Dead Wrong

“No buts,” Joa

“What are we supposed to do? Turn our backs? Let them keep on doing what they’re doing?”

“What you think they’re doing,” Joa

Jea

A swinging door on the far side of the lobby opened, and Dr. Millicent Ross strode into the room. She was a heavyset woman with gray hair pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Her brusque exterior belied a life lived with unstinting kindness.

“It’s still touch and go, Jea

Jea

“Really,” Dr. Ross answered. “The damage looked far worse than it was. I’ve stitched him back up. He’d lost a lot of blood, though, and he was very dehydrated, so I’m keeping him sedated and on an IV If you hadn’t brought him in right when you did, though, it would have been an entirely different story. He’d have been a goner.”

Jea

Once the ACO had left the waiting room, Joa

“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,” Joa

“That won’t be necessary,” Millicent Ross said. “It’s already been handled.”

“Surely Jea

“There won’t be any charges, Sheriff Brady,” Dr. Ross said firmly. “This is a situation where I’m donating my services.”

Joa

Dr. Ross smiled. “Absolutely,” she said.

“What about a microchip?” Joa

“No such luck,” Dr. Ross replied. “And no tag, either. What a surprise.”

Joa

“You work too hard,” she said, poking her head into his office. “You need to get a life.”

He gri

“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?” Joa

Frank nodded. “Not much to it,” he added.

“Do you mind?” Joa

“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 Joa

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. Joa

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 Joa

Sitting down at the table, Joa

“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 Joa

“In other words, there’s not much point,” Joa