Dead Wrong (31 page)

W
hile
Dennis Lee Dixon lay sleeping in his bassinet, Joanna plucked the
clicker off her bedside table and searched through the channels
until she located
Good Morning America
.
The last thing Butch had said before he left the hospital at
midnight was that Frank Montoya had told them
GMA
was going to run a feature about what had
happened the next morning and that Joanna should be sure to
watch.

The orderly came in bringing her
breakfast—ghastly oatmeal, cold toast, and something that was
supposed to pass for coffee. It made Joanna long for one of
Butch’s perfectly cooked over-easy eggs and a side of his
crisp bacon. But Dr. Lee had said his policy was that new mothers
needed to rest and that he wanted her in the hospital for a full
twenty-four hours, so twenty-four hours it would be.

Joanna ate what she could tolerate of her breakfast
and
waited through the news (bad) and the
weather (also bad) and the sports (marginal).

“And now,” Diane Sawyer was saying,
“from the southeastern corner of Arizona we have the
heartwarming story of how, when faced with the potentially tragic
aftermath of a triple homicide at a puppy mill, Cochise County
Sheriff Joanna Brady took the law into her own hands in something
our on-scene reporter is calling ‘The Pit Bull Penal
Project.’”

Joanna’s bedside table rang. “Are you
watching?” Butch demanded. “It’s on right now,
but I’m TIVOing it, just in case.”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “I’m
watching. At least I’m trying to.”

As she put down the phone, Joanna caught a fleeting
image of herself standing in front of the door to the department
with a bank of microphones in front of her. She didn’t hear
and didn’t remember what had been said. The only thing that
registered was how incredibly pregnant she looked.

The phone rang again as the cameras switched over
to a scene of Millicent Ross handing out puppies while the reporter
was saying, “…only inmates expected to be in custody
for at least the next six weeks are allowed to
participate.”

“I can’t believe it!” Eleanor
Lathrop Winfield exclaimed. “You’re actually on
Good Morning America.
Are you
watching?”

“Sort of,” Joanna said. “Can I
call you back?”

Joanna expected some kind of comment about her
missing dinner the night before, but no such diatribe was
forthcoming.

“Is the baby all right?” Eleanor went
on. “Butch called and told us that everything was fine, but I
want to hear it from you so I can stop worrying.”

“The baby’s fine, Mom,” Joanna
said. “And so am I, but I’m busy right now. Let me call
you back.”

By then the camera was focused on Axel Turnbull.
Axel was
one of the regular habitués of
the Cochise County Jail. He came in several times a year for
sentences of longer or shorter duration depending on how drunk and
disorderly he’d been and how much property damage he’d
caused in the course of his most recent bender.

There he was, sitting in his distinctive
red-and-white-striped jail uniform in the exercise yard with a
black-and-white pit bull puppy snuggled, sound asleep, under the
man’s grizzled chin. “I think I’ll call him
Tucker,” Turnbull was saying, “’cause, as you can
see, the little guy’s all tuckered out.”

The camera switched back to Diane Sawyer, who was
beaming. “We wanted to interview Sheriff Brady for this
piece, but we understand she’s in the hospital in Bisbee,
where, a few hours after we filmed this piece, she gave birth to a
seven-pound, eight-ounce boy. We are told both mother and baby are
doing well.”

The phone rang again. This time it was Jenny.
“Mom, did you see it? Were those puppies cute, or what? Oh,
and Butch is going to bring me by on my way to school so I can see
you and the baby. Does he really have red hair?”

Joanna glanced toward the bassinet.
“Definitely,” she answered. “An amazing amount of
bright red hair.”

“He takes after you then?”

“We’ll see,” Joanna said.

This time she didn’t even bother to hang up
the phone, she just depressed the receiver button with her finger.
Sure enough, it rang immediately.

“I told you it would be great
publicity,” Frank Montoya told her. “What did you
think?”

“I looked very pregnant,” Joanna
replied.

