Dance of the Bones

Reluctantly Gabe handed over the phone. “That’s not fair,” he said.

“This isn’t about fair,” Lani replied, dropping the phone on the passenger seat of the truck. “It never has been.”

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 gonna agree to see that daughter of yours?” Aubrey wanted to know. “Those guys in the visitors’ office tell me she keeps asking and asking.”

“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.