Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [19]
Fat Crack had told her Brandon Walker was a good man—a white man who could be trusted. She knew that Walker and his wife had a wogsha—an adopted Tohono O’odham child—named Lani. According to Fat Crack, the girl was the spiritual daughter of the Desert People’s greatest medicine woman, Kulani O’oks, a woman who, in a time of terrible drought, was saved from death by the beating of the wings of The Little People, the Bees and Wasps, the Butterflies and Moths. But Emma Orozco had not expected the Mil-gahn would understand or speak her native tongue. Her fingers unclenched. She relaxed her painful grip on the walker.
“They found her out along the highway beyond Giwho Tho’ag,” Emma said softly. “Someone cut her up and put her in a box.”
Emma deliberately used the Tohono O’odham word for Burden Basket Mountain. It was a test of sorts, to see how much the Mil-gahn knew.
“I remember now,” he said, nodding. “The girl in the ice chest over by Quijotoa.”
It came back to him then, not all the details, but enough. He was still working Homicide for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. When he heard about the case, he was happy the call hadn’t come to him. He’d already been through one ugly reservation-based homicide. A year earlier, a young Indian woman named Gina Antone had been murdered just off the reservation. The trail had led Brandon Walker to Andrew Philip Carlisle, a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, and eventually to one of Professor Carlisle’s star pupils, Garrison Ladd, Diana’s first husband.
As the investigation closed in, Garrison Ladd had perished in what was mistakenly thought to be a suicide. As far as Brandon was concerned, Carlisle’s slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain had been a less than satisfactory conclusion to the case. It had left a bad taste in Brandon’s mouth. The bitter taste still lingered in 1970, when Roseanne Orozco’s butchered body was found on the reservation, and Brandon had been happy to dodge that particular bullet. Some other investigator—he couldn’t remember exactly who—took the call.
There were several differences between the Orozco murder and Gina Antone’s. Gina had died off the reservation and at the hands of Anglos. Consequently, the investigation into her death had fallen under the jurisdiction of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Although the actual murder site was never found in the Orozco case, it was assumed Roseanne had died somewhere on the reservation and that she had been murdered by a fellow Indian. Investigations into Indians murdering Indians on Native lands were the responsibility of either the FBI or the local tribal police.
Brandon Walker remembered that, in the early seventies, there had been a small contingent inside the FBI with the kind of corporate mind-set that preferred shooting Indians to anything else. FBI investigations into reservation murders, unless the perpetrator was Indian and the victim Anglo, were often cursory at best. People went through the motions, and that was it. “Law and Order,” as the Papago Tribal Police Force was sometimes called, was summoned to the scene of the Orozco homicide. Hampered by a lack of three essential ingredients—training, equipment, and money—their subsequent investigation had obviously come to nothing, although Brandon hadn’t known that for sure—not until right then, when Emma told him.
The Orozco homicide hadn’t been Brandon Walker’s deal. Newly divorced, he’d had his hands full in those years. Money had been short. He had struggled to keep up with alimony and child-support payments by moonlighting as a rent-a-cop on occasion and by moving in with his parents for what they had all erroneously expected would be a short time. With all that going on and with his father in deteriorating health, no wonder he hadn’t kept track of the outcome of each investigation, successful or not, that had, however briefly, crossed his desk.
“Law and Order thought my husband