Dead Wrong (6 page)

“What are we supposed to do? Turn our backs?
Let them keep on doing what they’re doing?”

“What you
think
they’re doing,” Joanna corrected. “Look,
Jeannine. I understand how you feel. Don’t forget, I’m
every bit as much of an animal lover as you are, but the
sheriff’s department is a law enforcement agency. What you
suspect the O’Dwyers of doing is very much against the law,
but in order to catch them at it, we have to have more than
unsubstantiated suspicions. We have to put a team of people on this
and conduct a real investigation. Not only that, we’re going
to have to follow the rule of law while we do it. We have to have
probable cause, properly drawn search warrants, and all those other
things—the crossed
t
’s and
dotted
i
’s—that will stand
up in court. Believe me, when we do go in there, we’ll do it
with officers who are armed
and trained to
handle those guys, not with one officer acting on her own.
Understand?”

Jeannine Phillips nodded glumly. “Yes,
ma’am,” she said.

A swinging door on the far side of the lobby
opened, and Dr. Millicent Ross strode into the room. She was a
heavyset woman with gray hair pulled into a knot at the back of her
neck. Her brusque exterior belied a life lived with unstinting
kindness.

“It’s still touch and go,
Jeannine,” she said. “But I think that tough little guy
of yours may make it.”

Jeannine’s previously grim countenance
brightened. “Really?” she asked.

“Really,” Dr. Ross answered. “The
damage looked far worse than it was. I’ve stitched him back
up. He’d lost a lot of blood, though, and he was very
dehydrated, so I’m keeping him sedated and on an IV. If you
hadn’t brought him in right when you did, though, it would
have been an entirely different story. He’d have been a
goner.”

Jeannine scrambled to her feet. “I’ll
be going then. Thanks, Mil. Thanks a lot.” At the door she
stopped and turned back. “I’ll come back later to check
on him.”

Once the ACO had left the waiting room, Joanna
turned to Millicent Ross. “Jeannine told you the background
on this?”

“The dogfight issue?” the vet asked.
“Yes, she told me. And to that end, I took a number of photos
to document the extent of the dog’s injuries. You’ll
have those to use in court. If he lives, there’ll be plenty
of scars, too.”

“About the charges then,” Joanna said,
opening her wallet and removing a business card. “Since
we’re hoping to use the dog as evidence, you should bill the
sheriff’s department. Send it to my attention and I’ll
see that it’s taken care of.”

“That won’t be necessary,”
Millicent Ross said. “It’s already been
handled.”

“Surely Jeannine didn’t agree to pay
for the treatment. With what she makes, she couldn’t possibly
afford—”

“There won’t be any charges, Sheriff
Brady,” Dr. Ross said firmly. “This is a situation
where I’m donating my services.”

Joanna was taken aback. “Are you
sure?”

Dr. Ross smiled. “Absolutely,” she
said.

“What about a microchip?” Joanna asked
as an afterthought. “Did you find one so we’ll be able
to locate the owner?”

“No such luck,” Dr. Ross replied.
“And no tag, either. What a surprise.”

Joanna was still scratching her head about Dr.
Ross’s not charging for her services when she arrived at her
office in the Justice Center Complex. It may have been Saturday
morning, but Frank Montoya’s Crown Victoria was already in
the parking lot.

“You work too hard,” she said, poking
her head into his office. “You need to get a life.”

He grinned back at her. “Look who’s
talking,” he returned.

“I have some good news. There won’t be
a big vet bill for that injured dog after all.”

“What happened?” Frank asked.
“Did the poor thing croak?”

“No. Dr. Ross decided to donate her
services.”

“Amazing,” Frank said. “What
caused that?”

“Who knows? But don’t look a gift-horse
doctor in the mouth. Just be grateful for small blessings. So
what’s going on around here?”

Frank gestured toward a cardboard banker’s
storage box sitting on the small conference table in one corner of
this office. “That just turned up,” he said.

“Lisa Marie Evans?” Joanna asked.

Frank nodded. “Not much to it,” he
added.

“Do you mind?” Joanna asked.

“Be my guest.”

