Judgment Call

by J. A. Jance

  She needed to reclaim her Sunday. She needed to see her kids and her dogs. She needed to see her husband. She needed to talk to someone who wasn’t a fellow cop or a suspect or a victim. She needed to feel like an ordinary human being.

  When she got home, however, no dogs greeted her in the yard. When she let herself into the kitchen through the laundry room, the house was uncharacteristically quiet. Dirty dishes from lunch were still on the counter. If Butch had set aside some dinner for her, it wasn’t showing, and nobody seemed to be home. She knew too much about too many bad things to not find the oddly silent house disquieting.

  “Hello,” she called. “Anybody here?”

  “Office,” Butch called.

  She went into the office to find Butch leaning back in his chair with both feet propped on the desk, reading one of her father’s distinctive leather-bound journals. The bookshelf where the collection of journals usually sat was entirely empty, while the books themselves, some of them showing a trail of yellow Post-it notes, were stacked all over the desk and sofa. If he had managed to help out with the situation at Horace Mann, Joanna didn’t see how it was possible.

  “Hey, Joey,” he said, looking at her over the top of the volume in his hand. “Did anybody ever tell you that your father was a hell of a guy?”

  She cleared a space on the sofa and settled on it. “Someone may have mentioned that occasionally,” she said with a smile. “Where is everybody?”

  “Carol saw that I was busy with this, so she invited everyone over for popcorn and movies.”

  “Dogs, too?”

  “Dogs, too. They’re probably fine with the popcorn, although I don’t suppose they’re watching the movies.”

  “Busy with what exactly?” Joanna asked.

  “Reading your father’s journals,” Butch said. “They’re a gold mine. There’s enough material here for me to write a dozen books.” He closed the book he was reading. “That’s my day. George called me a little while ago. I’m almost afraid to ask you about yours. Did you have lunch?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  “We had leftovers, and the kids ate like they were starvelings. How does a grilled cheese grab you?”

  “Grilled cheese sounds great.”

  Joanna followed him into the kitchen. While he cleaned up the mess left from lunch, Joanna went out to the garage, unloaded the extra cookies into the freezer, and then brought the gallon of punch inside.

  “Leftovers, from the reception that didn’t happen. But then, I guess you know all about that. Mom said you were a big help.”

  “I try,” Butch said.

  While he grilled her sandwich, Joanna gave him a rundown of the whole day. Somehow, in the telling, she neglected to mention putting down her gun and turning her back on an armed assailant. There were some things about her job Butch Dixon didn’t need to know. Joanna suspected that there were things in her father’s life that might have made it into D. H. Lathrop’s journals but which were never the topic of dinnertime conversation, either.

  “That’s what Debra Highsmith’s murder was all about?” Butch asked when Joanna finally ran out of story and energy. “Some kind of long-term family feud?”

  “Because James’s father committed suicide while in custody, there was never a trial. James’s mother evidently turned a technical ‘not guilty’ into ‘innocent of all charges.’ She poisoned James against both his grandmother and his missing sister. That’s why he came here. To avenge his father’s death. Unfortunately, Maggie Oliphant figured out something was off about him. We may never learn what. Once he realized she had started checking out his cover story, that was enough for him to turn her into collateral damage.”

  They had been sitting across the table from each other while Joanna gobbled the very welcome cheese-and-jalapeño sandwich. Butch took a deep breath.

  “I think your father was collateral damage in another family feud,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Joanna asked.

  “Elizabeth and Wayne Stevens,” Butch said. “That’s how come he got pushed out of working underground for PD, but there’s more to it than that.”

  “Wait,” Joanna said. “Are you saying they had something to do with his death?”

  “Not at all, but they’re the reason he lost his job and ended up going to work for the sheriff’s department. He took Abby Holder’s side against her parents. He and your mother went to Freddy Holder’s funeral, and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what had really happened. Come look.”

  Butch led Joanna back into the office. “You need to read these,” he said, picking a pair of journals out of the stack. “Take a look at all the Post-it notes. It’s like following a trail of bread crumbs. Every time you open to one of the pages marked by a Post-it note, you’ll find a passage leading back to Fred and Abby Holder or to her parents, Wayne and Elizabeth. From the moment your father and the other guys dug up Freddy’s lifeless body, your dad was convinced there was something fishy about what had happened. Once he and your mother went to Fred Holder’s funeral—against Wayne Stevens’s express wishes—your father’s job was on the line.”

  “And he pushed Dad out?” Joanna asked.

  “Exactly, or at least that’s what your father claims in the journals. He believed they ran him off on so-called safety violations. He was really lucky to be hired on as a deputy. After he was working in law enforcement, he tried again. Once he started asking uncomfortable questions about Fred Holder, they shut him down there, too, but Wayne Stevens didn’t have quite the same amount of influence in the sheriff’s department that he had in town. It wasn’t enough to get your father fired outright, but it was enough to have him ordered to back off. That’s why your father ended up running for sheriff.”

  “Because of what happened to Fred Holder?”

