Unknown Means (12 page)

“Is there another way out of that garage?”

“There’s a hallway that leads to some maintenance areas. He could have gotten to the sidewalk outside from those and turned away from the smoking kiosk, so that the nurses didn’t see him. He could have waited there until you two left and then taken the stairs or the elevator to another floor. He didn’t go through the lobby. Nobody there but a nurse and some drunk lady.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “If he knows when the nurses would be busy, he probably knows every inch of this hospital too. And Marissa’s boyfriend is a doctor. I’m starting to feel a little suspicious about that.”

“A doctor could provide a much more sophisticated murder

weapon than a rope or a pillow.” With so many—their mothers, their coworkers, the media—expressing reservations about Marissa and Robert’s marriage, she felt obligated to defend them. “This guy covered the breathing tube, but he also held a pillow over her face. Intubation cuts off any flow of air to the nasal cavity, so he didn’t need the pillow—she couldn’t breathe through her nose anyway.”

“And a doctor would have known that. I’m not saying it’s Robert, but it could be someone he knows, who also works here, an obsessed ex-girlfriend—”

“This was a man. That, I’m sure of.”

“You didn’t get a good look at him?”

“No,” she said miserably. “The room was dark and no one had turned on the light—”

“Or he turned it off.”

The hallway began to shift in front of her eyes. The killer had sneaked in and prepared to murder Marissa while Evelyn slumbered, vulnerable, only a foot or two away. . . .

“Come on.” David gave her a little shake. “Don’t zone out on me. It’s over. Marissa’s no worse for wear, the nurse said. Her vital signs are all decent, and brain activity has not changed.”

“Yeah.”

“And he won’t get near you again.” He squeezed her shoulders for emphasis. “You’re not to go off investigating on your own this time. Right? Promise?”

“And Marissa?”

“Twenty-four-hour guard. I know, if we’d had one from the start, this wouldn’t have happened. But officially, Marissa’s attack is a random attempted rape. There was no reason to think, until now, that he had targeted her specifically. I certainly never thought he’d follow her here.”

“Neither did I.”

“So starting now, we function with extreme caution. Right?”

“If he planned to kill me, he could have. He could have . . .

strangled me first, then moved on to Marissa. Even if I struggled a bit, she wouldn’t have woken up.”

“Maybe he didn’t know that.”

She considered this. “Then he took a hell of a chance, smothering a conscious adult with me sleeping right there. He wasn’t clamping the pillow down hard, which suggests that he was trying to avoid leaving an impression of her teeth in her upper lip. Her death would look like a result of the unsolved strangling instead of a new attempt at murder.”

“About how tall?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” she admitted. “I was peering up at him, so my perspective was skewed. I thought he was about your height, that’s the best I can do. You know how crappy I am at esti-mating measurements.”

“Hair?”

“It seemed close to the scalp. Medium brown, I guess, but the light wasn’t good.”

“What about his skin? Black? White?”

“White. I’m pretty sure, anyway.” Her forehead slumped into her palm.

David’s arm tightened around her. “Don’t feel bad. Now you know why eyewitness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of evidence. It’s hard to take in every detail in two or three seconds’

time.”

“Boots.”

“What?”

“He wore heavy work boots. Black, I think, though everything about his clothing looked black against the light from the hallway, like a silhouette.”

David made a note, though she knew a great many men in the area wore boots, and it didn’t have to be for work purposes. The constant examination of victims’ clothing kept her up on fashion

trends. Most of the victims she saw wore Nike athletic shoes, but Timberland boots ran a close second.

“We searched floor to floor, but we didn’t find anyone who didn’t have a good reason for being here. That doesn’t mean much, since he had plenty of time to leave before we got here. Security got right on the ball, but this building has a million exits. And maybe he’s someone who does have a good reason for being here.”

David tucked his notebook into a jacket pocket, then paused, hands clasped between his knees. “This guy saw you, Evelyn, and you saw him. He’s brutally murdered one woman and seems determined to murder another. I’m not trying to push you, but maybe I should stay at your house. Just temporarily.”

