Joanna nodded. Thumbing through her stack of paperwork, Joanna settled on one that dealt with Bradley Evans’s vehicle. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about his truck for a minute. Were you able to figure out when it showed up on that vacant lot?”
“Not the exact hour and minute,” Jaime responded. “But we do know that it was sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning. We talked to the two guys who are selling the vehicles that were parked on either side of Evans’s Ford. According to them, the truck definitely wasn’t there on Friday. One of them, Rick Gomez, remembers seeing it for the first time around ten on Saturday morning, when he came by to meet up with someone who was interested in buying his Toyota.”
“There’s a lot more presence technology out there nowadays than there used to be,” Joanna said. “We should probably check out traffic security videos from neighboring businesses. One of those might have caught the pickup and / or driver on tape.”
“We can try,” Jaime said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. People use that particular lot for a reason. It’s not in the center of town, it’s been vacant for years, and it belongs to an absentee landowner. The lot itself has no security cameras at all.”
“What about neighbors?” Joanna asked.
Jaime shrugged. “There are a couple of gas stations, but not much else. We can ask to see their tapes, and who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Joanna turned her attention to Casey Ledford. “What’s going on with fingerprints?”
“Not much,” Casey replied. “All the prints I found inside the truck appear to belong to the victim and nobody else. The big difference is that the prints on the gearshift, steering wheel, and door handle have all been smudged or even obliterated.”
“So the last person to drive the vehicle was wearing gloves?” Joanna asked.
Casey nodded. “That would be my guess.”
“What about the prints you lifted from the exterior?”
“I didn’t find any prints at all inside the camper shell or the bed of the pickup,” Casey said. “There were signs that the bed of the pickup had been scrubbed out pretty thoroughly. The total absence of prints there would mean whoever cleaned it was wearing gloves-and probably not because he or she was worried about chapped hands. As for the unidentified prints on the exterior? The ones I found were mostly on the doors and side windows as well as on the liftgate on the camper shell and on the back of the pickup. All of those would be consistent with someone trying to catch a glimpse of the vehicle’s interior to see what kind of condition it was in.”
“In other words, innocent shoppers,” Joanna said.
Casey nodded.
“What about the primer?” Joanna asked. “Do we know if Bradley Evans himself was in the process of rehabbing the truck?”
“No,” Jaime said. “I asked about that, and his landlady said no way. She claims the pickup was still a dingy red when she saw it sometime last week. She couldn’t swear exactly when that was, but she says she saw it almost every day. And that makes sense. Evans’s apartment is a converted garage out behind the landlady’s house. The carport next to it is carved out of her backyard and is fully visible from her kitchen window.”
“So it’s possible the primer was added in an effort to keep us from finding it,” Joanna concluded.
“Make that delay our finding it,” Ernie said. “Whoever did it must have known we’d find it eventually.”
“How much primer would it take to cover a pickup like that?” Joanna asked.
“To cover it properly, it would have taken several cans more than our guy used,” Jaime said. “If you ask me, this was a crappy, half-assed job.”
“Because whoever did it was in a hurry?”
“Either that or because they had no idea what they were doing,” Ernie Carpenter said.
He turned to Debbie. “While you’re out in Sierra Vista talking to the Fry’s clerks, maybe you should also check with auto-parts stores in the area to find out if anyone purchased a supply of primer this past weekend.”
Joanna was gratified that Ernie was making sure Debbie had something useful to do-that she was being treated like a member of the team. As Debbie jotted a reminder to herself into a small spiral notebook, Joanna turned to her crime scene investigator, Dave Hollicker.
“What about the blood samples you found in the bed of the pickup?” she asked. “Any word on those?”
“They’re blood, all right,” Dave answered. “But we don’t know whose. Doc Winfield has already forwarded Evans’s blood and tissue samples to the Department of Public Safety Crime Lab in Tucson. They’re the ones who can give us a comparison in the shortest amount of time. I can take the new samples up there myself or I can send them. Which do you prefer?”
“By all means take them,” Joanna said. “And do it today. Let’s get this case moving.”
Frank shot a questioning look in her direction. He didn’t say anything aloud, but she knew what he was thinking. Why? What’s the big rush? And how much more is it going to add to this year’s expenditures?
With budgetary constraints always in mind, those were entirely legitimate questions, and Joanna didn’t have any ready answers-at least not the kind of reasonable answers that her chief deputy wanted or would understand.
In the days before Jenny was born, Joanna remembered throwing herself into a frenzy of housecleaning and nest-building-scrubbing the refrigerator and cleaning and rearranging all her kitchen cupboards. In light of her current position, wanting Bradley Evans’s homicide solved prior to the baby’s birth was probably a variation on that same theme. Solving a case amounted to a sworn law enforcement officer’s equivalence of nest building. From Joanna’s point of view, it was infinitely preferable to cleaning a refrigerator.
“Has anyone talked to Ted Chapman since we found out about this latest development?” Joanna asked, nodding toward the photographs still spread across the table. “Maybe he’ll know something about this and the photos will turn out to be totally harmless.”
“I doubt that will be the case,” Ernie said.
To be honest, Joanna doubted it, too.
Jaime glanced at his watch. “Sorry to rush this,” he said. “Ernie and I are due to meet up with the second in command at the Douglas prison in about forty-five. Since Ted’s usually around the jail here somewhere, we can probably catch up with him once we finish the Douglas interviews.”
With little additional discussion, the homicide team packed up their collection of photos and left the conference room. As soon as they were gone, a grim-faced Frank reached into a file and brought out a single paper which he slid across the table to Joanna. “Take a look at this,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Read it,” Frank urged. “It came off the fax machine as I was on my way into the briefing. It’s about one of those UDAs they picked up east of Douglas the other night.”
The words top secret and confidential were written in huge black letters across the cover sheet. Inside was what appeared to be a routine incident report, but as Joanna read it, she felt a sudden chill. One of the illegal crossers, a young unidentified male of Middle Eastern origin, had been apprehended by Border Patrol agents. While searching the surrounding area, the officers had discovered a backpack stuffed with fifteen thousand dollars in American currency, a collection of fake IDs and phony passports, a laptop computer, and three working cell phones.
“Yikes!” Joanna exclaimed.
Frank nodded. “That’s what I say.”
“If they picked him up the night before last, how come we’re only just now hearing about it?” she asked.
“The way the feds operate, I’m surprised we’re hearing about it at all,” Frank returned. “And I don’t think we would be, if they didn’t need our help. Border Patrol is asking us to beef up patrols all along the southern sector.”