Dead Wrong (10 page)

“You’ve already collected prints from
down in Douglas?” Joanna asked.

Casey nodded. “And it was just like Ernie and
Jaime predicted it would be. I found lots of the victim’s
prints and a few that belong to his landlady. If there’s been
anyone else in Mr. Evans’s apartment at some time in the
distant past, it’s long enough ago that they left no trace or
else they wore gloves.”

“What’s the program here?” Joanna
inquired.

“I talked it over with the Double Cs,”
Casey said. “The game plan is for me to go over the outside
first, but I don’t think that’s going to be
particularly helpful.”

“Why not?”

“The truck has been sitting on that vacant
lot for a number of days. Some of the prints may belong to whoever
came by and looked at the truck thinking they might want to buy it.
It could take a very long time, if it’s even possible, to
eliminate the ones that aren’t connected to the crime. Once I
finish on the outside, Dave Hollicker will pop the lock. Then he
and I will go through the interior together, dusting for prints and
collecting whatever trace evidence there is to be found.”

“With any luck there should be some,”
Joanna said. “I’m pretty certain that the last person
who drove this vehicle wasn’t Bradley Evans.”

Back in her office, Joanna tried to focus on the
paperwork littering her desk, but she couldn’t shake the
feeling of malaise that had crept over her during lunch. Finally,
late in the afternoon, she called her best friend and pastor, the
Reverend Marianne Maculyea.

“Are you okay?” Marianne asked.
“You sound a little down.”

Joanna and Marianne’s friendship went all the
way back to seventh grade. There was very little they didn’t
know about each other’s lives.

“Prenatal blues, I guess,” Joanna
admitted.

“That’s to be expected,” Marianne
said. “I was a complete fruitcake the week before Jeffy was
born. I almost drove Jeff crazy. What’s going on?”

“Jeffy was perfect,” Joanna said.
“He is perfect. But what if he hadn’t been?”

Marianne took a deep breath. “Has Dr. Lee
said there might be a problem? Did something show up in an
ultrasound?”

“No. It’s not that. It’s just
that…”

“It’s just what?”

“Butch’s parents are here,”
Joanna said.

“You mentioned that yesterday at
church,” Marianne said. “And it explains a lot.
Margaret Dixon won’t win any Ms. Congeniality awards.
What’s she up to now?”

“She told Jenny that Lucky should have been
put out of his misery, and at lunch, you should have seen her with
Junior. What if the baby’s born with some serious
problem?”

Marianne Maculyea had more than a little experience
in that regard. After years of trying to conceive, she and her
husband, Jeff Daniels, had adopted twin baby girls from
China—Esther Elaine and Ruth Rachel. Ruth was now a lively
first grader, but Esther had been born with a congenital heart
defect and had died within days of receiving a heart
transplant.

“You cope,” Marianne said simply.
“You do the best you can, and you cope. You ignore the people
who choose not to be in your corner, including your bitchy
mother-in-law.”

Her outspoken comment made Joanna laugh. “But
you have no strong opinions about Margaret Dixon.”

“Some people
require
strong opinions,” Marianne returned.
“When do you see Dr. Lee again?”

“Tomorrow,” Joanna said.
“That’s my last scheduled prenatal exam.”

“He’s the one you should talk to about
this,” Marianne advised. “Not me, not Butch, and
certainly not Margaret Dixon.”

“Will do,” Joanna said. She hung up the
phone feeling infinitely better.

L
ate
in the afternoon Joanna went back out to the impound lot, where
both Casey Ledford and Dave Hollicker were still hard at work.
“Finding anything?” she asked.

“Look at this,” Dave said. He held up
an evidence bag. Peering through it, Joanna was able to see a
single thread.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I found it hung up on the tailgate
latch,” Dave said. “I won’t know until I do my
analysis, but I’m guessing it’ll be from the tarp I
already have in the lab, the one Bradley Evans’s body was
wrapped in. I noticed there was a tear in it when I did my
preliminary exam. But the big thing is the Luminol.”

“You got a hit?”

“You bet,” Dave said. “Take a
look at this.” He switched off the overhead light. Peering
under the camper shell, Joanna saw several thin lines of bright
blue in the bed of the truck.

