Dead Wrong

Chapter 4

“Whoa,” Jaime said, once they were back in his Tahoe. “I didn’t see that one coming.” The conversation with Anna Marie Crystal had struck Joanna as a fairly normal next-of-kin notification. “Which one is that?” she asked.

“You heard what the woman said-that if Bradley Evans had shown up on her doorstep she would have plugged him full of lead herself. She’s an old lady, all right, but it still sounds like possible motive to me. Having a gun and knowing how to use it can do a lot to equalize differences in age and sex.”

“She said plug, not stab,” Joanna corrected. “There’s a big difference.”

“Still,” Jaime objected. “According to Ernie, Doc Winfield theorized that our perpetrator could very well be a female.”

Joanna wasn’t convinced. “I don’t see it that way,” she said. “Even after all these years, Anna Marie Crystal is still heartbroken over her daughter’s loss-and why wouldn’t she be? She lost her daughter, her grandchild, and her husband all within a matter of months, but to her it must have seemed like it happened in one fell swoop. Given those circumstances, I think I would have hated Bradley Evans’s guts, too, but the woman doesn’t strike me as a killer. Still, it won’t hurt to check her out,” Joanna conceded. “Let’s see what if any kind of an alibi she had for when Bradley Evans was murdered.”

“Good,” Jaime said. “I’m glad you agree, because that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

They were still in Sierra Vista when Joanna’s phone rang. “It’s Maggie,” the Records clerk said. She sounded annoyed and out of breath. “I’m still up here at the courthouse pawing through boxes. This place is a mess. I’m sure the file must be here somewhere, but I don’t know where. It’s like the movers just jammed things in wherever there was room with absolutely no rhyme or reason. I know you wanted it by tonight, but I’m due to get off at eleven…”

“It’s fine, Maggie,” Joanna said at once. “Who’s working graveyard?”

“I think it’s Cindy Hall. The problem is, there’s only one clerk on that shift. If she comes up here to take over where I leave off, there won’t be anyone in Records to support the guys in the cars.”

“Never mind,” Joanna said. “You’ve done the best you can, Maggie. It’ll have to wait until morning.”

When they got back to the Justice Center, it was after eleven. Joanna didn’t even bother stepping inside the office to retrieve her briefcase. Instead, she transferred directly to her Crown Victoria and headed for High Lonesome Ranch. With all the dogs closeted inside the house with Jenny, it was unnaturally quiet when she drove up the road to the U-shaped ranch house with its two separate wings and parked in her designated garage at the end of the far wing. When she let herself into the family room, however, Lady was at the door waiting to greet her.

After kicking off her shoes and giving her grateful toes a relaxing wiggle, Joanna did a barefoot inspection of the house. Jenny was asleep in her room with the television set booming away and with both Tigger and Lucky curled up on the bed with her, one dog per side. In the kitchen Joanna found a collection of dirty dishes, along with evidence both of the noodle soup Jenny had eaten for dinner as well as the microwave popcorn she had snacked on later. There were two popcorn bags in the trash. One was empty. The other, clearly overcooked, was full of black cinders. Why the bag hadn’t set the microwave on fire was nothing short of a miracle. Out in the laundry room Joanna found that the dogs had been well taken care of. The water dishes were full of water. The food dishes were empty. In other words, everything was fine.

For a moment, Joanna considered making herself a late-night cup of cocoa, but then she changed her mind. She was too tired. What she needed was rest instead of a late-night snack. She went into the bedroom, undressed, and tumbled into bed.

The phone awakened her at 6:07 a.m. “Sheriff Brady?” a hesitant voice said. “Sorry if I’m calling too early.”

It took Joanna a moment to sort out who was calling. Finally she recognized her caller’s voice. Jeannine Phillips was one of Joanna’s two Animal Control officers. A year earlier, during a series of budgetary cuts, Animal Control had been added to Joanna’s area of responsibility. At first she’d been told it was only a temporary measure, but so far nothing had changed.

“What is it, Jeannine?” Joanna asked groggily.

“I woke you up, didn’t I?” Jeannine apologized.

“It doesn’t matter. What is it?”

“I found another one.”

