Kiss of the Bees (43 page)

“I can tell you what clothes Lani was wearing when she left the house,” Diana said. “In case you’re interested, that is.”

“That information should go into the Missing Persons report when you make it.” Myers smiled. “Chances are, though, it won’t even be necessary. Most of the time, these kids turn up long before the twenty-four-hour deadline. I’m sure your husband can tell you how it works, Mrs. Walker. By allowing that day’s worth of grace time, we can cut down on unnecessary paperwork. Right, Mr. Walker?”

“Right,” Brandon said.

“And as far as the gun theft and the vandalism is concerned, on a low-priority residential robbery like this, I won’t be able to schedule someone to come out and lift prints until regular work hours next week. And besides, that may not prove necessary, either.”

“What do you mean?” Diana asked. “Why wouldn’t it be necessary?”

Myers shrugged. “What if the whole thing turns out to be a family prank of some kind? If your daughter took the gun herself on a lark, just to do a little unauthorized target practice, it might be better not to have those prints on file, don’t you think?”

“But Lani wouldn’t—” Diana began.

“Sure,” Brandon said, urging Detective Myers and the deputy out the door. “I see what you mean. Thanks for all your help.”

Diana was fuming when Brandon turned to face her. “Why did you let him off the hook like that?” she demanded. “Lani doesn’t even
like
guns. She would never—”

“I let Detective Myers off the hook because he has no intention of doing anything, and I do.” With that, Brandon Walker stalked toward the kitchen, with Diana right on his heels.

“What?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

“I could lift prints myself, but that might screw up some prosecutor’s chain of evidence,” Brandon said, picking up the phone. “So instead, I’m going to make a few calls. There are some people in this world who owe me. It’s time to call in a few of my markers.”

Fingerprints were Alvin Miller’s life. From the time an ink pad showed up as a birthday present for his sixth birthday party, he had found fingerprints endlessly fascinating. He had left a trail of indelible red marks across the face of his mother’s new Harvest Gold refrigerator and dishwasher. His mother had confiscated the damn thing after that and thrown it in the garbage.

By the time Alvin was sixteen, he had turned an Eagle Scout project into a volunteer position as an aide in the latent fingerprint lab for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Upon high school graduation, he had transformed his volunteer work into a paying job. Now, at age thirty-four and without benefit of more than a few college credits, he was the youngest and least formally educated person in the country to be placed in charge of a fully automated fingerprint identification system.

The civil service protections former sheriff Brandon Walker had instituted over the years kept his successor from doing politically based wholesale firings, but Bill Forsythe wasn’t above finding other ways of unloading what he considered deadwood. One of the people he wanted out most was Alvin Miller. To have some of the best, most up-to-date equipment in the Southwest in the hands of an “uneducated kid” was more than Forsythe could stand. He wanted somebody in that position with the proper credentials—somebody people around the country could look up to, somebody about whom they would say, “Now there’s a guy who knows what he’s doing.”

Since his election, Sheriff Forsythe had hit Alvin Miller where it hurt the worst—in the budget department, chopping both money and staff. The “automated” part of AFIS sounds good, but the part that precedes the automation—enhancing the prints so the computer can actually scan and analyze them—is a labor-intensive, manual process. Forsythe had cut so far back on staffing the fingerprint lab that it should have been impossible for it to function—would have been impossible—had the lab been left in any hands less capable or dedicated than those of Alvin Miller.

He worked night and day. He put in his eight hours on the clock and another eight or so besides almost every day, Saturdays and Sundays included. Only forty hours a week went on the clock; a whole lot more than forty were freebies.

Because Alvin had so much hands-on practice, he was incredibly quick at manually enhancing those prints. He could read volumes into what looked like—to everyone else’s untrained eyes—indecipherable circles and smudges. When it came to fingerprints, Alvin found each was as unique as he’d always heard snowflakes were supposed to be. And once he had dealt with a print, he remembered much of what he saw. Twice now, he had managed to make a hit—fingering a current resident in the Pima County Jail for another unrelated crime
before
feeding the information into the computer.

