Judgment Call (39 page)
Authors: J. A. Jance
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 storyâthat 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 allâon the road, coming back from the Chiricahuasâwas because of her. As a traumatized teenager, Joanna had managed to block out some of what went on back thenâsome 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.”
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 forâthe name 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.”
“Will that ever happen with Denny and me?”
Jenny was clearly nuts about her baby half brother and had been since the day he was born. Joanna smiled at her daughter and shook her head. “I don't think so,” she said. “Never in a million years.”
Jenny leaned over and stared at the photoâclearly a mug shotâthat was visible on Joanna's computer screen.
“Is that him?”
“No,” Joanna said, “that's a guy named David Fredericks.”
“What did David Fredericks do?” Jenny asked.
The question wasn't a surprise. The presence of a mug shot made it clear that he must have done something.
“He was the drunk driver who hit and killed my father, your grandfather, when I was about your age.” Joanna realized then that Jenny knew more about George Winfield, her stepgrandfather, than she did about her birth grandfather. One reason for that probably had to do with Joanna's continuing reluctance to talk about it.
“Were you there when it happened?” Jenny asked.
“Yes, I was.”
“Did you see it?”
Joanna hesitated before she answered but only for a moment. “Yes,” she said.
“So why are you looking at his picture now?” Jenny asked.
“Because things that happened a long time ago have a way of coming back to bite you in the butt.”
“Sort of like Ms. Highsmith's brother.”
“Exactly,” Joanna said.
“Is that what you're going to do with this guy?” Jenny asked. “Get revenge?”
“I don't know,” Joanna said. “I hadn't thought of it quite that way. I guess I'm more curious than anything else.”
Dennis came out of the bathroom then, still damp from his bath, wearing his jammies and ready for his night-night kiss. When first Dennis and then Jenny slipped off to bed, Joanna returned to her computer. Now that she had David Fredericks's name, she put that into her search engine. Moments later, she hit the jackpot. There was an article about David Fredericks in a magazine called
Trucking Today
. It was accompanied by two photos. One was the same unvarnished mug shot she had seen in the online articles written shortly after her father's death. In those, Fredericks appeared to be an angry young man somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties. The other one looked to be an official company portrait of an at-ease, smiling, and well-to-do middle-aged business executive.
Twenty years ago, David Fredericks was released from the Arizona State Prison in Florence where, before being paroled on good behavior, he had served twenty-eight months of a five-year sentence for vehicular homicide. Unlike many of his fellow parolees, David Fredericks emerged from prison determined to turn his life around.
“While I was locked up, what I missed more than anything was the open road. I was also a guy with a felony conviction. I needed a job, but people weren't exactly falling all over themselves to hire me, so I decided to hire myself.”
He sent himself to school and got a commercial driver's license. After patching together enough financial help to buy a rig of his own, he went to work hauling oversize equipment from one side of the country to the other. Two weeks ago, the company he built from scratch with that first vehicle was swallowed up in a deal that business analysts say is worth $7.5 million in Dave Fredericks's pocket.
“I wouldn't have been able to turn my life around if there hadn't been people who had faith in me and who gave me a hand up when I was down and out. That's one of the reasons I'm involved in a program that helps released inmates find meaningful work after they get out of prison. If they're doing something they love, they're a lot less likely to end up back in the slammer.”
Mr. Fredericks met Donna, his wife of seventeen years, when he was driving a truck and she was working as a waitress at a truck stop in Nebraska.
“Every time he came through town,” Donna says now with a smile, “he'd say, âWhen are you going to give all this up and marry me?' Finally he wore me down, and I had to say yes.”
The couple and their three adopted children live in Sahuarita, south of Tucson.
Joanna was still staring at the computer screen when her cell phone rang. “Hi, boss,” Jaime Carbajal said. “I thought you'd want us to bring you up-to-date. We found James Cameron's CR-V parked in one of the lots by the Rec Center. It's a treasure trove. We found a thirty-eight, which we're hoping will turn out to be the murder weapon in the Highsmith case. We also found duct tape and a dress shirt with bloodstains on the arm.”
“Sounds good,” Joanna said.
“That's not the half of it. We also found a blowgun. It looks like the darts have been altered so they could be loaded with some kind of liquid, most likely bear tranquilizer, an unused bottle of which we also found in the vehicle. Company records show that two weeks ago tranquilizer doses matching that batch number were shipped to James Gunnar Cameron of Palo Alto, California. We also found Debra Highsmith's missing cell phone and her computers, along with her calendars, which are, as far as we can tell, nothing but calendars.”
Joanna was surprised. “All this incriminating stuff was in his car? He just left it there for us to find?”
“Yup,” Jaime replied. “I think he meant what he told you up there on Juniper Flats. He had no intention of getting away. Once he took out his sister and his grandmother, his job was done. He didn't care what happened afterward. Still doesn't.”
“Has he asked for an attorney?”
“Not so far, and Deb and I have had him in the interview room for the better part of an hour.” Jaime paused then added, “Have you heard from Arlee Jones yet?”
“No,” Joanna answered. “Why do you ask?”
“He called the department thinking you'd be here. When you weren't, he asked to speak to Deb or me. He wanted us to run up the flag to him immediately if Cameron asked for an attorney. In the meantime, Arlee will probably call you next. He's got some bright idea about doing a plea bargain.”
Joanna was surprised. “A plea bargain? Already? So far we've got three people dead. We don't even know if all the victims who were injured on the sidewalk are going to survive. How can he possibly be talking plea bargain this early in the game?”
“Beats me,” Jaime said, “but I thought you should have a heads-up.”
“Thanks,” Joanna said.
Sure enough, when her phone rang again five minutes later, the county attorney was on the line.
“I understand you and your people have had quite a day of it,” Arlee said, sounding hearty and enthusiastic in the hail-fellow-well-met fashion that only career politicians can ever fully master.
“Make that several days,” Joanna said dryly, “and it's not over yet.”
“You're right,” Arlee said. “That's why I'm callingâwith an opportunity for all of us to have it be over.”
“I assume that means you're looking at a plea bargain?”
“Exactly. If we go for first-degree homicide in the Highsmith and Oliphant cases, we're talking about a possible death penalty trial. Undoubtedly that will attract big criminal defense guns from all over hell and gone. Cochise County will end up footing the bill for a multimillion-dollar trial that we can't afford. Besides, what happens if some doe-eyed defense attorney comes up with the brainy idea that Mr. Cameron is actually nutsâwhich I'm quite sure he is, by the way. They might end up getting the guy off on an insanity plea. That's something I don't want to see happen, and I doubt you do, either.”