Dead Wrong

Chapter 13

Joanna left the house after breakfast feeling very pregnant but incredibly lighthearted. It was wonderful to have their lives back again. By now the in-laws from hell should be past the New Mexico border and well into Texas. As she walked out to the garage, Butch was happily hauling his laptop out of its in-office exile and back onto the kitchen table, where he preferred to work.

And, without much fuss and a minimum of discussion, the three of them had settled on an acceptable boy’s name: Dennis Lee Dixon. No Frederick Junior. No lurking grandfathers’ names. No traditional family names. Just a solid boy’s name with a good ring to it. No doubt Eleanor wouldn’t approve, and neither would Margaret, probably for entirely different reasons, but that didn’t matter. It was the name Joanna and Butch and Jenny had chosen together, and that’s what counted.

When Joanna stepped out of her Crown Victoria in the Justice Center parking lot, the chill March wind blowing off the flanks of the Mule Mountains did nothing to dampen her spirits or take the spring out of her step. Maybe Joanna’s initial reaction to Margaret’s snoopiness had been negative, but now she felt as though a cloud of indecision-one she hadn’t known was there-had been lifted off her shoulders.

And Butch was thrilled as well. As he had said at breakfast, he had been worried about living in a family where girls outnumbered boys three to one. And Eleanor, regardless of her likely disapproval of the baby’s name, had been lobbying for a boy all along. So she would be thrilled as well.

Frank was already on his way to the board of supervisors meeting. With Debbie and Jaime headed back to Tucson, the morning briefing had been shifted to later in the day. That left Joanna free to spend the morning working with Kristin on sorting the mail and figuring out how best to handle routine correspondence issues on a day-to-day basis, both for now and for when Joanna went on maternity leave. As they worked to create a workable system, Joanna saw how her own almost irrational insistence on “Little Red Henning” it had been a bad idea. In the process, she had done a grave disservice to Kristin and had made her own job far more complicated than it needed to be. No wonder she had always been buried under an avalanche of paperwork.

“It’s going to mean more responsibility,” she told Kristin.

“Good,” Kristin said. And that was that.

Late in the morning, Joanna found herself sitting in front of an improbably clean desk. While she’d been working with Kristin, she hadn’t given her father’s journal entry a thought. Now, though, remembering, she picked up her phone and called the evidence room, where Buddy Richards answered.

“Do you still have that evidence box we brought down from the old courthouse the other day?” she asked.

“Lisa Evans?” Buddy answered. “Sure do. I was gonna ship it back up to storage today, but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it. Want me to bring it over?”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’d appreciate it.”

Buddy limped into her office a few minutes later, lugging the box. Buddy had started out as a deputy, but a badly broken leg from a rodeo bull-riding mishap had left him unfit for patrol duty. In lieu of disability, he had taken over as the department’s chief evidence clerk.

“This was long before my time,” he said, setting it on Joanna’s desk.

“Before mine, too,” Joanna said. “My father was the arresting officer.”

“Must’ve done a good job of it. I was curious, so I read through the case file. The prosecuting attorney got a conviction even though they never found a body.”

“The victim’s husband copped a plea,” Joanna said. “That’s not exactly the same thing as getting a conviction.”

“Right,” Buddy said. “I suppose not.”

Once Joanna was left alone, she carefully lifted the lid off the box. After that initial report, D. H. Lathrop was no longer part of the official investigative process. There was no further evidence of his being involved and no clue to tell Joanna why, despite the way court proceedings had turned out, her father had felt Bradley Evans was innocent.

It was getting on toward noon and almost time to head to Douglas to attend Bradley’s funeral service when Joanna picked up the next item in the box-Lisa Evans’s wallet. She was absently thumbing through the brittle plastic holders when she came to the one containing Lisa’s driver’s license. What she saw in the photo stunned her and made the hair on the back of Joanna’s neck stand on end. The name on the license said Lisa Marie Crystal, but the photo could have been Leslie Markham’s-except for one inarguable fact: Leslie Tazewell Markham hadn’t been born when the photo was taken. She flipped through the plastic folders until she found the graduation photo. The resemblance in that one was even more striking.

For a long time, all Joanna could do was flip back and forth between the two photos and stare. Finally she reached down, opened her briefcase, and rummaged through it until she found the envelope that contained the photos Bradley Evans had taken of Leslie Markham. The hair, the shape of the forehead, mouth, and chin, the set of the eyes. The two women were eerily similar. Looking at them, Joanna could draw only one conclusion: they had to be mother and daughter.

