by Lisa Black
Theresa went home. Half a workday remained, but she didn’t care. Leo could fuss all he wanted, but she couldn’t imagine what she would be able to do at work if she did return. She had failed. Evan had Cara and there was nothing she could do about it.
Her mother plied her with oxtail soup.
Theresa thought, ate, and spoke with the detachment of extreme intoxication but without the corresponding euphoria. “I thought you served chicken soup for colds. Oxtail is for flesh wounds.”
“You seem wounded enough to me,” Agnes said.
“Mom.” Theresa had to focus on the words to get them out. “When Dad died-”
She paused for so long that her mother, as always, helped her out. “I had you. You and Jackie and David. I got through it. You will too.”
After her mother set off for an afternoon shift at the restaurant, Theresa took a cup of tea to her kitchen table and did nothing. Absolutely nothing.
By the time a knock sounded at her door, the tea had grown cold and her knees, drawn to her chin, had stiffened into place. It took her a minute to stand up, then another to walk with a numb bottom and a sore hip, and another to order her overprotective Lab into the basement. In the meantime, the person knocked again.
Chris Cavanaugh stood there, his face carefully composed into a mask of bad news.
She didn’t ask, merely waited.
“They found his body.”
“Oh.” She did not move, her hand on the knob. Her mind formed the intention of telling him that while it was nice of him to tell her personally, it did not mean that he needed to stick around, but her body confounded this intention by erupting into sobs. They began in her stomach and moved up to her face, until the tears, heated by rage, seemed to burn her skin.
Chris reached for her, but she managed to avoid him by stumbling blindly around her kitchen until she reached a counter. With her back to him, she choked out, “I really need you to leave.”
“I think you could use some company,” he suggested, his voice disturbingly close, behind her.
She gripped the Formica. “No. Thank you.”
It seemed to take forever for him to think this over, or perhaps it only seemed that way because a mental image came to mind of Drew’s limp body reeled into shore like a piece of flotsam, useless detritus that no one wanted, and this time the sobs convulsed her, bending her body until her forehead knocked against the dishes in the strainer.
“The hell with that,” she heard Chris say, and found her body gently turned until her face rested against his shoulder, his arms across her back, one of his hands in her hair.
It took a while for her heartbeat to slow until it nearly matched his, and her lungs to take in enough air to breathe in a more or less normal manner. But tears continued to come each time she pictured hopeless, hapless Drew, lying still on the frozen riverbank.
She made one last effort. “You can let go of me now.”
“In another minute.”
Always the negotiator. Well, didn’t the most effective negotiations involve both give and take?
“Chris, I need a favor.”
“Really?”
His fingers moved gently through her hair, and she wished he’d stop that even though it felt-“I need to borrow something.”
She heard a door open and shut, and before she could ponder why that might be and whether she should open her eyes and do something about it, Chris said, “Hi. I’m-”
“The hostage guy,” she heard Rachael say. “I remember.”
CHAPTER 27
Theresa threaded a strap through the handle of a crime scene kit and slung it over one shoulder, leaving her hands free. Then she began to climb. The worn tennis shoes that had served her so ill on the ice were an advantage here, allowing her toes to fit into the small diamonds of space in the chain-link fence. She slipped at least every other time, but made it to the top.
She had never understood why people considered barbed-wire fences so impenetrable. She had gotten over one with ease at seventeen, simply by noticing that the wire had a break at the opening, where the gate swung freely. She hadn’t been breaking into a place, of course, she’d been sneaking out of a roller rink, but…she wondered if Rachael knew how to get over a barbed-wire fence, and resolved not to ask.
Long before she reached the top, three things became clear to her: She had not been wearing heavy winter clothing the last time, she had not been carrying at least forty pounds of equipment in a backpack and a hard case, and she was no longer seventeen years old.
Not to mention the fact that her left hip still ached from falling off Drew’s houseboat.
She got her toes settled on the top of the gatepost and used the support to lift her leg over the three remaining rows of wire. Then she very carefully worked in reverse to swing her body onto the carbon company grounds. Very carefully. Layers of winter clothing protected her from the barbs, but if she slipped, they would cut her face to ribbons.
Her body moved, but the crime scene kit stayed on the outside of the fence, the legal side, and it took her another few moments to untangle the strap and convince it to follow her. She wondered what the residents of Birdtown would have thought of her if she had tried this one hundred years before, or what her Bohemian great-grandmother would say. Probably Come down from there this instant, young lady. Until she learned of a risk to the child, then it would be more like Get your little dupa in there. Just wear your babushka.
These thoughts kept her mind off jumping the last six feet, her numb fingers no longer able to cling to the links. She scanned the property. She had entered from the far end of the factory grounds after parking on a side street called Magee. The covering of snow lay unbroken except for the triangular patterns of rabbits crisscrossing the expanse. She did not see any cameras at this end of the property and had never seen any outside cameras anyway, only inside. She trudged the seven hundred feet toward the second outbuilding, making little effort to keep out of sight. The brick structures hid her from the apartment building, and again, Evan would not have the manpower for surveillance. She felt certain he would be spending a quiet evening at home, free from witnesses, planning how best to announce the news of his stepdaughter’s tragic demise.
