Dance of the Bones (21 page)

Knowing the knife was there and being able to lay hands on it, however, were two different things. It took time to figure out how to approach the problem. Finally, by throwing his legs over Tim's in a way that formed a human X, Gabe was able to slither snakelike far enough down that his fingers touched the handle of the knife. Extricating it from the sock was another whole exercise that left Gabe out of breath, sweating and exhausted.

Back in his original position he had to rest for a bit—­rest and think. How much time had passed? Was it day or night? Their cage—­that's how he thought of it—­was gradually heating up, probably due to the warmth of the two bodies trapped inside it and maybe from sunlight, too—­but not direct sunlight. Even in March, if the black truck had been parked in the sun, the boys would have died from heatstroke by now. So where were they then? Gabe suspected the truck was parked inside some kind of shaded structure, far enough off the road that there were no sounds of passing vehicles.

Why do we still have air?
Gabe wondered. There had to be some form of ventilation that he couldn't see. Were there ventilation holes that kept them from running out of oxygen? If so, he wondered if that meant that he and Tim weren't the only ­people who had been transported in the back of Henry Rojas's pickup truck.

Tim moved impatiently beside him as if to say,
What
'
s the holdup?

Somewhat rested now, Gabe clicked the button. The knife sprang open with such force that it almost shot out of his hand. It was awkward to hold it, but Gabe was gratified to discover that his exertions had somehow weakened the grip of his restraints. He had more range of movement than he'd had earlier. That meant that he should probably be the one wielding the knife blade, even though he'd be working in the dark. And, clumsy as he was, he'd be working with his right hand. If Tim used the knife, he'd be using his left.

Gritting his teeth, dreading that the smallest slip of the blade might mean slicing into Tim's arm, Gabe snuggled over until their two bodies were once again touching. Then, after ascertaining where the tape started and stopped as best he could, he began to pick away with the tip of the razor-sharp blade. He couldn't see in the dark, but biting his lip, he concentrated as though he could and hoped that I'itoi or maybe one of the night-­flying bats that had filled his dreams would be there to help him.

As he did so, Gabe felt a surprising sense of joy rise in his heart. He was doing something. He was taking action, and for a change he wasn't afraid.

Maybe I'itoi had heard him after all.

 

CHAPTER 20

THE NEXT DAY,
NAWOJ
, MY
friend, when the women came again, Shining Falls was still sleeping. The women tried to awaken her, but she would not open her eyes. The women were frightened. When they tried to question the Evil Giantess, Ho
'
ok O
'
oks hid in the black cloud of her hair and would not answer them.

But there was one thing the Evil Giantess did not know and that the Indian women did not know, either. While Ho
'
ok O
'
oks
was singing and waving the feathers over Shining Falls
'
s face, she had dropped a single white feather. It was Alichum S-­toha A
'
an
—­
Little White Feather
.
Shining Falls had put her hand over it, and while she lay sleeping, she held Little White Feather ever so tightly in her hand.

After a time, Little White Feather grew very tired from the weight of Shining Falls
'
s hand and cried out for help. Some White-­Winged Doves
—­
O-­okokoi
—­
heard Little White Feather
'
s cry for help. It was really a song, and it goes like this:

White Feather, White Feather, child of my mother,

You in the air look down on your brother.

Alone am I here in pain and in trouble.

One of the White-­Winged Doves said to the others,
“
Why, I believe that is one of my feathers calling to us.
”

You must understand,
nawoj,
my friend, that it is the law of the desert that you must always answer a call for help, so the White-­Winged Doves circled in the air to try to learn what the trouble was.

BRANDON WAS SPEEDING SOUTH ON
Highway 77 when his phone rang. He answered it through the Escalade's sound system, and Diana's voice came out through the speakers.

“Have you talked to Lani today?” she asked with no preamble—­without asking where Brandon was or what he was doing. That was unusual in and of itself.

“No, why?”

“Gabe's gone missing,” she said.

“From Kitt Peak?” Brandon asked. That was the last thing he had known about the weekend's plans—­that Gabe and Lani were going to camp out on the mountain on Friday night and that the whole family planned to make a daylong expedition to the book festival in Tucson on Sunday.

“Not exactly,” Diana said. “Gabe and Lani evidently got into some kind of hassle, and he walked off the mountain. He made it home, but now no one can find him. Later, after Gabe left, Lani witnessed a shooting—­heard it rather than saw it—­in which two boys from Sells were killed. It's a mess, and Lani's really upset about it, but I have another panel to go to . . .”

