by Lisa Black
Shelly put out a hand to shake. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’d like an answer as much as me, or Evan.”
I wonder, Theresa thought as she waited by the expired meter for a chance to dart onto East Fourteenth and enter her car. Shelly would like to know the truth about Jillian’s demise, but Theresa wondered if Evan would be more than content to write off his wife as a suicide. Assuming Jerry Graham had nothing to do with Jillian or her death, whose wishes would he side with? His girlfriend’s or his partner’s?
Only one way to find out.
CHAPTER 13
Problem was, she didn’t know where to find Jerry Graham, and knew only one place to look. Theresa pulled out of the parking spot and headed for the freeway instead of the lab. Leo might wonder what had happened to her, but she would think of something to tell him. Quitting time grew nigh anyway.
She crossed over the Cuyahoga River. A Coast Guard tug, black and white with touches of red, thrust itself through the frozen water below. It chopped up the ice to give the ore ships access to the river and begin the year’s shipping season. The wind moaned across her windshield and she wondered how long it would take nature to undo the ship’s work.
The cold had been insidious for the past month. If Evan-or Drew-had taken Jillian, either alive, unconscious, or dead, to the edge of the water, he must have used a car. Carrying a 110-pound weight for a three-mile walk might have been possible, but would have been enormously risky and physically excruciating in such cold weather. Thus a car, one with no outstanding warrants-and he would have been careful to avoid breaking even the most minor traffic rule during the three-mile drive. He should have had Jillian in the trunk, though, just in case he did slide through a stop sign or commit some other faux pas. If a patrol car noticed him, if he got to Edgewater and there were people around, he could always go home or circle around until the coast, literally, cleared.
The risk could be minimized on the trip to and from, then. The real risk came with getting Jillian out of the car and into Edgewater Park.
If Drew had taken Jillian, he would have had to do all this in broad daylight, on Monday morning, after Evan left the apartment. It seemed more likely to have been Evan, who could have brought his wife to Edgewater in the wee hours, then simply lied about the last time he’d seen her. For this exercise, then, Theresa would picture Evan as the killer.
Could Jillian still move under her own power at that point? Oh, good evening, Officer, my wife is a little intoxicated and I thought we’d walk it off…sure, it was the middle of a frigid night, but it probably wouldn’t have been the strangest thing the average patrol officer had ever seen. But if Jillian were already dead or unconscious?
Rush hour had begun to gather on Route 2, and she hit the pedal as brake lights lit up in a chain reaction ahead of her. The car gave a sickening lurch as the tires slid against the icy pavement, but then the truckloads of salt that Ohio routinely dumps on its roadways did their job and she came to a stop with two feet to spare.
Dead, she decided. Jillian would have been dead. Evan would never have left her there unconscious and simply hoped she would freeze to death. That would have been too big a risk.
Theresa pulled into the Edgewater parking lot, completely deserted on the cold afternoon. The wind shoved her hard enough to make her stumble.
A paved walkway extended into the lawn and it crunched under her feet. Old shoe prints in the snow had frozen solid, but a fresh coating of flakes covered them, giving the pavement a lumpy appearance. Would Evan have stayed on the path? She wondered if the park plowed or at least salted the walkways. Even if not, snow on concrete melted faster than snow on grass, so it would have been an easier way to go than striking out over the lawn.
However, by parking in the far corner and cutting over to the small forest, he would have shortened his path considerably. She returned to the parking lot and walked over to the rear of the forested area, chin sunk into her upturned collar, double-gloved hands stuck deep in her pockets.
The expanse of snow-covered earth between the lot and the trees appeared pristine. She took a few steps, marring the surface. Her legs disappeared to more than midcalf. Evan wouldn’t have come this way carrying the 110-pound Jillian. Too easy to fall, and the indentations left by his feet would have lasted too long. The snow might have covered them by now, but he could not count on her body lying undiscovered for five days. It might have been found the next morning, with the tracks still visible. Tracks on the sidewalk would be easier to explain, and might be obliterated by other walkers. She passed two such hearty souls after returning to the sidewalk, young boys bundled to the eyeteeth, their noses red.
She continued toward the water, wondering how dark the wee hours could get there. One light stood where the path from the parking lot intersected with the path along the water. More lights circled the parking lot. She found none near the trees. The white snow would have reflected every photon, but there had been no moon-she’d already checked.
Evan would have been plainly visible to anyone present to see him. This clearly represented the riskiest part of his plan. How could he move Jillian’s body without detection? Was he strong enough to grasp her around the shoulders and carry her along beside him, hoping that no one would get close enough to notice that her feet were dragging on the ground? Or did he have a partner? Had Jerry been on the other side, helping to support Jillian between them?
But her shoes had been awfully clean. Unlike Theresa’s, where lumps of snow picked up from her foray onto the lawn had slid down and melted into her socks.
Had Jillian’s socks had wet spots, where they had frozen to the shoe? How would she be able to tell after they thawed out at the M.E.’s office, and surely snow could have gotten into them while moving the body. Still…why didn’t I pay more attention to this stuff at the time?
Because I didn’t know it would be important.
