J.A. Jance - Dead Wrong

“Maybe he spotted her somewhere in Sierra Vista,” Joanna mused, more to herself than to Frank.

“Spotted who?” Frank asked. “What are we talking about?”

Joanna had forgotten that Frank had been stuck at the board of supervisors meeting when she had made her latest discovery. “I think Bradley Evans must have run into Leslie Markham, realized she had to be his dead wife’s daughter, and decided to take the pictures as a form of verification.”

“Are you serious?”

“Go to the evidence room and check the box on the Lisa Evans homicide,” Joanna told him. “Take a look at the picture of Lisa Evans on her driver’s license and compare it with Leslie Markham’s photos from the website. Call me back and tell me what you think.”

Joanna was halfway back to the Justice Center when the phone rang.

“Whoa!” Frank exclaimed. “These two women could be twins. So what’s going on? Are you saying Lisa Marie Evans handed her baby off to someone else and then faked her own murder? Are you thinking maybe the wife’s alive and well somewhere while her husband spent twenty-plus years of his life in the slammer for killing her?”

“It’s a possibility,” Joanna said. “Meanwhile, the baby’s adoptive father happens to be Judge Lawrence Tazewell.”

Frank whistled. “As in the Arizona Supreme Court Justice?”

“One and the same. Not only that, according to Leslie Markham, he’s currently being considered as a nominee for a federal judgeship.”

“Which might explain why, once Bradley Evans got too close to the truth, someone felt obliged to knock him off.”

“Yes, it might,” Joanna agreed. “Especially considering how the FBI seems to be very good at turning up all that old dirty laundry. Dave Hollicker is taking Lisa’s bloodstained purse to the crime lab in Tucson so they can try running DNA tests on it. If someone was faking a murder, who knows where the blood came from?”

“Is DNA testing possible on a sample that old?” Frank asked.

“We’ll see,” Joanna agreed. “But we can also go at this from the other direction. I want to collect DNA samples from Leslie Markham and from Lisa’s mother as well. We should be able to tell from that whether or not those two women are related. A DNA match won’t tell us if Lisa Evans is still alive, but it’ll be a step in the right direction.”

“How do you plan on obtaining those other samples?” Frank asked.

“I’m not sure,” Joanna said. “I’m thinking. Once I figure it out, I’ll let you know. And one more thing. If you have time, see what you can find out about Rory Markham.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like the way he treated Leslie, for one thing. But there’s something about him that doesn’t ring quite true. It gave me a funny feeling.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

By the time Joanna reached the Justice Center, she had made up her mind on the DNA samples. She stopped off in the rest room long enough for a very necessary pit stop before she went looking for her detectives. “Where are Debbie and Jaime?” Joanna asked Kristin.

“Still in Tucson, as far as I know. How come?”

Joanna didn’t answer. She was already on her way to Frank’s office. She found him with his face glued to his computer screen while a nearby printer shot out page after page of material.

“Ready to take a run out to Sierra Vista?” she asked.

“In a minute,” he said. “We need to wait for the end of this print job. When you see it, you’re not going to believe it.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Once I got off the phone with you, I decided to do some research into Judge Lawrence Tazewell’s background. What do you suppose he was doing in February of 1979?”

“I have no idea.”

“He was serving as a Cochise County Superior Court judge.”

“You don’t mean…?”

“Yes,” Frank said, picking up the sheaf of computer printouts and handing them to Joanna. “That’s exactly what I mean. Judge Lawrence Tazewell is the judge who accepted Bradley Evans’s guilty plea and sent him off to the slammer.”

“And now he’s an Arizona Supreme Court justice who’s a possible presidential nominee for a seat on the federal bench. I didn’t think things could get any worse.”

“Guess again, boss,” Frank said. “They just did.”

“Where are we going?” Frank asked once they were in his Crown Victoria. “Anna Marie Crystal’s place on Short Street in Sierra Vista.”

“Lisa’s mother?”

“Right,” Joanna said. “Do you know how to get there?”

“No,” Frank said. “But I can find it.” While he adjusted his portable Garmin GPS, Joanna shuffled through the stack of papers he had handed her. Most of the material consisted of archived articles from various Arizona newspapers-many of them dealing with Arizona Supreme Court decisions in which Lawrence Tazewell was mentioned briefly as part of either the majority or dissenting opinion. After skipping over most of those, Joanna settled in to read a long feature article from the Arizona Reporter.

It was a mostly laudatory piece with several color photographs of Judge Tazewell and his wife, Sharon. One showed them posing arm in arm on the patio of their home, with Camelback Mountain looming in the background. Another showed them standing in a living room next to a white grand piano with a huge oil painting of the Grand Canyon covering the wall behind them. There were mentions of the Tazewells both as participants and movers and shakers in various social and charitable events. Clearly they were members in good standing of the Paradise Valley and greater Phoenix social scene.

Lawrence Tazewell, a man who had come from humble beginnings in the copper-mining town of Morenci, Arizona, had obviously done all right for himself. No doubt hard work accounted for what he had achieved and acquired along the way, but Joanna suspected that a couple of fortuitous marriages-one of them to Aileen Houlihan of Triple H Ranch-had benefited Judge Tazewell’s plentiful bottom line, but the only reference to that long-ago marriage came at the very end of the article in a sentence that read:

Judge Tazewell’s only child, a daughter from a previous marriage, still resides in Sierra Vista.

“So,” Joanna said when she finished reading. “Aileen and Lawrence Tazewell convince Lisa Marie Evans to hand her baby over to them, she disappears into thin air, and then Judge Tazewell makes sure Bradley goes away for a very long time. Neat. Ties up all the loose ends.”

Frank nodded. “Everything goes swimmingly until Bradley comes back, runs into Leslie Markham by accident, and then there’s trouble. If any of the old stuff comes out, then it’s bye-bye to Larry Tazewell’s next judicial appointment.”

Joanna’s telephone rang.

“Hi, Sheriff Brady,” Debbie Howell said. “Wanted to let you know what’s going on. Jaime and I are still in Tucson. We’re still not having much luck tracking Tony Zavala and his friends. They all seem to have gone to ground. The media coverage probably has them scared.”

“So keep looking,” Joanna said.

“We will,” Debbie agreed. “We’re particularly interested in talking to Tony’s girlfriend, the one with the city of Tucson dog-fighting citation. From everything we’re hearing on the street, she’s a ringleader. We did spend some time over at the Humane Society. According to the guy we spoke to there, Roostercomb pit bulls are legendary in dogfighting circles for being killers. They go for top dollar.”

“The O’Dwyers sell them?” Joanna asked.

“That’s right.”

“If all this is happening in my jurisdiction, why don’t I know about it?”