Evidence of Murder (36 page)

“Hey!” she heard Jerry say, but not because he realized her treachery. More likely he had found the end of the rubber hose that ran from the second nitrogen tank to the manufacturing hood. She had sliced through it upon her arrival.

“It’s a camera,” Evan said, and she heard a crashing sound that made her wince. Leo would make her pay for that Canon, and they didn’t come cheap.

Then she turned and walked to the entrance. Cara had begun to fuss, but quieted when Theresa removed her from the gym bag and warmed the infant against her shoulder. Behind her, the chain link rattled with fury.

She turned. Evan pulled at the fence as if he could rip it down with his bare hands. He couldn’t, of course; it had stood thus since before he was born. She watched for a moment to see if they might find some way out she hadn’t anticipated, but they didn’t. The fencing extended thirty feet upward, to the catwalk, and ended in a ceiling of more mesh.

Theresa pulled her cell phone out of her sock and called Frank. He asked rather more questions than she considered necessary but eventually assured her that both the Lakewood and Cleveland police would be there in five.

Her two prisoners were surprisingly quiet. Evan stared at her as if still blinded by the camera’s flash. She moved to the center of the floor so she would not have to shout, but stayed far enough away to have a head start. Just in case.

“The cops will arrive in a few minutes,” she told them.

“How—? How did you—?”

She patted the baby’s back. “It’s like this—you remember how on the second level of the castle you find out you have to have the silver ax and so you go all the way through the first level again looking for it before you finally ask the dwarf and find out the silver ax is in the second-level dining room all along, behind the queen’s portrait?”

He stared.

“I decided to plant my weapons in advance.”

“And take out the nitrogen,” Jerry muttered.

“Yeah, that too. What’s ironic, Evan, is that you might have killed me anyway by turning on the vacuum and sucking out the oxygen. But once Jerry opened the regulator to what should have been your murder weapon, I became supplied with all the clean air I needed.” She didn’t add that she had not counted on Jerry being there, and if one of them had stayed with her while the other investigated the camera flashes, she might now be dead. Of course, if Jerry had not proved as murderous as his partner, the camera diversion would not have been necessary.

“Lucky for me I can fake dazed and helpless. Jillian really was helpless when you put sleeping pills in, what, her dinner? Did she pass out or just get sleepy enough to go to bed? Then you redressed her, neglecting to tuck her polo shirt into her jeans, underneath the sweatshirt—which, by the way, is how most women dress themselves in cold weather. Then you brought her out here. What did you do, lower the oxygen levels until she couldn’t have regained consciousness if she wanted to, then left her alive long enough for the pills to metabolize and indicate a lower dose? I think that’s what the jury will find most heinous, how you let her lie in there for hours, allowing her blood chemistry to destroy the evidence. Hours during which you could have changed your mind. What did you do? Watch TV? Play Minesweeper?”

“Jillian was a whore! Nobody cared about her! Not even you—I saw it on your face when you first came to the apartment. You were there, what, five minutes?”

Theresa nodded, accepting her culpability in the previous events.

“I hadn’t gotten rid of anything yet. I hadn’t washed the snowboard bag or thrown out the towels I used to wrap her arms—”

She interrupted. “Why? So that the rubber bands wouldn’t leave bruises?”

“Or the sleeping pills. I left them right in the medicine cabinet, hiding in plain sight. But you never looked.”

What she had said before remained true, that none of these things would have seemed suspicious even if she had noticed them, not without the additional information from Jillian’s body. But, as before, this did not comfort her. “No. I didn’t.”

“Evan—” Jerry Graham said.

“Shut up. She still can’t prove it. Let the cops show up. This woman’s deranged and traumatized, and it’s our word against hers—and there are two of us. Just
shut up
.”

Theresa shifted Cara to her other shoulder, catching the distant wail of a police car siren. “No, there’s the video too.”

This did not cow Evan, it merely confused him. “What?”

“Your surveillance tape. You have two cameras mounted in the corners of this building. Your assault on me has been caught by electric eye. Your own electric eye.”

