Authors: J. A. Jance
“I ran into Jaime Carbajal and Ernie
Carpenter out in the parking lot,” Ted said. “The very
idea of Brad stalking someone is utterly ridiculous. I can’t
believe it!”
“Ernie showed you the photos?”
“Yes, but this makes no sense at
all.”
“The photos were taken from a disposable
camera that had Mr. Evans’s fingerprints all over it,”
Joanna pointed out. “According to Casey Ledford, his were the
only
prints on the camera, so he would
most likely be the one who took the pictures.”
Ted shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Even
so,” he said wearily, “Brad simply wouldn’t do
such a thing.”
“Did you recognize the young woman?”
Joanna asked. “Do you have any idea who she might
be?”
“None whatsoever!”
“Someone he might have dated in the
past?” Joanna suggested.
“No,” Ted answered. “If Brad had
been dating someone, I’m sure he would have mentioned it to
me. Besides, the young woman in the picture looks to be in her
twenties. She would have been far too young for him.”
“Older men and younger women do
happen,” Joanna said.
“In the movies, maybe,” Ted said.
“Or if the old guy has bundles of money, but that’s not
the case with Brad. He may have had a job and a paycheck, but I can
tell you from personal experience that the pay scale for members of
jail ministries is only one click above flipping burgers. If I
didn’t have my military retirement, Ginny and I
wouldn’t be able to make it. Someone who looks like that girl
did wouldn’t throw herself at an ex-con who’s just
barely getting by.”
“Maybe she corresponded with him while he was
in prison,” Joanna offered. “Suppose once Brad was
released from prison, he found out his pen pal had moved on. Maybe
she was dating someone else or had even gotten married. What if he
wasn’t ready to accept that?”
“No,” Ted said. “You’ve got
to believe me. Brad wasn’t like that, but that’s not
why I came to talk to you just now.”
“Why did you?”
“I understand Dr. Winfield is ready to
release Brad’s body, but so far no one has come forward to
claim it.”
Joanna thought back to Anna Marie Crystal’s
profoundly negative reaction upon learning that Bradley Evans, her
former son-in-law, had listed her as his sole next of kin. It
didn’t seem likely that she’d be rushing to the morgue
to take charge of his body.
“That’s not too surprising,”
Joanna said.
“No,” Ted agreed. “I suppose not.
But since no one else is going to claim the body, I’d like
to. I’ve talked to people at the prison down in Douglas. The
warden there is willing to let me officiate at a memorial service
inside the Papago Unit. That way some of the inmates Brad was
working with will be able to attend. Of course, if there’s
any need or interest, I suppose I could do a second service outside
the prison as well, although, since
the unit is
a minimum security facility, the warden might allow a few members
of the public to attend the prison service as well.”
“You’d do that?” Joanna
asked.
“He was a friend of mine,” Ted said.
“Yes, I would. That’s what friends are for.”
“All right,” Joanna said.
“I’ll call the ME and see what he says.”
Moments later Joanna was on the phone explaining
the situation to her stepfather. “Since we haven’t been
able to locate any other relatives,” George Winfield said,
“I suppose that would be fine. What mortuary?”
“Cochise Mortuary and Funeral Home,”
Ted replied in answer to George’s relayed question.
“They’re in Douglas. On G Avenue.”
“I know where they are,” George said.
“Have Mr. Chapman stop by. Once he signs the necessary
paperwork, I’ll call the funeral home and get things under
way.”
“Thank you,” Ted said to Joanna once
she was off the phone. “This means a lot to me. I really
appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” she returned.
“But are you all right?”
Ted sighed. “I’m disappointed,”
he admitted. “If this stalking thing turns out to be true, I
can’t help feeling that Brad betrayed the trust I put in him.
I pride myself on being a good judge of character. Maybe I’m
losing my touch.”
“I doubt that,” Joanna said.
“Maybe Brad Evans was really good at pulling the wool over
people’s eyes.”
But Ted Chapman was in no mood to give himself a
break. “Even so,” he said, getting up to leave,
“I should have seen through it.”
