Evidence of Murder (33 page)

She could see it now, a deceptively white expanse, lumpy underneath the latest dusting of snow. It could not have refrozen in only one day. Not solid.

“It’s water, Drew. It can’t hold us.” Now she did put her foot down on the sliding surface, checking for traction, something to support her leap from the snowmobile.

“It’s frozen, look at it.”

“They broke it up the other day.” The snowmobile continued to spin, albeit more slowly. Stop, she begged it. Just
stop
.

He continued to protest. “It was ten degrees last night.”

Cara screamed. Theresa felt like joining her.

“We can make it.”

She could not wait for the snowmobile to come to rest. As soon as it straightened out, Drew might propel them across the lumpy area at the edge of the river. She braced her right foot on the running board, knocked Drew’s arm away from the throttle, and pitched herself and the baby into space.

She landed on her feet, for a brief instant; then her slick shoes slid out from beneath her and the spinning vehicle smacked into her right hip. This threw her to her knees. Shock reverberated through all her bones as her kneecaps smashed into concrete-hard ice. She clutched Cara tighter as her body continued in motion, falling forward until she had to use her elbows to keep the infant from slamming onto the hard surface beneath them. She heard a loud snap and hoped it wasn’t one of her bones, but it must have been her forehead striking the ice.

Drew had finally come to a stop, at the edge of the river, still straddling the snowmobile. “Come on,” he shouted, as if she had fallen off accidentally instead of run for her life.

She struggled to her feet, pulling the blanket closed over Cara’s delicate face. Whiskey Island sat at least six hundred feet away, but the old Coast Guard station protruded from it like a lollipop on a stick of seawall. Only two hundred feet of ice separated her from the historic buildings. “Drew—”

Another crack split the air. Were the cops shooting at them? She looked toward the Coast Guard station but saw no one, though of course snipers wouldn’t stand out in the open—

Another, softer sound. At her feet.

She looked down. A dark line had formed in the ice, running in a jagged sweep from the river back toward the land.

The world, it seemed, grew very still.

“Come on,” Drew repeated.

She looked at him. “The ice is cracking.”

“What?”

Another split branched off from the first, making a snapping sound. “Listen to me. The ice is cracking. Get off that thing and come with me. Quickly.”

“But we can make it,” he insisted. His hands moved in a sort of end-over-end fashion, and feeling a new chill she saw why. The key she had ripped out of the ignition had a tether; he must have attached the other end of it to his coat or the vehicle and had now reeled it back in.

She stepped backward and turned, gingerly placing each foot flat on the surface to distribute the weight. The snapping continued, all around her.

“Theresa!”

She tried once more, pausing to look back at him. “Get to the Coast Guard station.
Now!
”

“At least give me Cara.”

She didn’t answer, just took another step. Perhaps this would force him to follow her. Though if he were very fast he might be able to intercept her, cut off her escape route, and she’d have to run all the way to Whiskey Island instead, and at the rate the ice was cracking—

The baby’s cries had subsided to whimpers. They had covered half the distance. She heard a click as Drew tried to start the snowmobile, but did not waste time by glancing back. Her worn shoes worked against her, sliding against the ice. She fell and waited for the sickening break to crackle in the air, but the ice seemed not to notice her weight. It cracked for reasons of its own.

After falling a second time, she decided to work with the ice instead of against it, and slid her feet along the surface as if skating. Forty feet. She could hear the sirens wending their way toward her.

Another crack, louder than the others.

“Theresa!”

She fell again. Pushing herself up with one hand while holding the baby with the other, she saw Drew, still at the edge of the river, snowmobile tilted down slightly by the uneven, disturbed ice. He had finally given up on the ignition and dismounted, but froze two feet from the vehicle, gazing in horror at his feet.

The front of the snowmobile began to sink. Then a crack rent the air, louder than any she had heard so far.

She met his gaze across the expanse; Drew looked at her with one last, forlorn hope.

As she formed her lips to call his name, the river opened up and swallowed him, the snowmobile, and the ice, churning it up to a stew of seething white chunks.

“Drew!”

