by Lisa Black
“No, and I doubt he’ll be able to. He’s not next of kin.”
“Is his name Evan Kovacic?”
The receptionist wrung her hands, though from daily contact Theresa knew that this action came as naturally to the woman as blinking. “No, Drew something. He told me he’s not the husband, but he wants the body, which of course he can’t have, but every time I tell him that, he asks more questions about her death, which of course I wouldn’t answer even if I could. Can you talk to him?”
“Me? I can’t tell him anything either. The autopsy isn’t even-”
“But the phones are ringing off their hooks and this guy just stands there, sniffling, half giving me the creeps, if you know what I mean. I need some help up there. I’ve got too much to do.” She cocked her head as if she could hear the switchboard buzzing, though of course she couldn’t, not without some sort of psychic ability.
“But I-” avoid grieving people, Theresa wanted to say. Though she wondered if the man could shed some light on why Jillian would have left her daughter and sat down in the middle of a frozen forest. She’d feel more comfortable with a finding of suicide if there were some history to back it up.
“Please?” the receptionist added, then piled on more hand-wringing until Theresa relented.
“Good luck,” Don said. “I’m going to stay here and hide some more.”
Theresa folded the jeans over their hanger and shoved the whole clothes rack into the storage room, locking the door. The receptionist waited, bobbing her head in gratitude, and then led the way back to the front lobby. Theresa had to trot to keep up.
The man waiting there could have used another ten pounds and a J. Crew catalog. And a box of Kleenex. Straight brown hair hung past his shoulders. He paced the worn linoleum with fists plunged into the pockets of a jersey jacket, the outline of each finger visible beneath the taut cloth.
“Mr.-?” Theresa prompted.
“Drew Fleming. I’m here to claim Jillian’s body.” He made no move to shake hands and neither did she.
“Jillian’s not ready to be released yet.” She did not tell him that Jillian currently lay on a table in the autopsy suite with her torso flayed open for all to see. “If you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Fleming, are you here on behalf of Evan Kovacic?”
“I wouldn’t cross the street on behalf of Evan Kovacic.” The man shifted from side to side and had difficulty meeting her eyes for more than a glance. She would assume the influence of some drugs, but his words were clear and his pupils weren’t dilated or jumpy. He was not under the influence but crying, lightly and without pause.
“He is Jillian’s husband.”
“The guy she married, yeah, I know that.”
“Then I’m afraid-”
“Because I loved her! Not him! He never loved her. He probably won’t even claim her body.” His eyes welled up, making the blue irises even bluer, and a shudder ran through his body. “I loved her.”
Theresa considered him, balancing the discomfort of conversing with a distraught bereaved with a sudden and intense curiosity about the circumstances of Jillian Perry’s life, as well as her death. It was not Theresa’s job to talk to witnesses, but on the other hand, no rules prohibited same. “If you’d like to come upstairs, Mr. Fleming, there’s a conference room where we can talk.”
He followed her without a word.
Once they were settled in the central conference room, a musty-smelling area furnished in dingy 1950s decor, she asked, “How did you know Jillian was dead?”
“I think I’ve known for four days. Everyone said she was nowhere to be found-”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Her work, Evan-”
“You spoke to her husband?”
“Yeah. He’s in the apartment in the evenings, though I used his cell too.”
“He didn’t mind you calling?”
Drew Fleming seemed surprised by the question. “Why should he? She married him, not me. Anyway, no one knew where Jillian had gone and I knew she’d never just walk off and leave Cara. She was an excellent mother. Even if she’d had some kind of total freak-out and run away, she’d have told me.”
“But how did you find out that we’d found her body?” Theresa persisted.
“I checked in with Vangie at the agency, to see if they’d heard from Jillian, and she told me.”
“How did she know?”
“Evan called them.”
“He called Jillian’s boss? Ex-boss?” In the first few hours after learning his wife was dead? Most people would be too busy with family members and funeral arrangements. But then perhaps they didn’t have much family.