“I live thirty miles away from the crime scenes.”

“It would give Angel a chance to get used to me being there before the arrangement becomes permanent.”

As he obviously expected it would. Her voice sounded more harsh than her injured throat could justify. “I’ll think about it. He didn’t want to kill me, David. He tried to smother Marissa without even waking me up. He socked me just to get me out of the way—he didn’t try to strangle me until I followed him. I promise, I’ll lock all my doors and windows and stay aware of my surroundings.”

“A locked door didn’t keep him from Grace Markham.”

David was right, which didn’t make her feel any better. But she wouldn’t be pushed to a decision, not even by some homicidal stranger. “I know.”

“And he’s twice attacked Marissa in public places.”

Evelyn raised herself, favoring the swelling knee. “Why is he so damn determined to kill her?”

“Maybe she can tell us, if she wakes up.”

If.

C H A P T E R

10

HOLDING A BAG OF ICE TO HER THROAT, EVELYN

sized up the boy now standing in her kitchen. Black hair, gelled into discrete spikes. A stud in one nostril. Baggy jeans.

Scuffed athletic shoes, which should have been discarded months ago. Slouching shoulders above an oversize T-shirt that advertised ACDelco spark plugs. Evelyn appreciated the T-shirt, the most normal item in his ensemble.

“This is Steve.” Angel squeezed his arm, smiling into his face with entirely too much zeal. Where had her daughter—the sarcastic, feminist, unyielding girl who disputed everyone’s ideas from what to have for dinner to the president’s foreign policy, who thought dating overrated and boys hopelessly backward—gone, and who was this fawning creature who had been left in her place?

“Hi,” Steve said. The boy made eye contact with Evelyn, indicating either honesty or cleverness. It did give her the opportunity to see that the whites of his eyes were fairly clear and the pupils did not jump. He seemed to be drug-free at the moment. That was something, at least.

“What’s wrong with your neck?” Angel asked.

“Long story. Where have you been?”

Her daughter’s eyes slid to the clock, which read 10:15. She was

supposed to be in by 9:30 on school nights. “At the library, working on our project.”

“The library closes at nine.”

“We went to get ice cream.”

“Dairy Queen also closes at nine.”

“We went to Cold Stone.”

“You hate Cold Stone.”

“But it doesn’t close at nine.” Her daughter’s voice was a few degrees cooler than the ice cream. “What’s the difference? You weren’t home anyway. We saw you pull in just before we did.”

Evelyn’s stomach fluttered, in either anger or fear—anger at her daughter for pretending that not coming straight home from work equaled neglect, and fear that she might be right. Evelyn didn’t have the energy to deal with either emotion.

Steve looked uncomfortable, which made Evelyn like him just a little. She tried to make her damaged throat relax. “Okay. What’s your project about?”

“Mrs. Evans is really into this Roman Empire stuff. We have to make a scale model of the Colosseum, like we’re in fourth grade.

She wondered why you weren’t at Meet the Teachers today,” Angel added coolly. “You usually have so many questions for them.”

Steve said that he had to go and gave Evelyn a halfhearted wave before opening the door to the garage. “Good night, Gellie.” He pronounced it with a soft G, as in Jell-O.

He has his own name for her?

Angel, so starved for her mother’s attention, promptly went upstairs for her nightly half-hour toilette. Evelyn replaced the ice bag on her throat.

When it came to boys, Evelyn had had it easy for too many years. Angel had raven hair and a strong frame, but her male class-mates had never seemed to notice her for any length of time, and Angel had never seemed to care.

Then this Steve had come along, and suddenly the phone rang every night, and Fridays and Saturdays found Angel anywhere but home. And this was normal. Angel was seventeen and lively. Her first serious boyfriend was not a life experience to avoid.

But that didn’t mean Evelyn had to be enthusiastic about it. Not when she saw the results of disastrous relationships arrayed on gurneys every morning.