Her voice echoed in the sudden silence.

As a sort of denouement, a second section of the ice collapsed. She turned and rushed for the land in an awkward, scrambling gait, clutching the baby so hard that Cara wailed.

Red and blue lights penetrated her snow blindness. She heard other voices but did not stop to look up. The ice continued to crack in whispering lines, calling her name.

“Theresa!”

Ten feet. Then the snow turned sharply upward at the seawall of the old station, devolving into a smooth drift that surely masked the jagged rocks underneath. That would not be fun to navigate, not in her shoes—

Then Frank had stumbled down the barrier and was on the ice in front of her. Her cousin’s face seemed whiter than the winter months could warrant.

“Drew,” she told him.

“Give me the baby.”

“Drew.” She made it to him, though she could feel the tremors through the surface beneath her as the ice collapsed, its collapse coming closer to them with every moment. “Drew.”

“I know. A rescue unit is on the way.”

“It took him.”

Frank gently removed Cara from her arms, then turned and handed her off to one of the several other officers making their way down the slope to the ice. Then he put one hand on her wrist and one arm around her waist and turned her away from the river with iron determination.

It frustrated her and she screamed,
“Drew!”

“Rescue is on its way, Tess. Now get off this damned ice.”

The rocks proved just as difficult to traverse as she had expected, particularly while looking behind her for any sign of Drew. He could get to the surface, surely? And swim to the edge? He had been, as always, underdressed, so it would not be as if he had a thick, wet parka dragging him down. But that backpack, full of books—

Another man dropped to the rocks in front of her and began to help Frank move her strangely reluctant body to safety. “Are you all right, Tess?”

“Cavanaugh.” She felt herself looking at him oddly, but couldn’t help it. What was
he
doing here?

Then she craned her neck to look behind her. “Frank, listen, it’s not even cracking close to shore. He’ll come up in the open area and then someone needs to get out there and grab him because he won’t be able to swim very—”

“Push,” Chris said. From on top of the seawall, he pulled both her arms. Frank lifted her by her waist, and in this extremely ungraceful manner she returned to solid ground. Good. From the new height she could see the river, a deep green mass of slowly moving liquid, the ripples from the swallowed ice already fading to nothing.

She did not see Drew. “Where is he?”

“They’re looking for him,” Frank told her, and indeed the river’s edge had become dotted with men watching for any sign of the pursued.

All right, she thought. With that many eyes, surely someone would see him when he surfaced and then they could pull him out. If they only had some Coast Guard members in this Coast Guard station, members with those big orange life vests, well trained in water rescues, even freezing water rescues; if only the station hadn’t moved to the East Ninth pier years before and left this shell as only a historical landmark…“Where’s Cara?”

“She’s safe. We’ve got her.” Chris still had his arm around her, which felt good. It
was
freezing out. She also suspected she’d fall down without the support.

“I know that. Where—” Then she caught sight of the bundle of blankets, now being passed from a uniformed officer to the baby’s stepfather, Evan. He smiled his thanks and gratitude with that boyish grin that charmed everyone at first. The officer smiled back, happy to be the hero, happy to have avoided a tragic situation. All’s well that ends well.

Cara continued to cry—she had never stopped—but Evan didn’t take a moment to comfort the infant. Instead he looked around, not at the water but the people. She waited until his gaze got to her and stopped. Only then did he allow the boyish, relieved smile to slide into something else, something more personal and ominous.

If she harbored any doubt of his crime or his intentions, any at all, they disappeared. She knew every thought in his mind as if he spoke them aloud.

He had won. Drew had, very decidedly, lost.

So had she.

Chris was speaking, saying, “Come on, Theresa. We’ve got to get you out of this cold.”

Frank spoke with the bluntness of a close relative. “Your ears are turning red.”

She slipped her arm out of Chris’s grasp and patted her pockets. The microphone pen had disappeared, had probably fallen from her coat during the trip. She hoped the SWAT team didn’t plan on billing her for it. “Frank. When you were listening to our conversation on the boat, was Evan there? Was he standing within earshot?”

“You mean when Drew outlined his getaway plan?”

