Evidence of Murder (28 page)

The judge didn’t care about her strategy. “So is he a suspect?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. It’s not my investigation.” Was she throwing Frank under the bus? Would he kill her if she did?

“Then why are you here?”

Good question,
she narrowly avoided answering. Then she made the mistake of looking at Drew. Skinny, runny-nosed, devastated Drew, who focused on her as if he had terminal cancer and she stood with the last vial of a known cure. Drew remained a problematic human being, but maybe the only one left on the planet with Cara’s best interests in mind.

She turned to the judge. “There are many unexplained factors in Mrs. Kovacic’s death.” She listed the location of the body, Jillian’s state of apparent contentment, and the absence of any obvious cause of death.

“So you don’t know why this woman died? What does it say on the death certificate?”

“The death certificate isn’t complete yet.” Drew should have called Christine, Theresa thought. She’d have impressed the judge and made mincemeat of that lawyer. Christine made mincemeat of most people.

“Is there any reason to suspect foul play?”

“It’s unusual for a perfectly healthy young woman to drop dead, Your Honor.”

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence.” The judge repeated what Frank had said, so primly that Theresa had to look down to keep from glaring at him. The worst part, of course, was that he was right.

“Mrs. Kovacic committed suicide, Your Honor.” Evan’s attorney molded his features into a properly empathetic mask to accompany the statement. “She walked out into the woods and let herself freeze to death. Postnatal depression could have played a part.”

“To do so she’d have to walk three miles in subfreezing temperatures without frostbite,” Theresa put in. “Which is highly unlikely.”

“No one dragged her to that forest. No one tied her to that tree or made her stay there,” the attorney persisted.

“How would you know that?” Theresa demanded.

“Why else would a perfectly healthy woman sit down in the freezing outdoors unless she intended to die? You said yourself there were no signs of foul play.”

“I—she—”

The judge said her name, waited for her full attention. “Do you believe this woman was murdered?”

Her mouth became too dry to form words. But the judge had not asked what she could prove or what Leo would think was prudent to state. He had asked her opinion after placing her under oath.

“Yes, Your Honor. I do.”

Evan leaped to his feet. “That’s a lie! This woman’s working with Fleming—”

“Your Honor! This is a clear violation of my client’s—”

The judge spoke over both of the men. “Do you have any proof?”

She tried. “Only my training and my experience in over ten years of working with both homicides and natural deaths—”

“Any other proof? Any physical evidence that implicates Mr. Kovacic in the death of his wife?”

She thought of something. Probably nuts, but worth a try. “It would help me to complete my investigation if Mr. Kovacic would give me his consent to search Jillian’s living areas.”

Evan had sat, but now jumped up again. “Your Honor! I asked the police to step in when Jillian disappeared. Mrs. MacLean searched my house then! What the hell is she looking for, and why didn’t she find it before?”

Theresa protested, “At that time I was investigating a disappearance with no signs of foul play, not a murder. Had I known Jillian’s body would show an…
unclear
cause of death or signs of transport, I would have conducted the search differently.”

This excuse brought her no comfort, nor did it impress the judge, who said, “Search warrants and the like are not my bailiwick. If this man needs to be investigated for murder, tell the police.”

Theresa worked hard to keep an even tone of voice. “I understand perfectly, Your Honor. Everyone in this room is here because they care about little Cara’s well-being. If I could complete my investigation, it would put everyone’s mind at ease, and surely Mr. Kovacic’s most of all. He must want to know what happened to his wife.”

She thought it sounded good. Then she glanced at Evan. Then his attorney, and then the judge. Not one was buying it.

“I don’t want this woman anywhere near me or my home, Your Honor,” Evan said.

“Despite the neat bit of extortion on Mrs. MacLean’s part—” began his attorney.

“Once more,” said the judge, who had probably spent his days in family court listening to participants hurl the wildest accusations ever concocted on the face of the earth, “I don’t issue search warrants and I don’t allow my courtroom to be used to persuade reluctant witnesses to cooperate in same. Do you, or do you not, have any evidence in hand that implicates Mr. Kovacic as having caused the death of his wife?”