Joanna’s phone was ringing again before Ted
Chapman was all the way out the door. “I forgot,”
George Winfield said. “I meant to apologize for dumping all
that stuff on you the other
day without so much
as a by-your-leave, but with Don and Margaret there, I didn’t
want to go into it.”
“It’s all right, George,” she
said. “Better late than never. Don’t worry about
it.”
“You know how your mother is,” George
continued. “Once she gets the bit in her teeth, there’s
no stopping her. We’ve been talking about cleaning out the
garage ever since we got married. This weekend we finally went to
work on it, and now Ellie wants it all done yesterday. I’m
sure some of the stuff has been lying around collecting dust for
decades. But not anymore, and now that we’ve started the
process…” He paused. “Now she wants it all done
immediately, if not sooner.”
“Sounds pretty familiar,” Joanna said
with a sympathetic laugh.
“Some of the boxes she had set aside for you
and Jenny are filled with knickknacks. If you don’t want
them, I wouldn’t blame you at all, but when it comes to the
diaries…”
“What diaries?” Joanna asked.
“Your father’s diaries,” George
answered. “Several boxes were full of books. They were up in
the rafters of the garage. When I started bringing them down, your
mother knew what was inside without even having to look. She
claimed they were just a bunch of worthless old books and that I
should take them out to the dump and get rid of them. She was so
adamant about it that it piqued my curiosity. When she went into
the house, I unsealed one of the boxes and what did I find? Your
father’s diaries.”
“My father kept diaries?” Joanna
asked.
“Volumes of them, Joanna,” George
returned. “As soon as I saw them, it occurred to me that
maybe you or your brother or Jenny might want to take a look at
them. If you want to get rid of
them yourself
later, fine. But bearing all that in mind, I loaded those boxes
into the back of the van along with everything else. Instead of
taking them to the dump, I dropped them off at your place on Sunday
along with the things Ellie actually wanted you to have. The
problem is…”
He paused uneasily.
“You don’t want me to let on to Mother
that I have them,” Joanna said.
“Exactly,” George Winfield breathed.
“Ellie would be terribly upset if she found out that I had
gone against her express wishes.”
“Don’t worry,” Joanna said with a
laugh. “Your secret’s safe with me. I’ve lived
with Eleanor long enough to know when to keep my mouth shut. I
didn’t even know my father kept diaries. It will be wonderful
for me to have a chance to look at them. So thanks. Sometimes I
think you know me better than my mother does.”
Once Joanna got off the phone, she sat at her desk
marveling and reliving the stab of memory that had assailed her
when she had glimpsed her father’s handwriting on the
evidence log in Lisa Marie Evans’s file.
D. H. Lathrop had been gone for a very long time.
Sometimes Joanna wondered if what she remembered about him was real
or if it had been filtered and changed somehow through the
hero-worshiping eyes of his unsophisticated daughter. For instance,
when she had recalled that fragmentary memory of him sitting
hunched with pen and paper at the kitchen table, she had assumed
he’d been laboring over some mundane piece of job-required
paperwork. Now, though, it seemed possible—likely,
even—that he’d been writing in a diary.
Had Joanna’s father grappled with his natural
adversary, the
written word, in order to leave
pieces of himself behind for those who followed? Had he wanted or
expected whatever he had written there to survive him? Had he
imagined that someday a grown-up Joanna might read his words and
somehow come to understand her father’s hopes and dreams and
aspirations? Had D. H. Lathrop ever, in his wildest dreams, thought
that the son he and Eleanor had given up for adoption might someday
come back into their lives and be able to study the diaries, thus
learning about the biological father who would otherwise forever be
a stranger? And what about Jenny and this as-yet-unborn grandchild?
Could the diaries shed light on the existence of a man they had
never met? Now, through George Winfield’s kindness, all those
things were possible.
