Evidence of Murder

by Lisa Black

  Theresa stammered, “I see your point.”

  “I could say to myself, Jillian’s an adult now, she has to make her own decisions, and of course that’s true. But I’d be saying it to absolve myself of responsibility. I see others doing the same thing, with kids younger and younger.”

  It took this woman thirty seconds to confess to a parent’s thorniest worry, Theresa thought. She wants to talk. She particularly wants to talk about Jillian. “What was Jillian like as a girl?”

  An awfully broad question for a medical examiner’s investigation, but Barbara couldn’t be expected to know typical queries from the atypical. Nor did she seem to care. “Sweet. They were both so easy, she and her brother. That’s why it jolted us so when she dropped out of school to be a model. She had always planned to be a teacher, and all of a sudden, after two years of college…at first I thought she’d gotten lazy, even though she never had been before. She had always worked hard for her grades. She’d had a job at the Dairy Queen since the tenth grade. Jillian was never lazy. She wanted to be a model.”

  “It sounds like a fun job,” Theresa put in when the woman’s voice faded.

  “For how long, though? She needed to be able to make a living, be independent. I always thought it had to do with breaking off her engagement to Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy?”

  “They dated through high school and into college. A nice boy. Even Andrew liked him, felt he would take sufficiently good care of his little princess.”

  “Is that what your husband called Jillian?”

  “Always.” A gentle smile showed, in no uncertain terms, the origin of Jillian’s looks. “Both our kids, the prince and princess. Just a family joke-it’s not that they were spoiled. Our son wasn’t interested in being royalty, only in running and playing ball and getting a car. But Jillian, she would play dress-up in my old clothes and fashion tiaras for herself out of pipe cleaners and costume jewelry. Every day in the summer she’d be in the backyard with a court of stuffed animals and dolls.”

  She seemed in danger of getting lost in the memory, so Theresa said, “My daughter did the same thing after I brought home a tape of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.” She didn’t add that Rachael had tired of the pomp and circumstance in a week, after figuring out you couldn’t ride a bike in a ball gown.

  “My husband finally built her a castle. It was basically just a plywood crate and she was nearly ten, barely enough room to turn around in, but Andrew put a little turret at the top and painted it as best he could. She’d spend hours in there, winter and summer. I’d go out and check on her, make sure she didn’t faint from heatstroke or freeze to-” She stopped.

  Theresa didn’t press the image. “Jillian and her father were close?”

  “We both were,” the woman said firmly, nipping that idea in the bud. Problem girls often had daddy issues, and sexually precocious behavior often sprang from molestation at a young age. But so many years with her steady, the “nice boy” Jeremy, did not mesh with that profile.

  “What about her brother?”

  “The typical bickering when they were kids, but otherwise fine.”

  “What about as adults? I understand he lives out of state?”

  “New Mexico. I don’t know if they spoke much, but I doubt it. He’s busy with his own family now…and he and his father have too much conflict. They love each other, but they’re too alike.”

  So you’ve lost both your children because of your husband. Theresa tried to think of a tactful way to ask for her reaction to that. “Did Jillian say why she broke up with Jeremy?”

  “She felt disappointed in him. She didn’t get more specific than that, so I don’t know what she meant, but I assume the relationship went on too long. He began to take her for granted; she began to think she had settled down too soon and was probably right. I wasn’t concerned about Jeremy. If she wanted to broaden her horizons, I thought that was a good idea. Dropping out of college to become a model, that wasn’t.”

  “Was she living at home?”

  “No, she had her own place by then. That’s why it took us almost a year to figure out that modeling wasn’t paying her bills. She didn’t get jobs-she had a pretty face but her personality…Jillian glowed in person, but the camera couldn’t catch that.”

  Theresa nodded. She realized her thighs were aching from pressing her knees together, trying not to fidget or do anything to break Barbara’s train of words. The man in the office had hung up the phone and Theresa hoped he would not come out and interrupt them. “Being beautiful and being photogenic are two different things.”

  “I think that’s how she got into the live modeling. I don’t know how she wound up with that-man-downtown. Then one of our friends saw her out with a group of businessmen and told Andrew. He called that man…I don’t know what he said, but it nearly killed Andrew. One day I had a daughter.” She sighed. “The next, I didn’t.”

  “Your husband disowned her?”

  The woman waved her hand at the idea. “We’re not the Hiltons. There wasn’t much to disown her from except us. He stopped speaking to her, which was a million times worse. Jillian thought the world rose and set on her father.”

  “But she wouldn’t quit the agency?”

  “No.” Barbara crossed her arms over the pink knit top, as if protecting her midsection against a new onslaught of pain. “I don’t understand. I never understood.”

  “Perhaps she wanted to, er, enjoy her youth after being in a steady relationship all those years.”

  “My daughter wasn’t a slut, Mrs.-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “MacLean.”

  “My daughter was a romantic. That was the problem all along. She had no realistic sense of how the world worked. She expected a man to come along and build her a castle.”

  “Evan.”

  This made Barbara look at her, the blue eyes startling in their clarity. “Was my daughter happy?”