Bradley Evans had gone to jail for the murder of his pregnant wife, Lisa, and her unborn baby, but from where Joanna was sitting, it looked like that baby was very much alive more than two decades later. What if D. H. Lathrop was right? What if Bradley Evans really had gone to prison after confessing to a crime he hadn’t committed? Had anyone ever examined the blood evidence that had been found in the vehicle or on Lisa Evans’s purse? Was it possible that it hadn’t even been hers?

In the late seventies, DNA identification had been rudimentary at best. It wouldn’t be used as evidence in legal proceedings until years later. But times had changed. Now even minute traces of blood evidence and sperm were routinely used to solve long-unsolvable crimes. Nothing in the case file had indicated that the bloodied purse had ever been subjected to any kind of forensic examination. That alone indicated that the Lisa Evans investigation had been something less than thorough.

Fired with a new sense of purpose, Joanna put all the items back in the box and then carried it through the building to the evidence room. “Can you scan a copy of these?” she asked, handing Lisa’s driver’s license and yearbook photo to Buddy. “And I’ll need you to bag up the purse for me.”

Buddy gave her a questioning look but then shrugged. “I can scan them if you want me to, Sheriff Brady, but are you sure? Chief Deputy Montoya’s equipment does a better job than mine.”

“Frank isn’t here,” Joanna said. “I need this now.”

While she waited, she tracked down Dave Hollicker and handed him the bagged purse.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Lisa Marie Evans’s bloodstained purse,” she said. “I want you to run it up to the DPS crime lab in Tucson.”

“Today?” Dave asked. “Casey and I have been working on evidence we gathered from Jeannine’s crime scenes-”

Joanna cut him off. “Yes, today,” she said. “And I want results ASAP. Ask if they can extract a DNA sample from the old bloodstains. I also want them to check for fingerprints. I don’t know if they’ll be able to spot any old ones. I know for sure that mine are on it from handling it recently, so they’ll need to run mine for elimination purposes.”

“But why the big rush?” Dave objected. “This homicide is decades old.”

“That’s just it,” Joanna said. “I have some new information that suggests maybe that ‘decades old’ homicide never happened.”

Ten minutes later she was on her way to Douglas with the newly scanned copy of Lisa’s license in the same envelope with her collection of Leslie Markham’s photos. It took a while for Joanna to clear security to get into the prison unit. By the time she was admitted to the chapel, the service was already under way. Ted Chapman, officiating, nodded to her as she slipped into the last row of folding chairs.

Bradley’s memorial service wasn’t particularly well attended. There were a dozen or so prisoners and three suit-and-tie-clad men Joanna assumed to be some of Brad Evans’s colleagues or supervisors from the jail ministry. The other attendee was an elderly white-haired Anglo woman who sat apart from the others and sobbed inconsolably into a lace-edged handkerchief. Listening to the grieving woman, Joanna decided she must be some heretofore unidentified relative of Bradley Evans who had managed to show up in time for his funeral.

Joanna tried to pay attention to what was being said, but her mind was going at breakneck speed. The striking resemblance between the long-presumed-dead Lisa Marie Evans and Leslie Markham presented Joanna with a startlingly new possible scenario. What if Lisa had somehow faked her own murder and allowed her husband to go to prison for it? Did that mean Lisa herself still was alive? And how was it that her daughter had been raised as Leslie Tazewell?

And if Bradley Evans had spent the better part of a quarter of a century believing that both his wife and daughter were dead, what would have been his reaction when he suddenly encountered living breathing proof to the contrary?

Joanna remembered all too well her own sense of shock, amazement, and disbelief when, a few years earlier while she had been sitting in a hotel lobby in Peoria, Arizona, a man who looked exactly like the ghost of her long-deceased father walked toward her. The spooky resemblance had been easily explained once she learned that the man was actually her brother, Bob Brundage, the baby her parents had given up for adoption years before their marriage and long before Joanna’s birth.

Joanna now knew that the similarities between D. H. Lathrop and his son went well beyond mere looks. Bob sounded like his father both when he spoke and when he laughed. He walked and carried himself in the same fashion. Bob Brundage now was an exact replica of D. H. Lathrop at the time of his death.

Joanna could easily empathize with everything Bradley Evans must have felt upon first encountering Leslie Markham, either in person or in a photograph. It seemed likely that he might well have questioned what he had seen, and doubted his own perceptions. In order to quiet those doubts he might have decided to photograph Leslie so he could examine the pictures at leisure. Perhaps he was searching for proof one way or the other. Either Leslie Markham was his daughter or she wasn’t.

