Returning from incarcerating the animal, Anna Marie Crystal held the door open. “Sorry about that,” she said. “He’s a little spoiled. Come in.”

Joanna and Jaime entered a room that reeked of years of uninterrupted cigarette smoking. The massive green glass ashtray on the coffee table was full, but not to the point of overflowing. There were doilies everywhere-beaded ones on the coffee table and on the end tables and crocheted ones on the backs of the couch and chairs. A bookshelf against one wall was lined with what looked like a complete collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Anna Marie was a tall, scrawny woman with an ill-fitting set of dentures. She motioned the two officers onto an old-fashioned sectional that was far too big for the size of the room, then hurried across the room, where she used a knob to switch off the blaring television set. “Now then, Sheriff Brady,” she said determinedly, “tell me. What’s this all about?”

Jaime looked questioningly at Joanna. Nodding, she took the lead. “Detective Jaime Carbajal is one of my homicide detectives,” she said. “I’m afraid we may have some bad news for you.”

“Homicide?” Anna Marie repeated, her gaunt face paling. “You mean someone’s been murdered?”

“Yes,” Joanna said. “The body was found early this morning on Border Road between Paul’s Spur and Bisbee Junction. The victim has been identified as Bradley Evans, your former son-in-law.”

The skin of Anna Marie’s face tightened into a grimace, revealing a glimpse of the angular skull beneath her wrinkled flesh. For a moment she said nothing. “So he’s dead then?” she asked at last. “That no-good son of a bitch is finally dead?”

“Yes,” Joanna said.

“What happened?”

“He was stabbed to death.”

“Good!” Anna Marie exclaimed bitterly, taking a seat in a wingback chair across from them. “It’s about damned time! Bradley Evans murdered my daughter. Why on earth would you think hearing he’s dead would be bad news for me? It’s what I’ve been praying for every day of my life since 1978. Twenty-five years to life! He murdered Lisa and her baby and all he got was twenty-five years! How the judge could give him that and then look at himself in the mirror I can’t imagine!”

With her hands shaking, Anna Marie shook a cigarette out of a packet of Camels on the coffee table, lit it, and then pulled the ashtray within easy reach.

“So you weren’t close?” Joanna asked.

Anna Marie blew an indignant plume of smoke into the air. “Close!” she exclaimed. “Don’t even think such a thing! Of course we weren’t close.”

“But he listed you as his next of kin.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m no kin of his at all.”

“He also named you as the beneficiary of his group life insurance policy. It’s a small death benefit, but-”

“Just because he put my name down on a piece of paper doesn’t mean I have to take the money!” Anna Marie declared. “Blood money is what I call it. He probably thought that by leaving me something I’d forgive him for what he did, but I won’t. Not ever. No matter what. I hope he rots in hell.”

It wasn’t at all the kind of next-of-kin notification Joanna had expected. Instead of a grieving relative, she was faced with this daunting old woman whose whole body bristled with righteous indignation.

“So he hasn’t been in touch with you since his release?” Joanna asked.

“Absolutely not. He wouldn’t dare. If he’d shown up here, I would have shot him myself. I have a gun, you know. An old thirty-aught-six. My husband used to hunt. I kept the gun after he died. I know how to use it, and believe me, if Bradley Evans had turned up anywhere within range, I would have plugged him full of lead. They’d have had to drag him off my porch in one of those zip-up body bags.”

Listening to the old woman rant, Joanna had no doubt that she meant every word. Anna Marie Crystal’s fury with her daughter’s killer was still white hot more than two decades after Lisa Marie Evans’s death.

“Tell me about your daughter,” Joanna said.

Anna Marie blew another cloud of smoke. Her face softened. “She was such a sweet, sweet girl,” she said. “She met Bradley over at the bar that used to be right there by the main gate. You remember the one.”

“The Military Inn?” Joanna offered.

Anna Marie nodded. “Right. That’s the one. It wasn’t a good place for her to hang out. I told her that, too, but she wasn’t about to listen. She was twenty-one and working for the dry cleaner’s just up the street. She liked going there after work to relax. It was a place where she and her friends could meet guys, and they did.”

“Did she and Bradley Evans meet there?”

“Yes. He was still in the army then. They got married only a couple of months after they met. Another bad idea. I told her she didn’t know enough about him. He was from somewhere else- Oklahoma or Texas maybe. Didn’t seem to have any family to speak of. That’s always a bad sign. Either the family’s bad or the one who’s on the outs is bad. It’s all the same. One way or the other it spells trouble, but Lisa thought Brad-as she called him-was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Nothing her father or I said could convince her otherwise.”

“So they got married?”

“Eloped,” Anna Marie said. “Ran off to Vegas and got married in one of those awful wedding chapels. I couldn’t believe it. Neither could my husband. He was crushed. He’d always planned on walking his little Lisa down the aisle. It broke his heart when she died. He never got over it.”

“You said Bradley was still in the army when he and Lisa met?” Joanna asked.

Anna Marie nodded. “Barely. He was about to get out. After he did, he managed to land some kind of job with the phone company. It was a good thing, too. A couple of months later, Lisa turned up pregnant. With him working for the phone company, at least she would have had maternity benefits. She didn’t have any benefits at all from the dry cleaner’s, even though she had worked there since her junior year in high school.”

“What happened?”

“You mean why did he kill her?” Anna Marie asked.

Joanna nodded.

“I have no idea. I thought Brad was a bit of a rounder. For sure he drank way too much, but he always seemed to behave around Lisa, and I thought he loved her.”

“Was there someone else involved?” Joanna asked.

“You mean like did Lisa have someone on the side? No way. She loved Bradley to distraction. I can’t say the same about him. I suppose Bradley could have had a girlfriend. I’ve wondered about that over the years, but I don’t know for sure.”

“They seemed happy together?”

“As happy as newlyweds are when they’re young and not making enough money. But Lisa was excited about being pregnant. She was never very interested in school. She did all right in high school, but she wasn’t the least bit interested in going off to college. She told me once that all she wanted to do was meet a nice man, get married, and raise lots of babies.”

“Did Bradley want the baby?”

“Who knows? I sure as hell didn’t ask him,” Anna Marie put in. “I mean, in those days, with the pill and all, if people got pregnant and it was after they got married, you assumed it was because they wanted to, but Bradley was a real good-time boy. On Saturdays, when he was off work and Lisa was at the dry cleaner’s, he’d go hang out at the bar and play pool until it was time for them to go home. He had a company car during the week, so they only had the one car-his pickup truck-on the weekends. So he’d take her to work and then he’d come back and pick her up when she got off in the afternoon.

“The last time I talked to her was that Saturday morning, the day she was killed. Lisa loved fried chicken, especially my fried chicken. I called her at work to see if she and Brad wanted to come over for a chicken dinner on Sunday. Fried chicken and pecan pie-Lisa’s two all-time favorites. She said she’d talk to Brad and let me know. I never heard her voice again. Sunday morning, about nine o’clock, a deputy sheriff showed up. He told me that they’d found Brad drunk out of his gourd somewhere up by Bisbee. He told me that they hadn’t found a body, but there was enough evidence of foul play that they were afraid something had happened to Lisa. And they never did find her. Brad went to prison without ever letting on what he had done to Lisa and her baby. Claimed he was drunk and didn’t remember.”