Dead Wrong (19 page)

What is it?
she
wondered.
What am I missing?

After an hour’s worth of restless tossing and
turning, Joanna finally bailed out of bed and padded into her
office with Lady at her heels. She had read her father’s
official version of Bradley Evans’s arrest in the case log,
but she wondered if D. H. Lathrop might have written something more
about the case in the privacy of his daily journal—something
that might shed some additional light on Bradley’s present
circumstances all these years later.

Grunting with the awkward position and effort,
Joanna managed to rummage through the bottom file drawer until she
located the volume in question, one that covered most of 1978 and
the beginning months of 1979. She found what she was looking for on
Monday, October 30, 1978. The entry read:

That passage was what she had been looking for, and
reading something that was related to the case she was working on
seemed justified—it didn’t feel like prying. Originally
that was all she had intended to do, but of course she didn’t
stop reading after that one entry. She kept right on. Not only had
D. H. Lathrop faithfully entered notations about his life as a
Cochise County deputy sheriff, he had also set down his views of
what was going on at home.

A few pages later she came across the entry for
December 17, 1978.

Joanna remembered that dress like no other. It had
been a deep, rich green with rhinestone-studded buttons. She had
thought it the most beautiful dress she had ever seen, and she
remembered her mother telling her to go in the dressing room and
try it on. They had been upstairs in Phelps Dodge Mercantile, in
the children’s clothing department. When she came out of the
dressing room wearing it, she had felt like a princess, and she had
been amazed when Eleanor had said to the saleslady,
“We’ll take it.”

On the way home she had added, “Now you
mustn’t tell your father about this. It’ll be a
surprise.”

It had been a surprise, all right, and not a
particularly welcome one. But it was one of the few times in
Joanna’s life when she remembered her mother going to the mat
for her.

Joanna had thought that reading her father’s
diaries would be all one-sided, and yet here she was remembering
something nice about her mother that she had forgotten completely.
She was almost idly skimming through pages when she came across the
entry for Friday, February 2, 1979.

Joanna sat for a long time staring at the entry.
Stand alone…Those familiar words were ones her father had
said to her often, and she had never known they came from her
grandmother, a woman who had died long before Joanna was born. And
how did those words apply now. Had Bradley Evans willingly spent
more than twenty years in prison for a crime he hadn’t
committed? Was that possible? And, if so, didn’t that mean
that Lisa Evans’s real killer had gone free all this
time?

From what anyone had been able to learn, as long as
Bradley Evans had stayed put in Douglas, everything had been fine.
But once he ventured as far afield as Sierra Vista—once he
started stalking Leslie Markham and snapping her
picture—things had changed. Before he finished shooting that
one camera’s worth of film, Bradley Evans was dead.

After talking to Rory Markham that afternoon,
Joanna had come away thinking that the real estate broker was a
plausible suspect in the Bradley Evans homicide. Jealous husbands
were always a good possibility, and no doubt Rory Markham deserved
further investigation. But D. H. Lathrop’s journal entry
opened the door to other avenues of investigation as well. He
claimed something had been missed in the original investigation.
What? And how? And by whom? Had it simply been overlooked or had it
been deliberately overlooked? And was it possible for a new set of
eyes to spot that missing ingredient all these years later?

Joanna felt energized, but she was realistic enough
to know her limits. Tomorrow was another long day. She needed her
rest. Closing the book, she returned it to the file cabinet drawer.
Then she stood up and switched off the lamp. “Come on,
girl,” she said to Lady. “Time to go back to
bed.”

She managed to get back into bed without disturbing
Butch. After that it took time for her to find a comfortable
position and
time to turn off her brain, which
had suddenly slipped into overdrive.

S
he
was in the bathroom the next morning putting on her makeup when
Butch came into the room, bringing her a cup of apricot tea and
grinning from ear to ear.

“You’re not going to believe it,”
he said.

“Believe what?” Joanna asked.

“They left.”

“Who left? You’re not making any
sense.”

“My parents. Overnight, they folded up their
awning and took off.”

“For where?”

“Home. For Arkansas. They left a note on the
kitchen table. Here it is.”

Taking the note, Joanna read: “Thanks for the
hospitality. Obviously we’ve worn out our welcome.
Mom.”

“Worn out their welcome? How can she say
that? We all bent over backwards.”

“And walked on eggshells,” Butch added.
“But that’s the way she is.”

Joanna was incredulous. “After driving all
this way they’re going to miss out on the birth of their
grandchild because of what happened at lunch, because Junior called
her on being rude?”

“I guess,” Butch said. “I suppose
that’s what started it, but now that she and Dad aren’t
speaking, they could go on like that indefinitely. Believe me,
we’re better off with them giving each other the silent
treatment as far away from here as possible. I had a bellyful of
that nonsense growing up, of passing messages back and forth
between them for days and weeks at a time. I sure as
hell don’t need it now. Actually, though, this
is a real stroke of luck for Dad. Mom’s an inveterate
backseat driver. With her not speaking to him, it’ll probably
be the most enjoyable cross-country drive he’s made in
years.”

Joanna shook her head. “That doesn’t
sound like a nice way to travel or to live,” she
observed.

Butch shrugged. “They’re used to
it,” he said. “They’ve been doing it for
years—for as long as I can remember. Now come on. Breakfast
is almost ready. I’m making omelets to celebrate. And with
them gone, you don’t have to rush things with the baby
anymore. He can arrive whenever he wants.”

“That’s easy for you to say,”
Joanna said. “You’re not the one who’s nine and a
half months pregnant.” Then she paused. “Wait a minute.
Did you say he?”

Butch heaved a sigh, then he nodded. “Yes, I
did,” he said.

“Was that just a figure of speech,
or…”

“Mom opened the envelope,” he said.
“The one on the refrigerator with the ultrasound results in
it. I didn’t know what she’d done until she asked me
what we’re going to name him. I wasn’t going to tell
you, but I let it slip. Sorry.”

Joanna could barely contain herself. “Your
mother actually opened the envelope—the envelope we’ve
left sealed all this time? You let her do that?”

“Joey,” Butch said, “I
didn’t
let
her do anything. I
told you she’s a snoop. I should have realized she
couldn’t leave well enough alone. I should have locked the
envelope away in the office along with everything else. I just
didn’t think about it. And when I found out what she’d
done, I climbed all over her about it. I’m sure that’s
the real reason they left. I doubt Junior Dowdle’s comment
had a thing to do with it.”

Just then Jenny and the three dogs bounded into the
master
bedroom behind them. “Hey,”
she said, flopping onto their unmade bed. “I was out feeding
Kiddo and I just noticed. The motor home is gone. What happened?
Where’d they go?”

“They went home,” Butch said.

“Home?” Jenny asked. “But I
thought they were going to stay until the baby got here. Why would
they leave now? I mean, it can’t be that much
longer.”

“It’s a long story,” Butch
said.

He looked so disheartened that Joanna
couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Whatever Margaret Dixon
had done, it wasn’t her son’s fault.

“It doesn’t matter why they
left,” Joanna said quickly. “The whole point is, they
did. Now let’s have some breakfast. We need to figure out a
name for this little brother of yours.”

“Little brother?” Jenny repeated
wonderingly. “You mean we know it’s going to be a
boy?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Thanks to
Margaret Dixon, we do now.”

J
oanna
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?”