“Not to worry,” Brandon said. “I'll call her right now.”

He did so. “What's going on?” he asked when Lani answered.

“You're not going to believe it.”

“Try me.”

Brandon listened patiently to the whole story, but he noticed there were undertones of things not said. “I know Gabe,” Brandon said when Lani finally came to a stop. “He's a good kid. And I've met Tim, too. I can't imagine either of them getting mixed up in any kind of smuggling enterprise.”

“I believe it all started with one of Tim's older brothers. Max was caught up in it to begin with. Then, after he got sent up for something or other, he must have passed his part of the business on to his younger brothers.”

Brandon and Lani had always been close, and he could tell from her voice that she was holding back.

“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “You've told me Dan and Leo are out looking for the boys, but I get the feeling that you left out a few pertinent details. How about telling me the rest of it?”

His question seemed to catch her off guard. “How did you know?” she asked.

“You've never been that good of a liar. Now spit it out.”

“I don't think Gabe and Tim are just missing, Dad,” she said at last. “I think it's worse than that. I'm afraid they're both dead—­Tim for sure and maybe Gabe, too.”

“Why?”

“Because there was another shot, one I haven't mentioned to anyone but you,” she said. “A while after the first two volleys of automatic gunfire, I heard another shot, a single one that time. I couldn't tell exactly where it came from, but it sounded like it was close enough to Rattlesnake Skull charco that it could be related.”

“You're saying you think whoever killed Carlos and Paul José may have killed Tim, too?”

“Yes,” Lani answered, her voice trembling with emotion. “The poor kid is probably lying out there in the desert in a place where we'll never find the body. I know the FBI agents are aware Tim has a phone, but I'm not sure they'll be in any hurry to put a tracer on it. Finding the phone might not show us where he is now, but it would be a starting point.”

“Surely the FBI will get right on that.”

“I'm not so sure.”

“Why?”

“Remember how you always used to complain about having to work with the FBI?”

“I do, but what does that have to do with this?”

“Believe me, it would have been a lot worse if you'd been Indian instead of Anglo back then,” she said. “That female agent barely gave me the time of day. The FBI probably will get around to tracing Tim's phone, but only when they're good and ready and have a properly drawn search warrant in hand. Tim José is an Indian, Dad. When it comes to Indian kids, you could say the FBI has no real sense of urgency. I need to find someone who will go looking for Tim's phone right now. Do you know of anyone who could do that for us, maybe someone from TLC?”

“Not offhand,” Brandon answered. “TLC's brief is with cold cases rather than new ones, and I'd hate to think about what will happen if we get caught up in the middle of an active FBI investigation. Still, let me give it some thought. I'm coming up on Oro Valley right now. I may stop and grab a bite to eat. Give me a call if you hear anything about those boys, will you?”

“Yes,” she promised. “I'll be sure to let you know.”

“And don't worry,” Brandon added. “It'll be okay.”

That's what he told his daughter, but it was an outright lie. Brandon had been in law enforcement long enough to understand that if Gabe Ortiz and Tim José had gotten themselves crosswise with drug smugglers, they were most likely already dead, just as Lani feared. Brandon also knew that losing Gabe would break Lani's heart, and she was the one Brandon was worried about.

That's what fathers do where their daughters' hearts are concerned. They worry.

I WON'T PRETEND THAT READING
through the Kenneth Myers murder book was easy. Most of the entries were written in Sue Danielson's back-­slanted handwriting. Seeing that again after all those years came as a shock, and it wasn't surprising that it was sometimes difficult to read the words themselves because tears kept blurring my eyes.

The skeletal remains had been discovered in 1990 by a highway department crew clearing brush during the completion of the I-90/I-5 interchange. The case had been assigned to Detectives Kramer and Danielson. There were autopsy notes showing some blunt force trauma, but the presumed cause of death was a shooting; two close-­range bullet holes were in the back of the skull, either one of which would have been fatal.

A search of public records for the names on the pendant, Ken Myers and Calliope Horn, had eventually led Kramer and Danielson to a woman named Calliope Horn, who had in turn identified the dead man as someone named Ken Myers, Calliope's former boyfriend, who had gone missing from a transient encampment in 1983.

That piece of information itself went a long way to explain why so little had ever been done. At the time, bum-­bashing was more or less a popular spectator sport. Hazing at UDub fraternities often included tracking down bums and beating the crap out of them. If one of them died? It was no big deal because nobody really cared. In fact, I distinctly remembered Kramer waxing eloquent on the topic one day in the break room—­talking about how taking down ­people like that was doing society a favor. I couldn't help but wonder now if he and Sue had been working this very case at the time.

