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.”
“Frank isn’t here,” Joanna said. “I need this now.”
While she waited, she tracked down Dave Hollicker and handed him the bagged purse.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Lisa Marie Evans’s bloodstained purse,” she said. “I want you to run it up to the DPS crime lab in Tucson.”
“Today?” Dave asked. “Casey and I have been working on evidence we gathered from Jeannine’s crime scenes-”
Joanna cut him off. “Yes, today,” she said. “And I want results ASAP. Ask if they can extract a DNA sample from the old bloodstains. I also want them to check for fingerprints. I don’t know if they’ll be able to spot any old ones. I know for sure that mine are on it from handling it recently, so they’ll need to run mine for elimination purposes.”
“But why the big rush?” Dave objected. “This homicide is decades old.”
“That’s just it,” Joanna said. “I have some new information that suggests maybe that ‘decades old’ homicide never happened.”
Ten minutes later she was on her way to Douglas with the newly scanned copy of Lisa’s license in the same envelope with her collection of Leslie Markham’s photos. It took a while for Joanna to clear security to get into the prison unit. By the time she was admitted to the chapel, the service was already under way. Ted Chapman, officiating, nodded to her as she slipped into the last row of folding chairs.
Bradley’s memorial service wasn’t particularly well attended. There were a dozen or so prisoners and three suit-and-tie-clad men Joanna assumed to be some of Brad Evans’s colleagues or supervisors from the jail ministry. The other attendee was an elderly white-haired Anglo woman who sat apart from the others and sobbed inconsolably into a lace-edged handkerchief. Listening to the grieving woman, Joanna decided she must be some heretofore unidentified relative of Bradley Evans who had managed to show up in time for his funeral.
Joanna tried to pay attention to what was being said, but her mind was going at breakneck speed. The striking resemblance between the long-presumed-dead Lisa Marie Evans and Leslie Markham presented Joanna with a startlingly new possible scenario. What if Lisa had somehow faked her own murder and allowed her husband to go to prison for it? Did that mean Lisa herself still was alive? And how was it that her daughter had been raised as Leslie Tazewell?
And if Bradley Evans had spent the better part of a quarter of a century believing that both his wife and daughter were dead, what would have been his reaction when he suddenly encountered living breathing proof to the contrary?
Joanna remembered all too well her own sense of shock, amazement, and disbelief when, a few years earlier while she had been sitting in a hotel lobby in Peoria, Arizona, a man who looked exactly like the ghost of her long- deceased father walked toward her. The spooky resemblance had been easily explained once she learned that the man was actually her brother, Bob Brundage, the baby her parents had given up for adoption years before their marriage and long before Joanna’s birth.
Joanna now knew that the similarities between D. H. Lathrop and his son went well beyond mere looks. Bob sounded like his father both when he spoke and when he laughed. He walked and carried himself in the same fashion. Bob Brundage now was an exact replica of D. H. Lathrop at the time of his death.
Joanna could easily empathize with everything Bradley Evans must have felt upon first encountering Leslie Markham, either in person or in a photograph. It seemed likely that he might well have questioned what he had seen, and doubted his own perceptions. In order to quiet those doubts he might have decided to photograph Leslie so he could examine the pictures at leisure. Perhaps he was searching for proof one way or the other. Either Leslie Markham was his daughter or she wasn’t.
