The Truth Seeker (8 page)

Laura is now complaining that Egan doesn’t visit her anymore.

Personally, it feels good to be back at work. We’re coping in our unique ways.”

“The yard will look wonderful when it’s complete.”

“I hope so. It’s a vision in my head at the moment; we’ll see if I can make it appear.”

“It looks like you got an early start.”

“In this business, to A.M. is best; you don’t want to be stuck in traffic with a couple ten-foot white birch trees.” He nodded toward the car. “Heading downtown? There’s construction on the Edens south of Winnetka today.”

“One of the reasons for my early start.”

“You’d best be heading that way then.” He wiped the dirt from his hands on his jeans. “Can I give you a hand back to the car? The ground’s a bit unlevel.”

“I wouldn’t turn one down. The cane makes me feel a bit old before my time.” She walked back with him.

Lisa settled back in the car and introduced her sister. Walter nodded a greeting across to her. A final good-bye, and they pulled back

onto the road. “Has that case closed?” Kate asked.

“Yes.”

“It looks like the nursery does a good job, though I’m surprised to see them in your neighborhood.”

“You should have seen the size of the Nakomi Nursery grounds, they must do business around the entire Chicagoland area. Walter strikes me as a hard-working guy who loves the business he’s in.

Expanding it would be the natural thing to do.”

“For someone you’ve met three times, you’ve got a definite opinion of him.”

“The flowers he sent from his greenhouses were picked on the optimal day to last as long as possible in a vase, and did you notice the patch of yard they were getting ready to sod? Someone took the time and care to leave a twelve-inch patch of grass around a wild violet in an area otherwise stripped and prepped for the sod. I have a feeling that was the work of the boss.” Lisa bet the flower would be taken home and potted at the end of the day. It showed the business was more than just a job.

She reached for her coffee and wondered if she had the endurance for a half day at work. She hoped she did. She was pushing it to return to work this early, but it was the one place she could lose herself and put the accident behind her. She needed her life back.

“Have you thought any more about what we were talking about last night?”

Kate was watching the road. There was nothing offhand about the question even though Kate’s body language was trying to convey that impression.

Kate had been her usual direct self last night, wanting to talk about the Bible passage in John she had been reading. Half the family had become Christians in the last three months—Jennifer, Kate, Marcus—

and it was making for some sincere, heartfelt, but awkward family conversations.

Kate was passionate about her new faith. Excited. Like most new They had all tried to answer her, surprised by her questions and When she had probed to ask why, each said the other perspectives Kate, Jennifer, and Marcus becoming active in a church hadn’t been

Christians, she was trying to convince everyone around her to believe too. Lisa didn’t have to wonder what motivated her actions. Kate cared.

Lisa couldn’t fault her for that. But she wasn’t interested.

In another month the excitement would fade, the subject would get dropped.

In a family with few secrets, there were still some things about her life before Trevor House that Lisa had kept private.

During her years in various foster homes she had attended Lutheran, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches. As a child she had been exposed to religion more than most of them. A typical Sunday school teacher did not expect to get grilled on the various points of theology by a fourth grader.

the depth of what she wanted to know. They had all given good answers based upon what their denominations taught. Lisa’s problem had been that while the answers were similar, they weren’t the same.

were well-meaning but wrong. Trying to end the confusion had only increased it. Even as a child she had hated feeling like she was being humored. And over the years, adults tended to dismiss the confusion as just a fact of life

she had never been able to accept that.

that big a deal before the accident. Lisa had listened and watched the three of them, respecting the change yet keeping her distance from the topic.

Since nearly getting killed, there was a conspiracy ongoing among the three of them to get her to believe too, and she was getting tired of it. About the only one who hadn’t been pushing the subject of religion recently was Quinn. He believed, but it was different when she was with him. The few times the subject of religion had come up it hadn’t felt like she had to be defensive. She frowned slightly at that thought

and forced her attention back to Kate. “No, I can’t say I’ve thought about it.”

“It’s important.”

“I know it’s important to you. And I’m happy that you’ve found something you and Dave can share. But it doesn’t mean I have to share it too.”

“Why are you so absolute in not talking about what the Bible says?”

Lisa didn’t want to have this conversation. She didn’t want to pit herself against Kate, against Marcus

against Jennifer. A conversation with Quinn was one thing, but family

She understood like no one else in the family what it meant to die, to return to dust. The process began when the last breath was taken, and while she had never said as much to Kate, she knew what the Gospels, the first four books in the New Testament, said. Mark and Luke both said Jesus breathed His last; Matthew and John said Jesus gave up His spirit.

Jesus had hung on a cross for hours and died. The Bible said that explicitly. And if that was true, she knew what had happened to Him five minutes later, an hour later, three hours later, a day later. She didn’t know the exact entomology of which flies lived in Palestine, but they would be cousins of those she understood very well from here. She knew the basics of Jerusalem two thousand years ago at the time of Passover: crowds, dust, heat—and flies. There would be no body left to resurrect three days later, not a body recognizable as the man Jesus.

Maybe if the Bible tried to argue He died for a few minutes, even an hour

but days—

Lisa knew from bitter experience that life ended forever with that last breath.

The old memory returned, a sharp stab, coming back in color and texture and terror. Lisa raised a shaky hand to adjust her shirt neckline.

She silently cursed as she tried to shove the memory back into the past and get that floating dead face out of her mind. She was normally so

careful to skirt everything that might brush against the memory, and instead she’d walked herself right into it.

She took deep breaths, slowly calming down. She’d had enough of this conversation. Kate was not one who did subtle, not unless it was on the job where she would willingly make small talk for hours if it was necessary to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to a dangerous situation.

“People don’t rise from the dead,” Lisa replied bluntly, knowing it would end the conversation for now. And just to make sure it stayed ended, she reached down and turned on the radio.

