Evidence of Murder

by Lisa Black

  Evidence of Murder

  Lisa Black

  "Lisa Black wows us with another tense and unputdownable thriller. She is, quite simply, one of the best storytellers around." – Tess Gerritsen

  Forensic investigator Theresa MacLean takes on the worst kind of murder case – one without clues – in this second novel in a hot new series from Lisa Black

  Eight months ago, forensic investigator Theresa MacLean lost her fiancÉ in a bank robbery gone wrong, and she's had trouble concentrating on her work ever since. But now a particularly difficult case may just be what she needs to regain her focus by demanding all her skill, intelligence, and attention.

  Jillian Perry has been found dead in the woods, leaving behind a husband of three weeks and a young daughter. The police can't determine how she died – her body shows no visible marks, and the autopsy reveals nothing suspicious – and the leading theory is that she purposely wandered into the forest and succumbed to the freezing weather. But something doesn't feel right to Theresa, and she can't let it go.

  To complicate matters, a former boyfriend of Jillian's unexpectedly petitions for custody of the daughter. Obsessed with Jillian, he also suspects foul play in Jillian's death, and now he and Theresa believe Jillian's daughter may be in danger of meeting a similar fate. With a child's life at stake, Theresa must search for evidence of murder – evidence that doesn't seem to exist – before it's too late.

  Lisa Black

  Evidence of Murder

  The second book in the Theresa MacLean series, 2009

  To my mother, Florence, and father, Stanley,

  and my siblings, Mary, Susan, Mike, and John,

  first in my heart

  every minute of every day

  CHAPTER 1

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3

  “I have a building full of dead people,” Theresa MacLean told the detective. “I don’t have time for one who isn’t even dead.”

  Frank Patrick parked the car against the curb and gestured up at the antique brick architecture in front of them. “Not that we know of. But what woman runs out on a rich husband, a cool apartment, and her five-month-old daughter?”

  “A stupid one.” Theresa pulled her stocking cap more tightly over the red hair she hadn’t bothered to curl, and took in the historic structure from a different perspective. “We’re in Lakewood.”

  “So you did pay attention on the drive over from the morgue. I thought you’d slipped back into your coma.”

  She ignored the coma comment. “I know this place. You can see it from the rapid transit.”

  “It used to be the National Carbon Company,” he told her. The redbrick building in front of her would have looked at home on the Oxford campus; its outbuildings, done in matching brick but with much less style, would not have.

  “Why are you involved?” Theresa asked. Frank had been a Cleveland homicide detective for eight years, but the well-to-do suburb of Lakewood had its own force, and besides, the woman was only missing.

  “Because of her job.”

  “At the carbon company?”

  “No, this place has been closed for years. Her husband bought the vacant campus six months ago. I meant her job.” He opened his door and got out, forcing her to follow suit. The March air hung icy and damp around Theresa’s face. She pulled the padded jacket with MEDICAL EXAMINER printed on the back around herself more tightly, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. She hadn’t felt warm in eight months. But the lettering identified her as one of the M.E.’s staff, a forensic scientist, not a cop, so that witnesses and family members greeted her with a shade more warmth than they did police officers.

  She waited for Frank to circle the car. Being the middle of a weekday didn’t lessen the traffic on 117th and cars whizzed down the narrow pavement; everyone had somewhere to go and wanted to get there fast. Frank darted out of their way; the homicide detective had a long-legged gait and was slender and handsome, with a mustache to go with his light brown hair, but had no more fashion sense than she had, though she wouldn’t dare say so. “And her job is?”

  “Escort.”

  “What?”

  “Escort. Was, actually-she quit on her wedding day. One of those pretty girls a businessman hires to take to cocktail parties so he can look like a player. The company-and I use the term loosely-is on West Twenty-fifth. I remember her boss from his humble origins and have been wanting to bust him for about fifteen years now. So if she’s dead, I’m hoping it’s got something to do with him.”

  “It’s good to have a goal.”

  “Hey, I’m not hoping the woman’s dead. I’m just hoping to bust her boss if she is. The Lakewood guys are in this with me, but right now they’ve got their hands full with that family that got wiped out over on Warren, so they don’t mind if I look into it. Let’s go in, I’m freezing.”

  “An escort.”

  “Which means her boss has an opening, if you’re looking to make a switch.” He grinned. She didn’t. He stopped smiling. She felt guilty because he’d been making her laugh since she was three years old and knew he felt bad that he couldn’t do it anymore. But she couldn’t help it. Her sense of humor had died with her fiancé, Paul. “So you dragged me out here for a hooker on a bender?”

  Humor fled his face as well. “Just take a look at the place, okay? Pick up some things that we can use for DNA testing if her body turns up and then you can go back to the trace evidence lab and hide behind your glass slides and microscopes.”

  She scowled, but then followed him up the cracked sidewalk and through the unlocked glass door; Frank had also been pushing her around since she was three and she had gotten used to it. Besides, if she argued with him for too long, he’d complain to his mother, who’d complain to her sister-Theresa’s mother-who’d give her the concerned Are you ever going to get your life back together? looks she’d been giving out for the past eight months. Theresa had gotten used to those too.

  Just keep going, she told herself. It’s not as if you’ve got anything else to do.

  The lobby smelled coldly musty. “They live in a factory?”

