Sells is the reservation community where the novel brings together everyday public life and the institutions that hold the history of Roseanne Orozco’s case. The Indian Health Services Hospital is linked to Roseanne’s treatment and disappearance, while the town’s police and archival records reveal how little had been done to pursue her murder. For Brandon Walker, Sells is at once a place of familiar community life and the point of entry into an investigation long neglected by authorities.

Community and Changing Landscape

When Brandon first visited the reservation, its two trading posts were known simply as the High Store, built on a hill, and the Low Store, which was not. They sold milk, soft drinks, and basic staples; decent meat and fresh vegetables were difficult to find. By the time of the investigation, Basha’s in Sells resembled a smaller version of a Tucson supermarket, with a produce section and shelves of dried beans. Among them were tepary beans, part of the Tohono O’odham food supply long before the Spanish introduced their own foodways. The newer store registers a practical change in local access to groceries, while the beans on its shelves connect present-day shopping with a much older food tradition.

Sells also appears as a gathering place during family mourning. On the morning Fat Crack’s grave was dug, five men drove into Sells and ate fresh tamales and thin, hot tortillas. Brian Fellows and Davy then returned to Tucson, while others remained with the family. The scene places the town within the rhythms of visiting, food, and funeral preparations, rather than presenting it solely as the setting of official institutions or criminal investigation.

Hospital and Medical Records

The Indian Health Services Hospital just up the road from Andrea Tashquinth’s home is central to the unanswered questions surrounding Roseanne. Andrea recalled that Roseanne had an appendectomy in the summer of 1970. After leaving the hospital, Roseanne remained unwell and missed the start of school; her mother later brought her to a doctor, who admitted her for tests. When Henry Orozco went to collect her after work, she had disappeared. The family never saw her again. The following week, her body was found in a cooler beside the road. Andrea believed that something had happened to Roseanne during her earlier hospital stay and had tried to raise the possibility with investigators at the time, but said that no one listened.

The hospital’s records offer a possible route back into that history. Brandon remembered that an Arizona State University grant project in the early 1990s had put existing Sells hospital health records into computers. The project, which included records dating to the 1950s, was intended to study longevity among the Tohono O’odham in comparison with other populations and to track diseases associated with deaths on the reservation. Together with funding from tribal casino operations, the study was one reason the hospital later had its own kidney dialysis center. Roseanne’s July 1970 appendectomy should therefore have been represented in the digitized records. But the existence of a record did not ensure access: Brandon expected that a white outsider asking the hospital for information could meet polite but firm resistance. He hoped that Emma Orozco, Roseanne’s mother, would not face the same barrier.

Policing, Jurisdiction, and an Unfinished Case

Sells anchors a history of divided responsibility for reservation homicides. Roseanne’s murder was assumed to have occurred somewhere on the reservation, although the actual site was never found, and investigators believed the killer was Indigenous. Under the jurisdictional arrangement described in the novel, murders of Indigenous people by other Indigenous people on Native lands were assigned either to the FBI or to local tribal police. By contrast, the murder of Gina Antone, which took place off the reservation and was attributed to Anglos, fell under the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.

The tribal police, then called the Papago Tribal Police Force and sometimes referred to as Law and Order, were summoned to investigate Roseanne’s homicide. Their work was hampered by shortages of training, equipment, and money. Brandon recalls that FBI investigations of reservation murders were often cursory, especially when the victim and suspected perpetrator were both Indigenous. The division of jurisdiction did not translate into an effective investigation: Roseanne’s case file was thin, and the inquiry soon went dormant. In the novel, Sells is thus not simply the location of the crime’s aftermath but the center of an institutional failure that left the family without answers for decades.

The Town in the Reopened Investigation

Years later, Brandon’s work with The Last Chance brings him back to the records and people connected to Sells. He explains to Lawrence Stryker that the group investigates cold cases no longer receiving the time or resources of law enforcement, often at the request of bereaved relatives seeking answers. Roseanne’s case fits that description precisely: she was a teenager, she had been a patient at the Sells hospital shortly before her death, and her disappearance and killing had not been resolved. Stryker initially denied remembering her, then recalled her hospitalization, the confusion over who would collect her, and her disappearance after release. His account adds detail to the hospital connection without resolving what happened there.

The effort to investigate also exposes a conflict between urgency and procedure. Roseanne’s unborn child had been buried at Big Fields, and Emma Orozco and family members dug up the remains after dark rather than wait for permission from the tribal council. Brandon understood why the family wanted to move quickly, but recognized that the unauthorized exhumation compromised the chain of evidence. He was caught between helping survivors obtain answers and preserving evidence that could support legal accountability. Although this grave was in Big Fields, not Sells, the episode extends the town’s role in the case: the hospital and old police records lead toward evidence whose recovery raises further questions of permission, community authority, and investigation.

Narrative Significance

Sells holds together the novel’s contrasting accounts of change and neglect. Its supermarket and dialysis center point to changing access to goods and medical services; its hospital files preserve information that might reopen a decades-old inquiry. Yet institutional presence alone has not meant that Roseanne’s family was heard or that her case was pursued. By placing the hospital, the police history, and the later search for records within the same community setting, the novel makes Sells a point where personal grief meets the practical limits—and failures—of official systems. For Emma, the town’s records matter because the loss remains part of her life; for Brandon, they offer a way to revisit a case he had once been relieved not to handle and later recognizes as unfinished.