Dance of the Bones

“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.