J.A. Jance - Dead Wrong

Just then Jenny and the three dogs bounded into the master bedroom behind them. “Hey,” she said, flopping onto their unmade bed. “I was out feeding Kiddo and I just noticed. The motor home is gone. What happened? Where’d they go?”

“They went home,” Butch said.

“Home?” Jenny asked. “But I thought they were going to stay until the baby got here. Why would they leave now? I mean, it can’t be that much longer.”

“It’s a long story,” Butch said.

He looked so disheartened that Joanna couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Whatever Margaret Dixon had done, it wasn’t her son’s fault.

“It doesn’t matter why they left,” Joanna said quickly. “The whole point is, they did. Now let’s have some breakfast. We need to figure out a name for this little brother of yours.”

“Little brother?” Jenny repeated wonderingly. “You mean we know it’s going to be a boy?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “Thanks to Margaret Dixon, we do now.”

Joanna left the house after breakfast feeling very pregnant but incredibly lighthearted. It was wonderful to have their lives back again. By now the in-laws from hell should be past the New Mexico border and well into Texas. As she walked out to the garage, Butch was happily hauling his laptop out of its in-office exile and back onto the kitchen table, where he preferred to work.

And, without much fuss and a minimum of discussion, the three of them had settled on an acceptable boy’s name: Dennis Lee Dixon. No Frederick Junior. No lurking grandfathers’ names. No traditional family names. Just a solid boy’s name with a good ring to it. No doubt Eleanor wouldn’t approve, and neither would Margaret, probably for entirely different reasons, but that didn’t matter. It was the name Joanna and Butch and Jenny had chosen together, and that’s what counted.

When Joanna stepped out of her Crown Victoria in the Justice Center parking lot, the chill March wind blowing off the flanks of the Mule Mountains did nothing to dampen her spirits or take the spring out of her step. Maybe Joanna’s initial reaction to Margaret’s snoopiness had been negative, but now she felt as though a cloud of indecision-one she hadn’t known was there-had been lifted off her shoulders.

And Butch was thrilled as well. As he had said at breakfast, he had been worried about living in a family where girls outnumbered boys three to one. And Eleanor, regardless of her likely disapproval of the baby’s name, had been lobbying for a boy all along. So she would be thrilled as well.

Frank was already on his way to the board of supervisors meeting. With Debbie and Jaime headed back to Tucson, the morning briefing had been shifted to later in the day. That left Joanna free to spend the morning working with Kristin on sorting the mail and figuring out how best to handle routine correspondence issues on a day-to-day basis, both for now and for when Joanna went on maternity leave. As they worked to create a workable system, Joanna saw how her own almost irrational insistence on “Little Red Henning” it had been a bad idea. In the process, she had done a grave disservice to Kristin and had made her own job far more complicated than it needed to be. No wonder she had always been buried under an avalanche of paperwork.

“It’s going to mean more responsibility,” she told Kristin.

“Good,” Kristin said. And that was that.

Late in the morning, Joanna found herself sitting in front of an improbably clean desk. While she’d been working with Kristin, she hadn’t given her father’s journal entry a thought. Now, though, remembering, she picked up her phone and called the evidence room, where Buddy Richards answered.

“Do you still have that evidence box we brought down from the old courthouse the other day?” she asked.

“Lisa Evans?” Buddy answered. “Sure do. I was gonna ship it back up to storage today, but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it. Want me to bring it over?”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’d appreciate it.”

Buddy limped into her office a few minutes later, lugging the box. Buddy had started out as a deputy, but a badly broken leg from a rodeo bull-riding mishap had left him unfit for patrol duty. In lieu of disability, he had taken over as the department’s chief evidence clerk.

“This was long before my time,” he said, setting it on Joanna’s desk.

“Before mine, too,” Joanna said. “My father was the arresting officer.”

“Must’ve done a good job of it. I was curious, so I read through the case file. The prosecuting attorney got a conviction even though they never found a body.”

“The victim’s husband copped a plea,” Joanna said. “That’s not exactly the same thing as getting a conviction.”

“Right,” Buddy said. “I suppose not.”

Once Joanna was left alone, she carefully lifted the lid off the box. After that initial report, D. H. Lathrop was no longer part of the official investigative process. There was no further evidence of his being involved and no clue to tell Joanna why, despite the way court proceedings had turned out, her father had felt Bradley Evans was innocent.

It was getting on toward noon and almost time to head to Douglas to attend Bradley’s funeral service when Joanna picked up the next item in the box-Lisa Evans’s wallet. She was absently thumbing through the brittle plastic holders when she came to the one containing Lisa’s driver’s license. What she saw in the photo stunned her and made the hair on the back of Joanna’s neck stand on end. The name on the license said Lisa Marie Crystal, but the photo could have been Leslie Markham’s-except for one inarguable fact: Leslie Tazewell Markham hadn’t been born when the photo was taken. She flipped through the plastic folders until she found the graduation photo. The resemblance in that one was even more striking.

For a long time, all Joanna could do was flip back and forth between the two photos and stare. Finally she reached down, opened her briefcase, and rummaged through it until she found the envelope that contained the photos Bradley Evans had taken of Leslie Markham. The hair, the shape of the forehead, mouth, and chin, the set of the eyes. The two women were eerily similar. Looking at them, Joanna could draw only one conclusion: they had to be mother and daughter.

Bradley Evans had gone to jail for the murder of his pregnant wife, Lisa, and her unborn baby, but from where Joanna was sitting, it looked like that baby was very much alive more than two decades later. What if D. H. Lathrop was right? What if Bradley Evans really had gone to prison after confessing to a crime he hadn’t committed? Had anyone ever examined the blood evidence that had been found in the vehicle or on Lisa Evans’s purse? Was it possible that it hadn’t even been hers?

In the late seventies, DNA identification had been rudimentary at best. It wouldn’t be used as evidence in legal proceedings until years later. But times had changed. Now even minute traces of blood evidence and sperm were routinely used to solve long-unsolvable crimes. Nothing in the case file had indicated that the bloodied purse had ever been subjected to any kind of forensic examination. That alone indicated that the Lisa Evans investigation had been something less than thorough.

Fired with a new sense of purpose, Joanna put all the items back in the box and then carried it through the building to the evidence room. “Can you scan a copy of these?” she asked, handing Lisa’s driver’s license and yearbook photo to Buddy. “And I’ll need you to bag up the purse for me.”

Buddy gave her a questioning look but then shrugged. “I can scan them if you want me to, Sheriff Brady, but are you sure? Chief Deputy Montoya’s equipment does a better job than mine.”