“Someone made a real effort to clean up the
mess, but they didn’t do a good enough job in the cracks
where the sections join together. Without more tests, I can’t
say for sure that what we found in those cracks is blood, or if
it’s human blood or even if it’s Bradley Evans’s
blood. We’ll find that out later.”

“But you’re saying that the back of the
truck might actually turn out to be the crime scene?” Joanna
asked.

“It’s possible,” Dave replied.
“Or maybe not. It all depends. I didn’t find any
visible spatter patterns, but it’s conceivable the killer
managed to wash them away. I think it’s likely that the truck
was only used for transporting the body.”

“Did you find anything else?” Joanna
asked.

Dave grinned. “As a matter of fact, we
did,” he boasted.
“Look at
this.” He produced another evidence bag. Inside Joanna saw a
small yellow-and-black disposable camera with a coating of black
fingerprint powder clinging to it.

“This was wedged in under the
passenger’s side of the seat. There are twenty-four shots per
camera. Only sixteen of them have been exposed. Casey lifted plenty
of prints. Her preliminary determination is that the prints on the
camera belong to the victim.”

“Which may mean Bradley Evans is the only
person who used it,” Joanna theorized.

Dave nodded. “And he stuffed it under the
seat in hopes of making sure no one saw either the camera or what
it was he was taking pictures of. I talked to Jaime a little while
ago. He’s still out in Huachuca City trying to find out
exactly when the pickup showed up on the lot and who may have put
it there. The Double Cs are sending Debbie Howell here to pick up
the camera. She’s going to take it to that One Hour Photo
Shop out in Sierra Vista.”

Obviously Debbie Howell was spending her first day
in Homicide as Jaime and Ernie’s gofer-in-chief.

“Good,” Joanna said. “The sooner
we see what’s on those photos, the better.”

Wanting to spell Butch, Joanna left work early that
afternoon. When she got home, though, the house was quiet. Butch
was seated at the kitchen table with his laptop open in front of
him while tantalizing cooking aromas wafted around him.

“Where is everybody?” Joanna asked,
kissing the smooth top of his bald head.

“Jenny and the dogs are hiding out in her
room, and I don’t blame them a bit,” Butch said.
“If I thought I could get away with
it,
I’d be there, too. As for my parents? They’re out in
the RV watching Fox News.”

“In the RV?” Joanna asked. “Why
not in the living room?”

“Because Dad likes watching on his
flat-screen TV and he prefers using his own clicker.”

“But what kind of reception do they
get?”

“Didn’t you notice the satellite TV
antenna up on top of their rig? I went out earlier today and
watched Dad locate the satellite. And don’t think I’m
not grateful. It gave me a couple of hours of peace and quiet. God
knows I was ready for some of that. Believe it or not, I even
managed to get some work done. I couldn’t very well work in
front of them. Somehow I never picked up on how much my mother
despises mysteries. Did you know that about her?”

“She may have mentioned something to that
effect,” Joanna answered diplomatically. “But
that’s one person’s opinion. Obviously the people who
handed over that check have other ideas, and so do I. Now
what’s for dinner? I’m starved.”

Butch patted her bulging belly affectionately.
“You’re always starved these days,” he said.
“We’re having two of my father’s
favorites—roasted Cornish game hen and baked acorn squash
with a side of coleslaw.”

“Do you need any help?”

“No,” Butch said, turning back to his
computer. “Everything’s under control. We’ll eat
about six-thirty.”

“In that case, I think I’ll go into the
office for a little while. I need to work on my thank-you notes
from the baby shower. Did you see all the great stuff we
got?”

“It’s great stuff, all right,”
Butch agreed, “but about your office—”

Butch’s warning came too late. Joanna was
already standing in the middle of the room and staring at the mound
of boxes—the same boxes that had been impeding traffic in the
garage earlier that morning, which were now piled in front of her
built-in bookcases. The blockade made it all but impossible for her
to reach the chair behind her desk.

“What are these doing here?” she
demanded.

