She remembered once listening to Davy and Brian Fellows talking about the day Tommy and Quentin Walker had found a big limestone cave out on the reservation.
"They didn't go inside, did they?" Lani had asked.
Davy shrugged. "Of course they did."
"But that's against the rules," Lani had objected indignantly. "Nobody's supposed to go inside those caves. They're sacred. You should have stopped them."
Davy and Brian had both laughed at her. "What's so funny?" she had demanded. "Why are you two laughing?"
"Fortunately, you're much too young to remember growing up with Quentin and Tommy. When we were all kids, those two were a pair of holy terrors. As far as they were concerned, rules were made to be broken."
"So what happened?"
"As far as I know, they went there just that once," Brian said. "It wasn't long after that when Tommy ran away. If Quentin went back out to the reservation to go exploring the cave by himself, he never mentioned it."
"If they went inside the cave, maybe that's what happened to Tommy."
"What?" Brian asked.
"Maybe I'itoi got him," Lani said.
Brian shook his head. When he spoke, the laughter had gone out of his voice. "Don't ever say anything about this to your dad," he said seriously, "but from the rumors I heard, I'd say drug-dealing is what got Tommy. What I've never been able to understand is why it didn't get Quentin, too."
As they turned up Coleman Road, Lani felt a growing certainty that the place where they were going was the same cave Brian and Davy had talked about. Off to the left was the dirt track that led off to Rattlesnake Skull charco, the place they used to go every year to redecorate the shrine dedicated to Nana Dahd' s murdered granddaughter.
"We shouldn't go there," Lani said softly, unable to keep herself from issuing the warning. Even someone as cruel as Mitch Vega deserved to be warned away from danger.
"See there?" Quentin yelped angrily, glaring at her. "I knew you shouldn't have brought her."
"Shut up, Lani," Mitch said.
Lani closed her eyes and tried to hear Rita's words. Listen to me and do exactly as I say.
Alvin Miller was a talented guy who was able to do his work in a seemingly focused fashion, all the while carrying on a reasonably intelligent conversation with whoever happened to be within earshot.
In this case, as he carried his gear into Brandon and Diana Walker's house in Gates Pass, Brandon was giving Alvin an earful. He had responded to former Sheriff Walker's call for help without asking for any specific details on the situation. Now, though, Brandon was venting his frustration over the way Detective Ford Myers was-or rather was not — handling the disappearance of Brandon's sixteen-year-old daughter, Lani.
Other than having been one once, Alvin wasn't especially wise to the ways of teenagers. Nonetheless, he did see some merit to Detective Ford's inclination to go slow and not push panic buttons. Although Alvin sympathized with his former boss, he could see that the whole thing might very well turn out to be nothing but a headstrong teenager pulling a stunt on her too-trusting parents. After all, armed or not, most missing kids did turn up back home eventually.
So Alvin listened and nodded. Betweentimes, he went to work. "What all would you like me to check for prints?" he asked.
"Lani's bicycle," Brandon answered. "That's outside in the carport. There's a pair of rubber-handled tongs in the kitchen sink. And back in my study, somebody went to the trouble of breaking up a couple thousand bucks' worth of custom-framing."
For comparison purposes, Alvin took prints from both Brandon and Diana Walker as well as prints from places in the daughter's room that would most likely prove to belong to Lani herself. He packed up the tongs, the bicycle, and the better part of the picture-frame display. Alvin knew he'd be better off dusting those in the privacy of his lab. What he couldn't take back to the department with him was the house itself and furniture that was too big to move.
"Where did you say you kept the key to the gun cabinet?"
"In the desk." Brandon had been following Alvin from room to room, watching the process with intent interest. As Alvin settled down to dust the desktop, Brandon left the room. The print-one with a distinctive diagonal slash across the face of it-leaped out at Alvin the moment he delicately brushed the graphite across the smooth oak surface.
Alvin Miller could barely believe his eyes. He knew he had seen that same print, or else one very much like it, on the wallet Dan Leggett had brought in earlier and on several of the bones in the detective's boxed collection. For a moment, Alvin was too flustered to know what to do.
He was here in Brandon Walker's home collecting prints as an unofficial favor to an old friend. The problem was, if he was right, if this print and the other one were identical, then Alvin Miller had stumbled across something that would link the newly discovered bones with the break-in here at the Gates Pass house. Not only that, connecting those two sets of dots could put him in the middle of a potentially career-killing cross fire between two dueling detectives-Dan Leggett and Ford Myers.
In addition, if Lani Walker was somehow involved in an assault and a possible homicide, the chances of her disappearance being nothing but ordinary teenaged rebellion went way down. Whatever was going on with her was most likely a whole lot more serious than that. The same went for Brandon Walker's missing.357.
Feeling as though he'd just blundered into a hive of killer bees, Alvin considered his next move. For the time being, saying anything to Brandon Walker was out, certainly until Alvin actually had a chance to compare those two distinctive prints. In the meantime, he took several more reasonably good prints off the desktop and drawer.
"Getting any good ones?" Brandon Walker asked, reappearing in the door to his study.
"Some," Alvin Miller allowed, "but my pager just went off." That was an outright lie, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. "I'll stop here for now. I'll come back tomorrow sometime. Just don't touch anything until I do. The stuff I've already picked up I'll work on in the lab."
"Sure thing, Al," Brandon Walker said. "I appreciate it."
Alvin Miller drove straight back to the department. There, after simply eyeballing the two dusted prints, he picked up the phone and dialed Dan Leggett's home phone number. "Who's calling?" Leggett's wife asked in a tone that indicated she wasn't pleased with this work-related, late Saturday-evening phone call.
"It's Alvin Miller. Tell him I'm calling about the prints."
"So there were some?" Leggett asked, coming on the phone. "Did you get a hit?"
"Not yet. I haven't had a chance to run them yet, but there's a problem."
"What kind of problem?" Dan Leggett asked.
"How well do you get along with Detective Myers?"
"He's a jerk, why?"
"Because I've got a match between one of your prints and prints on a case he's working. Actually, a case he hasn't quite gotten around to working on yet."
"This is beginning to sound complicated."
"It is. The matching print came from the top of the desk in Brandon Walker's study in his home office. Somebody broke into the place, smashed up some of his stuff, and stole a gun. But the real kicker is that Lani Walker, Sheriff Walker's sixteen-year-old daughter, is among the missing and has been since early this morning. Myers refused to take the MP report because of the twenty-four-hour wait. Claimed it was probably just kid bullshit. But with the matching print…"
"You think her disappearance may be linked to our assault case from this afternoon?"
"Don't you?" Alvin asked. "It's sure as hell linked to your bones and wallet."