Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  “You love mysteries.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she sighed, and repackaged the panties.

  She started to roll up the brown paper when she felt something under her foot. A white wad sat on the brick-colored tile. She thought several curses to herself as she picked it up.

  Unnoticed, the Kleenex from Lia Ripetti’s pocket had fallen off the table as she examined the shorts. She had already sealed the shorts and would have to reopen the bag, put it inside, and reseal it. Furthermore, it had been in the room when she examined Destiny’s clothing and so could possibly have cross-contaminated evidence; plus she might never have noticed it and it could have been swept up by the janitor and lost, and losing evidence did not occur at the ME’s office no matter how dingy and disorganized the entire building seemed. The more she thought about it, the worse it got. What if the Kleenex belonged to the killer and contained his nasal mucus, and he had stuffed it into Lia’s pocket . . . why? As a show of contempt? Because his clothes had no pockets? What if it came from his house or car, and he had given it to Lia?

  Enough already, she thought. You made a bad mistake but it’s fixed now. Just repackage it and stop worrying.

  Before she did that, however, she pulled over the magnifying light and a fresh piece of brown paper and took a closer look. The surface of the wad seemed no more interesting than expected, so she took it firmly in both hands and broke it open like a petrified egg.

  Something metal winked at her.

  She set it down and walked away. She poked her head into the next room, an all-black cubicle with all the attractiveness of a cave, and called “Zoe!”

  A thud echoed as the petite staff photographer put down her morning coffee and emerged from the darkroom, a mazelike tunnel hidden behind the studio. She followed Evelyn with a camera and a running commentary on the opinions of the Plain Dealer’s film critic, tossing dark curls in indignation. “. . . like the movie was supposed to be great art in the first place. This thing? What is it? Looks like Kleenex. This guy doesn’t like anything unless Bruce Willis is in it anyway.”

  “It is Kleenex. I think there’s something in it.”

  “Want the other side?”

  Evelyn flipped the lump over.

  Click. “I mean, it’s Jane Austen. What did he expect? A car chase in Act Two?”

  Evelyn separated the lump into two parts to reveal a round piece of metal, obviously a gold ring. Zoe took another photograph of this painstaking excavation and continued her review of the review. Zoe spoke almost constantly, to herself, to no one, to anyone present—a habit disconcerting to newcomers until they discovered that her eternal comments were interesting, observant, and often scathingly funny.

  Evelyn worked the rest of the tissue off. A deep green emerald gleamed from a delicate but sturdy setting of eighteen-karat gold. Zoe and Evelyn were silent for a moment with the respect any woman shows for a good piece of jewelry.

  “Nice,” Zoe said. Click.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did she wrap it in Kleenex?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Zoe returned to her den, ruminating now on both emeralds and boneheaded movie critics, while Evelyn pondered the question. Lia had been packing and probably cleaning, and could have put it in her pocket to keep from scratching or dirtying it. Or it was something she wanted to pack and shoved in her pocket temporarily? But why wrap it in Kleenex? If she was going to that length, why not just put it in the suitcase? Why not just wear it? She had been wearing only one ring when she was found—plenty of fingers left. Did she do it after the killer kidnapped her, afraid he would steal it? But why this ring and not the star sapphire she had on her right hand?

  The magnifying lamp revealed nothing but 18K and Corelli stamped into the band. There were some tiny scratches along the setting but not on the stone. It appeared to be a relatively new, expensive purchase. Or gift—from the looks of Lia Ripetti’s apartment, there wasn’t a lot of money left over at the end of the month to buy emeralds. Lia had believed in small luxuries, so she could have saved up for it. But why keep it in her pocket and not on her hand?

  Perhaps she didn’t want Durling to see it and shoved it in her pocket when he arrived for dinner. Or perhaps he had given it to her, and out of sentiment she protected it and not her other ring from the kidnapper. But David said that Durling had planned to propose at Christmas. Why buy her an expensive ring when he needed to save for a diamond on a Home Warehouse salary?

