Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  The clouds parted. “You sound like you have some of your own.”

  “A sixteen-year-old. Girl.”

  “Is it easier when you’re a woman?” he asked with an earnestness that surprised her.

  “No! Having hormones in common only gives them inside information. They know what buttons to push.”

  His shoulders relaxed. He was an attractive man, she couldn’t help but notice, with dimples and an athletic build. His shoulders loosened with a grateful smile, as if he had found an old friend in a crowded foreign airport. It seemed odd to her, but if he chose to forget which side of the law she came from, she wasn’t going to point it out.

  “Come in.” He turned and led the way into his study. “What can I help you with?”

  Riley settled in a leather armchair and stumbled over his words. The reappearance of Ashworth’s daughter had clearly thrown him off stride and now he had to come up with another reason for their visit. Evelyn didn’t bother, just handed over the autopsy photograph of victim number one’s face.

  “We’ve had two young women killed in the past week. Obviously your daughter is accounted for, but since we’re here, could you take a look at this? I’m sorry it’s a rather unpleasant picture, but . . .”

  He looked at the picture. And looked again. A slight compression of his lips, a set to his cheek, and Evelyn knew that he knew exactly who the dead girl was. Wow, she thought. Got it in one.

  Silently he passed the photo to Marcus, who had materialized at Ashworth’s elbow. Marcus also viewed the girl’s face, but his own revealed not the slightest flicker of muscle or an unguarded glance. He merely looked at his boss, and waited.

  “You know her?” David asked.

  “I think she may work for me,” Ashworth said. “Or have worked. Her name is . . . something unusual, started with an O . . .”

  “Ophelia,” Marcus said. “Ophelia Ripetti. Everyone called her Lia.”

  “Called by who?” Evelyn pressed, then amended, “Whom?”

  “Her family. Her friends,” Marcus said, and every word from his mouth rolled like a freight train through an underground tunnel, sonorous, heavy, and reluctant.

  “Were you her friend?” Riley asked.

  Marcus ignored Riley’s implication. “We met her once,” he went on. “She worked as a bookkeeper at our southeast office. It’s on Emory Road in Warrensville Heights. She has been working there, I believe, five years, with a satisfactory record. That is all we know about her. I’m sure our construction manager there could give you her home address.”

  Evelyn found the use of the word we curious, and wondered if Marcus meant Ashworth and him, or the Ashworth upper management as a whole. Or if he meant himself only and had taken a page from Queen Victoria, though he didn’t seem the Victorian type. She looked at Riley, who again seemed lost. He must have been dying to take Ashworth away in handcuffs but had no legitimate reason to do so. “You have over one hundred employees, yet you seem to recall a lot of detail about a girl you only met once.”

  “I remember everything,” he said simply and frighteningly.

  “Are you acquainted with our mayor?” David asked.

  “Darryl Pierson?” Ashworth asked in surprise.

  “Yes. That mayor.”

  “I’ve run into him here and there. I heard about his daughter, it’s a great tragedy.” He looked at Evelyn as he spoke, as if only she could appreciate his sincerity. Oddly he did sound sincere, but then she had never spoken to a crime boss before. Perhaps they all had that particular talent.

  “Mind telling us where you went after that fund-raiser the other night?” Riley asked.

  “I came home.” Ashworth’s voice and his color rose. The black man took a discreet step back, as if to avoid a splash by an approaching car. “What the hell does that have to do with Pierson’s daughter? I know it’s a habit of yours, Riley, to blame every murder in the city on me, but this time you’re further off base than usual. Why would I want to hurt Pierson’s daughter? I’ve never met the girl. I wouldn’t know her if I passed her on the street. Why would I want to go around killing girls anyway?”

  “I know,” David said. “You’re a businessman. But what if it was business?”

  Ashworth calmed. “Get out of here and do some real police work. Some nut’s out there killing girls and you’re wasting time with me, hoping I’ll make your job easy for you. I won’t.”