“Good luck. Those files are password protected.”

“They’re also transmitted by remote. Running wires in this ancient building would have been too difficult, wouldn’t it? Do you know—well, I’m sure you do, given what you do for a living—that wireless video can be intercepted by another router? I borrowed one from a friend who uses it for hostage situations. Of course I told him I needed it to tape my daughter’s school talent show tonight without paying forty dollars to the PTA. I also had to promise to have dinner with him, but that’s another story.”

“What are you
talking
about?” Graham complained. He had his hands on his knees, slightly bent over from the waist, as if he were about to throw up.

“Ever sit in your backyard with your laptop and use your neighbor’s expensive wireless DSL? I did something similar, I have to confess. Your surveillance video is showing up on the laptop in my car, and being recorded by same.”

“Really,” Evan said, displaying a ghost of his trademark smirk. “Are you sure about that?”

“I saw this interior plain as day before I scaled your fence.”

He nodded. “Not bad. Unfortunately for you I turned the cameras off before I came out here. You have no video. You have no proof.”

Theresa nodded and patted the baby’s bottom. “That was probably wise of you, given what you had in mind. I had a bad feeling you might. After all, Captain Alastair shoots a spear into the raven guarding the east hallway to keep him from squawking while he plants the dynamite in the rain barrel. Same concept.”

Evan’s smirk began, reluctantly, to recede. “So—”

“So I installed a backup. It’s up there.” She swung one arm wide, pointing to the corner of the building behind her. If they looked closely, they would see the small camera taped to the catwalk railing. The police car siren sounded close enough to be in the parking lot. In fact, it sounded close enough for the car to come through the wall any moment now. “I had to borrow that from my friend too. I hope that doesn’t add a lunch or something.”

“Another camera,” Evan said quietly, as if to himself.

“Plus, mine is better. It has sound as well as video.”

Jerry’s legs gave out and he sank in slow motion to the floor. Evan, on the other hand, straightened up.

“I learned from you, Evan. Think of every possibility and plan for it. Take risks when they’re necessary”—Theresa shifted the baby to her arms, feeling her own face crack in a smile at seeing the tiny girl’s wide eyes and rosebud lips—“and they’re worth it. You do that in your game. You did that in your murder. You really made only one mistake.”

As the door burst open behind her, letting in the frozen air and the sound of running feet, Evan asked, “And what was that?”

She told him, “You pissed me off.”

She slipped into the thinly cushioned seat next to her mother just as the lights in the auditorium dimmed after the intermission.

“You didn’t miss her. There are four acts before her and her friends.”

“Good.”

Agnes turned, studied her daughter’s face in the illumination of the stage floodlights. “You look flushed.”

“I ran from the parking lot.”

“Uh-huh. But you’re okay?” The curtain opened, revealing two boys with acoustic guitars.

“I’m great,” she assured her mother.

The woman in front of them turned around, but not to admonish the chatting. “Hi, Theresa. Haven’t seen you since—geesh, I think it was the science fair.”

“I’ve been around.”

The boys burst into a scratchy rendition of a country-western classic. One of their parents, several rows over, did not want to wait for the final chord and began to clap. Theresa settled back into her seat and listened to the boys sing about regret. She would have liked to close her eyes and tune out for a while, but who knew, Rachael might date one of these kids in the next year or two, so she’d better pay attention.

Thank you, Jillian, for teaching me that the price of carelessness might be too high.

And that every woman is a princess in someone’s eyes.

Chris Cavanaugh straightened up from the railing outside the Pier W restaurant and glanced a bit nervously at the fishy, slushy water thirty feet below. A biting wind sent his hair awry, but of course this slight imperfection only increased his charm. “Can we go in now? It’s freezing out here.”

“No, it’s not. It’s breaking up,” Theresa told him.

“The water?”

“The winter.”

“How do you figure that? My ears are about to snap off and it’s snowing even as we speak.”