He snorted and gave a hopeless chuckle. “Yeah, but did he call me? No.”
Legal complications could no doubt ensue from questioning a witness without his lawyer or a reading of his rights, except that Theresa was not questioning a witness, she was gathering information about a victim’s history and possible state of mind. Therefore she asked without hesitation, “When did you last see Jillian?”
“Last Friday. I went to visit, she made lunch.”
“Was Evan there?”
“At work. Out in the barns, I guess.”
She left that for a moment, shuffling topics as she’d seen her cousin do. “How did Jillian seem that day?”
A burst of laughter floated up the hallway from the busy records department. Theresa’s stomach rumbled. Fleming seemed to be thinking back, and his eyes grew wet with each memory. “Fine. Cara had been spitting up a lot, Jillian worried about that, but she’d gained another pound and she had just had a checkup. Cara’s perfectly healthy, her doctor said so. She got a new pair of shoes-Jillian did-at DSW and she loved the color, but they rubbed on the back of her ankles, so she planned to take them back. She complained about not having any sunlight for so long, not that she gets that seasonal affective disorder or anything, but the gray skies get to everybody by this time of the year. Does it always smell like that in here?”
“Yes, it does. She didn’t seem upset or worried about anything in particular, then?”
“Just being married to Evan.”
“Why would that upset her?”
“Because he didn’t love her! He just wanted a piece of eye candy to show off to his clients and his friends, none of whom have matured past the age of thirteen. They play games all day, for Pete’s sake.”
“I wouldn’t think a woman with a newborn would be ideal eye candy.”
The man gave her a pitying look, as if sorry for anyone who could be that clueless. “Jillian would be eye candy if she had five newborns, if she were ninety, if she had leprosy.”
Theresa had seen Jillian’s picture, and felt he overstated the case. “You dated Jillian before she met Evan?”
His gaze dropped. His finger traced the fake wood grain on the table. “Not really, no. We were friends. We’ve been friends for four years, since we met at Tri-C.”
The local community college. His occasional lapse into the present tense when referring to Jillian didn’t surprise Theresa. Most people had trouble adjusting immediately after a death.
“Did Evan know you came by to visit his wife?”
“Sure.” Again the surprised tone.
“Jillian told him? And he didn’t mind?”
“Like I said, why should he? She married him, not me.”
Drew Fleming and Evan Kovacic, Theresa thought, were either very, very modern or very, very old-fashioned.
“You’re sure Jillian told him?”
“Yeah, always. Besides, I ran into him on my way out of the building that day.”
Drew showed up for lunch and was still there when Evan came in from work? Or did Evan pop in and out all day? “What happened?”
“Nothing. We said a few words.”
“About Jillian?”
“No, about Polizei.” At her blank look, he added, “His video game. The one that made all the money. He’s coming out with version two in a few weeks.”
&n
bsp; “Polizei?”
“That’s Russian for ‘police,’ I guess. The character is a cop in the future and he takes his team to infiltrate this castle-I think it’s in Romania because there are vampires, and there’s a magic sword…it’s pretty cool.”
“Polizei is a German word.”
“Oh. Whatever. Evan can do games, I’ll say that for him.”
“I understand Evan is not Cara’s father?”
Drew blinked, apparently still lost in Romanian castles. “What? Oh, no, he isn’t.”
She waited for him to answer the obvious question. He didn’t. “Who is?”
“What? I don’t know. She never talked about him.”
“Uh-huh.” The desire to do right by the woman Theresa had initially dismissed began to seem a little silly. Jillian Perry had had one man’s baby, had a less-than-perfect marriage to another, and had a third coming by to let her cry on his shoulder. People had opted out of much less screwed-up lives than hers. Every year more people killed themselves than were killed by others. She started to push off the conference table with both hands. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Fleming, but you will not be able to claim the body, unless Mr. Kovacic decides not to-”
“You’re not listening,” Drew Fleming said flatly. Coldly. The weepiness evaporated from his eyes and they turned to ice in less time than it took her to notice. He enunciated his words, as if for someone not very bright. “I have a pretty plot in Riverside, under a tree, that she can have. Evan will just cremate her-and that will destroy all the evidence.”
