Dance of the Bones

Nodding to herself, Ava went back to work. She had always been careful to keep her life entirely separate from Jane Dobson’s, and in that regard, she was nothing if not a chip off the old block. Ava had been twelve years old when her mother discovered, quite by accident, that her husband, Ava’s father, was a bigamist with another whole family living in Eloy. A subsequent investigation revealed that there was yet a third family living in Deming, New Mexico.

Ava’s father was a long--haul trucker, and he’d been able to keep all the balls in the air for quite some time until a gallbladder attack unexpectedly landed him in the hospital and put him out of commission for a number of weeks—-long enough for the other two families to come looking for him. Ava had watched the unfolding drama from the sidelines. She had never been especially fond of her mother, so she’d had scant sympathy for the woman. What had really fascinated her was how her father had managed to pull off the whole escapade. He’d created separate identities complete with checking accounts and social security numbers—-one for each family, paying for it by working part--time jobs with three different trucking companies.

That was all a lot easier to do back in the day before computers and cell phones and in--car navigation systems. Ava was careful. She had never brought her cell phone here, and she’d never used her GPS to come to Jane Dobson’s house, either. There might be a trace of her travels lingering somewhere in the Mercedes’s black box, but she was confident by now her once shiny luxury vehicle had disappeared into some faraway, dusty spot or else it had been reduced to dozens or perhaps hundreds of anonymous pieces.

But that didn’t mean there weren’t traces of her lingering in the house, and once someone found Henry’s body here—-however long that took—-the cops would be all over the place searching for traces of Jane Dobson. By erasing Jane’s presence, Ava deleted her own as well, and that was the reason for her frenetic but very thorough job of housecleaning. She vacuumed everything. She made sure there were no traces of hair left in any of the sinks, sending a batch of hair--cleaning Liquid--Plumr down the drains.

She wiped down everything, polishing away fingerprints from every conceivable surface—-light switches, cabinets, appliances, furniture, silverware, dishes, canned goods in the cabinets, and frozen food in the fridge. From the lack of fingerprints, the cops would be able to tell at once that Jane Dobson had been a crook. What they wouldn’t be able to tell was that Jane Dobson and Ava Richland were one and the same.

And once the house was clean, all Ava had to do was wait.

WHEN I LEFT THE GROVERS’ condo, I could hardly wait to get back down to my car. I found I had a signal on the top floor of the parking garage, and I called Brandon Walker back immediately.

“Tell me about Amos Warren. Refresh me on the timeline.”

“In the spring of 1970, he went out on one of his prospecting/scavenging jaunts in the desert. Weeks later, his vehicle turns up at Tucson International Airport. Ten years after that, his remains are found in the desert twenty miles from the airport.”

“That means that the killer must have had an accomplice,” I said. “Assuming the victim’s vehicle was at the crime scene originally, someone had to help transport it to the spot where it was found.”

“We always assumed there was an accomplice,” Brandon said, “but we could never get any traction when it came to finding out who it was.”

“I think I may know,” I told him. “The dead guy up here.”

“Ken Mangum?”