“It’s not even eight o’clock in
the morning, and I’ve already
had four
requests for interviews with you.
People
magazine,
USA
Today,
the
Arizona Sun,
and
Newsweek.
What do you think?”

“I think I’m on maternity leave, Frank.
Besides, you and Millicent Ross were the ones who came up with the
idea. You should do the interviews.”

“I’ll tell them I’ll get back to
them later,” Frank said.

“You mean you think you’ll be able to
talk me into changing my mind. Tell me what happened after I left
the Triple H yesterday.”

“I thought you were on maternity
leave.”

“Frank…”

“Doc Winfield opened the boxes Joaquin
Mattias dug up. His recommendation is that we ship them, boxes and
all, to the University of Arizona, where the bones that were inside
can be properly examined by a forensic anthropologist. Autopsies
for Joaquin Mattias and Rory Markham will be later today. As far as
evidence, what we turned up is pretty damning.”

“What’s that?”

“Fingers,” Frank said.

Joanna felt her stomach lurch. “Bradley
Evans’s fingers?”

“Presumably. We found ten of them preserved
in a half-gallon jar of formaldehyde on a shelf in Rory
Markham’s garage. I can’t imagine what possessed him to
keep them, and now we’ll never be able to ask him, either.
There is a walk-in refrigerator in one of the outbuildings.
We’re checking but it looks as though Evans’s body was
stored there until they transported it to the dump site. Oops.
Another call,” Frank added. “Gotta go.”

When Joanna put down the phone that time, the
Reverend Marianne Maculyea was standing in the doorway.
“Congratulations,” she said. “I know it’s
not visiting hours, but there are
times when
being a member of the clergy has its advantages. How are
you?”

“A little overwhelmed. I’ve just been
on national TV.”

“I know.” Marianne grinned. “Jeff
taped it, but then everybody in town probably taped it as
well.”

“It’s all about the dogs, Mari,”
Joanna said. “What about the people who died? There was
hardly a word about them.”

“What happened to the guy who did it?”
Marianne asked.

“You mean Antonio Zavala, the one I shot?
He’s at UMC, where the doctors are patching his foot back
together. I didn’t want them to take him there because
that’s where Jeannine Phillips is. I actually wanted them to
bring him here so it would be easier to keep a guard on him. Now
I’m glad that didn’t happen. I have guards looking out
for Jeannine Phillips. I guess someone else was watching over
us.”

Marianne smiled. “Yes,” she said.
“I think He was.” She came over to the bed and gave
Joanna a hug. “You get some rest now. You’re going to
need it.”

But resting was out of the question. By the time
Butch took Jenny off to school, the first load of flower
arrangements showed up. And they continued to show up. A few came
from people Joanna knew, but most came from people she didn’t
know—one vase after another.

Once Joanna’s room was overflowing, she
started sending the flowers down the hall to other rooms. And still
the flowers kept on arriving, except now, with local flower
inventories exhausted, the arrangements were coming from shops in
Sierra Vista and Benson and even as far away as Tucson.

About two o’clock in the
afternoon—after a lunch that was almost as bad as
breakfast—Joanna tried nursing Dennis. It
wasn’t entirely successful, but Joanna
remembered how it had been with Jenny. There had been a learning
curve for both Joanna and the baby, and she was sure this was more
of the same thing.

Dennis, fed at last and newly diapered, was back in
his bassinet. Joanna was drifting into a much-needed nap when the
door to her room swished open. She expected to see either Butch or
else yet another flower delivery. Instead, Leslie Markham walked
into the room.

She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a worn leather
jacket, and an enormous pair of sunglasses. Her face, utterly
devoid of makeup, was dreadfully pale. She stopped uncertainly just
inside the door. Then, after a moment, she turned and started to
leave.

“It’s all right,” Joanna said.
“I’m not asleep.”