For a moment Joanna considered picking up her cell
phone and sharing this amazing news with Bob Brundage, her
long-lost brother whose out-of-wedlock birth had predated their
parents subsequent marriage by a number of years. Given up for
adoption as a newborn, he had come looking for his birth parents
years later, and only after the deaths of both his biological
father as well as his adoptive parents. Eleanor had welcomed him
and his wife, Marcie, with open arms.
Joanna scrolled through the stored numbers in her
cell phone until she located Bob Brundage’s name and number,
but she paused before pressing the “talk” button.
Joanna had told George Winfield that she wouldn’t betray his
secret in preserving the diaries, but what about her brother? Bob
hadn’t grown up at odds with Eleanor Lathrop. Joanna knew all
about keeping things from her mother. For her it had been a matter
of survival—as necessary as breathing. What if Joanna told
Bob, and he somehow let slip to their mother what George had
done?
No,
Joanna told herself
firmly, putting the phone back down.
Let
sleeping dogs lie.
She picked it back up a moment later, however, and
called home. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re a very
smart man?” she asked Butch when he answered.
“Not recently,” he said.
Hurriedly she explained what George had done.
“So it’s a very good thing you didn’t let your
mother get her hands on any of those boxes.”
“George was acting funny,” Butch said.
“It made me think something was up. But I’m glad the
boxes are safe and sound.”
“And how are things on the home front?”
Joanna asked.
“Quiet. Mom and Dad unhitched their Tracker
and went out sightseeing this morning. They told me not to plan on
cooking dinner. They want to take us out.”
“Where to?”
“Someplace nice was what I was told, so
I’ve made reservations at the restaurant at Rob Roy
Links.”
“Sounds good,” Joanna said.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
With that she went back to work. She stayed glued
to her desk until almost two o’clock dealing with a slew of
end-of-the-month reports.
Finally Kristin showed up in her doorway. “I
thought you had a doctor’s appointment,” she said,
pointing at her watch.
With a dismayed glance at the clock on her office
wall, Joanna bounded out of her chair. “Thanks,” she
said. “I was so engrossed that I would have missed
it.”
While sitting in Dr. Tommy Lee’s waiting
room, Joanna found her head lolling back. The next thing she knew,
Sugie Richards, Dr. Lee’s receptionist, was shaking her
awake.
“Sheriff Brady. Sheriff Brady. Are you all
right?”
Embarrassed, Joanna looked around the room to see
if anyone else had noticed. Obviously several people had.
“I’m fine,” she said impatiently.
“It’s nothing a good night’s sleep wouldn’t
fix.”
“Well, it’s time for you to come in
now,” Sugie said. “The doctor’s ready to see you.
Come on in and put on a gown.”
With people still staring at her, Joanna got up and
waddled into the examination room. “How are things?”
Dr. Lee asked when he appeared in the doorway several minutes
later.
“I’m tired,” she said.
“I’m tired and cranky and ready to be done carrying
this baby. Other than that, I’m fine.”
“I’m sure you are,” Dr. Lee
agreed.
His examination was perfunctory. “A few more
days,” Dr. Lee said at last. “It won’t be long
now.”
That’s easy for you to
say,
Joanna thought.
Your mother-in-law
isn’t parked in your driveway waiting for this damned kid to
put in an appearance.
“You can get dressed now,” the doctor
added. “Then we’ll talk.”
Stuffed back inside the confines of her maternity
uniform, Joanna went into Dr. Lee’s office and took a seat
beside his desk.
“You seem a little stressed,” he said.
“Are you all right?”
“Butch’s parents are here,” she
said.
Dr. Lee studied her face. “Is that
all?”
She remembered her panicked call to Marianne.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” she
asked.
“Tell you what?”
“If something was wrong with the baby,”
Joanna said in a rush. “I mean, if there were pieces missing
or if something wasn’t working right.”
“Of course I would,” he assured her
with a smile. “I would
have told you long
before this. Whatever would have made you think I
wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna answered
wanly. “I guess I just needed something to worry
about.”
“We doctors call it third-trimester
paranoia,” he said with a smile. “Believe me. That kind
of thinking is completely normal.”