With that in mind, it was no surprise that Sue Danielson had done the lion's share of the work. She was the one who had tracked down Calliope Horn and done the interview. I knew I could go down to Seattle PD and request a look at the interview tape. It wasn't something I was looking forward to, because I dreaded seeing Sue's face again. But it turned out I didn't have to, because Amanda Wasser had worked her Freedom of Information Act magic. The next file I opened included a PDF transcript of the Danielson/Horn interview.

Transcripts are to interviews as raisins are to grapes. They're lifeless and flat. They don't contain the facial expressions and hand gestures that let homicide cops know when someone is lying, but they can still deliver a lot of information, even when done—­as this one evidently had been—­with some low-­cost character recognition program that couldn't make heads or tails of either
Calliope
or
Puyallup
. Fortunately I was able to fill in those information gaps, telling myself all the while that if I needed to see the tape itself, I could always do so. But even with the character-recognition difficulties, I could see that Sue hadn't exactly handled Calliope Horn with kid gloves.

S
.
D
.:
For identification purposes, your name is Calliope Maxwell Horn and you were born in Puyallup, Washington?

C
.
H
.:
That's right, that's who I am, but why did you bring me here? Am I under arrest? What's going on?

S.D.:
You're not under arrest, but tell me. Were you once in a relationship with someone named Ken Myers?

C
.
H
.:
Yes, I was. It was a long time ago. Kenny and I were sort of engaged. I mean, I didn't have a ring or anything, but he'd asked me to marry him, and I'd said yes, but then he took off for Arizona. He told me that when he came back he'd have enough money that we'd be set. We'd be able to get our own apartment and start over. That's what he told me, but it's also the last thing he ever said to me. He left, and I never saw him again. But you still haven't explained why I'm here.

S
.
D
.:
Are you aware that human remains were discovered last week at the I-­90/I-­5 interchange?

C.H.:
I guess I saw something about that in the paper. But what does that have to do with me?

S.D.:
The victim, a male in his late twenties or early thirties, died of homicidal violence, shot in the back of the head with a .22. I'm sorry to tell you that he was wearing a pendant shaped like a heart, with two names engraved on it—­Calliope Horn and Ken Myers. If I'm not mistaken, you're wearing a similar item. Is this one engraved the same way?

C.H.:
(
nodding
) I still wear it. (
holding up a necklace
) He didn't have enough money for a ring, so he got us matching pendants instead. But are you saying Kenny is dead? That he never went to Arizona? That he died right here in Seattle? That's not possible. He can't be dead. He can't. (
sobbing
)

S
.
D
.:
That's how we found you, Ms. Horn, because of the pendant. Calliope Horn is a distinctive name. We were able to locate you through your driver's license records. Unfortunately, we've found no trace of Mr. Myers. No birth records; no driver's license. Are you sure Kenneth Myers is his real name?

C
.
H
.:
That's the name he gave me. I didn't exactly ask him to show me his ID. As for his license, he told me he lost it. Because of a DUI, I think.

S.D.:
Do you know where he came from? Or do you have any idea who his next of kin might be so we can notify his family?

C
.
H
.:
(
shaking her head
) He came from somewhere in ­Arizona. Phoenix, I think. Or maybe Tucson. I told him Phoenix was a place I'd always wanted to visit. It sounded warm.

I remembered seeing notes in the murder book that Sue had checked with authorities in both Phoenix and Tucson, looking for someone named Kenneth Myers. She'd come up empty, of course, because cops in Arizona knew Myers by the name of Kenneth Mangum.

S
.
D
.:
Do you remember when Mr. Myers left town?

C
.
H
.:
May 1, 1983.

S.D.:
You remember that date exactly after all these years?

C
.
H
.:
Yes, I remember it. When you're in love, you remember things like that. At least I do.

S
.
D
.:
How did you and Mr. Myers meet?

C.H.:
We were both homeless and living in a tent city up on the hillside just east of I-­5. A shelter had been cobbled together using old tarps and pieces of canvas. There must have been twenty of us or so living in camp at the time, but I didn't really notice Kenny until we were standing in line for a Thanksgiving dinner offered by the Salvation Army. It was cold and rainy. It was nice to be inside, out of the weather, and to have a hot meal for a change. We got our food, sat at the same table, and then started talking.