Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [94]
“Human remains?” Brian repeated. “What kind of human remains?”
“An unidentified female, thirteen to fifteen years of age.”
“The case is still open?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you saying it’s possible the victim here is actually the perpetrator in that other case?”
“I doubt that,” Miller said. “I think it’s more likely that you’ve stumbled into a serial homicide case. LaGrange may be involved, but I’m guessing so is somebody else. If I were you, I’d look for other cases with the same MO.”
So Brian did just that. He went back up to his cubicle and logged on to the VICAP system. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the brainchild of longtime L.A. homicide detective Pierce Brooks, was created back in the seventies, when the only way of finding similar crimes and perpetrators was to pore through mountains of newspaper files. Computers changed all that.
He keyed in the few details he knew: female victim, twelve to twenty years old, dismembered body. A few moments later, as he scrolled through the results of his search, what chilled him was the number of unsolved crimes that matched those criteria—forty-one in all, stretching through more than three decades. At the very end of the list, the earliest case in the database leaped out at him—Roseanne Orozco.
That was the name Brandon Walker had mentioned that morning as they dug Fat Crack’s grave, the victim he had called the Girl in the Box. The coincidence was too much to ignore. It was highly unlikely that Erik LaGrange had already been a serial killer as a five-year-old. Still, Brian’s instincts told him there had to be a connection. To find it, he needed information.
The Yuma County Sheriff’s Department had been the investigating agency in the crime Alvin Miller had uncovered. Brian put in a request for information on that case, asking that it be faxed to him. He had already asked for Roseanne Orozco’s file, but a weekend request for a paper file on a thirty-year-old case had yet to bubble to the top. Besides, since the homicide had occurred on the reservation, it seemed likely that much of the information on that case might still be located at the Law and Order office out in Sells.
He considered calling Brandon at home to ask if he remembered anything in particular about the case, but he thought better of it. Even though Brandon’s involuntary exit from office was years in the past, Brian knew that involving the former sheriff in a current investigation was bound to have unpleasant repercussions for everyone concerned, most especially for Brian Fellows.
Brandon picked Diana up from the Ortiz place. As they drove home, she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. “Tired?” he asked.
“I’m not used to doing that much physical labor,” she said. “If there isn’t enough food to go around at the feast tomorrow, it won’t be for lack of trying. If I ever look at another pile of masa harina or masa trigo, it’ll be too soon. How about you? You were gone a long time.”
He told her then about the situation with Emma Orozco and about how all record of Roseanne’s stay in the hospital had somehow been misplaced or deleted. “Isn’t that about when the husband of that teacher friend of yours was working on the reservation?”
“Larry Stryker?” Diana asked.
“Yeah. The guy who runs those free clinics down in Mexico.”
“You mean Larry Stryker? Medicos for Mexico.”
“Right. Maybe I should talk to him about this.”
“About Roseanne Orozco? It happened more than thirty years ago, Brandon. She went in for an appendectomy. I doubt he’ll remember the first thing about her.”
“Roseanne happened to be an appendectomy patient who was murdered four months after undergoing surgery,” Brandon replied. “The way I remember things, there weren’t that many murderers in Pima County back then, let alone out on the reservation.”
“Suit yourself,” Diana said.