Pima County is the local institutional setting for much of the novel’s law-enforcement history, but its boundaries do not settle who investigates every crime within the surrounding region. The distinction matters most in the renewed inquiry into Roseanne Orozco’s murder: assumptions about where she died placed the case outside the ordinary authority of the county sheriff’s department, helping leave her family without answers for decades.

County Setting and Law Enforcement

The Pima County Sheriff's Department is where homicide detective Brian Fellows receives the report that a dog has found human remains near Vail. Dispatch sends patrol officers to the scene, then alerts the medical examiner and crime-scene investigators. Because of budget constraints, weekend day-shift detectives now work alone rather than in pairs; Brian drives toward the scene by himself, an ordinary staffing decision that also marks the department’s limited resources.

Brandon Walker’s own career is tied to the county. He once worked homicide for the sheriff’s department and later ran unsuccessfully for reelection as sheriff. By April 2002, he is retired, living near Tucson with Diana Ladd and largely out of the loop. His return to investigative work is therefore both personal and institutional: he takes on a cold case not as a serving county officer, but as a member of The Last Chance.

Jurisdiction and the Orozco Case

The novel contrasts the Orozco investigation with the earlier murder of Gina Antone. Gina was killed off the reservation, and the case fell under the Pima County Sheriff's Department’s jurisdiction. The investigation led Brandon to Andrew Philip Carlisle and then to Garrison Ladd; Garrison’s death was mistakenly considered a suicide, while Carlisle received a plea bargain Brandon regarded as inadequate. The experience left Brandon distrustful of unsatisfactory case outcomes, even though the Orozco homicide was not his assignment.

Roseanne’s case crossed a different jurisdictional boundary. Although the actual murder site was never found, investigators assumed she had died on the reservation and that her killer was an Indigenous person. Responsibility consequently lay with either the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the local Papago Tribal Police Force, rather than the county sheriff’s department. Brandon recalls that FBI investigations of reservation murders were often cursory, while the tribal police lacked training, equipment, and money. Their inquiry produced no meaningful resolution. The county’s significance in this history is thus partly defined by absence: the case did not come to Brandon, and the agencies expected to handle it were poorly equipped or insufficiently committed.

Records, Evidence, and Renewed Investigation

Years later, Brandon considers how Roseanne’s medical records might help clarify what happened. A study funded by Arizona State University in the early 1990s had placed existing records from the Indian Health Services hospital in Sells into computers, both to examine longevity and to track causes of death; records reached back to the 1950s. The resulting archive helped make a dialysis center possible at the hospital, and it meant that a record of Roseanne’s July 1970 appendectomy might still be retrievable. Yet the existence of a record did not guarantee access: Brandon expected that a white former officer asking on his own would meet polite refusal. He hopes Emma Orozco, Roseanne’s mother, will encounter less resistance.

The reopened inquiry also tests the difference between obtaining information quickly and preserving evidence that can stand up in court. Emma and her family secretly exhume Roseanne’s daughter’s remains without waiting for tribal permission. Brandon recognizes that this gets the investigation moving but compromises the chain of evidence; his position outside the sworn police force leaves him caught between helping survivors and pursuing an accountable legal result. Pima County’s investigative world therefore meets, but does not subsume, the reservation’s governance and practices.

A Wider Investigative Geography

The casework connected to the county reaches beyond a single local scene. An AFIS match identifies a fingerprint from inside a garbage bag containing dismembered remains found three years earlier near an Interstate 8 rest area, far beyond the immediate Pima County setting. The unidentified victim was a girl between thirteen and fifteen. For Brian, the match turns a local homicide inquiry into a possible link between separate cases and places; it also shows how forensic records can reopen lines of investigation that geography and jurisdiction had kept apart.

The county’s role remains bounded by those same divisions. Brandon warns that Larry Stryker’s connections in Mexico could allow him to cross the border and disappear from reach; Brian notes that Mexico would not extradite someone likely to face a capital trial. Pima County is consequently not a self-contained arena in which local policing can guarantee an outcome. Its investigations depend on institutional capacity, access to records, lawful evidence handling, and cooperation across boundaries—conditions the novel repeatedly shows to be uneven.