Joanna didn’t need to ask another what. She knew. Three times in the last month, people had reported finding the badly mauled bodies of dead dogs-all of them pit bulls-along roads in the far northeast corner of the county. At first, Joanna’s Animal Control officers had thought they had tangled with something wild-a coyote or a mountain lion or even one of the far rarer jaguars which had, of late, strayed into southern Arizona from the wilds of northern Mexico. When the third dead animal was found, a microchip dog ID had traced it back to Tucson, where it had once belonged to the nephew of a known drug dealer, a man who had twice before been arrested for running a dog-fighting ring. It seemed likely that a similar operation was now up and running somewhere in Cochise County.

“Where?” Joanna asked.

“San Simon,” Jeannine said. “On 1-10 behind the port of entry. A long-haul truck driver parked his rig and went to take a leak. Found the dog in a trash can, except this one isn’t dead,” Jeannine said. “He was chewed all to hell and bloody all over, but he was still breathing. I was going to put him out of his misery. But when I started to lift him out of the garbage can, he tried to lick my hand, and I just couldn’t do it. Then I thought, If he’s made it this far, what if we could pull him through? Maybe we could use him as evidence when we finally nail these bastards.”

Joanna heard the break in Jeannine Phillips’s voice as she spoke-the hurt, along with an underlying streak of steely determination. “Where is he now?” Joanna asked.

“In my truck.”

“Do you really think he can make it?”

“I don’t know,” Jeannine said. “Like I said, he’s torn up pretty bad, but…”

“Take him to Dr. Ross,” Joanna said after a moment. “Have her call me and let me know whether or not she thinks she can save him and how much it’s going to cost.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jeannine Phillips said. “I’m on my way.”

With Lady on her heels, Joanna went to the kitchen to start water for tea. Then she called Frank Montoya. “What’s going on and why so early?” Frank asked. “Are you on your way to the hospital?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But I have an assignment for you. I just got off the phone with Jeannine Phillips. She thinks we’ve got a dogfight ring operating somewhere around Bowie or San Simon. I want a bunch of enforcement up there this weekend. I want you to pull deputies from Patrol-however many we can spare- and have them look for any kind of suspicious activity.”

“What happened?” Frank asked. “Did she find another dead dog?”

“No,” Joanna answered. “She found a live one for a change- if Dr. Ross can work some of her magic, that is. Jeannine is taking him to the vet’s office even as we speak.”

“Who’s paying?” As chief deputy, one of Frank’s areas of responsibility and expertise was keeping the lid on budgetary considerations.

“The department is paying,” Joanna said. “The dog is evidence, Frank. Once we arrest the guy, seeing a live dog will make a much bigger impression with a judge or jury than seeing pictures of dead ones.”

“But that could end up costing a fortune,” Frank objected.

“I told Jeannine to have Dr. Ross check with me before she begins any course of treatment.”

“With the budget the way it is, you can’t afford to be soft in the head about every stray dog that happens to wander into harm’s way.”

“We’ll find a way to pay for it, Frank,” Joanna said, cutting him off in mid-objection. “Now did you hear from Jaime after our trip to Sierra Vista last night?”

“He called me after he got home.”

“So you know what we came up with last night?”

“That you identified the John Doe?” Frank returned. “Yes, I heard the whole story. I told him I’d send someone up to the old courthouse first thing this morning to see if they can find Bradley Evans’s missing file. And Jaime said he and Ernie would head out to Sierra Vista to see if the dead guy’s ex-mother-in-law has an alibi for the time in question. What about you? Are you coming into the office?”

“For a little while,” Joanna answered. “Jenny’s Girl Scout troop is scheduled to do a car wash up at the traffic circle. Once I drop her off for that, I thought I’d stop by the office and stay until she’s ready to come back home. I just want to be sure everything is in good order before…”

Frank chuckled. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a control freak?”

“No,” Joanna returned. “I’m sure no one has ever mentioned any such thing.”

“Consider yourself told, then,” Frank said. “And remember, you heard it here first.”

Once Joanna got off the phone, she started a load of laundry and then hustled around making a breakfast that she hoped would help put her back in Jenny’s good graces. And it worked. Jenny and the two dogs emerged from her room as soon as the first whiff of pancakes made it to her bedroom door.

“What’s for breakfast?” Jenny asked, pausing in the kitchen door. “I’m starving.”