But Joanna knew that there were other tools available that would be far more reliable than a few surreptitiously taken photos. And even if an examination of the bloodstained purse failed to yield a usable sample, there were other available avenues of investigation. Mitochondrial DNA, passed from mother to daughter, could prove definitively whether or not Leslie Tazewell Markham really was Lisa Marie Evans’s daughter. The only difficulty was figuring out a way to make that testing possible.

“… he was someone who knew he had done wrong and who took full responsibility for his actions,” Ted Chapman was saying. “He had repented and believed the Lord God Almighty heard his prayers and granted him forgiveness. It was in that state of God-given grace that he was able to turn his life around and start helping others. If Bradley were here and able to speak for himself, I know he would be the first to forgive those who trespassed against him. And I hope that we can, too. Let us pray.. •”

But who were those trespassers? Joanna wondered. Obviously, first on the list would be the person who had murdered the poor man. But if Lisa Marie hadn’t died at her husband’s hand, what about the person or persons who had conspired to rob Bradley Evans of twenty-plus years of his life by letting him rot in prison? Yes, Joanna’s department needed to find out who had murdered the man, but if he had been wrongfully convicted, then they needed to do more than simply identify and punish his killer. There was the moral obligation of clearing an innocent man’s good name.

“Warden Howard has kindly granted us the use of the rec room next door,” Ted Chapman announced. “Anyone who wishes to do so may gather there for a time of fellowship and recollection. Punch, coffee, and cookies will be provided by the jail ministry.”

Joanna paused at the door of the chapel long enough for Ted to introduce her to the men in suits who were, just as she suspected, jail ministry people. When she went into the rec room, the elderly woman was standing at the refreshment table trying to juggle a styrofoam cup of coffee and a paper plate of cookies along with her walker.

“Here,” Joanna said, “let me help carry something.”

Gratefully, the woman passed her the coffee and cookies, then made her way to a nearby cafeteria-style table and dropped onto the bench seat. “Thank you so much,” she said. “The basket holds my purse, but the cookies and the coffee would have dropped right through.”

“Do you mind if I join you?” Joanna asked.

“Help yourself.”

Joanna went back to the refreshment table and snagged a cup of punch and a single cookie. “Are you a relative?” she asked as she returned to the table.

“Oh, heavens no,” the woman said. “No relation at all. I’m Marcelle Womack, Brad’s landlady for the past three-plus years. He was far more of a son to me than my own son is. Always helping me around the house. Always fixing things. Always so polite and understanding and never too busy to take the time to listen to an old lady flapping her jaw. I’m going to miss him so very much. So very, very much. You look familiar,” the woman added. “Who are you, one of Brad’s friends?”

Joanna reached into her pocket and produced one of her business cards. “I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she explained as the woman held the card at arm’s length and squinted at it.

“Yes, I suppose you are,” Marcelle agreed. “That’s why you look familiar. I must have seen your picture in the paper or on TV Why are you here?”

“My department is investigating Mr. Evans’s murder.”

“That’s right,” Marcelle said. “I’ve seen how that works in the crime shows on television-the detectives always come to the victim’s funeral looking for suspects.”

“More likely looking for information,” Joanna said.

“I already talked to one of your detectives,” Marcelle said. “The big one with the bushy eyebrows.”

“That would be Ernie Carpenter.”

“Right. Carpenter was his name. I told him everything I knew, but he wasn’t very happy with me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I made him go get a search warrant before I’d let him into Brad’s apartment. I wasn’t about to let him in without one. You know how those things work. Police treat ex-cons like dirt even though they’ve paid their debt to society.”

“Ernie did mention something about that,” Joanna said. “And you’re right to be cautious about letting anyone into a tenant’s apartment. But do you mind if I ask you to repeat what you told Ernie? I’m sure it’s all in his report, but things have been so hectic the last few days that I haven’t had a chance to read it.”

“I told the detective that Brad was a very nice man, but a very lonely one. All alone in the world.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“I saw him leave home on Wednesday morning. I could see his carport from my kitchen window. I often saw him drive off in his pickup truck on his way to work when I was sitting at my kitchen table having my morning coffee. But the last time I talked to him would have been Tuesday night.”

“And why was that?”

“I took him some soup-navy-bean soup. The back wall of my kitchen is also the back wall of his apartment. So whenever I cooked something that smelled good-like soup or stew-I always took him some. It didn’t seem fair for him to come home from work and have to smell the food without being able to eat any of it.”