  As usual, her mind became frustrated with too many questions and too few answers. She wrote a brief description of the ring, made a druggist’s fold of brown paper for both the ring and the Kleenex shreds, and sealed the edges. Then she took the envelopes of clothing tapings and went upstairs to call David.

  Chapter 16

  FOR A MOMENT DARRYL considered leaving. Playhouse Square hardly seemed a low-profile spot to meet, even on a weeknight, but after looking around the diner he decided to wait. Two partners with more money than sense had created Hanna’s in the early 1980s, during the renovation of the surrounding once-opulent theaters, to be Cleveland’s answer to Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Named after industrialist and senator Mark Hanna, whose funds had been vital to the area around the turn of the century, Hanna’s Diner was designed to spur Cleveland forward on its eternal quest for the glamour of L.A. or Chicago. As any sensible resident could have predicted, of course, the Hollywood crowd did not cooperate and the squares of cement in the sidewalk outside held hand- and footprints from local minor celebrities and a few singers from the Cleveland Opera, and one or two dotted prints of Cleveland Ballet stars’ toe shoes. After the boiler explosion in 1983, which killed a waitress, a cook, and three customers, the partners rebuilt and carried on until a dot-com disaster wiped out the last of their optimism. The new owners kept Hanna’s open, barely, and now theatergoers hurried past its dingy windows on the way to more fashionable lakefront eateries. Darryl relaxed. His fellow patrons seemed more interested in their beers than in him.

  At least it gave him a moment’s peace from both the well-meaning mourners and the critics who felt he did either too much or too little for “his people.” Or Cleveland. Most of the country considered Cleveland to be second only to Buffalo as the armpit of the nation, but he loved his town. Its citizens might like you or might not, but they never left you in doubt. He didn’t want to be anywhere else—except maybe in the governor’s mansion in Columbus, of course, though that would come with a new cast of hundreds to be dealt with. This thought, which usually invigorated him, now left him exhausted.

  Mario would know how to control the city council. Mario would know how to shake the funding loose. Mario always knew what to do.

  How Darryl had missed him.

  He warmed his hands around an Irish coffee and watched his old friend approach the table and sit across from him. Mario hardly seemed different from the dirty eight-year-old who had collided with him one summer day. Each had been running from a beating of one kind or another. From that day on, they ran together, and eventually convinced their tormentors to seek greener pastures. “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Like what, I’m granting an audience? It’s you who wouldn’t see me, in case you’ve forgotten,” Ashworth said without rancor, as if to establish the facts in case Darryl had developed a bad case of selective perception over the years.

  He hadn’t. “I know. Believe me, I know. I had to make choices to get my life where I needed it to go—”

  “You had to disassociate yourself. It wouldn’t do for the city councilman to have ties to organized crime.”

  “Or for you to have your best pal on the other side of the law.”

  They paused and looked at each other, but not for some sign of absolution. It had never been necessary and wasn’t necessary now. Perhaps they had been closer than brothers, but they were both survivors, first, last, and always.

  “Thanks for coming to the funeral yesterday. I saw you there.”

  Ashworth grinned,
the exact grin he had had at eight, with smug pleasure in doing something reckless and getting away with it. “Did you? The cops didn’t. At least they didn’t corner me afterward, which means they didn’t.”

  “You haven’t lost that knack of being invisible when you want to be.” A trace of a smile tugged at Darryl’s lips. It vanished quickly.

  “I’m sorry about your kid, Darryl. Really sorry.”

  Darryl just nodded. He had reached the point in his grief where words no longer helped.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to Ivy. And you know what? It probably will, because she’s wilder than wild. My boy’s great, real smart kid, but sometimes I think Ivy should inherit the business. She scares me.”

  “She’s a handful?”

