Scottsdale enters the story as both a changing landscape and a point of connection between private wealth and The Last Chance, the invitation-only organization devoted to helping solve old cases. The Brinkers’ dairy farm and Ralph Ames’s Scottsdale office give the city distinct roles in the history of that effort.

A Dairy Farm and a Changing City

Hedda Brinker and her husband, Toby Brinker, came to Arizona after escaping Europe ahead of the Nazis. They met aboard the boat to the United States and married within weeks of arriving in New York. Later, they bought a dairy farm in what the narrative describes as what is now pretty much downtown Scottsdale. The description sets their early life there against the urban development that followed: the farm’s former setting had become part of the city’s downtown.

Toby held on to the land long enough to make substantial money in real estate. By the time of the events in the novel, Hedda was a wealthy widow, but her fortune did not end her interest in a daughter’s unsolved murder. Scottsdale is thus associated with both the land that generated the Brinkers’ wealth and the later purpose to which Hedda put part of that wealth.

Hedda Brinker and The Last Chance

After seeing a television program about investigators who worked on old cases, Hedda tried to persuade them to take on her daughter Ursula’s case. They declined. She then asked Ralph Ames whether she had enough money to establish a similar organization on the West Coast, extending from the Mississippi westward. Ames initially advised that she lacked the funds for such a large undertaking.

Hedda subsequently won a $178 million lottery jackpot, the sole winning ticket. She arranged for the proceeds to be paid into a nonprofit organization before collecting them. The organization, The Last Chance, recruits mostly retired police investigators and forensic experts by invitation, selecting people considered committed to helping resolve cases that seem beyond solution. Hedda is identified as a woman from Scottsdale, making the city part of the organization’s origin story without establishing that its offices are located there.

Legal and Investigative Connections

Ralph Ames’s business card lists two office addresses, one in Seattle and one in Scottsdale. This places Scottsdale within the professional geography of the attorney who advised Hedda about whether she could fund a West Coast investigative organization. The city’s connection to the case is therefore not limited to the Brinkers’ property: it also appears in the practical network of legal and organizational work surrounding The Last Chance.

The novel’s account of the Orozco investigation provides a wider context for that work. Responsibility for investigating an Indigenous victim’s murder on reservation land could fall to federal authorities or local tribal police, while the investigation described in the novel had been hampered by a lack of training, equipment, and money. Against that history, The Last Chance represents Hedda’s attempt to direct her wealth toward cases that had not been solved. Scottsdale matters as the setting of the fortune behind that attempt and as one of the places named in Ames’s legal practice.