When Carley Fielding, Pima County’s weekend lab tech, called earlier that evening to see what she should do with the three boxes of bones Detective Leggett wanted printed, Alvin Miller happened to be in and working. Lifting fingerprints off human bones was nothing Alvin had ever done before. The prospect was interesting enough to take him away from whatever he had been working on before.

It turned out that bones were easy to process. It didn’t take long for Alvin to figure out that more than one person had handled the bones. Some had done so with gloves on, but only one had handled them bare-handed. Alvin sorted through one set of dusted prints after another until he was convinced that he had found the best possible one.

That was where he was when his phone rang. “Al?” a familiar voice asked. “What the hell are you still doing there working at this time of night?”

“Sheriff Walker!” Alvin Miller exclaimed. A pleased smile spread over his face as he recognized his former boss’s voice. “How’s it going?”

“Not all that good. I need some help.”

“Hey, if there’s something I can do,” Al Miller told him, “you’ve got it.”

“I know,” Brandon Walker said. “And as it turns out, there is something you can do, Al, because I just happen to have a houseful of fingerprints that need to be lifted.”

“What house?” Alvin Miller asked.

“Mine.”

“The same one you lived in before? The one out in Gates Pass?”

“That’s it. But I don’t want to get you in trouble with your new boss by taking you away from something important.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alvin Miller said with a grin. “My new boss isn’t going to say a word. As far as Bill Forsythe and his damned time clock are concerned, I’m not even working tonight. That being the case, I can come and go as I damned well please. See you in twenty minutes or so, give or take.”

*    *    *

Once Brandon was off the phone with Alvin Miller, Diana took her turn and tried dialing the number Davy had left on his message. She was surprised when a faraway desk clerk told her that she had dialed the Ritz-Carlton. She was even more surprised when the voice of a sleep-dulled young woman answered the phone. Moments later Davy’s voice came through the receiver as well.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. “How’s it going?”

Just hearing her son speak brought Diana close to tears. She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could answer. “Not all that well at the moment,” she said. “Lani’s missing.”

“What?” Davy asked.

“Lani’s gone,” Diana said bleakly.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean she’s not here. She never showed for that concert with Jessica, and she didn’t show up for work today, either.”

“Maybe she went to visit somebody else. Have you checked with her other friends?”

“We’re checking,” Diana said, “but I thought you’d want to know what was going on.”

“You don’t think she’s been kidnapped, or something, do you?” Davy demanded. “Shouldn’t somebody contact the FBI?”

“Brandon is handling it.”

“What can I do to help?” Davy asked urgently.

“Nothing much, for right now,” Diana answered. “I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Are you and Dad going to be all right?”

Diana felt herself choking on the phone. “We’ll be okay,” she said. “But hurry home. Hurry as fast as you can. And call every night so we can keep you posted.”

“I will,” Davy said. “I promise.”

A stricken David Ladd handed the phone over to Candace. “I was right,” he said. “Something awful
has
happened. Lani’s gone.”

Candace was the one who put the phone back in its cradle and switched on the light. “Gone where?” she asked.

Davy shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

“Your parents think she’s been kidnapped?”

“Maybe, but they’re not sure. Candace, I’ve never heard my mother this upset. She never even asked who you were.” While he spoke, Davy had crawled out of bed and was starting toward the bathroom.

“What are you doing?” Candace asked.

“I’m going to shower and get dressed.”

“But why?”

“So I can leave. You heard me. I told Mom I’d be there as soon as I can. If I go right now, I can be halfway to Bloomington before morning rush hour starts.”

“We,”
Candace said pointedly. “If
we
leave right now. Besides, it’s Sunday; there isn’t going to be a rush hour.”

David nodded. “I meant we,” he said.

“Doesn’t that seem like a stupid thing to do?” Candace asked.

“Stupid? Didn’t you hear what I said? This is a crisis, Candace. My family needs me.”

“I didn’t say going was stupid. Driving is. Why not fly?” Candace asked. “We can put the tickets on my AmEx. If we take a plane, we can be in Tucson by noon. Driving, that’s about as long as it would take us to make it to the Iowa state line.”