She went over to the box, removed the lid, and
peered inside. The evidence log was the first thing that came to
her attention. Leafing through it, she immediately recognized her
father’s distinctive scrawl. The written word had never been
D. H. Lathrop’s friend. He had often told people that, as a
grade school kid in East Texas, he’d never once been given a
passing grade in penmanship. Written missives from him had come in
an oddball style that was comprised haphazardly of both cursive and
printed letters.

It had been startling enough for Joanna to see her
father’s name appear on the printed documents that the
Records clerk had retrieved. Now, holding the evidence log in her
hand, it was touching and thrilling to be holding a notebook filled
with pages over which her father himself had labored. In that
moment she felt an incredible closeness to D. H. Lathrop, a
closeness that took her breath away. She vividly remembered seeing
him seated at the kitchen table with his shoulders hunched in
concentration, painstakingly putting pen to paper. Maybe he had
been working on this very document. Not wanting to sever that
slender thread of spiritual connection with her long-dead father,
Joanna held on to the book for a long time, studying what he had
written. Finally, with a sigh, she put the notebook aside and
turned once more to the box.

The casebook came next. In 1978 her father had been
a deputy in the sheriff’s department, so none of his
handiwork appeared in the casebook. The information there had been
compiled by the detectives on the case. Joanna recognized their
names if not their individual handwriting. Some of them had
been the very people whose lack of integrity had
propelled D. H. Lathrop into running for office himself.

When she put the casebook down and returned to the
box, she found only one additional item—a woman’s
purse. It was an old-fashioned pocket-style leather affair with
fringe on the bottom and an overlapping flap closure. Parts of the
outside were still soft and pliable while others were stiff,
stained dark with a substance that Joanna suspected to be dried
blood. Lots of dried blood! No wonder that, even without ever
finding Lisa Marie’s body, investigators had concluded that
she was dead.

Sitting down at the table, Joanna upended the purse
and let the contents fall into the cover of the banker’s box.
Old coins, time-faded and unreadable receipts, paper clips, a
compact, outdated lipstick containers, and several cheap ballpoint
pens tumbled out. So did a wallet. What surprised Joanna was what
was missing. There was absolutely no trace of black fingerprint
powder on either the purse or its contents.

“If this was the only evidence they had, why
wasn’t it in an evidence bag?” she asked. “And
how come nobody ever dusted any of this stuff for
prints?”

“I thought that was strange myself,”
Frank agreed, getting up from his desk and coming over to where
Joanna was seated. “I suppose that, since they closed the
case when Bradley Evans confessed to the crime, they must have had
enough evidence on him without having to mess around with the
purse. If you want to, I suppose we could see if Casey Ledford
could lift prints off it now, but I’m not sure it would
work.”

“In other words, there’s not much
point,” Joanna said. With that, she opened the wallet.
Inside, the cheap plastic sleeves were brittle and yellowed with
age. Thumbing through to the driver’s
license, Joanna studied the smiling visage of a
sweet-faced young woman identified as Lisa Marie Crystal. She had
gone to her death without ever having gotten around to changing her
last name on her driver’s license. The photo was one of
someone who seemed confident and supremely happy and who had no
idea that her life would be snuffed out within months of having
that picture taken. In addition to the license, there were several
other photos.

The first of those was a professionally shot pose
of Lisa Marie and Bradley Evans, a picture that might well have
been used for a wedding announcement in a local newspaper. One was
clearly a high school photo of Lisa Marie, while another showed a
crew-cut Bradley Evans proudly posing in his army dress uniform.
Then there was one of a somewhat older couple. After examining it,
Joanna recognized Anna Marie Crystal and the man who must have been
her husband, Lisa Marie’s father, Ken. There was so much loss
and hurt in that small collection of photos that Joanna was glad to
turn away from them.

In the back of the wallet she found twenty-three
dollars, and in the snap-closing change compartment, she found
another dollar’s worth of change.

“Whatever the motive for Lisa Marie’s
murder,” Joanna said, “robbery wasn’t
it.”

Thoughtfully she picked up all the items and
returned them to the box, lingering for a long moment over the
evidence log before she put that away as well.

“You’ll make sure Ernie and Jaime see
all this?”

“You bet.”

“Speaking of which,” Joanna said,
“have you talked to either one of them so far this
morning?”

