Dance of the Bones

“There was no sign of him here, but chances are he’s dead, too,” Leo said. “We have to get back to Sells. I want to tell Gabe before anyone else does.”


BRANDON WAS FINE FOR A while as he headed north on the Catalina Highway. Driving through the bustling business centers of Oro Valley, he couldn’t help but remember when Ina had been on the far edge of the city. That was no longer true. As for Catalina? He remembered that as a sleepy hamlet on a two--lane road with little more than a bar, a gas station, and a tow--truck operation. Now it, too, was busy enough to have multiple lanes and multiple traffic lights. Off to the left, between there and I--10, were numerous housing developments and golf resorts. And off to the right, the ridgelines in the distance teemed with newly constructed cheek--by--jowl houses.

He stopped briefly at the red light that marked the entrance to Saddlebrooke, with a thriving “active adult” community that included thousands of retirement homes and more golf courses. No doubt somewhere up there was the property near Golder Dam that John Lassiter had sold to some “crazy” developer who planned to build houses there. It turned out, Brandon realized, that the developer was having the last laugh.

It wasn’t until Brandon turned off Catalina Highway and onto Highway 77 that the familiar pall of grief settled over him. His meeting with Amanda Wasser, in which he had learned about her unyielding loyalty to a father she didn’t know, had put Brandon’s troubled relationship with his own sons in an even worse light.

Tommy had died in his late teens. He and his younger brother, Quentin, had been engaged in the felonious activity of stealing pots from an ancient site in a cavern on the reservation when Tommy had fallen to his death. Wanting to cover up what had really happened, Quentin spent years maintaining that Tommy had simply run away. During that time, before Mitch Johnson’s arrival on the scene had revealed the truth about Tommy’s death, Quentin had drifted ever deeper into the world of boozing and drugging. His coming down with hep C was pretty much a foregone conclusion, and his frequent run--ins with the law meant that he had finally been given a three--strikes life sentence.

On the surface it was easy to theorize that Quentin’s burden of guilt about his brother had been the cause of Quentin’s eventually fatal downward spiral, but every time Brandon had driven Highway 77 from Tucson to Florence—-every time he had gone to the prison to visit Quentin prior to his death—-Brandon had blamed only himself. Today was no exception.

Brandon hadn’t been able to prevent his divorce from his sons’ mother, Jane, but once that happened, he should have been more actively involved in raising the boys. He should have done more to set them on the right path. He should have done better. He should have fixed it. Brandon’s sons were both dead while he was still alive. That wasn’t the way life was supposed to work. He grieved for his boys who had died so young and wasted so much of their all-too-short lives.

Drowning in regret, Brandon wasn’t the least bit surprised to pull into the visitors’ parking lot at the prison and find that the knuckles on his fingers were white from his death grip on the steering wheel. On a sunny Saturday in March, the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence was the very last place in the universe where Brandon Walker wanted to be.





CHAPTER 17