Dance of the Bones

“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 Ke

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. Ke

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 Ke