“What about the car? What about all my stuff?”

“I’ll call Bridget,” Candace said decisively. “She works only a few blocks from here. If we leave the parking claim ticket at the desk, she can come over on Monday after work, pick up the car, and take it home with her. She and Larry can keep it with them until we can make arrangements to come back and get it later. In the meantime, we can take a cab to the airport. That’s a lot less trouble than fighting the parking-garage wars.”

Candace wrestled a city phone book out of the nightstand drawer and started looking through it.

“What are you doing?” David asked.

“Calling the airlines to find the earliest plane and get us a reservation.”

David looked at her wonderingly. “You’d do this for me? Go to all this trouble?”

She looked at him in mock exasperation as the “all lines are busy” message played out in her ear. “David,” Candace said, “we’re a team. I’ve been telling you for months now that I love you. If there’s a crisis in your life, then there’s a crisis in mine, too.”

Just then a live person somewhere in the airline industry must have come on the phone. “What’s your earliest flight from Chicago to Tucson?” she asked. There was a long pause. “Six A.M.?” she said a moment later.

Looking at the clock on the nightstand, Candace groaned. “Not much time for sleep, is there? But that’s the one we need. Two seats, together, if you have them.” There was a pause. “The return flight?” She glanced questioningly in David’s direction. “I don’t know about that. I guess we’d better just leave the return trip open for now.”

After making arrangements to pay for the tickets at the counter, Candace put down the phone. “Don’t you think we ought to try to sleep for another hour or so? We don’t want to get there and be so shot from lack of sleep that we can’t help out.”

Obligingly, Davy lay back down on the bed, but he didn’t crawl back under the sheets because he didn’t expect to fall asleep again. He did, though. The next thing he knew, the alarm in the clock radio next to his head was going off. It was four-thirty.

From the light leaking out of the bathroom and from the sound of running water, he could tell that Candace was already up and in the shower. Moments later, David Ladd was, too.

He was standing under the steaming spray of water when he remembered his dream from the day before—the dream and Lani’s horrifying scream.

Rocked by a terrible sense of foreboding, Davy braced himself against the shower wall to keep from falling. He knew now that the scream could mean only one thing.

Dolores Lanita Walker was already dead.

14

When the Indians heard the bad news—that PaDaj O’othham were coming again to steal their crops—they held another council. Everybody came. U’uwhig—the Birds—told their friends the Indians about a mountain which was not far from their village and quite near their fields. The people went to this mountain, and on the side of it they built three big walls of rock.

Those walls of rock are there, even to this day.

Then all the women and children went up on top of the mountain, behind the walls of rock. But the men stayed down to protect the fields.

Soon the Bad People of the South came once again.

The Wasps, the Scorpions, and Snakes were leading them. But
Nuhwi
—the Buzzards—and
Chuk U’uwhig
—the Blackbirds—and all the larger birds were on guard.
Nuhwi
—Buzzard—would catch
Ko’owi
—Snake—and break his back.
Tatdai
—Roadrunner—watched for the Scorpions, and
Pa-nahl
—the Bees—fought
Wihpsh
—the Wasps.

So at last the Bad People were driven away. The Desert People returned to their village and their fields. They built houses and were very happy. A great many of the Bad People had been killed in this fight, so it was a long time before they felt strong enough to fight again. But after a while they were very hungry. And
Wihpsh
—the Wasps—carried word to them that the Indian women were once again filling their ollas and grain baskets with corn and beans and honey.

This time
PaDaj O’othham
waited until it was very dry and hot. Then they started north.

This time
Shoh’o
—Grasshopper—had listened to the plans of the Bad People.
Shoh’o
started to jump to reach his friends, the Desert People, and warn them. The harder and faster Grasshopper jumped, the longer grew his hind legs. Still he could not go fast enough. So he took two leaves and fastened them on and flew. Before he arrived, he wore out one pair of leaves and put on another pair. To this day
Shoh’o
—Grasshopper—still carries one large thin pair of wings, and another thin small green pair.