“Paper-thin pancakes,” Joanna told her. “Cooked just the way you like them.”

By the time breakfast was over, Joanna had more or less worked her way off the “bad” list. When they got to the traffic circle, Joanna stayed long enough to have the girls wash her Crown Victoria.

“You have your cell?” Joanna asked. Having her own cell phone was the one thing Jenny had wanted for Christmas. Butch, over Joanna’s objections of its being extravagant, had seen to it that she got one.

“Yes, Mom,” she said. “I have it right here.”

Joanna was relieved to hear that she had been promoted back to “Mom” status from an all-time low of “Mother.”

“Call me at the office when you’re finished,” Joanna said. “I’ll come get you. Maybe we can have our girls’ night out and eat some Mexican food.”

Joanna stopped by Dr. Ross’s on the way to her office since the veterinary clinic was between the traffic circle and the Justice Center. Jeannine Phillips’s truck was still in the parking lot when Joanna arrived.

Jeannine was sitting in the waiting room thumbing her way through a worn magazine when Joanna entered. “Where’s the patient?” she asked.

Jeannine Phillips was a tough customer who looked as though she could have been comfortable working as a bouncer in a bar. But when Joanna asked the question, she looked down at her feet and blushed to the roots of her hair. “In surgery,” she said.

“In surgery!” Joanna repeated. “I thought I told you to have Dr. Ross call me before she did anything.”

“I’m sorry, Sheriff Brady,” Jeannine muttered. “There wasn’t time. I was afraid we were going to lose him. Besides, I told Dr. Ross that if the department wouldn’t pay I would.”

Well, Joanna thought, taking a nearby seat. At least I’m not the only softheaded one around here. “So what’s the prognosis?” she asked after a pause.

Jeannine shrugged. “She said we’d know more after she got him stitched back up. She’s been working on him for over an hour now.”

For some time the only sound was the small click of an oversize electric clock that hung on the wall behind the reception desk. Jeannine was the one who broke the silence. “I think I know who’s behind the fights,” she said quietly.

“Who?”

“The O’Dwyers.”

Joanna’s heart sank. If Cochise County had a natural, homegrown pair of troublemakers, the O’Dwyer brothers, Clarence and Billy, were it. Grandsons of one of Arizona‘s pioneer families, they had taken over their parents’ ancestral home. The vast Roostercomb Ranch, established before statehood, had once stretched from Arizona’s San Simon Valley across the northern Peloncillo Mountains and on into New Mexico.

Years of drought and a series of disastrous business decisions had caused the family to sell off huge tracts of land. Several years earlier, the death of their elderly mother had thrown her cantankerous sons into a pitched battle with the Internal Revenue Service over estate taxes. By the time the feds had collected what was due, the sons were left with a much smaller ranch and a permanent antipathy toward anyone in law enforcement. Their run-in with government officials had also left them with a fondness for high-powered firearms.

“How do you know that?” Joanna asked.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on them,” Jeannine said.

“On your own?” Joanna asked.

Jeannine nodded.

The thought of one of Joanna’s unarmed Animal Control officers facing down a pair of gun-toting conspiracy nuts wasn’t something she wanted to contemplate. And she didn’t want the actions of her ACO inadvertently to provoke a Cochise County version of Waco‘s Branch Davidian shoot-out.

“Leave them alone,” she said.

“But, Sheriff…” Jeannine began. “If we ignore them, we’re just letting them get away with it.”

“No buts,” Joanna snapped. “I’m ordering you to stay away from them, Jeannine, and I mean that’s a direct order. Billy and Clarence O’Dwyer are dangerous men. The two of them would make mincemeat out of you.”

“What are we supposed to do? Turn our backs? Let them keep on doing what they’re doing?”

“What you think they’re doing,” Joanna corrected. “Look, Jeannine. I understand how you feel. Don’t forget, I’m every bit as much of an animal lover as you are, but the sheriff’s department is a law enforcement agency. What you suspect the O’Dwyers of doing is very much against the law, but in order to catch them at it, we have to have more than unsubstantiated suspicions. We have to put a team of people on this and conduct a real investigation. Not only that, we’re going to have to follow the rule of law while we do it. We have to have probable cause, properly drawn search warrants, and all those other things-the crossed t’s and dotted i’s-that will stand up in court. Believe me, when we do go in there, we’ll do it with officers who are armed and trained to handle those guys, not with one officer acting on her own. Understand?”

