Day of the Dead (27 page)

“Yes,” Emma agreed.

The fact that the baby’s remains had been separated from her mother’s was more than Brandon Walker could have hoped for, but that didn’t make asking the critical questions any easier. He wanted to be diplomatic and kind. Emma Orozco had been hurt enough.

“Was the baby embalmed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. No one ever told us.”

She spoke softly, carefully, but Brandon knew what both the questions and answers cost her. “Do you know about DNA?”

“You mean like at O.J.’s trial?” Emma returned. “Sure, I know about that.”

“Yes,” Brandon said. “Like with O.J., but DNA identification techniques have improved greatly since then.”

“You want to dig up the baby?”

Emma’s direct approach caught Brandon off-guard. “Yes,” he said. “I’m thinking Law and Order may have been right back then. If we learn who the baby’s father was…”

“Do what you need to do, Mr. Walker,” Emma Orozco said. “If you need me to sign papers to make it happen, just let me know.”

***

Diana had told
Lani that Davy wouldn’t be able to pick her up at Sky Harbor. Candace and Tyler would be coming in Davy’s stead, but all through the long plane trip, Lani had hoped that either her brother or her dad would be there to pick her up.

It wasn’t that Lani disliked Candace. It was just that, with Candace’s upscale Midwest background, the two young women had virtually nothing in common—other than their mutual love for Lani’s brother. On that single subject they were in total agreement.

When she saw Candace and Tyler waving at her from the far side of the security checkpoint, Lani’s heart fell. She had tried without success to sleep on the plane. Now, bone-weary and still mourning, she was faced with riding home with someone who had once thought that Crack was somehow Fat Crack’s last name. Davy and Lani knew the emptiness Fat Crack’s absence would leave in both their lives. Candace had no clue.

Tyler, waving and grinning, gave every evidence of being delighted to see his auntie—right up until she was close enough to touch. At that point, he buried his head in his mother’s shoulder and screamed bloody murder.

“How was your flight?” Candace asked, bouncing the child and trying to quiet him.

“All right,” Lani said. “In terms of post-9/11 air travel, it went as well as possible.”

“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 in soapy water. The soap had done some but not all of the work of removing the blood from the joint where the handle and blade came together and from the decorative carvings on the handle itself, but as far as usable fingerprints were concerned, the machete was clean as a whistle.

The plates and silverware were a gold mine by comparison. Working carefully and humming under his breath, Alvin dusted and retrieved what appeared to him to be two relatively perfect sets of prints. Once he had the prints lifted, he spent the better part of two hours going over each print and enhancing by hand the lines and whorls he found there so that the image fed into the machine would be as clear as possible.

“Do we have anything to compare these to?” Alvin asked when Sally peered at his work over his shoulder. He spoke without ever looking away from the print he was working on.

“The suspect’s been booked,” Sally told her boss.

“That means his prints are already in the system,” Alvin said. “What about the victim’s?”

“The autopsy’s tomorrow sometime. We won’t have her prints until after that.”

“Some things can’t be rushed,” Alvin said. “When you entered the suspect’s prints, did you get a hit?”

“No.”

“Well,” Alvin said. “Run me off a copy of his prints, and I’ll take a look.”

In a matter of minutes Sally returned. Alvin peered at the paper for only a matter of seconds before making up his mind. “Yup,” he said. “The suspect’s prints are on both sets of dishes. He probably served the meal and cleared up afterward. We’ll put those aside for the time being. The ones we should concentrate on are the unknowns. If they belong to the victim and she’s in the system, we may make a positive ID before the ME does. That would be a huge help to the detectives. The sooner they know who’s dead, the sooner they find out who did it.”

That was Alvin Miller’s style—work, talk, and teach all at the same time. That was why people who moved on from his lab were always in demand.

It was almost noon before Alvin was finally satisfied enough with the second set of prints to put them into the machine for copying and transmitting. While the computer did its stuff, he walked back to his desk to retrieve a now-dead-cold cup of coffee. He had taken a single sip when Sally called him back.

“Hey, Mr. Miller,” she called. “Come look at this.”

Being referred to as Mr. Miller made Alvin feel old, but the excitement in Sally’s voice was unmistakable. “Must be a hit, then,” he said. “Whose is it?”

Wordlessly Carol handed him the printout. Alvin read it through.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “We’d better get Detective Fellows on the horn right away.”