It also made her wonder how Angel would react if Evelyn suddenly moved David into their household.

She threw the ice into the sink and turned off the lights.

A BUZZING NOISE woke her to the night-filled room. It couldn’t be time to get up already. She could swear she had been lying there for only an hour.

The buzzing, apparently, came from the phone. No, no, no!

She read the clock through bleary eyes. One-thirty, so she had been lying there for two hours. She should have felt positively reju-venated. “Hello?”

“Evelyn? We have another one.”

Who was this, and what were they talking about? “Another what?”

“Another body,” David’s voice told her.

She sat upright. “What? Who? Is Marissa all right? Where?”

“It’s not Marissa. It’s not even in Marissa’s building. We’re in Lakewood.”

“Lakewood?” That was across the river and a generation or two of old money away from the Riviere.

“You’d better come out. I’ll give you directions.”

She let her forehead rest for a moment on pulled-up knees. I can’t do this, she thought. Not even with all the caffeine in the world. I’m not twenty friggin’ years old anymore.

“Let me get a pen,” she said.

100

• • •

Riley greeted her, his face glowing red and blue as the lights on the nearby patrol car turned. “Your throat okay? How are you feeling?”

“Like Ford has been using me for a crash-test dummy. If Tony doesn’t hire more staff soon, I’m going to mutiny.”

“Want a hand with that equipment?”

She shifted her camera bag and fingerprint kit to her left hand.

“No, I got it.”

“David’s inside with the Lakewood detective, Womack. He’s the lead on this. They called us because they knew about Grace and figured it’s got to be the same guy. Then I think he called Channel Fifteen, because they got here before I did.”

“Why does he think it’s the same guy? Who’s dead?”

“You awake?” He cocked his head at her.

“I’m walking and talking. I can’t guarantee that’s the same thing.”

“Your shirt’s on inside out.”

“Who’s dead?”

“A woman named Frances Duarte. Forty-five, single. Same MO—strangled, strapped . . . You okay? You look faint.”

“No.” She steadied herself against a stone pillar to the right of the double doors, the pebbled surface rough against her palm. “Not faint, just surprised. Marissa had a newspaper article about a Frances Duarte in her purse when the guy tried to kill her.”

She would not have thought it possible to surprise the jaded detective, but this did. “No shit!”

“Nope.”

He lit a cigarette and puffed before he spoke again. “You think it really is some crazed gangbanger ex-boyfriend of Marissa’s?”

“Who said that?”

“One of our traffic investigators, who got it from one of your body snatchers, who said he got it from one of the pathologists.”

“Why would an ex-boyfriend of Marissa’s kill Grace and now this other woman?”

“You want logic from a rumor? What the hell does it mean, then?”

“That these attacks aren’t random. There’s a thread between this new victim and Marissa. Only location seems to link Marissa and Grace, but we can’t be sure of that until we can ask Marissa. Is there a connection between Frances Duarte and Grace Markham?”

“Just the MO. Strapped to a chair, no sign of forced entry.” He stubbed out his cigarette in a large, sand-filled pot and guided her through the lobby, all marble and mirrors. “She lived alone, with tons of bucks and a cat.”

“Is this building owned by Erie Realty?”

“Is it what? Oh, I see— No, Baylor Group. I asked the staff—the desk clerk and the superintendent—and they’ve never heard of the Riviere.”

“Who found the body?”

“The super. Or building manager, as the plaque on his office door says. He lives here, gets the apartment for free for running the building. He says the people downstairs have been complaining about a smell coming from Frances’s place.”

“I see.” The elevator opened.

“No, you’ll smell. She’s probably been like this at least a week. I hope you have a mask in that kit, and not one of those little paper ones.” He pushed the button for the seventh floor. “The manager thought Frances had gone out of town, he says, but he always watches America’s Most Wanted before bed, and suddenly the idea of a bad smell started to worry him. So he checked.”