Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [91]
“Sorry David couldn’t make it,” Candace said.
Lani winced. David was so much more formal than Davy, so much more serious. Davy was her brother. Who exactly was David?
“Gabe’s sons asked him and your dad to come out to some village on the reservation and help dig the grave,” Candace continued as they headed for the luggage carousels. “I don’t know why they have to do things like that by hand. Back home, we had people with machines who dug graves. Nobody had to show up at cemeteries with picks and shovels.”
Lani didn’t hear the rest of Candace’s complaint. For the remainder of the trip home, Lani was virtually impervious to Tyler’s wails and screeches from his car-seat imprisonment in the back. Her feelings were no longer hurt. She was content.
Neither Davy Ladd nor Brandon Walker had driven to the airport to pick Lani up and bring her home, but both her father and her brother—the Boy with Two Mothers and Four Fathers—were at Ban Thak, doing what needed to be done.
And that, nawoj, she thought to herself, is the way things ought to be.
Alvin Miller was forty years old and had worked for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department for more than half his life. He had started out doing an Eagle Scout volunteer project for the Latent Fingerprint Lab as a sixteen-year-old and had been there ever since, becoming the youngest person in the country to achieve full technician qualification with the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. With only a few community college credits to his name, all of his experience and most of his education had come the hard way—hands-on.
Alvin’s unwavering loyalty to Sheriff Walker hadn’t been lost on incoming Sheriff Forsythe. The new administration hadn’t been tough enough to come right out and fire Miller, but Forsythe had done his underhanded best to run Alvin Miller out of Dodge. First he cut the fingerprint lab’s budget and head count, thinking that tactic would persuade Alvin to pack up and go elsewhere. Instead, Alvin had worked more hours himself, many of them off the clock, until even Sheriff Forsythe could see that losing Miller’s expertise would be a serious blow.
Late the previous evening, a CSI unit had come dragging back to the department with an armload of dishes, silverware, and other items taken from a crime scene related to Saturday’s Vail homicide. The evidence had arrived too late in the shift to be processed on Saturday evening.
Alvin understood the sacrosanct pecking order inside the department. People with the least amount of seniority and experience were the ones who were stuck manning weekend shifts. Alvin, a lifelong bachelor with no family responsibilities, made it a practice to check in every Sunday morning to make sure whoever was minding the store didn’t need assistance.
This morning, Sally Carmichael, his newest intern, called Alvin at home before he could call her. She seemed close to hyperventilating.
“What’s the problem, Sally?” he asked. “You sound upset.”
“I am upset,” she told him. “I’m here by myself. Tom and Marlene left me a whole pile of stuff to be processed ASAP. Detective Fellows has already called twice, asking if I’ve done any work on it. I told him I’ll try to get to it this afternoon, but I don’t see how—”
“Don’t worry,” Alvin reassured her. “I’ll come give you a hand.”
In actual fact, Alvin was more than happy to do it. He still felt a proprietary interest in his AFIS equipment. No matter how well trained his people were, he was never quite as confident of anyone else’s fingerprint enhancements as he was of his own.
Alvin came in, donned his lab jacket, checked the items in question out of the evidence room, and went to work. The CSI unit had brought in a number of prints they had lifted from the scene, but rather than paying attention to those, Alvin went looking for prints he could process himself from beginning to end. He started with the presumed murder weapon—the machete.
The evidence log reported that the machete had been found in a kitchen sink, soaking