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.