Surely he didn’t heft her over his shoulder. That would have looked more than suspicious, though it would also have allowed him to move as quickly as possible.
No one appeared to stir on Drew’s houseboat, though she had to squint to see that far. He probably hadn’t come home from work yet. Drew could have killed her on his houseboat, carried her here. Even in daylight there wouldn’t be many visitors to the frozen park, and the trees would hide most of his route from the road. Then he’d have to drive Cara home, for Jillian wouldn’t have left the apartment without her daughter. But Drew seemed barely capable of carting around his own weight, much less a full-grown, unconscious woman.
She reached the spot where Jillian had been and faced, as before, the lake instead of the trees. The breeze slapped her with the smell of dead but frozen fish, and her nostrils stuck together when she breathed in. Damn, she loved the water.
When her cheeks began to tingle from the icy onslaught, she turned into the woods. An obvious dumping ground for Drew, but how would Evan decide on this spot? Had he been here often? Even with all the trooping in and out she had done with Frank and the M.E. staff, no path seemed apparent in the close-knit brush. The blackberry bush caught her ankles once more. Snow covered the ground only sparsely in here, filtered by the thick evergreens above her.
What could tie Evan to this spot? Nothing would be significant regarding Drew, since he lived nearby and had already admitted to having visited the spot several times. But Evan…the fiber from the bush’s thorny branch? Evergreen needles…no, there were evergreens on the carbon company grounds…hell, there were evergreens all over Cleveland. On the other hand, plants had their own DNA, which could be individualized just as in humans or animals. She had no idea how to do it, but surely they could find someone in the United States who could. Pulling out a packet of manila coin envelopes she had thought to stuff into her pocket before leaving the car, she broke tips off the boughs around the crime scene, labeling the envelopes as best she could.
She collected a few dead oak leaves from the base of the tree where Jillian’s body had sat as well. Why n
ot? If she were grasping at straws, might as well grasp at all of them.
Okay, what else? Dirt. Dirt could be individualized to a particular place, depending on its composition. Theresa had once attended a seminar given by a cute Canadian Mountie about soil analysis. Unfortunately for her, the old, simple ways to analyze soil, such as gradient density, had been largely discredited, and the lab lacked a scanning electron microscope or an energy dispersive X-ray to use for more sophisticated tests. She still liked to collect soil, however, to check to see if there were anything in it that could be useful-fibers, paint flakes, etc. If that didn’t pan out, and if she got desperate enough, at least she would have an excuse to call the cute Canadian Mountie.
The frozen earth did not want to give up its surface. She had to kick at it for a while to dislodge a relatively snow-free clump of dirt. She doubled-wrapped that, since surely the moisture within it would start to seep through the envelope once it thawed.
Moisture. Water. Diatoms.
Diatoms were a type of plankton, usually one-celled, with intricate and beautiful cell walls made of silica. They were found in both fresh and salt water, and Lake Erie, microscopically speaking, was choked with them. If she could find diatoms on Evan, his clothes, shoes, maybe even his car tires, it would prove…that he’d been near the water lately, which, in Cleveland, was not hard to accomplish. The man lived in freakin’ Lakewood.
Still…she collected a sample from the parking lot as well. The asphalt, as nearly as she could tell underneath the snow, had been there for years, with several dirt-encrusted areas of cracks and potholes.
Out of ideas, she dove into her car and turned the key. As the engine warmed, she called her cousin and asked if he could get Evan’s and/or Jillian’s financial information from Griffin Investments.
Silence on the other end of the line, or the digital satellite transmission, or whatever. “Why don’t we just bug his apartment while we’re at it?”
“Okay.”
“I was kidding, Tess.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Okay, then. No. With what little you’ve got so far, I will not be able to get a subpoena for financials.”
“What about his car? Can I get a search warrant for Evan’s car? He had to use it to transport the body.”
“And you have probable cause to support that?”
She threw the car into gear and backed up, sliding across several unoccupied parking spaces.
“Do you even have probable cause yet to show she was murdered?” he pressed.
“Okay, what about the outside of the car? If it’s parked in a public place, and I collect something off the tires, say…would that be admissible?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t think so.” She let him mull it over for a moment. “Actually, I’m not one hundred percent positive about that, but I’m pretty sure it won’t be. What would you be looking for, anyway?”
“Diatoms. They’re microscopic algae found in-”
“I know what diatoms are. You think he might have picked them up at Edgewater Park? Okay, I’ll check, but unless you hear from me you stay away from him, his car, his factory, everything, got it?”
She approached the intersection of Madison and West 117th. Lights shone in the windows of the second-floor apartment. “Um, good idea. Thanks, Frank.”
Her nonchalant tone never had fooled him. “Tess-”
“Have to go.” She flipped the phone shut and pulled past the iron gates.
A lone car sat in the parking lot at the old carbon company, slowly collecting flakes of snow across its roof and windshield-a Dodge K car that she would have thought couldn’t travel another ten feet, and not the sort of thing two breaking-out young designers would drive.