Drew watched her, his gaze so intense it sucked the air from the room into its path.

“No, Your Honor.”

Evan sat back down.

Drew wilted before her, his hands gripping the antique wooden railing, his forehead sinking to his fingers.

“Then I have no choice but to grant the custody of Cara Perry to her mother’s legal spouse, Evan Kovacic. This decision is permanent and binding. Next case.”

Theresa didn’t know what else to do except go back to work. She could do nothing more for Jillian Perry. She had examined every fiber, tested every hair, wrung as much information as she could out of her own coworkers. She had reached a dead end, and now Evan had custody of Cara. Game over.

Several reporters had gotten wind of her testimony—no doubt through Evan’s lawyer, who wanted to portray her as irrationally biased—and called to ask about it. They were, as always, referred to the M.E.’s office. None called to ask any more about serial killers, since the semen in Sarah Taylor had come back to an East Cleveland man with a history of sexual assault. If he didn’t come up with an ironclad alibi or at least some good answers to questions the officers had for him, he would probably be arrested for her murder.

And he had a dog. A large Doberman pinscher.

That left the boy, Jacob Wheeler, on her slate. Not much had been turned up about him. His habits and movements remained sketchy, shrouded by the veil of secrecy teenagers maintained in the face of authority figures. When kids did talk, they didn’t say much. Jacob had been a loser, poor and uninteresting, but with just good-enough grades and friends to avoid close scrutiny by a post-Columbine school administration.

Theresa had found nothing of interest on his clothing, so now she pulled out the plaster cast she had made of the shoe print behind the tree. She had not been trained as a shoe print expert, so the cast would have to be sent to the state lab, but they would not accept it until they had a suspect’s shoes for comparison. It did not match Jacob Wheeler’s; one did not have to be an expert to tell that much.

The treads were quite clean, as the snow had been too deep to allow dirt to penetrate and now had melted. Still, some deposits remained. She set the cast tread side up underneath her stereomicroscope, fully aware that the work served only to distract her mind from Evan’s custody of Cara. The odds of finding anything significant amid all that snow were slim to none, and at any rate, she had no items from a suspect for comparison.

With the lens brought into focus over the rough, undulating plaster surface, she began to see tiny pebbles of stone, sand size when not magnified. Some were pretty, but not helpful to anyone but a forensic geologist. A piece of something yellow that crumbled into dust when touched—oops—also defied identification. Two fibers stuck to a piece of tar had evidently chosen that moment to release themselves from the bottom of the shoe, and were fixed to the plaster. Upon closer examination, they were covered in the gunk Theresa had sprayed into the print so that the plaster, which warmed as it set, would not completely melt the shoe print before the cast hardened. She cleaned that off the fibers and mounted them.

She identified one as black cotton, and the other one as an orange-colored trilobal-shaped synthetic.

Orange.

Jacob’s bedroom had orange carpeting, and trilobal had always been a popular shape for flooring textiles. It hid dirt well. Perhaps the killer had been in Jacob’s bedroom. That would not be surprising; they had always assumed that Jacob met someone he knew in the woods. It seemed an unlikely spot for a mugging.

She pulled her head back from the stereomicroscope to take another look at the cast. The length of it seemed rather small. A girlfriend? His mother?

He had certainly been a trial. But would his own mother fracture his skull and then leave him to freeze to death in the woods?

Maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time.

She took another look at the yellow, crumbly substance and scraped some of it into a glassine fold. It could be a tortilla chip, Jacob’s last meal. Suppose, during their argument, he had swept some to the floor…

But the shoe print seemed too big for the tiny woman, and at the scene she had worn hiking boots, which would have deeper and more complicated treads than this print.

Then there was the scrap of paper in Jacob’s hand. Possibly a comic book.

She picked up the phone. “Frank? No, I’m not calling about Jillian Perry.”

They didn’t need a search warrant to enter the house Jacob Wheeler had shared with his mother. Ellen Wheeler welcomed them in. Anything to help find out what had happened to her son.