  “Yes,” Butch said. “Your dad was determined to get to the bottom of it.”

  Joanna picked up one of the journals at random. From the dates on the cover, she knew it was one that covered the better part of two years after D. H. Lathrop had won election to the office of sheriff. Three different Post-it notes stuck out of the top of the book.

  “So all these Post-it notes are references to the Holder situation?” she asked.

  Butch nodded. “In the journals he notes whenever he crossed paths with any of the people from that series of events—Abby and both her parents as well as Mad Dog Muncey.”

  “Did he put them under actual surveillance?”

  “Not really,” Butch said. “At least, not officially. Even so, he made it his business to run into them more than you’d think would happen even in a small town. More than once he mentions thinking that eventually he was going to get a break in the case, and finally he did.”

  “When?” Joanna asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Butch said, looking hesitant. “The break didn’t come until a week before he died.”

  “How?”

  “Mad Dog Muncey’s wife, Nelda, came to see your father at the sheriff’s department. She told him that her husband was in the hospital and most likely dying of emphysema. Mad Dog said he wanted to speak to your father, and so your father went to the hospital. Do you want to read the entries for yourself?”

  Joanna shook her head. Once, much earlier, Joanna had ventured into that particular volume—the last one—of her father’s journals. In the process, she had discovered the unwelcome news that for years before D. H. Lathrop died, he had carried on a love affair with someone other than his wife. The fact that one of the last entries mentioned his giving up the other woman in favor of not losing his daughter had done nothing to ease the hurt and shock Joanna had felt when she learned about her father’s duplicity. Butch held it out to her, but knowing it was the same book, Joanna couldn’t quite bring herself to touch it.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “I’ll read it to you,” Butch said. He reopened the book and started to read:

  Nelda Muncey came by to see me
today. She didn’t make an appointment or come into the office. She caught up with me outside as I was parking my car. She told me Mad Dog was in the hospital and wanted to talk to me. I knew he’d been dusted and had emphysema, but until I got to the hospital, I had no idea how bad it was. He’s on oxygen and IV painkillers and weighs maybe a hundred and twenty pounds. He used to be double that. Made me realize I was lucky to get out of the mines when I did.

  On the way to the hospital I kept thinking, “This is it.” When we got there, Nelda started to come into his room with me, but Mad Dog waved her away. “Go on out and shut the door,” he told her. “Just me and D.H. We’re the only ones who need to be here.”

  He waited until she shut the door. “She told you I’m dying?”

  I shook my head, but all you had to do was look at the man to know it was close to the end.

  “I done it,” he said.

  Just like that—with no introduction, no discussion of what he was talking about. It was like we’d been having this conversation all along for more than twenty years.

  “I knew that one stope was shaky—that the support beams had come loose during shutdown. I put a come-along on one of them beams, then I sent Freddy into the stope to get something I said I’d left in there. When he went inside, I gave the come-along a yank and the whole thing caved in. The rest of us were lucky that whole damn shaft didn’t come down on top of us.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

  “Confession’s good for the soul,” he said. “I don’t want to meet my Maker with this on my conscience. I done it. I’m sorry.”

  “I know you got a new car out of the deal,” I said. “So who put you up to it—Wayne Stevens?”

  I could see that he was getting tired, that the conversation was wearing him down.

  “Nelda don’t know nothin’ about any of this,” he said. “If’n I tell you that, her life won’t be worth a plugged nickel. You find out the answer, I’ll say straight out yes or no, but whatever you find can’t come from me. You hear?”

  He reached over and rang the little buzzer that was pinned to his pillow. A nurse came in, so did Nelda, and that was the end of it.

  I was pissed when I left the hospital. It was what I’d always known—that he was the one responsible, the triggerman. In the old days Mad Dog Muncey wasn’t scared of anyone or anything, leastways not for himself, but now he was scared for Nelda. She’d just gotten a new job at the company store, and he was afraid she’d lose it. There are only a couple of people in town who wield that kind of power, and Wayne Stevens is one of them.

  It was a judgment call. At that point there was nothing about Mad Dog’s supposed confession that would have held up in a court of law. There weren’t any witnesses to what he’d said. It would be my word alone. So I’ll have to find something to corroborate what Mad Dog said, but right that minute, I wanted more than anything for Wayne Stevens to know that the jig was up—that after years of getting away with murder he wasn’t going to be dodging that bullet any longer.

  Instead of lying low, I decided to beard the lion in his den. I went straight there—to the general office—and marched right into Stevens’s private office, past his secretary who was chasing after me saying I couldn’t go in there, but I did anyway.

  Stevens was on his phone when I went inside, and he took his own sweet time getting off. “Good morning, Sheriff Lathrop,” he says to me, cool as can be. “This is an unexpected visit. I don’t believe I see your name in my appointment book. What can I do for you?”

  “I just came from Mad Dog Muncey’s room at the hospital,” I said. “He told me the whole story.”

  “What story would that be?”

  “I know who’s behind the hit on Freddy Holder.”

  “Now, now,” Stevens said to me. “No one around here is going to put any stock in the ravings of a dying man.”

