Brandon was bemused. “Thank you?” he asked. “For what?”

“For changing the course of my life,” Suzanne answered. “What you said that day out in the desert about finding the murderer and bringing him to justice really got to me. It was something that seemed far more important than studying ancient artifacts. I could see that tracking that man’s killer down gave you a sense of purpose. I wanted to have that same kind of purpose in my life, too. I ended up quitting anthropology and moving over into pre-­med. I’m an M.E. now, living and working in Littleton, Colorado.”

That meant that at least one good thing had come out of Amos Warren’s homicide. Brandon was proud of Suzanne, of course, and gratified that in those few hours on the back side of the Rincons he’d been able to have such a positive influence on her life.

What seemed grossly unfair to him was that guiding a complete stranger onto a better path had been so effortless and easy when having the same impact on his own sons had turned out to be utterly impossible.

Brandon looked down at the sleeping dog. “Life isn’t fair, is it, Bozo boy?” he said aloud. “Come on. It’s late. Go get busy and then what do you say we hit the hay?”

CHAPTER 10

THEY SAY IT HAPPENED LONG ago that a boy and girl, a brother and sister, were left all alone when their parents died. They lived in the southern part of the Tohono O’odham’s lands. They felt very lonely living there because everything made them think about their father and mother. So they moved to a new place, the village of Uhs Kehk—­Stick Standing—­which is close to the place the Milgahn call Casa Grande.

The boy had no fields, so he went out hunting and was gone all day. The girl, after grinding her corn on her wihthakud—­her grinding stone—­would go out into the desert to find plants for cooking and drying and to find seeds as well. The girl was S’kehg Chehia, which is to say, she was very beautiful.

But because this brother and sister were alone and had no ­people and seemed so sad, the ­people in Stick Standing said they were bad. In this kihhim—­this village—­there was a man of great influence, Big Man—­Ge Cheoj. Big Man had power over the ­people because he had large fields. He soon fell in love with this new girl who was so very beautiful and so very different from the girls in his own village.

But Beautiful Girl was always working or out in the desert gathering plants, so Big Man could not see her very often.

THE LIGHTS WERE OFF AND Diana was sleeping when Brandon tiptoed into the bedroom. Bozo was already sacked out and snoring on his bed in the corner. Of the three, Brandon was the only one who still couldn’t sleep. With his mind caught up in the case, he tossed and turned, wrestling his covers, battling his pillow, and once again reliving that long-­ago crime scene.

Since Brandon had been the first officer summoned to the crime scene, that meant the homicide investigation was assigned to him from the start. At Sheriff DuShane’s insistence, Brandon worked the case solo. He understood from the outset that this wasn’t a favor. The Amos Warren investigation started out as a ten-­year-­old case. No doubt DuShane assumed that the homicide would never be solved. By assigning the case to Brandon, the sheriff could be sure that it would count against Brandon’s closure rates and no one else’s.

DuShane’s automatic expectation of failure made Brandon all the more determined to succeed. Knowing that the best he could hope for would be to build a circumstantial case, he went looking into Amos Warren’s circumstances.

Over time the victim’s history came into focus. He was an ex-­con who had gone to prison for killing someone in a bar fight on the night of his twenty-­first birthday. After serving his time and being released, he’d been a loner, earning a somewhat sketchy living doing some kind of prospecting rather than having a regular job. Somewhere along the way, he had taken in a young kid from the neighborhood, a neglected boy named John Lassiter.

Since Brandon knew John Lassiter was the one who had filed the missing persons report after Amos Warren disappeared, that’s where Brandon started his investigation. Their first meeting went about as well as could be expected.

According to county records, John Lassiter lived in a house on Lee Street in Tucson, a few houses east of Park. It was a modest place, two bedrooms or so, with a screened-­in front porch. Because of the neighborhood’s proximity to the University of Arizona campus, most of the other houses served as student rentals, but this one seemed to be an exception to that rule. The bearded, burly man who opened the door looked too old and shopworn to be a college student. Brandon estimated the guy was six-­foot-­six if he was an inch. Already, at nine o’clock in the morning, there was a distinct odor of beer on his breath.

“John Lassiter?” Brandon asked, pulling out his ID.

“That’s who I am. Who are you?”

“I’m Detective Brandon Walker with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. May I come in?”

Rather than opening the door, Lassiter stepped outside onto a concrete walkway, pulling the door shut behind him. Folding his arms tightly across his chest, he stood there surly and glowering. “What’s this all about?” he demanded.

“It’s about a friend of yours—­Amos Warren.”

“Friend?” he snorted back. “Some friend. What about him?”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Brandon answered. “His recently identified remains were found some time ago on the far side of the Rincons. We’ve been unable to locate any next of kin. Since you were the one who filed the missing persons report, I thought you might be able to offer us some direction about a next of kin.”

Brandon watched Lassiter’s face as he delivered the bad news. The two men had once been friends. There was a pause, but no visible reaction crossed Lassiter’s face when he heard the news.

“Good riddance then,” John said at last. “And he didn’t have any next of kin—­no wife, no kids, no nothing. So what happened to him?”

“I’m not at liberty to say at this time. What I can tell you is that Mr. Warren’s death is being investigated as a possible homicide.”

“All right then,” Lassiter said with a shrug. “Nothing to do with me. I haven’t seen him in years. Where did this happen, down in Mexico?”

“No,” Brandon answered. “It happened right here in the States. What made you think he might have died in Mexico?”

“He used to talk about going there someday and being able to live on the cheap. And when he took off the way he did, that’s where I thought he went. A ­couple of years ago, when they finally got around to declaring him dead, I went along with the program, and why not? But I still didn’t believe he was dead, not really.”

Brandon was caught off guard. “Are you saying Amos Warren has already been declared dead in a court of law?”

Brandon’s obvious consternation seemed to amuse Lassiter. “You didn’t know about that?” he asked with a grin. “But that’s exactly what happened. Three years ago or so and seven years after Amos took off, his attorney, a guy named Ralph Roundtree, initiated proceedings to have him declared dead. The first time I knew anything about it was when Ralph let me know that I was the only beneficiary under Amos’s will. That was news to me. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

“What do you mean, it was news to you?”

“After the way he played me? I didn’t care if I ever saw the snake in the grass again, and yet he left me everything—­like nothing had ever gone wrong between us.”