Theresa had stopped halfway through the act of rising, her body obeying the instinct to retreat from the odd man, knees half bent in a way that worked her thighs. “Evidence of what?”
He couldn’t maintain the icy control, and the timbre of his voice climbed upward. “Murder! Evan murdered her, of course!”
“What makes you say-”
“Why else would she be here? That’s what you investigate, right? Murders?”
“The medical examiner’s office investigates all deaths, Mr. Fleming, natural deaths, homicides, suicides-”
His hands, on the table, clenched into fists. “He murdered her.”
She tried to speak gently. Fleming seemed to be more tightly wound than could be considered healthy, both for himself and others. “We will know more when all the tests are completed, Mr. Fleming, but it appears that Jillian died of exposure. No one harmed her.”
This did not convince him. In fact, her words did not even seem to penetrate. Fine, straight hair fell in his face as he shook his head. His skin had been white from the cold when he first arrived and hadn’t grown any rosier during his visit, only emphasizing the deep blue irises and red veins in his eyes. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Don’t let him fool you. He fooled her too, at first.”
She worked to hold on to her patience. “Why would Evan Kovacic want to kill his wife, Mr. Fleming?”
Again the stare, the aura of surprise at how little she knew about the life of Jillian Perry, at her seeming incuriosity about a woman who had apparently been the most fascinating woman to ever walk the planet. “You mean you don’t know about the money?”
“What money?”
A touch of color finally pricked his skin, a pinkish hue almost like a faint glow of triumph. “Sit down.”
She sat.
CHAPTER 7
“So get this,” Theresa told Frank while shifting her niece’s one-year-old to her other hip. She had driven directly from work to her cousin’s middle child’s tenth birthday party in Parma, and now stood in an overwarm, overcrowded house with a marauding horde of sugar-crazed children, a passel of widowed aunts, and the harried generation-her generation-caught in between. As long as she ignored the claustrophobic air, the warmth felt good, and her mother beamed to see her at a family function. She had avoided far too many of them in the past nine months, and family was everything to her mother. Everything.
“Jillian’s grandparents left a huge amount of money to her baby, Cara. Like a million and a half huge.”
Frank shoveled another spoonful of potato salad into his mouth despite having made the comment earlier that potato salad was a summer dish and there was something weird about eating it in March. “So Jillian was rich? Then she didn’t marry for the money.”
Theresa’s niece reappeared and collected her son. He took a handful of Theresa’s hair with him, but at least the danger of a spit-up had passed. Theresa began to rethink the glories of a large family gathering. “According to Drew, she’s never drawn on the money. It’s sitting in an account, waiting for Cara. Jillian paid her bills with her salary from Beautiful Girlz. Her parents disowned her, more or less. They didn’t care for her choice of careers, and they certainly didn’t care for her having a baby and not only not marrying the father, but not even telling them who he was.”
Theresa’s daughter, Rachael, chose that moment to dart in for another piece of her grandmother’s cheesecake, and Theresa took the opportunity to add, “As any parent wouldn’t. Something all daughters should keep in mind.”
Rachael just laughed in response and carried her prize off to a corner of the living room, rejoining the daughters of Theresa’s cousins. The girls burst back into conversation. Theresa’s heart gave a contented sigh to see her daughter laughing; perhaps she had managed to keep up enough of a show at home that Rachael’s life, at least, had gotten back to normal. She did wish the kid would eat something other than dessert, like potato salad, though the cheesecake actually had more nutritional value. “But Jillian’s grandparents felt sorry for her and slipped her money now and then. They died, three days apart, two months ago. They left all their assets to Cara.”
“Hmm. Lucky kid.”
“She’s now an orphan.”
