Dead Wrong (22 page)

There was a clear hint of regret in his voice.
“You don’t sound particularly happy about it,”
Joanna said.

“Being here brings it all back, I
guess,” he said. “My colossal failure in life. The
funny thing is, I didn’t see it coming even though one of my
fraternity brothers from the U of A tried to warn me. Dudley told
me he thought I was getting in over my head, only I didn’t
believe him. Old Dud was of the opinion that marrying a rich
man’s daughter was a bad idea. Turns out he was right. Which
brings us, I suppose, to Leslie. What’s going on with her?
What’s this about stalking? I’m willing to bet it has a
lot more to do with that slime bucket named Rory Markham than it
does with me.”

“I take it you don’t approve of your
son-in-law?” Joanna asked casually.

“Look,” Lawrence Tazewell said.
“Aileen wrote me out of my daughter’s life a long time
ago. I’ve had no contact with Leslie at all since she was
little, but I still care, and I try to keep
track of what’s going on with her. When I found
out she had married Rory Markham, I assumed it was Rory’s
son. I knew he had at least one. I didn’t find out until much
later that wasn’t the case. When I learned she had married
the father instead, the Rory I knew, I couldn’t believe it.
Why would someone like Leslie, a girl in her twenties, want to hook
up with an old goat almost as old as her father?”

Joanna had her own ideas about why Leslie had
married Rory Markham. “So you and he knew each other?”
she asked.

“I knew him slightly, but Rory and my ex have
been pals forever,” Tazewell answered finally. “Maybe
even more than pals on occasion. I suspect Aileen is the one who
engineered the whole thing.”

Joanna was thunderstruck. “You’re
saying your wife allowed your daughter to marry one of her
ex-boyfriends?”

“Encouraged probably more than
allowed,” Tazewell replied. “In fact, she probably
manipulated the whole transaction and poor Leslie probably still
hasn’t figured it out. Aileen’s like that, you
see—someone who always gets her way. That’s one of the
reasons I divorced her.”

“But—” Joanna began. Lawrence
Tazewell stopped her mid-objection.

“Look,” he said. “Just because
someone gives birth doesn’t make her a decent
mother—present company excepted, of course. Now tell me about
this stalking business. You say the guy was taking pictures. Do you
have any idea who it is?”

Joanna hadn’t expected the interview to
progress this far without being back at the department and having
someone else to witness and record exactly what was said, but she
was into it now, and there was no turning back.

“His name is Evans,” Joanna answered.
“Bradley Evans.”

She glanced in Tazewell’s direction to see if
there was any visible reaction to this revelation, but there was
nothing—no sign of recognition or even interest.

“And he is?”

“An ex-con,” Joanna said. “And
he’s dead. Someone murdered him last week.”

“A friend of Rory’s?” Tazewell
asked.

“No,” Joanna said. “Not as far as
we’ve been able to determine. You may know him,
though.”

“Me?” Tazewell asked. “How would
I know the man?”

“You’re the one who sent him to
prison.”

“What’s the man’s name
again?”

“Bradley Evans. He went to prison in 1978 for
the murder of his pregnant wife. You were the judge who accepted
his plea agreement and imposed the prison sentence.”

“Wait a minute. I think I do remember now.
The guy was an ex-soldier from Fort Huachuca, right? He copped a
plea even though no one ever found his wife’s
body.”

Joanna nodded.

“And you’re right. I’m the one
who imposed his sentence. It wasn’t a good time for me,
though. I barely remember the proceedings. But what would he have
against Leslie?”

By then Joanna was pulling into the Justice Center
complex. “Let’s talk about it when we get
inside,” she said.

“All this is new?” Tazewell asked.

Joanna nodded. “Relatively,” she
said.

“When I was here everything was still located
in the courthouse up in Old Bisbee—the jail, the
sheriff’s department, the courts.”

“Times change,” Joanna said.
“Come on in.” She ushered him into her office through
her private entrance and offered him
a chair.
“Would you mind excusing me?” she asked. “Nature
calls—urgently.”

Tazewell smiled. “I understand,” he
said. “Take your time.”

Leaving him alone in her office, Joanna hurried to
the rest room and then back to Frank’s office. “Got
him?” Frank asked.

