Dead Wrong (5 page)

Quickly Joanna rose to her feet. “We’ll
be going then, Mrs. Crystal. I can see this has been very hard on
you.”

“Thank you for letting me talk about
Lisa,” Anna Marie said. “Most of my friends don’t
have the patience for it. Talking helps me remember her. Otherwise
she’d be forgotten completely.”

On an impulse, Joanna reached into her pocket and
pulled out a business card. “Lisa must have been a wonderful
daughter,” she said. “Anytime you want to talk about
her, feel free to give me a call.”

Anna Marie studied the card for a moment and then
looked at Joanna. There were tears in her eyes. “Thank
you,” she said.

As Joanna stepped off the porch and into the crisp,
clear night air, she breathed in deeply, cleansing the cigarette
smoke from her lungs.

Twenty-seven years earlier her father had probably
come to this very house to make a next-of-kin notification. Despite
the long slow passage of time since then, the grief that had filled
the little clapboard house remained as palpable and overwhelming as
it must have been that fateful Sunday morning in 1978. Through all
the intervening years, none of the hurt had disappeared. It was
still trapped inside the house right along with Anna Marie
Crystal’s collection of decades-old cigarette smoke.

W
hoa,” 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
dogfighting 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
I-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 runin 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.”