  He turned and exited through a back door, one not hidden but so cleverly camouflaged that they hadn’t noticed it. The room fell silent. They were left alone with Ivan Marcus.

  “This way, gentlemen. Ma’am.”

  Riley moved with great reluctance. “We’re going to need Miss Ripetti’s information.”

  “I’ll tell the southeast office manager to expect you.”

  They left.

  “Ophelia,” Evelyn said as soon as her car door had slammed shut. “That seems appropriate.”

  “Why?”

  “Suitably dramatic.” The car had cooled off and she rubbed her hands together. “Poor doomed Ophelia, wet tendrils of hair flowing around her pale face.”

  Riley stared at her via the rearview mirror. “You got a weird kind of imagination, girl.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “It’s not the same thing at all,” David argued. “Ophelia went mad because her man dumped her. I don’t think this girl committed suicide.”

  “True. So now we have to find out everything about Lia. And more important, why no one missed her.”

  “No, the first thing we have to do is go to a funeral.”

  “What?” Evelyn asked with great misgiving.

  “Destiny’s funeral. It’s at eleven, and I want to check out the crowd. The old myth about killers attending their victim’s funeral is usually a myth, but in a case this weird, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m sorry, but we don’t have time to drop you off first.”

  “But—”

  He cut her off. “It’s already ten-fifty.”

  David said nothing.

  Evelyn spent the rest of the trip trying to get her curls to behave and buttoning her full-length coat to hide her sweatshirt. If she looped her scarf around with some sort of fashionable flair, she might carry it off but not happily. Darryl had asked her for help on the darkest day of his life, and first she took a day off and then showed up for his daughter’s funeral in Reeboks. If he ever needed a reason to be glad he married Danielle instead . . . She gave up and pulled out her cell phone to check on Angel.

  Chapter 13

  THE FUNERAL SERVICE TOOK place in a seventy-year-old Baptist church on the near east side. The cavernous main room overflowed with people, mostly African-American, dressed for elegant mourning and waiting quietly when Evelyn and the two cops took the last three open spaces against the back wall. Competing brands of cologne wafted upward, where lightbulbs in wrought-iron fixtures did their best to dispel the gloom cast by eternally overcast Cleveland skies. She could see Darryl in the first pew, head bent.

  Only two days had elapsed since Destiny’s murder, long enough to turn her funeral into an event. Wedged between Riley and David like a sardine in a tin, Evelyn felt very short and very white. At least she was warm. No one else wore Reeboks, and her bright blue parka stuck out among the somber black overcoats like a stripper at a PTA meeting. Too many had dressed for an important corporate function, as if this teenage girl’s funeral served as nothing more than a step in their career networking plan. Darryl’s political life could not be separated from his personal one, even for one day. But Danielle’s family sat with her—their subtle but potent wealth made their identity obvious—and the pews across the aisle were occupied by Destiny’s entire school class. All the girls cried, and even some of the boys. Kids are so emotional at that age, Evelyn thought. But then they had known Destiny the best and must have been very important to her. As Angel’s friends must be to her, Evelyn thought, and how much do I really know about them?

  She broke from this un
comfortable line of thought, startled by a face across the pews. At the same time, the preacher took to the pulpit for an opening prayer.

  David heard her gasp, and leaned down. “What is it?”

  “See that guy over there?”

  He looked up. “Which of the two hundred guys over there are you referring to?”

  “Brothers and sisters,” the preacher intoned. “Oftentimes when I am called upon for a funeral service, I have a hard time coming up with something to say about the deceased. Speaking ill of the dead is frowned upon, and the truth is, most people are quite ordinary.”

  “The one standing next to the guy with the purple tie. White guy, about five-eleven, gray coat.”

  “But in this case, there is so much one can say about Destiny Pierson that I scarcely know where to begin. A young woman, with all the energy and enthusiasm that youth confers, and then some.”

  “The one standing under the second window from the left?”