  She should have been. She’d found a man to replace her father, in charge, controlling, a man who designed castles and took her to live in one with her very own little princess at her side. She should have been very happy. “I don’t know, Mrs. Perry. She might have been.”

  “Then why is she dead?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Barbara.” The office man had materialized next to them and Theresa gave a little start. “Here’s the order for that wardrobe. They’ll be in this afternoon.”

  She took the folder he held out. Her hand trembled.

  He did not appear to notice the wet eyes or quavering voice. Perhaps he had poor eyesight or an utter lack of empathy. “Be sure it’s wrapped properly. We don’t want another disaster like the Bennings’ china cabinet.”

  “No, of course.”

  When he had returned to his desk, Theresa asked, “Did Jillian have any health problems?”

  Barbara seemed a bit relieved to have a specific, answerable question to tackle. “She was born with a hole in her heart, where the wall didn’t close up.”

  “A septal defect? Between the two ventricles?”

  “Yes. It had healed by the time she started school. It didn’t hold her back from any activities, but Jillian didn’t care for sports anyway. She had chicken pox at ten, and mono her first year in college. Other than that she was hardly ever sick.”

  “Any allergies?”

  She shuddered. “Shellfish. I let her try my crab at a restaurant once, on her first day of second grade. She turned blue and we had to go to the emergency room. She scared me to death, and completely terrified her father.”

  There had been no sign of anaphylactic shock in the dead woman. “Anything else you can think of, something that might have affected her physical condition?”

  “I thought Jillian froze to death. Do you think it could have been natural causes?” The stillness in her face eased, and her spine straightened just a millimeter in cautious hope. “Do you think some physical ailment could have affected her mind? Is
that why she walked into the woods and froze to death?”

  “I’m just gathering information, Mrs. Perry-”

  “Maybe she didn’t know what she was doing. Because I don’t believe she would kill herself, I really don’t. Only if she had taken a lot of drugs, but Jillian hardly took aspirin, and you didn’t find any drugs in her system, did you, or you wouldn’t be asking all these questions. Maybe it was a brain tumor?”

  “We would have found that during the autopsy.” It pained Theresa to dampen Barbara Perry’s hope that her daughter had not chosen to end her own life. Some bizarre biochemical reaction would be preferable. A brain tumor would be preferable.

  Murder, even, would be preferable.

  “I don’t know exactly how Jillian died, Mrs. Perry. That’s why I’m trying to find out.”

  “I know there’s some explanation. You don’t know how frustrating it is, to know that there must be an answer out there but without any means of finding it.” For the first time her fingers unclenched. “I have to wait for someone like you to find out for me.”

  Great. First Drew and now Jillian’s mother, both counting on her to uncover the truth. But only their specified truths. Drew wanted to know that Evan murdered Jillian and Barbara wanted to know that her daughter had found happiness before dying of an unexpected and unpreventable physical disorder.

  Theresa wanted to ensure Cara a long and healthy childhood.

  Tall orders. Tall, and perhaps mutually exclusive. Even for Wonder Woman.

  “Your granddaughter Cara-do you know who her father is?”

  The brief reprieve for Barbara Perry’s emotional health had come to an end. Her shoulders sank so, she could be accused of bad posture. “A soldier, apparently. He died in Iraq.”

  Theresa had been waiting for an “I don’t know.”

  “Really?”

  The woman shrugged. “She said so after I asked for the fifteenth time. I expect she planned to tell Cara that someday.”

  The salesgirl, Carlotta, approached the sitting area. “Barbara?”

  “I’ll be done here in a minute.”

  “That couple I have are interested in a canopy bed. Do you want to show them that one from the estate sale-”

  “Herd them over to it, slowly. Be sure to show them the lamps. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The girl trotted away. Barbara smoothed her skirt as if preparing to stand, but Theresa pressed on. “You don’t think it was the truth? Because whoever he is, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about Cara’s money, or you’d think he would have reappeared in a hurry.”

  “Andrew said if the soldier story was true, Jillian wouldn’t have kept it a secret. She would have been able to tell us something about him, what he did, where he was from. A name, at least.”

  “Jillian invented him to make everyone around her feel better?”

  “She never could lie. She was terrible at it.”

  “She didn’t say anything else about him?”

  “It’s hard-” Barbara took a deep breath. “But I have to conclude that she didn’t tell us anything about him because she didn’t know anything about him. He was a one-night stand. Or a client.”

  Or a pimp.

  Or what she did know was so bad that Jillian gave up child support in order to stay away from him. Could that have gotten her killed? Some secret from her past that had nothing to do with Evan, or Cara’s money?

  In any event…Theresa chose her words carefully. “Evan has had to apply to the courts for guardianship of Cara since he was not married to Jillian at the time of Cara’s birth and makes no claim to be her parent.”

  Barbara responded with what seemed to be equal caution. “Yes?”

  She was probably going to get sued anyway, so she might as well do what she had been accused of. “You and Mr. Perry are the baby’s next of kin.”

  “We can’t take her.”

