Dance of the Bones

By then Leo was at the back of the vehicle unloading gear from the luggage compartment. Leo gave a snort of suppressed laughter. Lani heard it and hoped Gabe had not.

“Oi g hihm,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Where to?” Gabe asked.

“There’s a clearing up there,” she answered, pointing first to a point farther up the mountain and then to a spot nearby where a faint path disappeared into the brush. “It’s not all that far, but it’s steep. You’ll need to watch your step.”

“YOU GONNA BE ALL RIGHT now?” Aubrey Bayless asked, pushing John Lassiter’s bulky wheelchair into his cell and locking the wheels close enough to the metal cot that the prisoner would be able to manage the last bit of distance on his own.

“I’m fine, Aubrey,” Lassiter said, levering his heavy frame out of the chair and onto the narrow bed. “Thank you for bringing me back.”

Big Bad John Lassiter was still big, but the bad part had largely disappeared. Multiple sclerosis had turned him into a wheelchair-­bound mass of mostly uncooperative muscles. It was hard to tell if he was still bad because, on occasion, he was also virtually helpless. He lived alone in a cell not because he was a danger to himself or others, but because none of the other inmates at the Arizona State Prison in Florence was willing to help him with his ever-­increasing physical deficits.

That job usually fell to Aubrey Bayless, a kind, grizzle-­haired old black man who primarily functioned as an orderly inside the prison’s infirmary. It was there the two men—­prisoner and caregiver—­had gradually developed a friendship. On those occasions when John wasn’t confined to a hospital bed, Aubrey voluntarily helped him in and out of his cell as well as back and forth to the dining room and elsewhere.

“When you go

“How many times do I have to tell you?” John replied wearily. “I don’t have a daughter. I signed away my parental rights to that girl the moment she was born.”

“You maybe signed ’em away, but I don’t think she be listening,” Aubrey countered. “They say she even gots the same thing you got. She’s what, not even forty years old, and she already stuck on one of them scooters.”

That hurt. The idea that MS was hereditary and that he’d most likely passed his own ailment along to an offspring he’d never met seemed grossly unfair. All Big Bad John knew about his daughter was her name—­the name her adoptive parents had given her—­Amanda Wasser.

Years had passed between the time Amos Warren disappeared and when his remains had been found. By the time John was charged with his murder, his onetime girlfriend, Ava Martin—­the one who had caused all the trouble—­was years in his rearview mirror. At the time John was taken into custody, he and his then girlfriend, Bernadette Benson, had actually started thinking about getting married. By the time the baby was born, he’d been found guilty and sentenced to life without parole for Amos’s murder.

Bernadette had come to the prison visitors’ room, hugely pregnant. She had begged him to marry her and give the baby his last name, promising that she’d keep the child and raise it on her own, but John had steadfastly refused. Why give the poor kid the name of a guy who would be spending the rest of his life in prison? Bernadette had no education beyond high school. Without John’s support, she was barely scratching out a meager existence working as a waitress.

“Why not give the kid up for adoption?” he had asked her. “Why not let him have half a chance at a decent life?”

Of course, the baby had turned out to be a girl rather than a boy, but Bernadette had come around to John’s way of thinking. He’d been surprised when she had put the baby up for adoption, signing away her parental rights at the same time John gave up his. He knew how much Bernadette regretted that decision because she herself had told him so, saying over and over that, more than anything, she wished she had kept the baby after all.

The other thing about Bernadette Benson that had surprised John Lassiter was that, although she had let their child go, she had continued to love him no matter what. For years she had faithfully driven back and forth between Tucson and Florence once a week to spend a few short minutes talking to him through a plexiglass barrier. Bernadette’s visits had ceased abruptly in 1983 when she had been fatally injured in a late-­afternoon one-­car rollover on her way back home from the prison.

John’s mind had drifted away. When he came back to the present, Aubrey Bayless was still talking.

“And she be the one who been talking to them JFA folks about getting your ass sprung out of here. You should be givin’ her a chance to at least know you, man. Seems like you owe her that much.”

John Lassiter had no idea how Amanda had reinserted herself into his life. He had refused to meet with her mostly because he was too ashamed to do so. He didn’t want to have to sit there, as a convicted killer, and look her in the eye. And he had no idea how or why she had managed to persuade the ­people from Justice for All to go to bat for him, but her efforts on his behalf hadn’t and wouldn’t make him change his mind about seeing her.

The old Big Bad John would have jumped all over Aubrey and told him to give it a rest and mind his own damned business, but this John Lassiter was painfully aware of how much he depended on the kindness of this good-­hearted old man.

“I’m not making any promises,” John said as Aubrey backed out of the cell and slammed the barred door shut behind him. “I’ll think about it.”

CHAPTER 5

YOUNG GIRL RAN BACK TO the village as fast as she could, but she was too late. Before she could sound an alarm, the Apaches were already there. The men who had been out working in the fields hurried to do battle while the women and children ran to hide.

You must know, nawoj, my friend, that Ioligam,I’itoi’s sacred mountain, is full of caves. Because I’itoi lives in these caves, the Desert ­People usually stay away from them. The caves are Elder Brother’s quiet place, and the ­People do not want to bother him. But when there is danger, that is where they go.

That day, as the Ohb descended on Rattlesnake Skull village, that’s where the women and children ran to hide—­in one of the caves—­and the cave they chose was the one where Young Man had been staying. When they found him there, knowing he was Ohb, they attacked him with clubs and beat him very badly even though Young Girl told them she loved him and begged them to leave him alone.

The ­people of Rattlesnake Skull village were very angry when the Apaches stole all their food. And when the ­people learned that Young Man, an Ohb, had been living in one of I’itoi’s sacred caves and that Young Girl had been feeding him, they held a council to decide what they should do.

BY THE TIME LANI, LEO, and Gabe set out walking, the sun had long since sunk past Ioligam’s summit, and that part of the mountain was already shrouded in shadow. Within a few steps, the white buildings atop the mountain that comprised Kitt Peak National Observatory disappeared from view.

As Lani had warned, it was a steep climb. They might have been covered with sweat from exertion, but a chill wind blowing out of the east dried the moisture on their perspiring bodies as soon as it formed.

Even though it had been years since she’d come this way, Lani could have led the way with her eyes closed. She walked past the path she knew would lead to the tiny entrance they had used to enter the cavern on that day so many years ago. She had awakened from a drugged stupor to find herself Mitch Johnson’s prisoner. She had traveled to the mountain with him and Quentin Walker, a man whom Lani had never regarded as a brother, although he was Brandon Walker’s son. It had taken time that awful day for Lani to realize that, rather than being Mitch’s ally, Quentin was as much Mitch’s prisoner as she was.