  “Yes.”

  “She had her mother’s beauty and her father’s popularity, and brains that made Darryl admit he had no idea where she got them.”

  The crowd gave a low chuckle, except from one or two people who turned to glare at Evelyn and David. The cop didn’t notice. “What about him?”

  “Well, he—”

  The glares escalated to psychic threats of gagging and eviction, and Evelyn muttered, “He’s Nurse Neal.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  The cemetery matched the church—neat, fashionably antique, and crowded, but much colder. Appropriately gloomy weather walled off the sun behind heavy clouds, while a bitter wind off the lake added insult to injury. Ladies held on to their hats and men hunched into their overcoats. Evelyn wished desperately to be somewhere else—preferably somewhere warm—because she wasn’t there as a mourner or even a friend. She might have arrived there by accident, but now she intended to ferret out the slightest fact that might help the cops solve this murder. She had loved Darryl once. She owed him that much.

  Nurse Neal topped her list of avenues for investigation. The stocky, sandy-haired boy had disappeared from the service before she could speak to him, but to her relief had shown up among the gravestones. While the sad procession of people emerged reluctantly from their vehicles, she approached him, Riley and David within earshot.

  He seemed more surprised to see her than vice versa. “Oh, hi!” he said, making a haphazard gesture with his index finger. “Appendectomy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Angel, right? Who can forget that name? How’s she doing?”

  “Fine, thanks. What are you doing here?”

  “I took care of her.” He seemed unfazed by the question. “Destiny Pierson, I mean.”

  “Took care of her?”

  “Yeah, at the hospital. They put her and her broken finger in my unit. Last week,” he added, as if that final detail explained it all. She watched him, perplexed, and under her scrutiny he went on. Occasionally he sniffled, wiping his nose with the sleeve of the trench coat. It had a coffee stain on the right sleeve and a torn pocket. She saw, with mixed feelings, that he wore Reeboks.

  “I worked Pediatrics that week. I’m a floater at the moment because surgery is a little overstaffed, so I’m always all over the place. They kept her for observation in case of thrombosis—which means they milked the case because her parents had money. I liked her. She would order everyone around like she was the Queen of Sheba or something, but the way she did it made you laugh instead of get mad.”

  Evelyn had done her best to ignore him during Angel’s appendectomy, frankly hadn’t wanted to look at him, and doing so now did nothing to help her dislike of him. He seemed on the surface to be a kind, caring man, and though that part of him rang sincere, it couldn’t counteract the somehow bizarre set to his frame, the thick neck, the uncertain flutter of his hands, the way his eye movements didn’t seem to be perfectly coordinated. A whole series of almost indiscernible maladjustments put him somehow out of whack.

  “So you came to her funeral?”

  “Yeah, I feel bad for her, dying and all.” She noticed he spent more time looking at the assembled guests than gazing sadly at the casket. “There’s her father and mother over there. That guy next to the mother is worth over two billion. Incredible.”

  “Do you know how she died?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at her oddly. “She was murdered. It said so in the paper. Big headlines.”

  “Do you always come to funerals of people you only met once?”

  “Sometimes people can really affect your life—even if you only met once,” he said with jaunty confidence, peering at a group of city council members.

  Dimly aware that the graveside service was about to begin, she couldn’t take her eyes from Jimmy Neal. Lust? Loneliness? Or madness? What brought him here?

  A young man with eyes the color of Hershey bars stepped up to them, hands jammed into his pockets. “Jeez, Jimmy, do we have to stay for this whole thing?”

  “I want to.” He gestured to Evelyn. “This is my cousin Max.”

  “Had you met Destiny, too?”

  “No. Jimmy just dragged me along. Jimmy doesn’t do anything alone.” He shivered and gave his cousin an unappreciative look. “He’s kind of needy that way.”

  “Hey, I go with you to visit your dead,” Neal snapped. “You can come see mine. How did you know Destiny, Mrs. James?”