“Okay. Poor kid. Very rich poor kid.”
With some difficulty, Theresa turned her back on a plate of brownies. “And now it will be Evan’s. Or will it? He’s not Cara’s father.”
“A man married to the mother is considered the father unless a court rules otherwise,” Frank recited around the potatoes.
“Unless the biological father shows up and sues for custody.”
“Obviously that mystery man hasn’t heard about Cara’s nest egg. Though isn’t it all tied up in trusts or whatever?”
“No. Her grandparents thought Jillian would need the money now, so that Cara wouldn’t starve to death before she reached her majority. They didn’t have much faith in either Jillian’s job or her fiancé, according to Drew. No trusts or mutual funds for them, just a big ole pile of money with no strings attached.” She watched Frank chew thoughtfully, no doubt deciding what he could do with a million and a half.
One of their aunts nudged him out of his daydream before Theresa could, placing a birthday cake festooned with pink-frosting roses among the other dishes. Theresa moved bowls out of the way to make room while the aunt grilled Frank about his latest girlfriend and when they could expect to hear some news. She did not give Theresa the same treatment. The nice thing about being a divorcée in a large Catholic family was that no one encouraged you to remarry. Oh, they had supported her engagement to Paul and planned to attend the wedding. They would be happy for her again if the same situation occurred, but they didn’t actively encourage the idea, an attitude for which she felt only gratitude. She had enough thoughtless coworkers encouraging her to “start dating again.” The thought made her want to gasp for air.
As a bachelor, however, Frank remained fair game.
“What about the phone number in her pocket?” Theresa asked him.
“The main line for some place called Delta Dynamics. They do data processing for trade shows. Don’t ask me what that means, but neither the receptionist nor the manager had ever heard of Jillian Perry.”
“Trade shows. She could have worked one of theirs.”
Frank said, “Yeah, and one of their employees slipped her his number. Maybe Jillian did take on side jobs.”
“Why? S
he obviously didn’t need the money. It could have been for a number of reasons, for that matter-a future contact for Georgie, or even Evan. He’s sponsoring a tech show at the factory tomorrow. I got that off his Web site.” As her aunt lit tiny pastel candles, Theresa asked, “What if Drew tried to get custody of Cara?”
“Applied for guardianship? Why would he do that? Does he want the baby?”
“Probably not. He seemed more interested in Jillian than her child.”
“He’d have to prove that Evan is unfit, or at least that he’d be a better guardian than Evan would.” He sneaked a finger into the frosting before his aunt could slap it away.
“You haven’t heard him discourse on the many ways in which he truly loved Jillian and Evan truly didn’t.”
“He’ll need more than that. This guy sounds like a loony tune.”
“He’s harmless,” Theresa said, but without conviction.
“Jeesh, Tess, how do you figure that? What you’ve described sounds exactly like your classic call-twenty-times-a-day, leave-notes-on-your-car stalker.”
She knew this to be correct, but still felt oddly protective of the weepy man. “Because I dated guys like him. Nerdy, sweet, too shy for their own good. The biggest mistake I made was marrying the one who wasn’t nerdy and shy. I don’t think Drew’s dangerous.”
Frank considered this, since he had met every boy she had ever dated, but still shook his head. “You don’t know that. Obsession can be a very dangerous thing.”
They paused to sing “Happy Birthday,” a chorus of happy and only slightly off-key voices. Theresa stammered through the third line; she had forgotten whose birthday it was, but consoled herself with the thought that the lack of oxygen in the room had starved her brain cells.
The birthday girl ripped into the wrapping paper like a human chain saw. Theresa’s aunt returned to cut the cake. Theresa didn’t envy her the job of dividing the swirls of colored frosting among close to fifteen panting children with strong views on the particular decoration to which they were entitled. She turned again to Frank. “Yes, obsession can turn violent. But so can greed, and the idea of that much money makes me look at Jillian’s marriage in a new light. What happened when you told Evan?”