Jeannine Phillips nodded glumly. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

A swinging door on the far side of the lobby opened, and Dr. Millicent Ross strode into the room. She was a heavyset woman with gray hair pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Her brusque exterior belied a life lived with unstinting kindness.

“It’s still touch and go, Jeannine,” she said. “But I think that tough little guy of yours may make it.”

Jeannine’s previously grim countenance brightened. “Really?” she asked.

“Really,” Dr. Ross answered. “The damage looked far worse than it was. I’ve stitched him back up. He’d lost a lot of blood, though, and he was very dehydrated, so I’m keeping him sedated and on an IV If you hadn’t brought him in right when you did, though, it would have been an entirely different story. He’d have been a goner.”

Jeannine scrambled to her feet. “I’ll be going then. Thanks, Mil. Thanks a lot.” At the door she stopped and turned back. “I’ll come back later to check on him.”

Once the ACO had left the waiting room, Joanna turned to Millicent Ross. “Jeannine told you the background on this?”

“The dogfight issue?” the vet asked. “Yes, she told me. And to that end, I took a number of photos to document the extent of the dog’s injuries. You’ll have those to use in court. If he lives, there’ll be plenty of scars, too.”

“About the charges then,” Joanna said, opening her wallet and removing a business card. “Since we’re hoping to use the dog as evidence, you should bill the sheriff’s department. Send it to my attention and I’ll see that it’s taken care of.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Millicent Ross said. “It’s already been handled.”

“Surely Jeannine didn’t agree to pay for the treatment. With what she makes, she couldn’t possibly afford-”

“There won’t be any charges, Sheriff Brady,” Dr. Ross said firmly. “This is a situation where I’m donating my services.”

Joanna was taken aback. “Are you sure?”

Dr. Ross smiled. “Absolutely,” she said.

“What about a microchip?” Joanna asked as an afterthought. “Did you find one so we’ll be able to locate the owner?”

“No such luck,” Dr. Ross replied. “And no tag, either. What a surprise.”

Joanna was still scratching her head about Dr. Ross’s not charging for her services when she arrived at her office in the Justice Center Complex. It may have been Saturday morning, but Frank Montoya’s Crown Victoria was already in the parking lot.

“You work too hard,” she said, poking her head into his office. “You need to get a life.”

He grinned back at her. “Look who’s talking,” he returned.

“I have some good news. There won’t be a big vet bill for that injured dog after all.”

“What happened?” Frank asked. “Did the poor thing croak?”

“No. Dr. Ross decided to donate her services.”

“Amazing,” Frank said. “What caused that?”

“Who knows? But don’t look a gift-horse doctor in the mouth. Just be grateful for small blessings. So what’s going on around here?”

Frank gestured toward a cardboard banker’s storage box sitting on the small conference table in one corner of this office. “That just turned up,” he said.

“Lisa Marie Evans?” Joanna asked.

Frank nodded. “Not much to it,” he added.

“Do you mind?” Joanna asked.

“Be my guest.”

She went over to the box, removed the lid, and peered inside. The evidence log was the first thing that came to her attention. Leafing through it, she immediately recognized her father’s distinctive scrawl. The written word had never been D. H. Lathrop’s friend. He had often told people that, as a grade school kid in East Texas, he’d never once been given a passing grade in penmanship. Written missives from him had come in an oddball style that was comprised haphazardly of both cursive and printed letters.

It had been startling enough for Joanna to see her father’s name appear on the printed documents that the Records clerk had retrieved. Now, holding the evidence log in her hand, it was touching and thrilling to be holding a notebook filled with pages over which her father himself had labored. In that moment she felt an incredible closeness to D. H. Lathrop, a closeness that took her breath away. She vividly remembered seeing him seated at the kitchen table with his shoulders hunched in concentration, painstakingly putting pen to paper. Maybe he had been working on this very document. Not wanting to sever that slender thread of spiritual connection with her long-dead father, Joanna held on to the book for a long time, studying what he had written. Finally, with a sigh, she put the notebook aside and turned once more to the box.