The door to the lobby of the ornate office/apartment building opened easily. Evan either did not worry about crime or heating bills or found security too cumbersome. She headed for the stairs, feeling no enthusiasm for the shuddering elevator in a building this empty. The door to the lobby clanged shut behind her. The stairway, however, stretched upward, with only the dusky light from unclean windows and oppressive silence.
It did release her into the second-floor hallway, where someone had repaired the gouge in the plaster next to the door of apartment 212. She knocked. Still quiet, then a shuffling sound as if something large were approaching on the other side. The speck of light through the peephole darkened as the something checked her out.
The door swung open, and the woman inside, though portly, was not half as large as her tread made her sound. She had accumulated enough years to be considered middle-aged and, to judge from the perfection of each burnished curl, seemed to have spent half of them doing her hair. She held an oval of baby blanket in her arms, from which protruded two tiny fists. “Hello. Looking for Evan?”
“Jerry, actually.”
“Doesn’t matter, honey, they’re both out in the barns. Can you find them, or do you want me to call and have him come here?”
Over her shoulder, Theresa scanned the living room, now as tidy as the baby’s room had been. “I’ll find them. How is Cara doing?”
The woman smiled all the wider and turned her bundle outward so that Theresa could see the round face and impossibly huge blue eyes. “She’s great, poor little tyke. Eats like a linebacker.”
Theresa did not let the opportunity go by. “Did you work for the Kovacics’ before Jillian’s death?”
“No. I sat for them a couple of times, but that was it. I don’t think they had anyone on a regular basis.”
“How did Jillian seem to you, just before she died?”
The woman began to rock Cara with an agitated motion, yet her answer promptly tumbled out. “She seemed fine to me, but you can never tell, can you? Though I only knew her to say hello and good-bye to. It’s Evan I’ve known since he was a little boy. I lived next door and his mother and I would get to talking.”
“It’s kind of him to adopt Cara now, since he’s not her real father.” She had to make herself say it, accompanying her words with as close to a genuine smile as she could muster, aware that Evan’s friends and family might not be privy to that detail. But the nanny merely agreed, saying that Evan had always tried to help others, even as a child.
“Did he play video games back then?”
The rocking slowed to a smoother pace. “I don’t think they had too much in the way of games, but he had plenty of fun taking things apart-alarm clocks, the blender-I remember that. His mother couldn’t keep any mechanical device intact, so she’d give him jobs. A device to keep squirrels out of the bird feeder. He made me a little puller thing to help me start my push mower. When he was twelve years old he installed an electric eye to let his mother know when his baby sister got out of her crib. Then there was the gate closer.”
“Gate-?”
A low whine sounded from within the apartment. “That’s my tea. Could you hold her a second?”
Theresa found the baby thrust into her arms, the pink blanket swathing a tiny human in pink flannel pajamas, with miniature hands feeling the air. Cara did not protest at the change in her view, merely studied this new face with solemn detachment. Did she have any inkling at all of how much of her world had changed this week, and what it would mean for the rest of her life? Of course not, and yet…her eyes, so resigned…
The sitter fixed her cup while Theresa proffered a finger for Cara to grasp, feeling that inevitable melting sensation when the baby did. “He and his brother were always forgetting to latch the gate that led out of their backyard and their dachshund would get out, so, a typical male, instead of remembering to stop and latch the gate, he tried to invent a mechanism that would shut it automatically.”
She sipped tea and continued, “Problem was, it worked too well. It snapped shut with such force that it cut the poor dog in half.”
“What?” Theresa straightened so suddenly that she ripped her finger from the baby’s grip and Cara frowned.
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��Well, crushed it anyway. Poor Evan. He must have felt awful. His brother started screaming, and I remember rushing outside to see what on earth was the matter. There was Evan, wiping the blood off the mechanism so he could adjust it. I made him bury the dog first. His brother finally calmed down some then.”
Cara let out a small cry as Theresa’s arms tightened around her.
“Oh, there she goes. Probably filled her diaper again.”
“Did they move after that?”
“Oh, heavens no. They lived there until the kids were long gone and then they retired to Florida. Never got another dog, though, even though he nagged his mother for one something awful. At first I thought he wanted to make his brother feel better-it was sort of the older boy’s dog, see-but he told me he wanted to make sure his machinery worked right. He couldn’t test it right without a dog, he said, and I told him that’s ridiculous, just push on the stupid thing, but you know boys, once they get something in their heads…here, I’ll take her back, she’s deciding to be fussy. There, there, baby. Nothing to cry about here. Would you like a cup, dear? It’s so cold out.”
“No, thank you, I’d better be going. I-I hope everything goes well with Cara.”
“Oh, sure. There’s nothing wrong with this little tyke.” She rocked the infant with a swooping motion as she closed the door behind Theresa with a quick good-bye.
The hallway had grown darker in the meantime, or perhaps it only seemed so, to keep pace with her thoughts.
Every child loses a pet more or less tragically. It didn’t mean anything.
But why did she say Evan must have felt terrible? She came upon the incident seconds after it had occurred. Wouldn’t you say “Evan felt terrible”?
Unless he clearly hadn’t, more focused on perfecting his invention than on the death of the dog. Just as now he was more focused on marketing his virtual-reality sphere than on the death of his young wife.
It didn’t mean anything.