Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [83]
Brandon dropped Diana off outside Wanda’s mobile home in Sells and then headed for Ban Thak. He arrived at the cemetery just after Davy and just before Brian. Brandon knew he was late. Baby and Leo had already dug down to knee level. Leo was down in the hole whaling away with a pickax while Baby stood on the surface leaning on a shovel.
He wiped his dusty hand off on his jeans before accepting Brandon’s proffered handshake. “Thanks for having us,” Brandon said.
Baby nodded. “Grab a shovel,” he said. “We’ll take turns.”
The younger men worked faster, and although Brandon shoveled steadily and was a little winded, he had nonetheless accomplished almost as much when his turn was over. Standing on the sidelines, catching his breath and listening to the others joke and tease, he remembered what Fat Crack had told him once—that as a young child, Looks at Nothing had told Rita Antone she would be a bridge between the Anglo world and the Tohono O’odham. And it was true. Years after Rita’s death, here were five men of different generations and races—Rita’s great-nephews, Brandon Walker and his Mil-gahn sons, who weren’t really his sons at all—working together in a blending of harmony and friendship that would have been unthinkable years earlier.
“Why so late?” Leo asked Brian. “Were you hanging around with that cute red-haired wife of yours?”
“I overslept,” Brian admitted. “I was out late last night working a case and didn’t set the alarm.”
“What kind of case?” Davy asked.
“I’m sure it’ll be on the news again today if you missed it last night,” Brian said, making conversation. “Some guy hacked a little Mexican girl to pieces and tossed her out in the desert.”
Brandon had stepped over to the fence to take a drink from the cooler, but the words stopped him. “What do you mean, hacked to pieces?” he asked.
Brian put down the pick and came out of the deepening hole while Davy went in to shovel up loosened dirt. Brian wiped his face and neck with a grimy hanky before answering.
“Just that. It was brutal. The murder weapon’s most likely a machete. Her limbs were whacked off at the joints. A woman hiking near Vail yesterday morning found the body in bags strewn along the railroad tracks.”
Brandon Walker’s heart constricted. It was nothing scientific—nothing he could take to court or turn in on a written police report—but instinctively he sensed a connection between this new case and an old one, between this new dead girl and Roseanne Orozco from 1970.
“Why do you ask?” Brian continued.
Brandon Walker knew that his close connection to Brian Fellows had often been a detriment to Brian’s career within the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The passage of time had made most of that go away, and Brandon didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Brian’s future by bringing their relationship back to the fore. He knew that if he and TLC were to solve a case that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department had left hanging, Brian Fellows had better not be anywhere nearby when the shit hit the fan.
“There was another case like that a long time ago, a couple of years after I started working Homicide,” Brandon said carefully. “It happened out here on the reservation. The victim’s name was Roseanne Orozco. A highway worker found the body near Quijotoa. She’d been chopped to pieces and left in an ice chest. People called her the ‘Girl in the Box.’ ”
“I remember hearing about that,” Leo said. “I was just a kid. Grandma always used to tell us if we weren’t good, we’d end up chopped to pieces and in a box the same way she was.”
“Probably no connection,” Brian said. “There wasn’t any ice chest this time. This girl’s body was in garbage bags and left out in the open in the