“He’s in my office. Do you have
anything for me?”

“Not yet,” Frank answered.
“Nothing on the blood work, if that’s what you mean.
Trying to get the crime lab moving on this is like pulling
teeth.”

“Having a supreme court justice sitting in my
office may be our secret weapon on that score,” Joanna said.
“Care to join us?”

Nodding, Frank followed Joanna from his office to
hers. After introductions, the three of them settled into chairs
around the small conference table in the corner of the room.
“What can you tell me about your former wife’s
friends?” Joanna asked.

“What friends?” Lawrence Tazewell asked
with a snort of derision. “Rory was the only one I knew of,
and he was a chum of hers from grade school on. Rory earned money
by working on the Triple H during the summers and on weekends.
Aileen was totally preoccupied with her parents and her horses. In
that order. Her father came first, her mother second, the horses
third.”

“What about Leslie?”

“A distant fourth. They hired the wife of one
of the Triple H ranch hands to look after her.”

“Did you sue for custody?” Joanna
asked. “If you knew your ex-wife wasn’t much of a
mother and that your daughter was being raised by a paid caregiver,
I should think you would have tried to gain custody.”

Lawrence Tazewell said nothing for a very long
time. Instead of answering, he stared out the window at the gray
limestone cliffs rising in the distance. “No,” he said
finally. “I wasn’t tough
enough. I
took the easy way out. Aileen said she wanted a divorce, so I gave
it to her. And Max made it worth my while to get out and not to
rock the boat.”

“Max?” Frank Montoya asked.

“Maxfield Houlihan,” Tazewell answered.
“Aileen’s father. Once she made it clear she wanted to
be rid of me, Max did whatever he could to make it happen. And I
have to hand it to the man. Max Houlihan may have looked like a
rube, but he was surprisingly well connected. With the clear
understanding that I would go away and stay away, Max pulled a few
choice strings. I ended up being offered a great position with a
law firm up in Phoenix, one that was far too lucrative to turn
down. And that position inevitably resulted in where I am
today.”

“You’re saying that it’s because
of your ex-father-in-law’s string pulling that you’re a
supreme court justice?”

“He didn’t get me the
appointment,” Tazewell said. “I got that on my own, but
that first job he obtained for me was certainly a springboard to
bigger and better things. It put me on a fast track in a way being
a superior court judge in Cochise County never would have. But,
yes, that is what happened. I’ve felt guilty about it for
years. I paid my child support every month, but other than that, I
stayed out of Aileen’s and Leslie’s lives. I
didn’t want to be involved. I had already lost them once, and
I didn’t want to face losing them again. Over the years
I’ve tried to make up for my shortcomings with Leslie by
doing my level best to be a good father to my present wife
Sharon’s two daughters.”

There was something in Tazewell’s demeanor
that made Joanna think he was leaving something out. “What do
you mean, lose them again?” she asked.

“HD,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Huntington’s disease,” Tazewell
answered.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Joanna
said. “What is it?”

“It’s a degenerative disease,” he
said. “It’s hereditary and incurable. They used to call
it Huntington’s chorea because it causes
chorea—violent, uncontrollable spasms. It progresses over a
period of time—ten to fifteen years, rendering its victims
more and more helpless. Ruth, Aileen’s mother, had it, and so
did two of her brothers. HD would have killed Ruth eventually, but
she committed suicide before things progressed that far. Since
Aileen’s mother had HD, there’s a fifty-fifty chance
that she’ll develop it too. The same goes for Leslie. God
forgive me, but I wasn’t tough enough to stay around and
watch it happen.”

“Leslie told us last night that her mother
was ill with some kind of degenerative disorder. She didn’t
say what kind.”

Lawrence Tazewell’s eyes blinked with tears.
“Sorry to hear it,” he said gruffly. “I always
hoped she’d dodge that bullet. I think they do genetic
testing now. I hope Leslie has it done before she has kids. If she
doesn’t have the HD gene, she can’t pass it along to
her children.”

“Genetic testing may not be necessary,”
Joanna said.

She struggled up out of the chair, went over to her
desk, opened her briefcase, and removed the envelope containing the
photos of Leslie Markham and Lisa Marie Evans.

