Dead Wrong (11 page)

Joanna hung up the phone feeling guilty that it had
been Ernie Carpenter rather than Sheriff Joanna Brady who had
opened the door on Debbie Howell’s new opportunity.

And then she thought about Bradley Evans. Was it
true that he had been a stalker? That idea certainly didn’t
square with what Ted Chapman had told her about the man. But now
Joanna wondered. If he had been following an unsuspecting young
woman around and snapping pictures of her without her knowledge or
consent, then perhaps he had been on his way to reverting to the
behavior that had put him in prison in the first place.

When Joanna returned to the dining room, the table
had been cleared and Jenny was serving dessert—rhubarb pie
topped with generous scoops of vanilla ice cream.

Joanna resumed her place, and Margaret looked at
her questioningly. Clearly she was dying of curiosity about the
phone call, but she couldn’t bring herself to come straight
out and ask. In that moment, Joanna understood Margaret Dixon
perfectly. She was every bit as nosy as Butch had said she was, but
a lifetime’s worth of dealing with Eleanor—of
constantly battling and frustrating her own mother—had left
Joanna Brady uniquely prepared to deal with the Margaret Dixons of
the world.

“No biggie,” Joanna said, sending a
casual smile in her mother-in-law’s direction. “You
know how it is—same old, same old.”

W
hen
Joanna arrived at the conference room the next morning, her
homicide team was already assembled. They were studying a
collection of color snapshots scattered across the conference-room
table.

“I’ve already mentioned that Ernie will
be taking a few days off at the end of this week and maybe the
beginning of the next,” Frank told Joanna as people came to
order. “I’ve let everyone know that Debbie’s
going to be working as a detective for the next little
while.”

Joanna was relieved that the announcement about
Ernie’s upcoming absence had already been handled. Nodding,
Joanna went straight to the task at hand. “What about the
pictures?” she asked.

“I think we’ll need several copies of
each of these,” Frank said. “Enough to go around, and
enlargements, too. Eight-by-tens at least. Then we may be able to
use Photo Shop to enhance the images so we can figure out where
these were taken.”

“You’re right,” Ernie agreed.
“We should all have copies, but
it
isn’t going to take some high-tech computer program to see
what we need to see.” Ernie tapped one of the photos with a
thick forefinger. “Look at the background on this one. If
those aren’t the Huachuca Mountains, I’ll eat my
hat.”

Joanna picked up the photo and studied it herself,
looking beyond the woman pushing the grocery cart to the undulating
wall of mountains looming behind her.

“I think you’re right, Ernie,”
she agreed. “If I’m not mistaken, we’re going to
find this was taken in the parking lot of that Fry’s grocery
store out on Highway 92.”

“Do you want me to check on that?”
Debbie asked. “I could take copies of a couple of the photos
out there. If the woman is a regular customer, one of the clerks or
carryout people will recognize her.”

If it’s not already too
late,
Joanna worried.
What if Bradley
Evans had already done his worst before someone got to
him?

“Good thinking,” Joanna said. “We
need to know who she is and why Evans was following her around
snapping photos.”

Joanna glanced around the table, settling on the
Double Cs. “Do we have a viable suspect in this case?”
she asked.

Ernie shook his head. “Not yet,” he
said as Jaime Carbajal nodded in agreement.

“All right then,” Joanna said.
“That brings us back to Evans himself. What do we know about
him so far?”

“Evans may have been a loner, but his
landlady thought he walked on water,” Jaime conceded.
“That’s why she was so adamant about not letting us
into his place without a search warrant. The guy didn’t smoke
or drink; paid his rent on time; never gave her any trouble;
didn’t have women spending the night; and helped out
occasionally with little jobs around the house. When it comes to
renters, it doesn’t get any better than that. So either
Evans really was a good guy or else he was
really good at creating a screen so people
thought
he was a good guy.”

“Which is it?” Joanna asked.

Jaime Carbajal shrugged. “The jury’s
still out on that,” he said. “We need to see if we can
track down Bradley’s credit-card use and telephone records.
Frank will be focusing on that. Credit-card receipts will help us
track his movements in the days before he died. So will his phone
calls. In the meantime, Ernie and I will spend most of today
interviewing people at the prison down in Douglas. We know Ted
Chapman’s opinions about Bradley Evans. Personally, I’d
like to see if there are any dissenting ones. If he had something
going with the girl in the pictures, maybe he confided in one or
more of the people he was working with at the prison.”