“In case you haven’t noticed, my mother
is an incredible busybody,” Butch said. “When I was
growing up, she was forever going through my stuff. I finally
started leaving things I didn’t want her to see at a
friend’s house. This morning she was all over me, wondering
what was in the boxes. When I told her where the boxes came from,
she was hot to trot to go through them. I told her I was sure
you’d rather do that yourself. When she insisted that someone
in your condition shouldn’t be lifting heavy boxes, I finally
moved them in here to keep them out of her reach. I put
today’s mail in here, too, for the same reason.”

“You think she’d go through
that?” Joanna asked.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,”
Butch replied. “The good thing about your office is that we
can always lock the door if need be. Come to think of it,
I’ll probably lock my computer in here, too, when I’m
not using it.”

“Poor baby,” Joanna said and meant
it.

For the next hour Joanna sat at the desk in her
now-crowded home office and dutifully wrote thank-you notes exactly
as Eleanor would have wanted her daughter to do. It was funny, in a
way, to think that both she and Butch had survived being raised by
very similar and extremely autocratic mothers. It went a long way
to explaining why the two of them got along so well.

Dinner turned out to be more of the same, with
Margaret monopolizing every avenue of conversation. Knowing that
Butch had been stuck with his mother all day,
Joanna did her best to run interference for him. She was cheerful.
She asked focused questions. And she kept Margaret rambling away.
With Margaret’s having downed a predinner cocktail or two,
that wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t until dessert when
Margaret finally managed to get under Joanna’s skin.

“I guess I didn’t realize your father
used to be a sheriff,” Margaret said with a smile.
“I’m sure Butch must have told me, but it didn’t
sink in. Is that why you wanted to be involved in law
enforcement?”

Joanna wasn’t sure where Margaret was going.
Joanna had grown accustomed to these kinds of unwelcome questions
out on the campaign trail, but she didn’t expect them to crop
up at her own dining-room table.

“I didn’t really want it,” Joanna
answered warily. “It simply happened.”

“Are you saying you were elected to office by
accident?” Margaret asked incredulously. “How is that
possible? I was under the impression that election campaigns are a
lot more complicated than that.”

Joanna remembered how, in the painful aftermath of
Andy’s funeral, she had been asked to run for office in his
stead. She had agreed—not because her father had been sheriff
once or because Andy had wanted to be, but because it was something
she actually wanted to do.

“I wasn’t elected to an office,”
she said. “I was elected to do a job, and it’s a job I
do willingly every single day.”

She would have said more, but the phone rang, and
Jenny hurried to answer it. “It’s for you, Mom,”
Jenny said. “Somebody from work.”

Taking the phone from her daughter’s hand,
Joanna returned
to the relative privacy of the
far end of the living room before she answered. An excited Debbie
Howell was on the phone, calling from Sierra Vista.

“What’s up?” Joanna asked.

“I’m looking at the photos,”
Debbie Howell said breathlessly. “You’re not going to
believe this.”

“What?”

“Bradley Evans was stalking
someone.”

“Stalking?” Joanna repeated.
“Who? And how can you be sure?”

“A woman,” Debbie returned. “A
dark-haired Anglo woman, a brunette. Looks to be in her late
twenties. She’s wearing what looks like a wedding ring. There
are several pictures of her walking in a mall and several others of
her pushing a shopping cart through a parking lot. Two more show
her getting into a vehicle—a blue sedan. I can’t be
sure of the make or model.”

“Does the woman know she’s being
photographed?”

“I doubt it,” Debbie returned.
“It doesn’t look like she does. In fact, I’d say
she’s totally oblivious.”

“Is there any way to identify who she
is?” Joanna asked.

“Not that I can tell. There’s no
visible license plate, if that’s what you mean.”

“Can you tell where the pictures are taken? I
mean, are they from Sierra Vista or maybe somewhere else you
recognize? And what about the Double Cs? Have they seen the
photos?”

“Not yet. They’re coming here to meet
me right now to take a look. Ernie wanted me to let you know
what’s going on.”

“Thanks, Debbie,” Joanna said. “I
appreciate being kept in the loop. So how’s your first day
been?”

“Terrific, Sheriff Brady. I don’t know
how much of a help I’ve
been so far, but
it’s what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Thanks for
giving me a chance.”