“They called in and said they were
working,” Frank replied. “Something about getting a
search warrant so they can go through Bradley Evans’s
apartment down in Douglas.”

“What about San Simon?” Joanna
asked.

“I’ve got three cars scheduled to go
there late this afternoon to hang out and sort of get the lay of
the land.”

“Good,” Joanna said. “Tell them
to pay special attention to Roostercomb Ranch.”

Frank had been revising the schedule sheet. Now he
put down his pen and studied Joanna’s face.
“Don’t tell me. The O’Dwyers?”

“Yup,” Joanna said. “At least
that’s what Jeannine Phillips thinks.”

“We can’t afford to have an armed
confrontation with those guys.”

“Don’t I know it,” Joanna agreed.
“But at least it gives us an idea of where to start looking.
Tell whoever’s going there to keep an eye out but to be very,
very discreet. None of my officers is to set foot inside their
gate. We’re talking surveillance only.”

“Got it,” Frank said.

His phone rang just then, and Frank reached to
answer it. “Sure,” he said after a moment.
“She’s right here. Hold on.” Frank covered the
mouth and turned to Joanna. “It’s Lisa Howard out at
the front desk. She says your husband is on the line. Do you want
to take the call here or in your office?”

“My office,” Joanna said, and hurried
off to answer it.

Butch’s greeting was something less than
cordial. “What are you doing at work? I thought you promised
to take it easy this weekend.”

“I am taking it easy,” she countered.
“I came here to wait for Jenny to finish up with her Girl
Scout car wash. It was easier and
closer to just
wait around here at the office than it was to spend the whole day
running back and forth between town and home.”

“Oh,” Butch said, sounding somewhat
mollified. “I forgot all about the car wash. So you’re
not working.”

“Not really,” Joanna said. “And
how’s the conference?”

“I’ve met a bunch of interesting
people,” he said. “And I’ve gone to several
panels. Even though they all write murder mysteries, the authors
seem to have all different kinds of ideas about how to do that job.
And the woman I told you about yesterday, the one who was so upset
because I had review copies of my book here and she
didn’t?”

“What was her name again?” Joanna
asked.

“Christina Hanson. It turns out she’s a
pretty decent person after all. We had breakfast together this
morning. It’s like we’re all in the freshman class of
the writing business.”

“So you’re having a good
time?”

“Yes, and I’m very glad to be
here,” Butch answered. “Thanks for encouraging me to
come. Sometimes, when I’m working away all by myself, I feel
like some kind of freak. The good thing about being here at the
conference is that I’m finding out there are a whole lot of
other freaks just like me, and they are going to like my book. Now
tell me about you. How are you feeling?”

“Pregnant,” Joanna replied. “Nine
and a half months’ worth, in fact, even though that’s
not quite true. So I’m a little grumpy, but it’s
nothing dropping twenty pounds or so of ballast won’t
help.”

“Do you want me to come home tonight?”
Butch asked. “There are a couple of panels I wanted to see
tomorrow, but if you’d rather I came home…”

“No, Butch,” she said. “You
signed up for the conference and I want you to stay for the whole
thing.”

“Maybe you and Jenny should stay in town
tonight—maybe with Eva Lou and Jim Bob. Or maybe they could
come stay with you. I worry about you being out at the ranch all by
yourself.”

“I’m not all by myself,” Joanna
said. “As you just pointed out, Jenny’s there, too. If
the baby decides to come early, she’s more than capable of
summoning help. Besides, how could I come to town? Do you think
Jenny and I could just show up on Jim Bob and Eva Lou’s
doorstep with three dogs in tow and say ‘Take us
in’?”

“No,” Butch said. “I don’t
suppose you could.”

“I’m a big girl,” Joanna said.
“In more ways than one. And I’m fully capable of
handling whatever comes up.”

“Right,” Butch said. “And I
didn’t mean that you weren’t.”

But it is what you
said,
Joanna thought.

They talked a while longer, but Joanna was still
slightly steamed when she got off the phone. After the call she
stayed in her office for the next two hours, using the unexpected
quiet time to read a few of the most recent issues of law
enforcement magazines and journals that tended to stack up on her
bookshelf without her ever having time enough to glance at them. At
three o’clock her cell phone rang.