Joanna nodded. Thumbing through her stack of
paperwork, Joanna settled on one that dealt with Bradley
Evans’s vehicle. “All right,” she said.
“Let’s talk about his truck for a minute. Were you able
to figure out when it showed up on that vacant lot?”

“Not the exact hour and minute,” Jaime
responded. “But we do know that it was sometime between
Friday night and Saturday morning. We talked to the two guys who
are selling the vehicles that were parked on either side of
Evans’s Ford. According to them, the truck definitely
wasn’t there on Friday. One of them, Rick Gomez, remembers
seeing it for the first time around ten on Saturday morning, when
he came by to meet up with someone who was interested in buying his
Toyota.”

“There’s a lot more presence technology
out there nowadays than there used to be,” Joanna said.
“We should probably check out traffic security videos from
neighboring businesses. One of those might have caught the pickup
and /or driver on tape.”

“We can try,” Jaime said, “but I
wouldn’t count on it. People
use that
particular lot for a reason. It’s not in the center of town,
it’s been vacant for years, and it belongs to an absentee
landowner. The lot itself has no security cameras at
all.”

“What about neighbors?” Joanna
asked.

Jaime shrugged. “There are a couple of gas
stations, but not much else. We can ask to see their tapes, and who
knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Joanna turned her attention to Casey Ledford.
“What’s going on with fingerprints?”

“Not much,” Casey replied. “All
the prints I found inside the truck appear to belong to the victim
and nobody else. The big difference is that the prints on the
gearshift, steering wheel, and door handle have all been smudged or
even obliterated.”

“So the last person to drive the vehicle was
wearing gloves?” Joanna asked.

Casey nodded. “That would be my
guess.”

“What about the prints you lifted from the
exterior?”

“I didn’t find any prints at all inside
the camper shell or the bed of the pickup,” Casey said.
“There were signs that the bed of the pickup had been
scrubbed out pretty thoroughly. The total absence of prints there
would mean whoever cleaned it was wearing gloves—and probably
not because he or she was worried about chapped hands. As for the
unidentified prints on the exterior? The ones I found were mostly
on the doors and side windows as well as on the liftgate on the
camper shell and on the back of the pickup. All of those would be
consistent with someone trying to catch a glimpse of the
vehicle’s interior to see what kind of condition it was
in.”

“In other words, innocent shoppers,”
Joanna said.

Casey nodded.

“What about the primer?” Joanna asked.
“Do we know if
Bradley Evans himself was
in the process of rehabbing the truck?”

“No,” Jaime said. “I asked about
that, and his landlady said no way. She claims the pickup was still
a dingy red when she saw it sometime last week. She couldn’t
swear exactly when that was, but she says she saw it almost every
day. And that makes sense. Evans’s apartment is a converted
garage out behind the landlady’s house. The carport next to
it is carved out of her backyard and is fully visible from her
kitchen window.”

“So it’s possible the primer was added
in an effort to keep us from finding it,” Joanna
concluded.

“Make that
delay
our finding it,” Ernie said. “Whoever did it must have
known we’d find it eventually.”

“How much primer would it take to cover a
pickup like that?” Joanna asked.

“To cover it properly, it would have taken
several cans more than our guy used,” Jaime said. “If
you ask me, this was a crappy, half-assed job.”

“Because whoever did it was in a
hurry?”

“Either that or because they had no idea what
they were doing,” Ernie Carpenter said.

He turned to Debbie. “While you’re out
in Sierra Vista talking to the Fry’s clerks, maybe you should
also check with auto-parts stores in the area to find out if anyone
purchased a supply of primer this past weekend.”

Joanna was gratified that Ernie was making sure
Debbie had something useful to do—that she was being treated
like a member of the team. As Debbie jotted a reminder to herself
into a small spiral notebook, Joanna turned to her crime scene
investigator, Dave Hollicker.

“What about the blood samples you found in
the bed of the pickup?” she asked. “Any word on
those?”

“They’re blood, all right,” Dave
answered. “But we don’t know whose. Doc Winfield has
already forwarded Evans’s blood and tissue samples to the
Department of Public Safety Crime Lab in Tucson. They’re the
ones who can give us a comparison in the shortest amount of time. I
can take the new samples up there myself or I can send them. Which
do you prefer?”

“By all means take them,” Joanna said.
“And do it today. Let’s get this case
moving.”

Frank shot a questioning look in her direction. He
didn’t say anything aloud, but she knew what he was thinking.
Why? What’s the big rush? And how much
more is it going to add to this year’s
expenditures?