  “I put stock in it, Mr. Stevens, and I intend to prove it. If it’s the last thing I do.”

  So help me God, I will!

  Butch stopped reading, closed the book, and placed it on the desk.

  “That’s it?” Joanna asked.

  “Not quite,” Butch said. “He spent the whole next week working on it, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was building up his nerve to go talk to Nelda. That was on the following Friday. It’s the next-to-last entry. You already know about the last one.”

  Yes, Joanna did know about it. That was the one that had turned her whole world on its head, the one that had confirmed D. H. Lathrop’s long-term relationship with his secretary, Mona Tipton. When Joanna had been scanning through her father’s journals, she had been so stricken by his infidelity that she had completely overlooked this other part of the story—that at the time of his death, he had been hot on the trail of a killer. Had that material been passed along to investigators at the time of D. H. Lathrop’s death, they might have made the necessary connections, but Eleanor, D. H. Lathrop’s widow, had made certain that the damning material didn’t see the light of day. Had it not been for George Winfield’s interference in passing the journals along to Joanna, it never would have.

  Yes, Joanna had overlooked that part of the story once, but she wasn’t overlooking it now.

  “Is it possible Wayne Stevens was behind what happened to my father?” she asked. “Behind his death, I mean?”

  Butch shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, “but I always thought he died after being hit by a drunk driver.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Joanna said numbly, “because that’s what I was told, but the timing suggests otherwise.”

  The drunk-driving part had been a given. Joanna, her father, and two other girls from her Girl Scout troop had been coming back from a weekend campout in the Wonderland of Rocks. They had all seen the disabled car parked along the road. Joanna’s father had driven a little farther down the road, then he had made a U-turn and gone back. By the time they stopped, the stranded woman was trying to wrestle the spare out of her trunk.

  It was summer. The car windows had been rolled down. “Here, ma’am,” Joanna remembered hearing him say. “Let me help you with that.”

  As far as Joanna knew, those were the last words D. H. Lathrop said. Minutes later, with the woman’s car up on a jack and with the woman and her kids safely away from the vehicle, another car had appeared from out of nowhere and come screaming past them. No matter how she tried, Joanna could never forget the sound of the impact as the car smashed into her father’s kneeling body or the vision of him flying through the air like a broken rag doll. Memories of her father’s death still haunted Joanna’s dreams from time to time. They were the kind of nightmares that brought her awake, gasping for breath, and left her shaking and dripping with sweat.

  At the time it happened, Joanna had blamed herself. It wasn’t her fault that her father had been out changing that tire, but the reason he was there at all—on the road, coming back from the Chiricahuas—was because of her. As a traumatized teenager, Joanna had managed to block out some of what went on back then—some but not all. It had been a hit-and-run. The drunk driver had been caught miles away in Benson. She didn’t remember that there had been any kind of trial or legal proceedings. More likely some kind of plea bargain had been put into effect.

  “So who was he?” Butch asked.

  “The driver?”

  Butch nodded.

  “I have no idea,” Joanna said, “but you’d better believe I’m going to find out.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THERE WAS NO SENSE IN JOANNA’S GOING BACK TO THE JUSTICE Center to look for the information she needed. Literally thousands of dusty boxes of county records sat in storage in the old courthouse, waiting to be turned into digital files. Instead, with her computer back on the dining room table, she logged on to the Internet. She knew the date of her father’s death. Newspapers statewide had covered the event in gory detail, and their records had been digitized. Within a matter of minutes she found what she was looking for—the n
ame of her father’s killer, David Fredericks.

  He was a former soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca and had been dismissed from the army with an other-than-honorable discharge. At the time of the accident, Fredericks was still living in Sierra Vista. An hour and a half after the incident, he had been arrested in Benson, more than sixty miles away, on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. When he was arrested, trace evidence from his high-speed collision with D. H. Lathrop’s body was still embedded in the grille of his T-bird.

  Further details about the actual investigation were sketchy, but, as Joanna had surmised, the case had ended swiftly with a plea bargain in which Fredericks had pled guilty to one count of vehicular homicide, one count of hit-and-run, and one count of driving while intoxicated. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Case closed. That was where the official news record left off. Joanna was just finishing reading the last article when Carol Sunderson dropped off Jenny and Dennis.

  While Butch hustled Dennis off to the bathroom for a quick bath, Jenny settled down at the dining room table. “You were on TV tonight,” she said. “You and Mr. Bernard. You caught the guy?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “Someone on the news said he’s Ms. Highsmith’s brother. Is that true?”

  “The man hasn’t been officially charged yet, so his name hasn’t been released,” Joanna said. “That kind of information shouldn’t be out there, but yes, he’s her half brother.”

  “So why did he do it?” Jenny wanted to know.

  It frustrated Joanna to realize that once again the media was getting ahead of the law enforcement process. She shrugged. “I’m not sure. It’s evidently something that happened between them when they were kids. He’s spent his adult life consumed with anger and jealousy, plotting a way to get his revenge.”