Or cleaning up any last trace of his wife’s murder, since a light shone inside the windows of her destination, building number two.
She pulled at one of the double doors, very gently, and watched for a while through the crack. Dim light from the ceiling lamps filtered down to the row of manufacturing equipment with the nitrogen hoods, but she did not see anyone inside.
The door opened several inches and stopped, chained from the inside. She set her burdens down to retrieve a bolt cutter from the backpack. The steel did not give easily, however, and after trying to cut the links, and then the padlock, she finally just loosened the coil of chain enough to create a gap no wider than ten inches. She managed to squeeze herself and her bags through it. Uncomfortably.
Inside, she entered the fenced area and tucked the crime scene kit behind one of the huge nitrogen tanks, then climbed to the catwalk. The windows were too high to look through, but at least she didn’t have to crawl below them to keep her figure from appearing in silhouette. From the hard case she removed the piece of equipment Chris had given her, affixing it to the corner of the railing with electrical tape. It took her a while, but this span of time convinced her that her arrival had gone unnoticed. Evan did not appear. If he had the camera’s monitor on, somewhere in the apartment building, he wasn’t paying attention to it.
The air felt cold, but the ancient radiators kept the temperature slightly higher than that of refrigerators. Freezing couldn’t be good for the equipment.
At the nitrogen tanks she took a moment to trace the path of the hoses on their way from the tanks to the manufacturing hoods, traveling beneath the grate in the floor. Then she retrieved her crime scene kit and approached the workstations.
There were manufacturing hoods in a row after the initial
assembly area. They did not have gloves mounted in the sides for human hands but plenty of doodads inside to construct the circuit boards via computer. She had no idea how that would work and didn’t care. All she wanted to see was the inlet for the nitrogen gas.
The Plexiglas formed, now that she could examine it more closely, a tight fit. Jillian would not have had much room to move around, assuming she moved at all. But this meant there would have been ample opportunity for Jillian’s hair, skin, and the fibers of her clothes to catch on the belt and the robotic arms and the fittings. Theresa got out her camera.
This was the risky part. The flashes might show in the windows, alerting Evan to an intruder. However, the windows were awfully high, and only the rear windows in his apartment faced this building. As long as he hung out in his kitchen and living room, she should be all right. Unless Cara cried and he went to the nursery, of course. Unless he decided to leave the baby alone to come out and get some work done. Unless he retired early. After all, it had been quite a day for him. Then all he’d have to do would be to glance out his bedroom windows at the precise moment she snapped a photo.
She had to take the chance. Photographs might be her only evidence, and besides, to photograph before collecting had been too thoroughly ingrained for her to ignore.
A slight brushing sound startled her and she dropped to her knees, as if the row of equipment would hide her. Silly, since the row ran lengthwise through the building and she would be instantly visible on either side of it.
Nothing happened. Perhaps it had been the cat.
Perhaps Evan would stroll past the monitor and notice her working as the camera sent the images over the airwaves. She could have turned the cameras off or covered the lens with a glove, but had feared that a blank screen would be even more noticeable.
After some photographs of the general equipment, she got out a small halogen flashlight and opened a hood. The Plexiglas side swung silently into the air. First she examined the inside of the Plexiglas. If Jillian had been conscious inside the hood, surely she would have banged or pressed on the glass to get out. But no prints appeared on the inside-plenty on the outside, but the inside remained clear. She did find a pink fiber on the latch mechanism, which she plucked up with Teflon tweezers and secured in a fold of glassine paper, careful not to breathe. More than once, fibers had slipped away from her, pushed by even that slight draft.
Without any further discoveries, she repeated the process on the next hood. It proved cleaner than the first, so she returned to it. At least the first hood had a pink fiber, surely not a color that Evan wore. If it would only match Jillian’s polo shirt…
With her head thrust into the work area, a glistening spot on the frame caught her eye. The Plexiglas hood, when closed, fit into a metal track at the edge of the work area, and this track had a spot of oil or liquid about the size of a quarter. She rubbed it with a dry swab and packaged it, then repeated the process with a second swab. This she examined quickly before packaging. Tiny flecks of pigment stained the cotton, and it gave off the telltale whiff of phenol.
Suddenly some things made sense…or at least she had a theory. Skiers used light sticks for night activity. Glow sticks burst into light through a reaction of hydrogen peroxide and phenol, substances used similarly in DNA analysis. Evan would have been working in the dark, not wanting to draw attention to the factory’s lighted windows, with a light stick dangling around his neck, just as when snowboarding. He would have shoved Jillian into the hood and slammed it shut, catching the stick under the edge of the hood and cracking it. Then, when he pulled the unconscious Jillian from the hood, her arm brushed the liquid, leaving the stain on her sweatshirt.
Not conclusive, of course, but every little grain of circumstantial evidence could add up to a weight around Evan’s neck.
Then, under the belt, she found a hair. The end of it had wound around the pulley that guided the belt through a passageway into the next hood. She tried to untangle the thin strand, but even the Teflon tweezers couldn’t help her disassemble the mechanism.