  “She’s exactly like me in that she likes to take risks. But I never took crazy risks, I always put self-preservation first. Like how I never fought Harry Vincenza, even though I could have beat him, because he had that group of cousins, uncles, and all and it just would have opened a can of worms that I didn’t want to waste time dealing with.”

  Another half smile. “Destiny could scare me sometimes. She was irrepressible. She never had to think of her own safety, someone else did that for her. Maybe that made it easy for someone to snatch my baby off the street.”

  Ashworth said nothing. There were no words for that kind of pain. He turned his face away, giving Darryl a moment, and focused instead on a photo of a pretty, vapid-looking woman who laughed as she placed one stiletto pump into wet cement outside the restaurant. The kind of woman his grandfather went for. A man very like his grandfather stood next to her, with one meaty hand on her rear end. One of them had autographed the photo, adding the sentiment Make your own dreams. Just like Darryl and me, he thought. We made our own. The trick is to keep them from turning into nightmares.

  “Of course she might not have had a chance,” Darryl went on. “And her attitude had nothing to do with it. I just don’t know. In my mind I’ve gone over every single person I know, looking for some clue, for something to make me see a political motivation. Every scenario I come up with seems ludicrous.”

  “Nobody’s leaning on you? About a vote or a zoning law? An appointment?”

  “Nothing worth killing over. Not that I’m universally liked,” he added with a rueful smile. “I have as many enemies as I have friends, I know that. That’s politics. But no matter how much I hate certain people, I just can’t see them killing my daughter over a political issue. Besides, what’s the point if I don’t know who did it or why?”

  Ashworth stirred the cherry in his Manhattan. “Well, like my grandpa always said, ask why first. Why is always more important than who or how. No one’s blackmailing you, holding something over your head? You’re not pressuring anyone else?”

  Darryl took no offense at the question, no more than if Ashworth had asked where he might have dropped his wallet. “No. Nothing.”

  “What about you personally? Having an affair with anyone? Is Danielle?”

  He flinched at that one, but only at the thought. “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “No other family problems? Former girlfriends, boyfriends? Does Danielle have an ex-husband? Anyone, in other words, who might have some deep hatred for either or both of you?”

  “No.”

  “What about Destiny? She break up with a boyfriend lately? Steal some girl’s boyfriend?”

  “The police asked me all this,” Darryl pointed out mildly.

  “The police haven’t found him. If you want me to apply my resources to find this guy, I need some facts to start with.”

  Darryl hesitated.

  “That is why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve got no right to ask.” He hadn’t spoken to his best and only friend in years, and he spoke now because he wanted something. He did it because he could. Loyalty wasn’t just a word to Mario, it was a way of living. “She was my baby, Mar. The only daughter I’ll ever have. I can wait, but I can’t not know. I can live with her death—I know I can—but I can’t live with the thought that this guy might never be found, never be caught, or never be punished. As logical as I’ve always been about my career, I’m not willing to be logical about this. I’ll find this guy if it takes every penny I have, and if the courts can’t kill him I’ll do it with my bare hands. And if it costs me my career, so be it. I can live with not being governor. I can’t live with this.”

  “It won’t bring Destiny back, you know. You still have to live without her for the rest of your years whether you want to or not. Throwing away your life won’t bring her more peace than she’s already got.”

  “No, it won’t. But it will bring it to me. And Danielle.”

  That said, Ashworth turned businesslike. “We can keep you out of it anyway. Now, back to Destiny. Any boyfriends?”

  “She had too much strength for most boys,” Darryl said proudly. “And they were intimidated by me. Mostly they just hung out in a group. There weren’t any falling-outs that I know of, but I’ll ask Danielle. The other thing that worries me—both worries and relieves me—is this other girl. The other drowned girl. She had nothing to do with us, so maybe he picked Destiny at random. If he snatched this other girl off the street . . .”

  Ashworth nodded. “She worked for me.”

  “What?”

  “She worked at one of my offices. I didn’t know her.”