J
oanna
had barely returned to her office when an almost giddy Debbie
Howell bounded into the room. “Look,” she said, waving
a fistful of papers in the air. “The woman in Brad
Evans’s pictures. I finally talked to a Fry’s checkout
clerk who was able to look at the pictures and give me the
woman’s name—Leslie Markham. I came back to the office,
Googled the name, and found her! Here she is. She and her husband,
Rory Markham, own a real estate company out in Sierra Vista. I
downloaded this from their website.”
Joanna took the proffered pieces of paper. While
she read through them, Debbie, too excited to sit, paced the floor.
Rory Markham, Real Estate Group, LLC, was a brokerage specializing
in “fine homes and ranches.” Rory, who was evidently
both owner and broker of the firm, was a tanned, silver-haired
gentleman who looked to be in his late fifties. Just under the
company name was a color photo of Mr. Markham with a radiantly
smiling Leslie standing at his side. Leslie’s photo turned up
a second time
among the head shots of
salespeople working for the company. In the associates section her
caption read: “Leslie Tazewell Markham.”
“Looks like she started out as an associate
and ended up marrying the boss,” Joanna said.
Debbie nodded. “I believe it’s called
marrying up.”
“In every sense of the word,” Joanna
added. “She looks like she’s barely mid-twenties and
he’s what, early fifties?”
“At least,” Debbie agreed. “He
could be even older than that.”
Joanna remembered what Ted Chapman had
said—something to the effect that younger women only threw
themselves at older men if money was involved. From the looks of
the man in the picture it appeared that there couldn’t be
more than a couple of years of difference in age between Rory
Markham and Bradley Evans. So maybe Leslie Markham had a thing for
older men.
“Do Jaime and Ernie know about this?”
Joanna asked.
“Not yet,” Debbie said. “I came
straight here to tell you.”
“I’m glad to know about it, but
they’re your partners on this,” Joanna reminded her.
“Whatever you know, they need to know.”
“Right,” Debbie said. “I’ll
see if I can locate them.”
She left Joanna’s office, taking the website
information on Rory Markham Real Estate with her when she went.
Within minutes Debbie was back, bringing the Double Cs with
her.
“Look who I found,” she said.
“They were just pulling into the parking lot.”
Ernie was scanning the Leslie Markham info as he
followed Debbie into Joanna’s office. “Well,” he
said, tossing the papers on the small conference table in one
corner of the room, “this is all very interesting. Now that
we know who she is, the question has to be: Is she a victim here or
is she the perpetrator?”
“Maybe she’s both,” Joanna
suggested.
“What do you mean?” Ernie asked.
“First, tell me. What did you find out down
in Douglas?”
“Nothing bad,” Jaime admitted.
“All the guys at the prison, the ones Brad Evans was working
with on a regular basis, thought he was a great guy. For one thing,
he evidently learned to speak Spanish—fluent
Spanish—while he was in prison. So when he was counseling the
guys, he could do it in English or Spanish, which isn’t
nearly as common as you’d think. And he’s evidently
stayed in touch with a couple of the guys who were local after they
were released. They told us that they saw him at AA meetings, in
Douglas and in Agua Prieta. But none of them mentioned Brad having
a girlfriend. Nobody hinted that he might be gay or anything like
that. It’s just that if he had relationships with women, he
never told anyone.”
“Did anyone mention a pen-pal
situation?” Joanna asked.
“Nope.”
“So here we are then,” Joanna said.
“What we know is that, for whatever reason, Brad Evans was
definitely interested in Leslie Markham—a happily and
possibly recently married woman. Let’s suppose for a minute
that she and Brad did have a relationship of some kind, one that
none of his friends happen to know anything about. Maybe it was
over as far as she was concerned, but Brad was still hanging
on.”
“I see where you’re going with
this,” Ernie said. “Somehow she gets wind that Brad
Evans is still sniffing around. Leslie doesn’t want to rock
the boat with her husband, this Markham guy, so she takes Evans out
of the picture permanently.”
“Which makes her a possible stalking victim
and a possible homicide suspect,” Joanna returned.