The far door opened.
The hair broke.
Evan stood in the doorway, dressed in a bulky sweater and carrying a small black gym bag. He saw her instantly, and froze.
So did she.
The door swung shut behind him. The slight clap it gave as it closed seemed to her like the final beat of her heart, echoing into the empty night.
He set the bag down, slowly, without moving his head. He did not seem particularly surprised to see her, nor did he seem particularly disturbed. “Mrs. MacLean.”
She said nothing.
He took a step toward her, watching carefully, as if wondering when she would run and where. “What are you doing here?”
She did not run. “You know.”
“Collecting your precious trace evidence? Find anything?”
“Just the phenol from where you cracked your light stick.”
“Hmm.” Another step, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. “Yeah, I forgot about that. By the way, the cops standing there also heard you propound your theory. But I don’t see any of them here with a warrant.”
“No, you don’t.”
“They didn’t believe you, did they?”
“They didn’t think a judge would feel strongly enough about it.”
“Poor, poor Theresa. First your fiancé gets killed, your one fan drowns, and now your coworkers think you’ve lost your mind. You’ve been abandoned on all sides, haven’t you? You can’t prove I killed Jillian. You’ll never be able to prove I killed Jillian.”
“I know.”
He blinked.
She didn’t wait for him to catch up. “I know now that I can’t prove it. Hairs and fibers don’t mean a thing because you cohabitated. The plaster that settled to the bottom of your snowboard bag when you knocked it into the wall removing her from the apartment, that could have gotten into Jillian’s pockets during some home-improvement project. The blackberry bush caught on your snow pants and ripped some Tencel fibers off, putting you in the woods by Jillian’s body, but we have lots of skiers in this area who might own pants like those. The diatoms from your car tires can be found in any lakeside parking lot. I’m sure you threw out the sleeping pills.”
He said nothing.
“But it doesn’t matter in the long run. Death by nitrogen suffocation can’t be physically proved, not at this point. I can’t prove murder.”
He watched her without expressing the slightest sign of relief at her admission of failure.
“At least not in a criminal court.”
He no longer came toward Theresa, but stayed between her and the door, a tower of muscle and flesh. She didn’t move anything but her mouth in case it startled him into attacking, like a cobra or a rabid dog.
His curiosity won out. “What are you doing here, then?”
“Remember O.J.?”
“Huh?”
“I said I couldn’t prove murder in a criminal court. A civil court, however, is quite different. Almost everything is admissible, and even more so in family court, where the only concern is the well-being of the children. I didn’t have enough to win Cara’s freedom during your first round at guardianship. I will have enough for the second. I have Jillian’s means of death, a death that could only have been engineered by you. I have the fibers I just collected from the hood. Most important, I have Cara’s father.”
Lot’s wife, formed into a salt sculpture, couldn’t have been any more still. She could swear Evan had stopped breathing. With his voice strangled and low, he asked, “Cara’s father was some john. Jillian didn’t even know which-”
“Jillian didn’t have johns. She had knights in shining armor who would take her back to their castle to love and live, happily every after. At least that was what she hoped, but until you-or so she thought-it had never happened. The knight she tried out before you fathered Cara. Nicholas Cannon. Your source of capital. Attendee of numerous trade shows and meet-and-greet
cocktail parties, keeping an eye on his investments, scouting out new ones.”
Evan seemed to absorb this in the blink of an eye, without it angering or even annoying him. “Interesting. But he doesn’t know, right?” “According to Vangie, his armor was tarnished when Jillian realized he did not have marriage in mind. He didn’t consider her a queen or a princess or anything but a reasonably priced consort to help him get over the death of his wife. Jillian gave up. One month later she told Georgie about her pregnancy. Let’s put two and two together here. You’re the engineer, you should be able to do that.”
“So can a financier. Jillian pushed out a kid who might be his and he doesn’t even ask about it? Obviously he doesn’t care.”
“But did he know? I’m guessing you don’t talk about your-family-much in the work setting. Too busy showing off, a wunderkind, a bad boy playa of the digital world. Cannon might know about Cara. Then again, he might not.”
Her chattiness on the topic finally caught his attention. “You haven’t told him.”
“I plan to, tomorrow morning-”
“What makes you think I’m going to let you walk out of here?”
“-unless we can come to an arrangement.”
Finally, surprise. “You want to make a deal?”
“I’ll apply for guardianship myself. Let me take Cara, and you keep the money. As her guardian I will invest it in your company on her behalf. You’ll be able to pay Griffin Investments what you owe them for financing the factory. By the time she’s twenty-one, that account will be ancient history and Cara will never know it existed. Once that is taken care of, we can see if a paternity test proves my theory, and if Cannon wants to be a father to his daughter. Even if he doesn’t, Cara will still be alive and you won’t have a baby on your hands.”
He considered this. For about ten seconds. “You want to make a deal.”
“You want the money. I want Cara and myself to live past this evening. Everyone wins.”
Another long pause as he thought. Examining all the angles. Probing for booby traps. Then he said, “That’s like asking Alastair to make a deal with the vampires. There can only be one winner.”