The casebook came next. In 1978 her father had been a deputy in the sheriff’s department, so none of his handiwork appeared in the casebook. The information there had been compiled by the detectives on the case. Joanna recognized their names if not their individual handwriting. Some of them had been the very people whose lack of integrity had propelled D. H. Lathrop into running for office himself.

When she put the casebook down and returned to the box, she found only one additional item-a woman’s purse. It was an old-fashioned pocket-style leather affair with fringe on the bottom and an overlapping flap closure. Parts of the outside were still soft and pliable while others were stiff, stained dark with a substance that Joanna suspected to be dried blood. Lots of dried blood! No wonder that, even without ever finding Lisa Marie’s body, investigators had concluded that she was dead.

Sitting down at the table, Joanna upended the purse and let the contents fall into the cover of the banker’s box. Old coins, time-faded and unreadable receipts, paper clips, a compact, outdated lipstick containers, and several cheap ballpoint pens tumbled out. So did a wallet. What surprised Joanna was what was missing. There was absolutely no trace of black fingerprint powder on either the purse or its contents.

“If this was the only evidence they had, why wasn’t it in an evidence bag?” she asked. “And how come nobody ever dusted any of this stuff for prints?”

“I thought that was strange myself,” Frank agreed, getting up from his desk and coming over to where Joanna was seated. “I suppose that, since they closed the case when Bradley Evans confessed to the crime, they must have had enough evidence on him without having to mess around with the purse. If you want to, I suppose we could see if Casey Ledford could lift prints off it now, but I’m not sure it would work.”

“In other words, there’s not much point,” Joanna said. With that, she opened the wallet. Inside, the cheap plastic sleeves were brittle and yellowed with age. Thumbing through to the driver’s license, Joanna studied the smiling visage of a sweet-faced young woman identified as Lisa Marie Crystal. She had gone to her death without ever having gotten around to changing her last name on her driver’s license. The photo was one of someone who seemed confident and supremely happy and who had no idea that her life would be snuffed out within months of having that picture taken. In addition to the license, there were several other photos.

The first of those was a professionally shot pose of Lisa Marie and Bradley Evans, a picture that might well have been used for a wedding announcement in a local newspaper. One was clearly a high school photo of Lisa Marie, while another showed a crew-cut Bradley Evans proudly posing in his army dress uniform. Then there was one of a somewhat older couple. After examining it, Joanna recognized Anna Marie Crystal and the man who must have been her husband, Lisa Marie’s father, Ken. There was so much loss and hurt in that small collection of photos that Joanna was glad to turn away from them.

In the back of the wallet she found twenty-three dollars, and in the snap-closing change compartment, she found another dollar’s worth of change.

“Whatever the motive for Lisa Marie’s murder,” Joanna said, “robbery wasn’t it.”

Thoughtfully she picked up all the items and returned them to the box, lingering for a long moment over the evidence log before she put that away as well.

“You’ll make sure Ernie and Jaime see all this?”

“You bet.”

“Speaking of which,” Joanna said, “have you talked to either one of them so far this morning?”

“They called in and said they were working,” Frank replied. “Something about getting a search warrant so they can go through Bradley Evans’s apartment down in Douglas.”

“What about San Simon?” Joanna asked.

“I’ve got three cars scheduled to go there late this afternoon to hang out and sort of get the lay of the land.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “Tell them to pay special attention to Roostercomb Ranch.”

Frank had been revising the schedule sheet. Now he put down his pen and studied Joanna’s face. “Don’t tell me. The O’Dwyers?”

“Yup,” Joanna said. “At least that’s what Jeannine Phillips thinks.”

“We can’t afford to have an armed confrontation with those guys.”

“Don’t I know it,” Joanna agreed. “But at least it gives us an idea of where to start looking. Tell whoever’s going there to keep an eye out but to be very, very discreet. None of my officers is to set foot inside their gate. We’re talking surveillance only.”

“Got it,” Frank said.

His phone rang just then, and Frank reached to answer it. “Sure,” he said after a moment. “She’s right here. Hold on.” Frank covered the mouth and turned to Joanna. “It’s Lisa Howard out at the front desk. She says your husband is on the line. Do you want to take the call here or in your office?”