Ignoring Frank’s warning look, Joanna
returned to the conference table with the envelope in hand.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen your
daughter?” she asked.

“Eighteen years or so,” Tazewell
answered. “The last time I saw her was at her
grandmother’s funeral. She must have been seven then. I
haven’t contacted her since. Why?”

Wordlessly Joanna shuffled through the photos and
removed
one that Bradley Evans had shot of
Leslie pushing a grocery cart across a parking lot. She handed it
over to Lawrence Tazewell. He fumbled a pair of reading glasses out
of his pocket, put them on, and then studied the photo for several
seconds. “This is her?” he asked at last.

Joanna nodded. “You haven’t even seen
pictures of her?”

“No,” Tazewell said at last. “Not
since she was in grade school. She’s beautiful, but she
doesn’t look like anybody—not her mother’s side
of the family or mine.”

“There could be a reason for that,”
Joanna told him as she extracted Lisa Marie Evans’s senior
picture from the envelope and handed it over.

Lawrence Tazewell studied the photo for a long
time. Then he picked it up and held it next to Leslie’s
picture. When he spoke, his voice was a hoarse whisper. “Who
the hell is this?” he demanded. “The women in these two
pictures could be twins.”

“Not twins but close,” Joanna said.
“The one woman’s maiden name was Lisa Marie Crystal.
Her married name was Evans. She was Bradley Evans’s wife, our
murder victim’s supposed murder victim. We have reason to
believe Lisa Marie Evans may have been Leslie’s biological
mother.”

Tazewell looked stunned. “Not Aileen?”
he asked. “How could such a thing be possible?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find
out. We’ve collected some DNA samples that should confirm
Leslie’s real parentage. It’ll take time to have them
processed, of course. In the meantime, Leslie told us a few things
about the unusual circumstances surrounding her birth, including
the fact that you were out of town at the time it
happened.”

Tazewell nodded. “I was in Dallas at a
conference. Leslie was
delivered at home with
her grandmother’s help and then taken to the hospital
later.” He paused and then added, “But if Leslie is
someone else’s baby, what happened to
Aileen’s?”

“Are you certain she was pregnant at the
time?”

“That’s what I thought,” Tazewell
said. “It’s what Aileen told me. So did her
doctor.”

“Do you remember the doctor’s
name?”

“Carstairs, Carston, Carmmody,”
Tazewell answered. “I don’t remember exactly, but I
think his name started with a C.”

“Maybe something happened to that
baby,” Joanna suggested. “Some kind of late-term
miscarriage. And if she and Lisa Evans were friends, maybe they
arranged for Aileen to supposedly give birth at home so they could
pass Lisa’s baby off as your wife’s. Doing that would
have cleared the way for Lisa to leave her husband and simply
disappear.”

“The murdered man, Bradley Evans,”
Tazewell said. “He would have been the husband, the same man
I personally sentenced to prison.”

Joanna nodded. “That’s right,”
she agreed.

“But he pleaded guilty, didn’t
he?”

“Yes.”

“If he wasn’t responsible for his
wife’s death, why would he do a thing like that?”

“Who knows? If he was drunk, maybe he was
operating in a blackout and felt ultimately responsible for
whatever had happened to her regardless of who actually did
it,” Joanna offered. “Now tell me. Did your wife ever
mention having a friend named Lisa?”

“No, not that I remember,” Tazewell
responded. “But our marriage was what one could charitably
call troubled. With the notable exception of Rory Markham, I
wasn’t really privy to
Aileen’s
circle of acquaintances. Still, are you saying that she knowingly
participated in some kind of conspiracy that resulted in my sending
an innocent man to jail for murder?”

“At this point,” Joanna said,
“all I’m suggesting is that’s a
possibility.”

“And Evans was innocent the whole
time?”

Joanna nodded. “Also possible.”

“If I’d had any idea—if I’d
had even the slightest hint that Aileen knew the woman—I
would have recused myself immediately. I never would have agreed to
preside over the Evans case. You do believe me, don’t
you?”

Joanna nodded. “Yes, I do,” she
said.

“But supposing Evans didn’t kill his
wife. Where the hell did she go? Is she still alive and well
somewhere, living under an assumed name? And what if that other
baby—my baby—didn’t die either? Where is that
child?”