Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [9]
When he had gone in for his annual physical, Dr. Browder had hinted that it was about time to discuss the possibility of hip- and knee-replacement surgery. Brandon was considering the possibility all right, but not very seriously. He’d get around to having joint replacement surgery about the same time someone perfected the art of human brain transplants. In the meantime, he’d get along as best he could without complaining. If he didn’t gripe about it, maybe he could keep his wife, Diana Ladd, from setting another doctor’s appointment.
The cordless phone he had carried out to the patio rang with the distinctive ringer that said someone was calling from the locked security gate at the front wall. Had he been home alone, he would have had to scramble out of the pool to see who was there and let them in. Fortunately, Diana was home and in her study, locked in mortal combat with the stalled beginning of her next book. Convinced she would welcome any interruption, Brandon kept swimming. Besides, the visitor was probably UPS or FedEx bringing some new missive or assignment from Diana’s New York publishers. Most of the mail, packages, and e-mails that arrived at their Gates Pass home near Tucson these days were part of Diana’s ongoing business. Years after Brandon’s failed reelection bid for the office of Pima County sheriff, he had adjusted to being retired and mostly out of the loop. Diana Ladd was still working hard; Brandon was hardly working.
His wife came out through the sliding door onto the patio trailed by Damsel, a now three-year-old long-eared mutt Diana had found as a shivering, starving, and abandoned pup outside their front gate on a chilly Thanksgiving morning two and a half years earlier. Brandon and Diana had agreed that, with their daughter Lani off at school, the last thing they needed was a puppy. In the end, however, sentimentality had won out over good sense. Their Damsel in Distress—Damn Dog, as Brandon often called her, since she was usually underfoot—was now a well-loved and decidedly spoiled member of the family.
Walking toward the pool, Diana beckoned her husband to climb out. They had been married for more than twenty-five years, but in his eyes she was still as beautiful as she had been that stormy summer afternoon some thirty years earlier, when he had knocked on the door of her mobile home in a teachers’ living compound near the Papago village of Topawa. He had gone there looking for Diana’s first husband, Garrison, who was a suspect in a homicide that then Pima County homicide detective Brandon Walker was investigating.
By the time Brandon arrived at Diana’s house, Garrison Ladd was already dead of what would be ruled a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but neither Brandon Walker nor Diana Ladd had known that then. The detective had sat across from her in the living room of a threadbare single-wide mobile home, asking tough questions about her husband’s doings and whereabouts. As he did so, Brandon was struck by Diana’s delicate beauty; by the hard-won poise with which she answered his troubling questions; and by her unwavering loyalty to her jerk of a husband, even though by then she must have suspected some of what had gone on behind her back.
That very afternoon, as Diana Ladd struggled to cope with the looming disaster that was about to engulf her life, Brandon Walker had longed to take the distraught woman in his arms and comfort her, but he hadn’t—not then. Married at the time, Brandon had managed to maintain his professional distance then and six months later, as well, when a profoundly pregnant Diana Ladd had worked determinedly to see to it that her dead husband’s accomplice, Andrew Carlisle, was sent to prison. Six years after that, when Carlisle was released from prison and came stalking Diana, Brandon Walker had once again been thrown into Diana’s orbit. During those intervening years, a divorced Brandon Walker had looked at a few other women and even dated one or two, but none of them had measured up.
Brandon remembered