***

Delia Chavez stood outside,
patting balls of dough into tortillas and then tossing them onto a wood-fire-heated griddle. Her sister-in-law waited while the dough cooked, then turned them deftly with her fingers, let them cook on the other side, and then tossed them onto a waxed-paper-covered table to cool. Delia’s tortilla-making deficit had been corrected first by her aunt Julia and later by her mother-in-law after Delia’s return to the reservation.

She had come home grateful to have a job that allowed her to leave D.C. and Philip’s betrayal far behind. But coming back to Arizona did something else—it brought her face-to-face with her father and his betrayal of her mother all those years earlier.

As far as Delia could see, Eddie was nothing but a worthless drunk; so was her father. Still bristling with anger at Philip, Delia had been more than ready to write both of them off. Then, when a seriously injured Manny was sent home from Tucson a virtually helpless cripple, Delia had no choice but to take charge of her father’s life. She looked after him because she had to—because she was his daughter and there was no one else to do it.

“You shouldn’t be so angry with him, you know,” Aunt Julia said one day. She had come into Sells from Little Tucson and was patiently instructing Delia’s clumsy computer-savvy fingers in the fine art of patting popover dough while Manny Chavez, visiting on his paid caregiver’s day off, dozed in his wheelchair in the next room.

“You really need to forgive him,” Aunt Julia continued. “Blaming your father for everything that happened is only hurting you and no one else. You’re very smart,
ni ma’i—
niece, and a lawyer besides. Everything you learned in school should have taught you that it’s wrong to see only one side of things.”

Julia, Delia’s mother’s aunt, was the last person Delia expected to leap to Manny’s defense.

“What other side is there?” Delia shot back angrily. “It
is
his fault. He’s the one who beat my mother up. I saw him do it. If it’s not his fault, whose is it, my mother’s?”

“No,” Julia said. “It wasn’t Ellie’s fault, either. She was too young to know what was what.”

“Whose, then?” Delia persisted.

“If you want someone to blame,” Aunt Julia said, “you should probably look to your grandmother, to my sister Guadalupe.”

“Come on,” Delia objected. “She died so long ago, I don’t even remember her. How could you blame any of this on her?”

“Guadalupe knew what your mother was like. We all did, from the time she was little. It was wrong of my sister to arrange a marriage with Manny. Girls like that don’t make good wives.”

“Girls like what?” Delia demanded. “You mean girls like me—ones who are smart the way my mother was or who want to go to school to better themselves?”

“No,” Aunt Julia said softly. “I mean girls who like girls.”

That conversation had proved to be a watershed for Delia Cachora. For the first time she could see that the tragedy of her father’s life wasn’t so different from her own. Manny had married Ellie Francisco expecting one thing and had gotten another in the same way Delia’s marriage to Philip had turned out to be far different from her own expectations.

From then on, Delia was able to be kinder to her father and far more patient in her dealings with him. Eventually she was able to forgive both her parents for the unwitting mistakes they had made along the way. She never forgave Philip, though. Unlike Manny Chavez and Ellie Francisco when they married, Philip Cachora had known exactly what he was doing.

Twenty

B
ut even with all the Indian mother’s care, her baby seemed to grow smaller and smaller. When the cold days came, she slept more and more and smiled less often. And the mother, in those days, never smiled at all. She was afraid.

Then one morning, the parents found that their baby was not breathing.

So the mother wrapped the little one in her brightest blankets. And the father called for his neighbors to help him. The parents and their friends carried the baby to the mountains, where the dead are put in their rock homes.

They did not need much brush or many stones to cover such a little thing.

Now a good Indian does not show how he feels. Especially if one is sad, it must not be shown. Great Spirit—
I’itoi
—who is the Spirit of Goodness and Elder Brother of the Tohono O’odham—manages everything. So to feel very bad about anything is to oppose the Spirit of Goodness.

But this mother had eaten nothing all that day. In her throat there was something big and hard which she could not swallow. As she went up the mountain with her friends, she kept stumbling. And this worried her husband. He was afraid she would let the water come in her eyes.

***

PeeWee had gone home
and Brian was at his desk trying to sort through his impressions of the LaGrange interview when his phone rang. “Brian? Glad you answered the phone.”

Alvin Miller wasn’t a great one for using proper titles, and Brian recognized his voice. “What’s up?”