Leslie removed the glasses. Dark shadows surrounded
her eyes—eyes that had wept too much and slept too little.
“I’m so sorry, Sheriff Brady. I shouldn’t have
disturbed you…”

“You’re not disturbing me,”
Joanna returned. “I’m sorry, too, about everything that
happened. If you’ll get in touch with my chief deputy, Frank
Montoya, I’m sure he’ll do everything he can to assist
you.”

“He already has,” Leslie said. “I
came to Bisbee to talk to Dr. Winfield. I wanted to have some idea
of when he’ll be able to release the body—bodies,
actually; Joaquin Mattias’s, too. Dolores and I need to know
so we can decide on services, that kind of thing. He said
it’ll probably be several days.”

“That’s how these things go,”
Joanna said. “It usually takes longer than you would
expect.”

“Everyone in your department has been very
kind,” Leslie continued. “Mr. Carpenter, your
detective, told me about…” She paused and bit her lip.
“He told me about what they found up by the old cabin,”
she added. “About the two boxes and what
was in them and what he thinks happened. He showed me
the picture, too, the picture of Lisa Marie Evans. When I looked at
it, I couldn’t tell if I was looking in a mirror or if I was
seeing a ghost. A little bit of both, I guess.”

She paused again. This time it was more than a
minute before she gathered herself enough to go on. Joanna wanted
to hug the poor woman and comfort her, but Leslie Markham was too
far out of reach. She remained just inside the doorway, as if what
she really wanted to do was bolt out of the room and back down the
corridor.

“I came to ask a favor,” she said at
last.

“I’m sure Chief Deputy Montoya would be
happy—”

“No, I need to ask you, Sheriff Brady,”
Leslie said determinedly. “I need to ask you woman-to-woman.
I want you to keep your people from trying to question my
mother.”

“Mrs. Markham,” Joanna began.
“We’re talking about several different homicides and a
suicide here. My investigators need to get to the bottom of what
happened and what caused it.”

“My mother used to take me to that
cabin!” Leslie Markham broke in forcefully.
“That’s where we’d go on horseback sometimes,
just the two of us. Do you think she would have taken me there if
she’d had any idea that her own dead baby was buried in that
exact spot? She was terrified for me every minute, terrified that
someday I’d come down with HD just the way she did and the
way her mother did, too. Do you think she would have been so
petrified if she’d had any idea at all that I wasn’t
her own?”

“But how could she not know?” Joanna
asked.

“Ruth Houlihan didn’t want her daughter
giving birth to a baby at risk of developing HD,” Leslie
answered. “She was also a nurse. I have no doubt she gave
Aileen drugs of some kind, prob
ably something
that induced labor. I’ve done some checking on the Internet.
Those kinds of drugs were available back then.

“Once Aileen’s baby was born, Ruth made
the switch and then took Aileen and me to the hospital, leaving
Rory and Joaquin to clean up the mess and take care of pinning the
blame on Bradley Evans.

“Please, Sheriff Brady,” Leslie begged.
“Aileen Houlihan is the only mother I’ve ever known.
She won’t be around much longer. Let her die in peace. She
doesn’t watch the news or listen to the radio. What’s
going on outside her room—the things the news reporters are
saying—stays outside her room, but if your detectives go
there questioning her…”

“They won’t,” Joanna said.
“I’ll see that they don’t.”

“Thank you,” Leslie said. “Thank
you so much.

“And then there’s one more
thing,” Leslie said. “One more favor.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not ready to do it now,”
Leslie said. “Not until the DNA reports confirm it and
probably not until after my mother is gone, but when it’s
time, I’d like someone from your office—Mr. Montoya or
Mr. Carpenter or someone—to take me to meet Lisa Marie
Evans’s mother. Is that possible? I could go on my own, I
suppose, but I think it would be better if there were someone there
to introduce me—someone official.”

Joanna thought about her father, who had somehow
felt that the wheels of justice had been spinning out of control
when Bradley Evans went to prison for murder. And she thought about
Butch and Frank telling her she would flunk maternity leave. And
she thought about doing what needed to be done.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Joanna
said, “let me know. I’ll be happy to go with you. In
fact, I’d be honored.”