With budgetary constraints always in mind, those
were entirely legitimate questions, and Joanna didn’t have
any ready answers—at least not the kind of reasonable answers
that her chief deputy wanted or would understand.

In the days before Jenny was born, Joanna
remembered throwing herself into a frenzy of housecleaning and
nest-building—scrubbing the refrigerator and cleaning and
rearranging all her kitchen cupboards. In light of her current
position, wanting Bradley Evans’s homicide solved prior to
the baby’s birth was probably a variation on that same theme.
Solving a case amounted to a sworn law enforcement officer’s
equivalence of nest building. From Joanna’s point of view, it
was infinitely preferable to cleaning a refrigerator.

“Has anyone talked to Ted Chapman since we
found out about this latest development?” Joanna asked,
nodding toward the photographs still spread across the table.
“Maybe he’ll know
something about
this and the photos will turn out to be totally
harmless.”

“I doubt that will be the case,” Ernie
said.

To be honest, Joanna doubted it, too.

Jaime glanced at his watch. “Sorry to rush
this,” he said. “Ernie and I are due to meet up with
the second in command at the Douglas prison in about forty-five.
Since Ted’s usually around the jail here somewhere, we can
probably catch up with him once we finish the Douglas
interviews.”

With little additional discussion, the homicide
team packed up their collection of photos and left the conference
room. As soon as they were gone, a grim-faced Frank reached into a
file and brought out a single paper which he slid across the table
to Joanna. “Take a look at this,” he said.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Read it,” Frank urged. “It came
off the fax machine as I was on my way into the briefing.
It’s about one of those UDAs they picked up east of Douglas
the other night.”

The words
TOP SECRET
and
CONFIDENTIAL
were written in
huge black letters across the cover sheet. Inside was what appeared
to be a routine incident report, but as Joanna read it, she felt a
sudden chill. One of the illegal crossers, a young unidentified
male of Middle Eastern origin, had been apprehended by Border
Patrol agents. While searching the surrounding area, the officers
had discovered a backpack stuffed with fifteen thousand dollars in
American currency, a collection of fake IDs and phony passports, a
laptop computer, and three working cell phones.

“Yikes!” Joanna exclaimed.

Frank nodded. “That’s what I
say.”

“If they picked him up the night before last,
how come we’re only just now hearing about it?” she
asked.

“The way the feds operate, I’m
surprised we’re hearing about it at all,” Frank
returned. “And I don’t think we would be, if they
didn’t need our help. Border Patrol is asking us to beef up
patrols all along the southern sector.”

Over the months since 9/11, there had been rumors
of the Border Patrol apprehending illegal crossers who didn’t
fit the usual profile of UDAs simply looking for work. It was
thought that some of the arrests had included possible terrorist
operatives, but all the rumors in the world hadn’t been
enough for the federal government to bring to bear the kind of
focused attention border issues clearly merited. Evidently this
latest bust was one that might finally succeed in attracting
Washington’s attention, but until that happened, it would be
up to the severely understaffed Border Patrol and outmanned local
law enforcement agencies to fill in the gap.

“And we will give them help,” Joanna
declared. “As much as we can spare and maybe even some we
can’t. Is any of this being made public?”

Frank shook his head. “Homeland Security
wants to see how much information they can glean from the cell
phones and the computer before anyone knows the bad guy has been
picked up. So, yes, they want our help, but they also want us to
keep it quiet.”

“Okay,” Joanna said with a nod.
“It makes sense. That way we do the work and they get the
credit.”

Frank nodded. “You’ve got that
right,” he said.

When the briefing was over, Frank started toward
the door. He paused in the doorway. “I assume this means
Billy and Clarence O’Dwyer are still off our surveillance
list for the time being?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” Joanna said.

“Jeannine Phillips isn’t going to like
it,” Frank cautioned.

“Don’t worry,” Joanna said.
“I told her yesterday that we wouldn’t be able to
divert any more patrol officers to San Simon.”

“How’d she take it?” Frank
asked.

“Medium,” Joanna said. “Which is
to say she wasn’t thrilled.”

Frank looked relieved. “I’m glad you
told her,” he said. “I don’t think Jeannine likes
me very much.”

“She likes you well enough,” Joanna
observed. “You’re just not her type.”

Returning to her office, Joanna had barely picked
up the first piece of mail when a shaken Ted Chapman appeared in
her doorway.