“Like I said earlier—maybe she’s both.”
“For right now, we’d better take the
victim option,” Jaime said. “If we even acknowledge
that she could be a suspect—”
“Exactly,” Joanna said. “First
let’s try to find out everything we can about the woman. Then
tomorrow, maybe you can go talk to her.”
“Did you have any luck tracking down whoever
bought primer over the weekend?” Ernie asked Debbie.
She shook her head. “I spent all day on
this.”
“That’s all right,” Ernie said.
“Tomorrow will be plenty of time to do that.”
For a change Joanna left the office right at five.
Dinner at the Rob Roy was good—at least the food was.
Margaret was off on another tirade, but Joanna, taking
Butch’s advice, simply tuned her mother-in-law out. Instead,
Joanna found herself thinking about Bradley Evans—a convicted
murderer and a murder victim as well, a man whose life in prison
and out of it seemed to be a complete contradiction. The people who
knew him best—like Ted Chapman, for instance—seemed to
have thought very highly of him. On the surface it appeared that he
had lived an almost monastic life.
But somewhere along the line Brad Evans had met up
with someone who hadn’t liked him nearly as well as other
people did. This unknown person had disliked Evans enough not just
to kill him but to mutilate his body as well.
How much do you have to hate
someone,
Joanna wondered,
to
systematically remove their fingers?
“Well,” Margaret Dixon asked
impatiently, “what do you think?”
Joanna’s attention returned to the dinner
table in time to find the other four people seated there staring at
her and waiting for
an answer. Butch, seeing
what must have been a totally blank look on her face, came to her
rescue.
“Dessert,” he said quickly. “What
do you think about dessert?”
Joanna actually didn’t want dessert. Caught
off guard, though, she ordered some anyway. “I’ll have
the crème brûlée,” she answered at once. Which
was why, when midnight rolled around, she was wide awake, tossing
and turning and suffering from a terrible case of indigestion.
Not wanting to disturb Butch, she and Lady
abandoned the bedroom. For a while, Joanna and the dog sat on the
couch in the living room. Finally, though, recognizing that this
was a time when she’d have a bit of privacy, Joanna headed
for her office. Butch had carried through on his promise to lock
the door, but the key was hidden beneath one of his prized O-gauge
model train engines displayed on a nearby shelf.
Joanna let herself into the office, where she found
Butch’s laptop in the middle of her desk. No doubt he had
used the office as a refuge from his parents during the course of
the previous day.
Putting the computer aside, Joanna focused on the
boxes stacked along the wall. One by one, she lifted them. It
wasn’t necessary to open them in order to discern which ones
held knickknacks. Those were all fairly light. The boxes at the
bottom of the stack were too heavy to lift. Slicing open the top
one, she found that the box was chock-full of books.
Some of them were old history texts. D. H. Lathrop
had been a self-taught history buff. She remembered him regaling
her with stories of the Old West, and it didn’t surprise
Joanna in the least to find a collection of history books among her
father’s treasured
possessions. And there
were several outdated law enforcement manuals as well. D. H.
Lathrop had left off formal schooling without completing high
school. When he had wanted to switch from mining to law
enforcement, signing up for a college degree in criminal justice
hadn’t been an option. Instead, he had pored over the
textbooks and manuals on his own, using what he learned there to
bootstrap himself out of a dead-end job as a miner into the Cochise
County Sheriff’s Department.
He may have started out there as a deputy, but he
had worked his way up through the ranks until eventually he had
been elected sheriff. Just seeing the books he had used to
accomplish that transformation gave Joanna a whole new sense of her
father’s single-minded struggle to better himself.
Joanna found the diaries in the second of the two
heavy boxes. When she picked up the first of the leather-bound
volumes, she did so almost reverently. Two dates—March 26,
1964, to June 8, 1969—were inscribed in indelible black ink
on the front cover of the book and repeated again, in the same
hand, on the spine. It took Joanna’s breath away to think
that the small volume in her hand contained five years of her
father’s life—five years she knew nothing about. At the
time D. H. Lathrop had been writing in this diary, his daughter,
Joanna, hadn’t been born.