“It’s been abysmal without you around, Lisa.”

Her boss rose to greet her with a welcoming smile. Lisa walked slowly into his office, returning the smile. Ben Wilcott was in his late fifties, had overseen the state crime lab for the last eleven years.

“Thanks, Ben. I almost got caught up on my reading thanks to your contributions—though I think the doctors were a little startled to see copies of the NIJ Journals and FSA Bulletins on the bedside table.”

“I know how hard it is to go cold turkey from work, and I’d like your opinion on those National Institute of Justice proposed protocols.”

“I took notes,” Lisa replied, having anticipated the request. “And the Forensic Science Academy has another seminar scheduled on fiber collection and analysis. I think it would be a good idea to send Kim.”

“I’ll get it arranged. Can I get you something? Coffee? A soft drink?”

She’d worked for him too long not to know when something was coming that she wasn’t going to want to hear. “I’d love something cold.”

He brought her back a cold soda and one for himself, then settled in the chair beside her rather than behind the desk. “Classic looking cane.”

Lisa spun its white ivory handle and burnished mahogany wood.

“Stephen’s contribution.”

“I was surprised the doctors okayed you coming back this soon, even for desk duty.”

She smiled. “They were afraid I meant it when I said I’d go sailing if they insisted I take a vacation. Seriously, I’m looking forward to being back.”

“Gloria was asking about you.”

She sipped at the soda, wondering where this was heading. Ben was walking one of the wooden nickels his granddaughter had given him through his fingers, and he only did that when he was thinking about something during a meeting unrelated to the topic at hand or when he was waiting for the right time to mention some news. “Is Gloria here today? I was surprised not to see her at her desk outside your office.”

“Funding came through to move the police file archives into the new cold storage warehouse. She’s in her element cataloging and organizing the move; making it happen has been her personal crusade.”

“That’s wonderful news. That funding has been held up for, what?

Two years? How’d you ever get it to happen?”

“Actually, that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

She lowered her drink, her smile flickering.

“The new police commissioner wants a reexamination of all unsolved murders over five years old in light of new forensic techniques.

I told him I’d do it

”

“

if you got funding to combine the archives.”

“Exactly.”

She could see a rushing train coming her way. “Ben, one of the lab guys, Peter—”

“I need more than a good technician. You spend a good portion of your days out at the crime scenes, and you’ve worked directly with cops, you can interpret the case notes. You’re on desk duty for the next several weeks anyway, and you know better than anyone what evidence is worth the time to analyze.”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“Anything you need, ask.”

“A vacation is sounding better all the time—”

He laughed and got to his feet. “Thank you, Lisa. I knew I could

“Sorry, it’s done.” He gave her a sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry, it’s not Siberia. And I’ll owe you one when it’s done.”

Bribery still worked. She considered him and wondered how hard she could push it. “A new mass spectrometer?”

“I’ll see what I can work into next year’s budget.”

Whoa. She should have thought larger; that had been a fast yes. He was serious enough about this she might have been able to wrangle another technician slot.

“You’ll do it?”

She rubbed her eyes, hating this proposition with a passion, remembering her last visit to the police archives. The files were in poor shape, only a fraction of the records had been computerized, most cases had to be located from incomplete and fading handwritten indexes. And the older the case, the more disorganized the evidence.

She owed Ben more than one favor, but still

“You’re asking for a miracle. Those cases are cold for a reason.”

count on you.” He offered his hand to help her up.

She accepted, already dreading the next few weeks. She was getting exiled, graciously, but exiled.

“I took the liberty

you’ll need a place to work. There is a lot of material.”

Ben’s executive assistant, Gloria Fraim, pushed open the door to the task force room. Basically, it was one large open room located one floor below the laboratories. It could be configured to suit the needs of the particular situation from a large disaster to a multiagency case.

A series of worktables, a whiteboard, and a light table had been moved in. Metal shelves on rollers lined the inner wall; they were stacked with black boxes two deep. The boxes were worn and sagging,

the writing on the ends barely visible because the black ink had faded.

Lisa rubbed her finger in the dust on one of the box lids. This case hadn’t been worked in years. She scanned the row of boxes. “These are all the cases?”

“Sorry, only about half. We’ve been setting aside the unsolved murder cases as we find them.” Gloria walked over to the other side of the room and pulled the blinds up on the wall of windows, letting in the sunlight. “I asked for you.”

“Did you?” Lisa smiled; she should have guessed. “I don’t know if I should thank you.”

“Before this is over you will,” Gloria promised. “You’ve always enjoyed a challenge. Some of these cases that haven’t been solved will break your heart.”

“What shape are the files in?”

“Photograph film is brittle, paper yellowing. About what I would expect. Stop by the cold storage records room in the next few days and take a look at the entire project. It’s quite impressive. We’re bringing over the archive files in batches, transferring the most vulnerable of the records to CD-ROM, using charcoal to deal with the odor and moisture in the paper files, indexing and computerizing the cases records.”

“Massive doesn’t begin to describe that project.”

“We’ll get it done on time, although I’m afraid you’ll have to deal with the murder cases in their original shape from the police archives.

We’d need to hold them up several weeks to take them through the charcoal process.”

“I’ll talk to Henry about the ventilation and get some air filters in here before I start opening decades worth of history. It won’t be a problem.”

“Is there anything else I can arrange to be brought in for you?”

Lisa looked around the room that would be her home for the next few weeks. It had the essentials: quiet and space. She smiled. “You know me, Gloria. I’m sure I’ll collect things as I need them. I’ve just got a larger office to fill up with my toys.”

They shared a laugh, for they were both pack rats. Gloria a neat “Diane Peller. She’s already begun working on it.”