Straining her eyes to the east she could see the barest tip of the Edgewater Marina, where she and Drew had skimmed along the ice, and resisted the urge to shiver from more than the cold. She brushed off the flakes now littering her nose, both literally and figuratively. “Yeah, but your nostrils don’t stick together when you breathe in anymore. Come on, you’re a Cleveland boy. You can’t feel that?”

“I’m past the point of feeling much of anything.”

“You’re kind of wimpy for a special response team guy, you know that?”

“Hey!”

“You got cool gadgets, though, I’ll give you that.”

“Glad the camera and the router could help you out.”

She nodded, still facing the wind. “I might not have needed them if I had been a little more thorough at the start. By the time I finally got suspicious, Evan had already begun destroying the evidence. He left the duffel bag in a Dumpster downtown, Jerry told us. When we searched the apartment the second time, he had flushed the sleeping pills and melted the bottle in the microwave. I should have kept my mouth shut in Stone’s office. I kept tipping him off.”

“Well, you got him. But hey”—Chris turned her to face him—“don’t do that again. Not like that. I would never have lent you that equipment if I had thought you were going to—it could so easily have—”

“Ended badly.”

He tilted her chin up to face him, thought better of it, and settled for grasping her shoulders. “Some risks aren’t worth taking.”

“Come inside. Then see if you still feel the same way.”

“Finally!”

“I hope you don’t mind,” she told him as they bustled into the warm restaurant. “I invited someone else to join us.”

He saw them instantly. “Let me guess.”

Nicholas Cannon sat at a corner table, holding Cara in his arms. The baby’s fists pumped through the air above her, encircling and wrinkling what appeared to be an expensive silk tie, but the man didn’t seem to care. A younger couple sat with him, leaning in from each side, apparently egging the infant on.

Theresa explained before they made their way to the table. “Cannon had no idea Cara was his daughter. Jillian had broken off their affair before she knew she was pregnant, and when he saw her again, she had married. He never saw the baby, never asked her age, and just assumed she belonged to Evan.”

“Who’s that with him?”

“His son and daughter-in-law. As it turns out, they’ve been trying to conceive for years and have been on a waiting list for an adoption for the past two. Since Nicholas is Cara’s next of kin, he can allow them to legally adopt her. No waiting, no fostering.”

Chris stepped aside to let a waitress by and watched the family for a moment. “He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to give her up. Well, shall we?”

He held out an elbow, and she slipped her arm through it. “Sure. Oh, by the way—”

“What?”

“You’re buying, right?”

First of all, I have to thank Medical Examiner’s Investigator Brett Harding, who gave me the method of murder while chatting over an autopsy one day.

Dr. Andrew Wolfe, who helped me, as before, to get the exact chemistry right. My nephew, Brian, who gave me some hints about the murky world of venture capital. Another nephew, Alex, who is my resident reference on video games. Sharon Wildwind, who is both a critique partner and one of my medical references. Leslie Budewitz, for legal information. And my husband, Russ, a walking reference library of all things mechanical and historical.

And, of course, I’d like to thank my personal miracle worker, Elaine Koster, and Stephanie of the Elaine Koster Literary Agency.

American Institute of Physics. “The New Virtual Reality: Human-Interface Engineers Create Virtual-Reality Experience by Letting Users Walk in Rotating Sphere.”
Science Daily,
April 1, 2006, www.sciencedaily.com.

Harding, Brett E., MBA, and Barbara C. Wolf, M.D. “Case Report of Suicide by Inhalation of Nitrogen Gas.”
American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology
29 (2008): 235–37.

Herz, J. C.
Joystick Nation
. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997.

King, Brad, and John Borland.
Dungeons and Dreamers
. New York: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2003.

Spitz, Werner U., MD.
Medicolegal Investigation of Death,
3d ed. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1993.

LISA BLACK
is a latent fingerprint examiner in Florida and a former forensic scientist for the Cleveland coroner’s office. She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and has testified in more than forty-five homicide trials. This is her second Theresa MacLean novel.