“My office,” Joanna said, and hurried off to answer it.

Butch’s greeting was something less than cordial. “What are you doing at work? I thought you promised to take it easy this weekend.”

“I am taking it easy,” she countered. “I came here to wait for Jenny to finish up with her Girl Scout car wash. It was easier and closer to just wait around here at the office than it was to spend the whole day running back and forth between town and home.”

“Oh,” Butch said, sounding somewhat mollified. “I forgot all about the car wash. So you’re not working.”

“Not really,” Joanna said. “And how’s the conference?”

“I’ve met a bunch of interesting people,” he said. “And I’ve gone to several panels. Even though they all write murder mysteries, the authors seem to have all different kinds of ideas about how to do that job. And the woman I told you about yesterday, the one who was so upset because I had review copies of my book here and she didn’t?”

“What was her name again?” Joanna asked.

“Christina Hanson. It turns out she’s a pretty decent person after all. We had breakfast together this morning. It’s like we’re all in the freshman class of the writing business.”

“So you’re having a good time?”

“Yes, and I’m very glad to be here,” Butch answered. “Thanks for encouraging me to come. Sometimes, when I’m working away all by myself, I feel like some kind of freak. The good thing about being here at the conference is that I’m finding out there are a whole lot of other freaks just like me, and they are going to like my book. Now tell me about you. How are you feeling?”

“Pregnant,” Joanna replied. “Nine and a half months’ worth, in fact, even though that’s not quite true. So I’m a little grumpy, but it’s nothing dropping twenty pounds or so of ballast won’t help.”

“Do you want me to come home tonight?” Butch asked. “There are a couple of panels I wanted to see tomorrow, but if you’d rather I came home…”

“No, Butch,” she said. “You signed up for the conference and I want you to stay for the whole thing.”

“Maybe you and Jenny should stay in town tonight-maybe with Eva Lou and Jim Bob. Or maybe they could come stay with you. I worry about you being out at the ranch all by yourself.”

“I’m not all by myself,” Joanna said. “As you just pointed out, Jenny’s there, too. If the baby decides to come early, she’s more than capable of summoning help. Besides, how could I come to town? Do you think Jenny and I could just show up on Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s doorstep with three dogs in tow and say ”Take us in‘?“

“No,” Butch said. “I don’t suppose you could.”

“I’m a big girl,” Joanna said. “In more ways than one. And I’m fully capable of handling whatever comes up.”

“Right,” Butch said. “And I didn’t mean that you weren’t.”

But it is what you said, Joanna thought.

They talked a while longer, but Joanna was still slightly steamed when she got off the phone. After the call she stayed in her office for the next two hours, using the unexpected quiet time to read a few of the most recent issues of law enforcement magazines and journals that tended to stack up on her bookshelf without her ever having time enough to glance at them. At three o’clock her cell phone rang.

“I’m ready to go home,” Jenny announced.

“How was it?”

“Great,” Jenny said. “We made almost two hundred dollars, over twice as much as we made last year.”

It was nearing four when they turned off High Lonesome Road and onto the rough dirt track that led to the house. As usual, the three dogs came out to the road to greet them and race them into the yard. The only problem was, when Joanna arrived at the house, someone else was already there. A huge Itasca motor home towing a Geo Tracker with Illinois plates was parked in the driveway, blocking access to Joanna’s garage.

The door opened and Joanna’s mother-in-law, Margaret Dixon, bounded down the steps, waving enthusiastically.

“Oh, no!” Jenny managed.

Joanna rolled down her window. “Those god-awful dogs of yours wouldn’t let us out, but now that you’re here, I’m sure it’s all right. They won’t bite, will they?”

“No,” Joanna said. “They won’t. What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” Margaret returned. “You don’t think Donald and I would miss the arrival of our very first grandchild, do you? I mean, better late than never.”

“Did Butch know you were coming?” Joanna asked.

“Of course not. It’s a surprise.”

It’s a surprise, all right, Joanna thought.

“Where is he, by the way?” Margaret Dixon continued. “Him being a house husband and all, I thought for sure he’d be here.”

“He’s in El Paso at a conference,” Joanna said stiffly.

And I’ll be damned if I’ll call him and ask him to come home early!