“I don’t know the answer to any of those questions,” Joanna told him. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The idea that Lisa is alive and well is certainly one possible scenario. The other is that she’s been dead all along. The fact that Bradley Evans is dead, too, tends to suggest he ended up spooking someone who had something to hide.”
“How did that all come about?” Tazewell asked.
“Pure bad luck,” Joanna replied. “We’ve learned that Bradley Evans and Leslie Markham both happened to have lunch in the same Sierra Vista restaurant on Tuesday a week ago. Evans must have noticed the striking resemblance between Leslie and his presumably dead wife. He spent most of the next day following her around Sierra Vista taking pictures with a disposable camera.
“Maybe he wanted to confirm for himself what he thought he was seeing. Or maybe he planned on showing the photos to someone else. But he never got a chance to show them to anyone. Before he finished shooting that roll of film, he was dead- stabbed to death. When his vehicle was impounded after his death, we found the camera hidden under the front seat of his vehicle.”
“Am I a suspect?” Tazewell asked.
The man’s direct question caught Joanna off guard. He certainly had been a suspect initially, but the longer she talked to him, the less she thought Lawrence Tazewell was directly involved in Bradley Evans’s murder. Still, without substantiating his alibi, there was no way to be sure.
“Possibly,” Joanna admitted. “Although not much of one. Is there any way to confirm that you were in Denver last week?”
Nodding, Tazewell removed a PDA from his pocket and reeled off a telephone number. “That’s the FBO-Fixed Base Operator-at the general aviation airport north of Denver where we landed and where the plane was parked from Wednesday until Monday morning. Sharon and I spent a lot of time at the hospital, but we were at our daughter’s in-laws’ apartment a good deal of the time as well, and we met some of her friends and neighbors. Do you want their names and phone numbers?”
“Wherever possible,” Joanna said.
It took several minutes for Joanna to collect the information. While she took notes, Frank Montoya did the same. When Tazewell finally returned his PalmPilot to his pocket, his face was grave. “So everything was fine until Evans stumbled on to the fact that maybe his dead daughter really wasn’t dead.”
Joanna nodded. “That’s how it looks.”
“Has Leslie been informed about any of this?” Tazewell asked.
“Not yet,” Joanna said. “And until we have some kind of solid confirmation…”
“Right,” Tazewell said. “Of course. It would be irresponsible to mention any of this to her while it’s still a matter of supposition, but when the time comes, are you going to tell her or should I?”
“I’d prefer to have that handled by a family member-either you or her mother.”
Tazewell nodded. “That may not be possible,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Depending on how far Aileen’s HD has progressed, she may not be able to talk.”
“I’d like to hear Aileen’s side of the story,” Joanna said. “But in case that’s not possible, what can you tell us about her?”
Lawrence Tazewell shook his head. “I really don’t have any idea where to start,” he said.
Frank Montoya caught Joanna’s eye and then stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, there are a couple of things I need to attend to.”
“Fine,” Joanna said, then she turned back to Lawrence Tazewell, who was holding the pictures of Lisa Evans and Leslie Markham and gazing back and forth between them. “I guess you’d best start at the beginning.”
Chapter 16
But Lawrence Tazewell was still mulling over what he’d just heard. “I’m surprised she hasn’t done herself in the same way her mother did. I wouldn’t blame her, but this does go a long way to explaining the Rory thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“He saw what happened to Ruth. And I’m sure he knows that, one way or the other, Aileen is a short-timer. By marrying Leslie, Rory puts himself in a position to be half owner of a very valuable parcel of Cochise County real estate.” “Are there any other children?”
Tazewell shook his head. “Max and his first wife, Margie, had a little boy who died of leukemia when he was twelve. Margie suffered a debilitating stroke while she was still in her forties. Ruth was the nurse Max hired to take care of Margie. Max and Ruth married within months of Margie’s death. The only child the two of them had together was Aileen. Max was delighted beyond bearing when Aileen showed up, and he and Ruth spoiled her rotten.”
“You said Ruth’s brothers died of Huntington‘s?” Joanna asked.
Tazewell nodded. “But they were younger than she was. The brothers were only in their twenties when they started going downhill. Ruth was in her thirties when Aileen was born. Because she still wasn’t sick, I think she must have thought it wasn’t going to happen to her.”
“But it did,” Joanna offered.
“Yes. Ruth was just beginning to show symptoms of HD when Aileen and I married. And when she found out Aileen was pregnant, Ruth went nuts. She wanted Aileen to have an abortion, but neither Max nor Aileen would hear of it. Aileen because she really wanted to have the baby, and Max because he wanted to keep the Triple H in the family.”
Tazewell paused. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “I had forgotten all about that.”
“About what?”
“Sometime early in October of that year, Ruth and Aileen flew to Albuquerque to see her brothers. By then both of them were confined to a nursing home. I offered to fly Ruth and Aileen there, but Ruth wasn’t having any of that. She insisted on flying commercial. At that stage of her pregnancy, Aileen had to have written permission from her doctor to fly at all. I remember she was really offended that she had to have a permission slip. But when she came back from that trip, Aileen was a completely different person.”
“How so?” Joanna asked.
But Lawrence Tazewell, lost in his own thoughts, didn’t seem to hear her. “Do you think that’s what happened?” he asked. “Do you think that, after seeing Ruth’s brothers, Aileen decided she couldn’t risk having a child of her own, so she got rid of her own baby and took someone else’s?”
“Tell me about Aileen Houlihan,” Joanna said.
“As in do I think she’s capable of doing such a thing? No,” he said after a pause. “I don’t.”
“What was she like then?”
The faraway look returned to Tazewell’s eyes. “When I first met Aileen Houlihan, she was a pistol,” he said at last. “Headstrong, stubborn, and spoiled rotten. She came to the University of Arizona with a whole catalog of parental rules and a single-minded determination to break ‘ em all. I was a case in point.”
“How so?”
“Aileen’s daddy wanted his daughter to graduate from the University of Arizona with honors, go on to law school, and then come home to do her parents proud-maybe end up going into politics. She carefully deconstructed that whole program. Her freshman year she did three things that sent her old man round the bend-she flunked out of school, married me, and brought me home to live on her parents’ ranch. Max was in his late seventies when Aileen came dragging home with me and told him that she didn’t need a college degree to raise cattle and horses.”
“You’re saying she married you out of spite?”
“Pretty much. Did you ever meet Max and Ruth Houlihan?”
Joanna shook her head. “Never. It sounds like they were a little before my time.”
“I suppose,” Tazewell agreed. “They were quite a pair. Ruth was beautiful. Fortunately for her, Aileen took after her mother in the looks department. Old Maxfield was ugly as a stump-a crotchety old bowlegged cowboy who never got over his incredible good luck at finding himself such a gorgeous young woman to be his second wife. He didn’t know about the Huntington‘s, at least not before they got married, and I don’t think it would have made any difference if he had. I’m sure he would have married Ruth anyway. Max was stubborn as hell. Aileen takes after her father in that regard.”