“So you took him soup?”

Marcelle nodded. “In one of those new Ziploc containers.”

“And was there anything out of the ordinary about your visit? How did he seem?”

“He was just the regular Brad, sitting there reading his Bible. If I hadn’t brought him the soup, he might not have remembered to eat. He was like that sometimes. He’d just get all caught up in his Bible study and forget about eating. He asked me if I wanted to sit with him and share some of his soup. I knew he would, you see, so I brought plenty for both of us. Wait until you get to be my age. You’ll see that it’s no fun eating alone.”

“You ate dinner with him?”

“Yes, and we talked about Revelations,” Marcelle said. “He liked one passage in particular. Revelations 21:4. I looked it up when I got back home. It didn’t make much of an impression on me then, but after I knew he was dead, I looked it up again. I even memorized it in Brad’s honor-at least I tried to. It goes something like this: God shall wipe away all their tears; there shall be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain because the former things are passed away.

“Do you think he knew he was going to die, Sheriff Brady? Do you think he had some kind of premonition?”

“Maybe,” Joanna said.

But right then it seemed far more likely to her that Brad Evans wasn’t seeing his own death in those words. He was, instead, seeing his supposedly murdered daughter inexplicably alive. Still, if he had made such an earth-shattering discovery, wouldn’t he have been shouting it from the rooftops rather than making oblique Bible-based comments about it to his landlady? Whom else would he have told? Or perhaps he himself wasn’t yet fully convinced and he hadn’t confided in anyone while he waited to make some kind of confirmation. That might be where the camera and the stealth photos came in.

“Did he seem sad or unhappy?” Joanna asked.

“Not at all,” Marcelle replied. “In fact, I’d say he was the exact opposite of sad. When he said grace before we ate, I remember him thanking God for the many blessings in his life-including me. I took that as a compliment.”

“I’m sure you were a blessing in his life,” Joanna said.

Marcelle nodded and dabbed at teary eyes with her already sodden hanky. “I hope I was,” she murmured and then frowned. “And he said something else-that he was grateful for second chances.”

“What kind of second chances?” Joanna asked.

“He didn’t say, not specifically, but I hoped it meant he had met a woman-a woman who was as nice as he was. It’s hard living alone, you know. I miss my Roger so much, and I had been praying for Brad to find someone who would make his life less lonely.”

“So you’re pretty sure the last time you saw him was Tuesday?” Joanna asked.

Marcelle nodded. “Wednesday was his day off. On Thursday I had an early-morning appointment with my dentist, so he might have been there and he might not, but not seeing him for a day or two at a time wasn’t all that unusual, either-not unusual enough for me to think about reporting him as missing. Brad often went out at night-to meetings and such. He was very involved in AA, you know. He must have been quite a drinker at one time, but I never saw any sign of liquor once he moved into my apartment. As I said, he was a very nice man, and I’m going to miss him.”

Ted Chapman appeared at Joanna’s elbow. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but Mrs. Womack’s ride is here. So anytime you’re ready to go…”

“I’m ready to go right now,” Marcelle said, getting to her feet. “I’ve monopolized Sheriff Brady for far too long. Very nice meeting you,” she added. “I hope you find out who did this.”

“So do I,” Joanna replied.

As Marcelle tottered away with Ted Chapman at her side, Joanna turned to survey the rest of the room. Most of the inmates were gone by then. The two that remained were gathering up paper plates and plastic glasses and clearing off the refreshment table under the watchful eyes of two of the suit-clad jail ministry honchos.

Joanna walked up and introduced herself. One of the men was Rich Higgins, the human resources guy Ted Chapman had called. The other was Dave Enright, who identified himself as the executive director.

“Are you making any progress?” Dave asked, once he realized who Joanna was.

“Some,” she said. “But not much. We’re checking his phone and credit-card records to see if we can track what he was doing or who was in contact with him in the days before his death.”

“That would include his cell-phone records?” Rich Higgins asked.

“I’m not sure we knew he had a cell phone,” Joanna said. “I know we’re checking his home number. If my investigators had discovered a billing for a cell phone, I’m sure they would have included that in their request for phone company records.”

“There wouldn’t be a billing in his name,” Rich told her. “Our company cell phones are an in-kind contribution from one of the cell-phone-service providers. They provide the phones and the service both, so there is no individual billing as such.”

“Do you happen to have that number?” Joanna asked.

“Sure do.” Rich Higgins unsnapped a cell-phone case from his belt and scrolled through a list of numbers. “Here it is,” he said.