  “Of course that would be a huge decision-”

  Barbara didn’t ask why she’d brought it up, or seem to take any offense at the topic. “I know she’s our granddaughter, and no matter what, I’ll love her. But we can’t go back to raising a child. My husband wants to take early retirement next year and the income will be fixed.” Now she did stand, dismissing the idea with a stilted wave. “I know what you’re going to say, that Cara comes with her own funding, but it’s not the money.”

  “About Cara’s account…was your husband angry when Jillian’s grandparents left the money to her?”

  The implications of this question went right over Barbara’s head. “No, that’s what I mean-it’s not the money, it’s the time. When my husband retires we’ll finally have time for ourselves, maybe travel while we’re still young enough to keep up with a group. I know that sounds horribly selfish.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “But I did my job. I just can’t do it over again. Even with all the money and help in the world-” Her eyes grew wet. “I just can’t. I’m too old, and I’m too tired.”

  “I understand perfectly. Thank you for your time, and again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Out in the parking lot, Theresa waited for the engine to warm up. A couple strolled on the sidewalk in front of her, a young man and woman, each carrying a matching Tiffany glass lamp. They must have been happy with the purchase; they stopped to congratulate each other with a kiss.

  She hadn’t thought of Paul all morning, and, as if the feelings had accumulated in the meantime, like held mail, longing and abject pain rushed through her now. Her stomach had begun to sink with her visit to Stone’s office and continued through the up-close-and-personal visit with Barbara Perry and her loss. Now it did its best to shrink into her spine, while her lungs froze up in that limbo that comes before a sob.

  Oh, Paul.

  Was life ever going to seem good again?

  Stop. Focus. Concentrate on the work. Did I learn anything from the interview? Only that Jillian had been healthy, and her princess Cara would not be rescued from the castle’s turret by her grandparents.

  Not that Theresa found that difficult to understand. Would I want to raise Rachael’s kids? Hell, no.

  Though it would be different if Rachael’s child lay beneath a suspended sword, ready to fall from its thread the moment Evan became her official next of kin. But of course she couldn’t tell Barbara Perry that, because she couldn’t prove it.

  Yet.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Thank you for seeing me.” Theresa gathered her purse and her coat and stood up with as much grace as she could muster carrying these heavy accoutrements. Normally grace did not register on her list of priorities, but something about the muted colors and pristine leather of the firm’s waiting room prompted her to awaken her inner Emily Post. The offices of the venture capital firm Cannon, Jennings, and Chang made Barbara’s antiques shop look like a garage sale.

  Mr. Cannon led her through the well-appointed hallways to his office, which bulged with enough expensive good taste to cap off the tour. She had stopped noticing, however, and slid into a suede armchair with barely a glance around. “If you remember from the tech show, Mr. Cannon-”

  “Nick.”

  “Um, Nick. I work for the medical examiner’s office-”

  “Our local CSI. Yes, I remember. I hope you’re here to take me up on my lunch invitation, though I can’t do it today. I have a noontime meeting at John Q’s with my two partners and a guy who’s going to revolutionize the data services field. Or so he says. I would much rather have lunch with y-”

  “No.” Her stomach had had a bad day so far, and the idea of eating out with a man who was not Paul finished it off. “Thank you, but I will need only a few minutes of your time. We’re still looking into Jillian Kovacic’s death, trying to figure out why it happened.”

  If disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm for his company, he hid it well. He also wore a wedding ring on his left hand, which made her go hmm. But he nodded with no change of expression and she went on. “Everyo
ne who knows Jillian is at a loss to explain how she wound up in those woods. I’d like to know if there were any financial worries in her life. I’m sure your arrangements with Kovacic Industries are confidential-”

  “Not necessarily. We keep fairly open books here, once a deal is made. Secrecy produces things like the Enron disaster. Cannon, Jennings, and Chang does not believe in secrecy.”

  She stifled the urge to smile at this prim announcement. “At the tech show you told me that you finance Evan’s work. I understand he’s been quite successful.”

  “Enormously.”

  “So he and Jillian should have plenty of money.”

  The man chuckled and leaned back. “Successful doesn’t always mean plenty of money. His games are selling like hotcakes. We expect part two to sell equally as well, which is why we lent him the start-up money to produce it. We’re sort of the meantime people.”

  She lifted her eyebrows, and that gave him all the encouragement he needed to go on. “In the meantime, between selling game one and when game two will be on the shelves and generating income, Evan needed extra cash flow to buy equipment, hire more staff, and support himself while he’s writing the game. We provide that cash flow. We became limited-term partners with Kovacic Industries.”

  “So both sides are betting that the new game, part two, will be successful enough to pay everyone back.”

  “With a healthy profit, yes.”

  “But there’s a risk.”

  “There is no profit without risk, Mrs. MacLean. We study it, do our best to minimize it, of course, but there is always risk. The biggest risk here would be a competitor releasing a similar, or worse, better product shortly before we do. That would be about the worst that could happen. Other than that, Kovacic Industries is a sure thing.”

  He beamed, delivering this reassuring news. Problem was, it did not reassure her about her theory. If Evan had no money woes, why would he kill his wife?