“Before that. About Evan using the nitrogen to kill Jillian.”

“I don’t know.”

The man in question finally got tired of the stare-off and turned away, watching his step and jiggling the baby in his arms as he left the scene. “It’s
important,
Frank!”

Chris told her, “He was standing about two feet behind Frank when I got there, and I came in just as Drew said that Jillian had died too young, et cetera. You should have waited for me. I could have given you a camera.”

“So he heard me.”

“Come on,” Frank complained. “Let’s get out of this wind. Did he hear you detailing how he murdered his wife? Yes. Which is another reason you’re going to avoid the guy like a hantavirus, right?”

“He’s going to go straight home and destroy it all.” She wrapped her arms around her torso, but she didn’t feel cold. Rage warmed her from the inside.

“Come again?”

“If there is any evidence left, if he didn’t clean Jillian’s fingerprints from the inside of that hood or throw out the sleeping pills he slipped her, he’s going to go do that right now.”

“He could have done that long before now anyway,” Frank pointed out.

“Inside the apartment, yes. But he had no reason to think we’d ever look at the nitrogen hood. He might have missed that. Frank, I need a search warrant.”

“Why do you keep saying that to me—”

“We’ve got to keep him from getting to that outbuilding and—”

“—when you know I can’t do it. You still have no probable cause. Certainly nothing that happened today implicates Evan, only the extremely unstable Drew Fleming. And personally, I’m not convinced that a guy that obsessed wouldn’t eventually get fed up and strike out at the object of his obsession.”

“It wasn’t Drew! It was Evan!” She watched Evan walk away, his back firmly turned on the entire incident, the prize in his arms. A prize worth a million and a half, enough to keep his empire afloat until the income from the new game began to roll in. She started after him. “We have to get that baby away from him
right now
.”

Frank moved forward with her, but held her elbow to keep her from outpacing him. “Don’t be ridiculous. Kovacic doesn’t need the baby dead to get at her money, and any judge would want more than a theory to have her removed.”

Chris, always the diplomat, added, “Besides, he’d be crazy to do anything to the kid now, and from what you’ve been saying, he’s anything but crazy.”

“That’s exactly the argument he would make if it came to trial, that he would never do anything so stupid. Maybe he’ll even say it’s his fault, that he put her to sleep on her stomach or he put her in his own bed and rolled onto her, but he’s had so much trauma lately that he couldn’t sleep and—add in crocodile tears for the media, and it will be a performance worthy of the red carpet. All he has to do is pop her into his easy-bake nitrogen oven and he’s all set. Instant crib death.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Can you keep him busy for a few hours while I look at the factory?”

Frank stopped trying to walk, spun her in a one-quarter turn and grabbed both her arms. “Evan did not kill Paul. Do you understand me?
Evan did not kill Paul
.”

The world seemed to pause. Even the biting wind off the lake seemed to quell itself. “What did you say?”

“I’m saying maybe a vendetta is easier to deal with than grief. I don’t know if you’re right or wrong—maybe Evan is some kind of master criminal—but I know that some fights you win and some you lose, Tess. We lost this one.”

She felt her face begin to crumple, but he would not relent, saying only, “Come on, let’s get in my car. Your ears have turned white.”

Both men tugged at her arms, and her worn shoes slid along the snowy ground. “But—what about Drew?”

“They’re doing all they can,” Chris reminded her, and indeed she heard the distant
wuffwuffwuff
sound of an approaching helicopter.

Evan had almost reached the end of the seawall, ready to step onto the solid ground of Whiskey Island. He turned there, and glanced back. Even at that distance she could feel the slap of his gaze as it found her.

For the first time that day, she began to shiver.

Theresa went home. Half a workday remained, but she didn’t care. Leo could fuss all he wanted, but she couldn’t imagine what she would be able to do at work if she did return. She had failed. Evan had Cara and there was nothing she could do about it.

Her mother plied her with oxtail soup.

Theresa thought, ate, and spoke with the detachment of extreme intoxication but without the corresponding euphoria. “I thought you served chicken soup for colds. Oxtail is for flesh wounds.”