She opened the first page. It was yellow and
brittle to the touch, but her father’s distinctive
handwriting leaped out at her.
“Work,” the entry dated March 1964
read. “I hate it. I hate working in the mine. I hate being
dirty. I hate the dust and the dark. Fell in a stope today.
It’s a wonder I didn’t break my neck. I don’t
know how long I can keep this up, but I promised
Ellie…”
Joanna stopped cold, allowing the word to sink into
her con
sciousness. Ellie! Her father had called
her mother that. So did George Winfield. Two very different men
with the same wife who used the same affectionate nickname.
“…that I would support her until death
do us part. And I will. A promise is a promise.”
And there it was. Joanna had always known that much
about her parents’ relationship—that her mother had
married someone who had been considered beneath her and that
Eleanor had never, not for one day, allowed her husband to forget
that fact. Regardless, though, Eleanor hadn’t bolted. She had
married D. H. Lathrop for better or for worse. She may have been
disappointed. There may have been far more “worse” days
than “better,” and her husband may not have measured up
to Eleanor’s lofty expectations, but she had stuck with him,
too.
For the very first time, it occurred to Joanna that
in reading her father’s version of his life, she might be
doing her mother a disservice—that if she read the diaries
she might come away with too much information about both of
them.
Eleanor isn’t
perfect,
Joanna thought.
But maybe
neither was he.
Closing the book, Joanna threw it down. Then she
took out the others—fifteen of them in all—and arranged
them in chronological order across her desk. At volume eight, the
format suddenly changed. The handsome leather-bound volumes were
replaced with reddish cloth-bound books, with only the word
“Journal” stamped on the front, with a blank space
provided where her father had dutifully inked in the dates.
Joanna was lost in thought when Butch appeared in
the doorway. “What are you doing?” he asked.
She jumped. “You startled me,” she
said. “I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to disturb
you, so Lady and I came in here.”
“Your father’s books?” Butch
asked.
Joanna nodded. “His diaries and some other
books as well.”
“What are you going to do with
them?”
“Keep them,” Joanna answered.
“I know that. I guess, I meant,
where
are you going to keep them? My mother
isn’t the only one who might pay your office an unauthorized
visit. Your mother wouldn’t be above doing some snooping,
either.”
In the end, they stowed all of the books in the
bottom drawer of Joanna’s file cabinet. And because bending
over was too cumbersome for Joanna, Butch was the one who actually
put them away.
“This is silly, you know,” she said.
“After all, it’s our house.”
Butch straightened up and looked at her. “How
much luck have you had changing your mother’s
behavior?” he asked.
“None.”
“Same thing with my mother,” he said.
“So let’s just deal with it—and keep the door
locked. Now come to bed. It’s going to be another long day
tomorrow.”
J
oanna
had just stepped out of the shower a little past seven the next
morning when Butch tapped on the bathroom door, reached in, and
handed her the telephone.
“It’s Jeannine Phillips,” Tica
Romero said when Joanna answered.
“What about her?”
“Her damaged truck was found abandoned in the
westbound rest area at Texas Canyon,” Tica said.
There was a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of
Joanna’s stomach. Texas Canyon was only a matter of miles
away from
San Simon and from Billy and Clarence
O’Dwyer’s Roostercomb Ranch.
“What do you mean, damaged?” Joanna
demanded. “Is it wrecked?”
“Somebody put a rock through the passenger
window. Officer Phillips is nowhere to be found.”
“When’s the last time someone heard
from her?”
“She radioed in to Dispatch at midnight to
say that everything was fine and she was going off
shift.”
“Did she give her location at that
time?”
“No.”
“Has someone secured the vehicle?”
Joanna asked.
“Yes. Deputy Raymond is on the
scene.”
“Tell him to hold the fort. Then call
everyone else—Dave Hollicker, Casey Ledford, and Chief
Montoya. Tell them to meet me at the scene.”
“What about Homicide?” Tica asked
tentatively. “Should I call them?”