As Rich read off the number, Joanna jotted it down. Once she was out of the prison and back in her vehicle, she called Frank Montoya.

“How was the funeral?” he asked.

“About what I expected. Got to talk to Bradley’s landlady and to a couple of his jail ministry colleagues, which is why I’m calling. Have you had a chance to check Bradley Evans’s phone and credit-card records?”

“The phone was easy,” Frank said. “I don’t know why he even bothered to have one. From what I could see, he hardly used the damned thing.”

“I know why,” Joanna said. “He had a cell phone somebody else was paying for.” She gave Frank the number. “What about credit-card usage?”

“Nothing after he disappeared,” Frank answered. “The last time it was used was on Wednesday. He had lunch at Denny’s in Sierra Vista on Tuesday. From the size of the bill, I’d say he ate alone. On Wednesday he bought a camera from a Walgreen’s on Fry Boulevard.”

“Maybe he spotted her somewhere in Sierra Vista,” Joanna mused, more to herself than to Frank.

“Spotted who?” Frank asked. “What are we talking about?”

Joanna had forgotten that Frank had been stuck at the board of supervisors meeting when she had made her latest discovery. “I think Bradley Evans must have run into Leslie Markham, realized she had to be his dead wife’s daughter, and decided to take the pictures as a form of verification.”

“Are you serious?”

“Go to the evidence room and check the box on the Lisa Evans homicide,” Joanna told him. “Take a look at the picture of Lisa Evans on her driver’s license and compare it with Leslie Markham’s photos from the website. Call me back and tell me what you think.”

Joanna was halfway back to the Justice Center when the phone rang.

“Whoa!” Frank exclaimed. “These two women could be twins. So what’s going on? Are you saying Lisa Marie Evans handed her baby off to someone else and then faked her own murder? Are you thinking maybe the wife’s alive and well somewhere while her husband spent twenty-plus years of his life in the slammer for killing her?”

“It’s a possibility,” Joanna said. “Meanwhile, the baby’s adoptive father happens to be Judge Lawrence Tazewell.”

Frank whistled. “As in the Arizona Supreme Court Justice?”

“One and the same. Not only that, according to Leslie Markham, he’s currently being considered as a nominee for a federal judgeship.”

“Which might explain why, once Bradley Evans got too close to the truth, someone felt obliged to knock him off.”

“Yes, it might,” Joanna agreed. “Especially considering how the FBI seems to be very good at turning up all that old dirty laundry. Dave Hollicker is taking Lisa’s bloodstained purse to the crime lab in Tucson so they can try running DNA tests on it. If someone was faking a murder, who knows where the blood came from?”

“Is DNA testing possible on a sample that old?” Frank asked.

“We’ll see,” Joanna agreed. “But we can also go at this from the other direction. I want to collect DNA samples from Leslie Markham and from Lisa’s mother as well. We should be able to tell from that whether or not those two women are related. A DNA match won’t tell us if Lisa Evans is still alive, but it’ll be a step in the right direction.”

“How do you plan on obtaining those other samples?” Frank asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joanna said. “I’m thinking. Once I figure it out, I’ll let you know. And one more thing. If you have time, see what you can find out about Rory Markham.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like the way he treated Leslie, for one thing. But there’s something about him that doesn’t ring quite true. It gave me a funny feeling.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

By the time Joanna reached the Justice Center, she had made up her mind on the DNA samples. She stopped off in the rest room long enough for a very necessary pit stop before she went looking for her detectives. “Where are Debbie and Jaime?” Joanna asked Kristin.

“Still in Tucson, as far as I know. How come?”

Joanna didn’t answer. She was already on her way to Frank’s office. She found him with his face glued to his computer screen while a nearby printer shot out page after page of material.

“Ready to take a run out to Sierra Vista?” she asked.

“In a minute,” he said. “We need to wait for the end of this print job. When you see it, you’re not going to believe it.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Once I got off the phone with you, I decided to do some research into Judge Lawrence Tazewell’s background. What do you suppose he was doing in February of 1979?”

“I have no idea.”

“He was serving as a Cochise County Superior Court judge.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“Yes,” Frank said, picking up the sheaf of computer printouts and handing them to Joanna. “That’s exactly what I mean. Judge Lawrence Tazewell is the judge who accepted Bradley Evans’s guilty plea and sent him off to the slammer.”

“And now he’s an Arizona Supreme Court justice who’s a possible presidential nominee for a seat on the federal bench. I didn’t think things could get any worse.”

“Guess again, boss,” Frank said. “They just did.”