The cluttered little home hadn’t changed much during the intervening days. The dust had thickened on the end tables and a sludge had formed at the bottom of the coffeepot, as if Ellen had done nothing else in the intervening time except drink caffeine and stare out the front window, as she did now, waiting for her son to return home.

“Thanks for letting us come by,” Frank said.

She didn’t turn from the window. “He’s gone. It doesn’t matter.”

The boy’s bedroom hadn’t changed any either. It remained a testament to the untidy habits of teenage boys, where clothes, food wrappers, papers, and CDs remained where they had been dropped. Theresa pulled on latex gloves with the uncomfortable feeling that Ellen Wheeler had fallen into a catatonic depression, or else intended to preserve the place like a shrine.

Well, I don’t blame her. If anything happened to Rachael I’d probably leave—

Don’t
think that.

There were certain thoughts that could not be permitted to enter her head if she wanted to keep working in this field, and putting herself in the shoes of victims topped the list.

Frank entered the room behind her. “Still don’t know where to begin, huh?”

“Sort of.” She had been looking for anything that seemed out of place, that didn’t have the same amount of dust as its neighbors. That was silly, though, since Jacob had been living in the room nearly up until the minute of his murder, so not enough time would have elapsed to show a difference in dust deposited on relevant items. Like, say, a comic book.

Still, three things leaped to the eye: the wound-up cord to his video game joystick, a printed flyer at the foot of his bed, and a neatly stacked pile of comic books on the nightstand. They stood out as the only neatly stacked pile of anything in the room.

The half sheet of paper on the bed turned out to be a sort of program for Jacob’s funeral, held two days previously. No doubt Ellen had left it there as an offering to the shrine, or had perused it while surrounded by her son’s belongings, or whatever reasoning passed for sanity following the death of a child. The cord to the joystick stood out because, again, it was the only cord so wrapped. Perhaps she had begun to clean up before abandoning the idea, since the rest of the wires and accessories had simply been swept to the foot of the TV stand.

The comic book on top of the stack had a dramatic cover of black and blue with the figure of Batman in the foreground. Theresa picked it up and riffled the pages.

She set it on the bed carefully, as if it might explode, and then took a square of sealed plastic out of her camera bag. She needed to make sure—after all, Jacob might have been routinely hard on all his comic books.

She didn’t even have to take the torn piece out of its plastic evidence bag to see where it matched the torn page. That, in forensics parlance, was known as a jigsaw match, and considered an absolute identification.

Theresa wanted to cry.

“What is it?” Frank asked.

“I need to check one other thing.” She began to search the closets—Jacob’s, Ellen’s, and then the small one by the front door. On the floor, in a jumble of shoes and boots, she found a pair of rubber overshoes with plain tread lines crossing the sole.

Theresa glanced to her left, where Ellen Wheeler rested in an armchair, one hand holding up her head.

“Yes,” she said.

Theresa waited, still crouched. Frank, with that cop’s instinct, waited as well.

“Yes, those are the boots I wore when I killed Jacob.”

Theresa straightened slowly, still holding the comic book. “Is this what you argued about?”

“He stole it. He insisted he didn’t, but I know he didn’t have any money. He stole everything. I might have been able to cope if he’d at least told me the truth, but the constant lying wore me down.”

Unobtrusively, Frank pulled out a notebook and a pencil.

Ellen lifted her head from her hand, as if finding just enough strength to tell her story. She nodded at the boots. “My husband left those rubber boots behind when he left us. I can pull them right over my shoes.”

That explained why the size of the shoe print seemed too big for Ellen Wheeler, the depth of the print too shallow for the size of the shoe.

“I told Jake it had to stop. The same thing I’ve told him every day for the past four years, more or less. So finally he said it was my fault, that he wouldn’t have to steal things if I’d only give him more money, if I’d only be a decent enough mother to provide for him. I moved toward him. I would have tried to kill him with my bare hands right then if he’d given me the chance. I still want to, sometimes. But when I think about him before his teens, when we would spend the summers thinking up new things to do—”