  So there had been a connection between the two girls, and that connection was Mario Ashworth. In the next instant he dismissed the fact as a coincidence, even before Mario went on.

  “I know it’s weird. She kept some books, nothing big. She didn’t know anything that made her a danger. None of my boys did it, that I’m sure of. They’re as baffled as anyone else. And angry.”

  “Evelyn didn’t tell me that.”

  “Who?”

  “An old friend of mine works at the ME’s office. She didn’t tell me they’d even identified the girl, or that she worked for you.”

  “They didn’t know until this morning. I think, for some bizarre reason, they thought she might be Ivy—the first dead girl, I mean. I ID’d Lia from the picture. I met Evelyn.” He paused, making connections. “Oh. That Evelyn.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The one you dumped for Danielle.”

  “I didn’t dump her.” Had he? How much of the attraction had been Danielle’s stunning looks and how much Danielle’s stunning stock portfolio? All he knew now was that he’d love Danielle even if she’d grown up in a trailer park. And that was all he needed to know. “How did you hear about that? We’d already—”

  “Yeah, you’d already dropped me,” Ashworth said cheerfully. “But I kept up with current events. So you have a pal at the ME’s office . . . that might come in handy.”

  Darryl shook his head. “I’m not sure. We’ve been out of touch for a lot of years. She promised to keep me informed, but I think when it hits the fan she won’t risk her job for me.”

  “Mmm. Evelyn and me, both cast aside like something the cat coughed up—and both of us castees still willing to help out the caster,” Ashworth pointed out with a wide grin. “Are we loyal or just stupid? Relax, man, I’m just ragging you. Anyway, if she doesn’t help we’ll find another source. There’s always a disgruntled or frustrated employee willing to talk in order to make something happen for themselves.”

  “Besides,” Darryl backpedaled, “the ME’s office probably doesn’t know much. What about the cops?”

  “I’ve got a few on my payroll. I’ll see what they can produce. How do I get hold of you?”

  Darryl pulled out his card and scribbled a number on the back. “This will be either me or Will. You can leave a message with him. He doesn’t know who you are, but he won’t ask.”

  “Okay.” Ashworth sobered. “I’ll do everything I can, Dare.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  Ashworth started to fidg
et, in the universal language of someone preparing to leave. But Darryl hadn’t finished.

  “About the new ME’s office—”

  Ashworth stilled. “Yes?”

  “I’m going to offer you a bribe.” Darryl’s lips twisted in their secret smile. “And I will ask you not to be insulted; I know you would help me out of friendship, but I’m asking a lot and I want to show my . . . gratitude.”

  Ashworth waited, flushing with the beginnings of anger despite Darryl’s plea.

  “Find who killed my daughter and I’ll see you get the contract.”

  Ashworth laughed, anger apparently forgotten, then shook his head. “Wow, Dare. You’ve conspired with the mob and subverted the public interest in the same day. You really have been knocked for a loop.”

  Darryl shrugged. “Remember Gram used to say ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’? Besides, I can do it with a clear conscience. I’ve looked at the other bids and their past projects. You do the best work for the money. You should get the contract.”

  “What about—”

  “The city council does make the final decision, so no, I can’t make any guarantees. But I’ve got a good council. They’ll put a lot of weight on my recommendation.”

  “They’ll do what you tell them,” Ashworth translated.

  “The council will listen to my advice,” Darryl retranslated. “And my advice will be to do what’s best for Cleveland.”

  “I could point out how many similarities a political enterprise and a criminal one have in common. But I won’t.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  They left Hanna’s together. No one noticed.

  Chapter 17

  “GO AWAY,” SUSANNAH SHINE demanded from a staging area behind her fortress of manila folders. Piled around the edge of her desk, they formed an impressive wall complete with flying buttresses, and she clutched an egg salad sandwich in one hand as if lining up a shot. A single desk lamp did little to dispel the industrial-gray gloom of the basement office. “Can’t I even have my lunch hour in peace?”