  A pause. “I’m a friend of the family.” The service began and she moved closer to the preacher, not daring to disrupt another of his sermons.

  The weather had thinned the crowd, and for the first time she could see the mourning parents. Darryl’s hollow eyes stared at his daughter’s coffin as if his soul lay inside, leaving his body lost on the frigid hillside. Danielle sat beside him; her beauty had deserted her like a fair-weather friend. Her skin looked chalky, her hair completely hidden by an unfashionable black hat. Only the perfect bone structure could not be disguised.

  After a mercifully brief graveside service the crowd scattered to their warm cars. David went after Neal and Riley collared another man he said he knew. Evelyn shivered and hoped they would hurry. The wind pierced her long coat and her feet were slowly freezing in the slushy grass.

  “Evelyn.”

  She turned. Darryl stood beside her, with a face so haunted it frightened her.

  “I’m so sorry, Darryl,” she said. “I know you told me not to say that, but I don’t know what else to say. I know—” Then she did stop herself, knowing that she couldn’t possibly know how he felt and hoped she never would. “Angel is sixteen. I keep thinking—” It could have been her.

  “Look at us. Angel and Destiny. Aren’t we a couple of optimists.” His lips curved in a faint smile, and for a second his eyes were the old Darryl, the same boy who wrote hilarious limericks and had secret, wickedly apropos nicknames for all his professors.

  She smiled back. “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes, we are.”

  “Were.” His smile evanesced. “Have you made any progress?”

  “I’m so sorry. But I spent yesterday with Angel, she—”

  “I know. Will told me. My personal assistant. Of course I understand—but have you gotten anywhere?”

  She told him how the divers found the cement—he already knew that, too, Channel 3 had the report of an intrepid reporter who had camped at the scene—and added: “We’re trying to get some information about the first victim, and maybe who attended that campaign fund-raiser the other night. Destiny is top, top priority, Darryl. I can assure you of that at least.”

  “I believe you.” He sighed, gazing at the field of gravestones, apparently unaware of the soft flakes of snow dusting his head and shoulders. “There’s something else, Evelyn.”

  “What?”

  He turned to her. “I know you think I tossed you aside because Danielle’s family had money, but that’s not how it was.”

  She felt her breath whoosh
out of her. “Darryl—”

  “I did love you, Evelyn.”

  “This really isn’t the time to talk about this,” she said desperately.

  “Yes, it is. My daughter’s dead. All the games I’ve played in my life, and what did they get me? My daughter’s in her grave at sixteen. I’m through with games.”

  Evelyn held his gaze as she searched for words. “It—it probably wouldn’t have worked out, anyway. I wouldn’t have been a very good mayor’s wife, and even in this day and age, interracial marriages—”

  “I made a million excuses.” His voice grated harshly against the cold air. “They were all shit. I had a million reasons, and most of them were shit, too.”

  “So did I, Darryl,” she assured him. Out popped a question she never thought she’d hear herself ask. “Do you love her?”

  It startled him. His face returned to something like normal as he thought about something other than Destiny for the first time in twenty-four hours. “Danielle?”

  “Yes. Danielle.”

  He paused just for an instant, then said without smiling, “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Then that’s all that matters.”

  He took her hand, pressing it gently, and they rested for a moment in a temporary calm. Then a man, the same person who had escorted Evelyn to Darryl’s study, approached them. “Darryl.”

  He looked up, still holding Evelyn’s hand. “I’ll be right there, Will.” To Evelyn he added, “You’ll keep me informed?”

  “Yes,” she promised, still without knowing what she meant by it.

  The men walked off, and David appeared at her side. The snow continued to fall, and his face reflected the cruel clouds.

  “How informed?”

  She felt blindsided. “What?”

  “I had a bad feeling about him asking you to come to the house. So you’re going to be his inside girl?”

  Fury began to burn in the pit of her stomach. “His daughter’s dead. He wants to know how the investigation is going. You can’t blame him.”