heads. “Too bad, buddy.” PeeWee grinned. “This is one damned autopsy I’m happy to miss.”
Brandon drove to the back side of Kino Community Hospital and pulled up in front of the Pima County medical examiner’s office. He had come here often enough in the distant past, back when what he still considered the “new” hospital first opened. It had