  “No, the other buildings are the factory. This building used to be the offices. Apparently he’s renovating it as living space for himself and his partner and the programmers. It’s high-tech stuff and those types like to work unconventional hours. Sounds like he plans to be the Bill Gates of Cleveland. I got all this from the Lakewood cop who took the report; he was a whole lot more interested in the architecture than in our errant young mom.”

  The elevator took an inordinate amount of time to rise one floor, and Frank used the trip to tell her more about the missing Jillian Perry. Twenty-four, native of Cleveland, she lived with her husband of three weeks, Evan Kovacic, and her baby girl. Evan Kovacic owned and operated a video-game design firm. He had come home from a downtown meeting on Monday to find the door locked, Jillian gone, and the baby crying in her crib.

  “And her husband knew about her former occupation.”

  “Absolutely. Says Jillian worked as a three-dimensional model.”

  “Dimensions, right. You keep saying her daughter,” Theresa said as the claustrophobic elevator shuddered to a halt. “This baby isn’t his daughter?”

  “No. Jillian was pregnant when they met. I guess the father isn’t in the picture.”

  Theresa snorted and nudged the sliding door with her foot to encourage it to open faster. “Great.”

  “We don’t get to pick our victims, Tess.”

  “Tell me about it.” The second-floor lobby had fresh carpeting but a gouge in the plaster outside door number 212. Frank gave her a warning look as he knocked, and she straightened her shoulders. I’m a professional. Focus on the job. What do I need to do right now?

  I car
e about every victim. Even if she was a drug-addled slut.

  Who doesn’t give a crap about her own kid.

  She thought that these were the things we say about other people in the shuttered rooms of our own minds, the harsh judgments we would never, ever confess to another living soul.

  A man about her age-thirty-nine-opened the door. He had black hair cut fashionably close, and wore jeans and a dress shirt without a tie. The untucked shirt had a hard time staying neat over his medium girth. He seemed more like an overgrown boy than a large man. CNN broadcasters chattered in the background and someone had recently microwaved Italian food.

  “Hi, I’m Evan. I’m glad you’re on time, I do have to get back to work when we’re done. But I let the sitter go home for lunch since I had to be here anyway, so I’ve got another half hour. Have you found out anything about Jillian? You’re Detective Patrick, right?”

  Frank introduced Theresa. Never touchy-feely and especially not with distraught family members, she would have been satisfied with a nod, but Evan Kovacic held out his hand, so she had to shake it. His fingers felt soft and too fleshy, and she couldn’t picture him building microchips or whatever it was he did. She let him talk at her cousin while she took in the room.

  Walking into the home of a stressed stranger no longer felt odd to her. She had done it at least once a week for the past dozen years. But she no longer found it fascinating either.

  At least it was clean. The polished wood floors gleamed and the furniture arranged around the leather sofa held just enough of the accoutrements of daily living to look comfortable. Lightweight draperies framed the window with a dramatic swoosh. Video-game designing must pay well.

  “Nice place,” she said, interrupting Evan Kovacic’s questions. Then she cleared her throat and forced herself to enunciate. Somewhere along the line, talking to people had become an effort. “This is a lovely apartment.”

  “Jillian did the decorating,” Evan told her, biting a nail. “She had-has-a real talent for it.”

  “I need to see her bedroom and bathroom, please.” Let’s grab the DNA samples and get back to my routine.

  “In there.” Evan Kovacic waved his hand at the hallway, and continued to ask Frank how the police go about looking for a woman who seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Theresa came to the bathroom first. She had no trouble guessing which toothbrush and razor and hairbrush belonged to the missing woman-Jillian apparently liked pink. Pink hand mirror, pink towels, pink makeup case with pink rhinestones. Theresa donned latex gloves and dropped the items she wanted into three separate manila envelopes. She didn’t bother to label them, she could do that back at the lab; as long as the items remained in her custody, they did not have to be sealed immediately. She caught her own face in the mirror for a brief moment, her expression sour and irritated, and left the room.

  Stuffing the envelopes into her camera bag, she stepped into the nursery, realized her mistake, and turned to go. But it had been seventeen years since Rachael had been an infant, so she tiptoed up to the gleaming white crib. Mothers never lost their professional curiosity about other people’s children.

  Jillian’s daughter slept soundly on pink sheets printed with the word Princess, her little face scrunched, concentrating on some dream or the condition of her diaper or merely the new act of breathing. Light-colored down spread over her skull and both hands made loose fists, the fingernails impossibly small. Her skin was perfect and her bed smelled of baby powder and warmth.

  I should feel something right now. Hope, sorrow, empathy. Anything.

  But I don’t.

  She left the room, backing away from the sleeping child as if the softest footfall might disturb her, though the men’s voices only twenty feet away did not.

  The Kovacics’ bedroom lacked the immaculate quality of the nursery. The bedclothes had been pulled up in a quick attempt at neatness; satin sheets-what else?-slipped haphazardly from beneath a chocolate velour cover. The matching nightstands had been segregated-a pink ribbon, a book of crossword puzzles, and a jumble of earrings on hers, a handheld video game and a ball cap on his. Jillian’s dresser held bottles of perfume and several framed photos, which Theresa glanced at. For a professional model-and I use the term loosely-there were no posed shots, just candid snaps of a blond woman, Evan, the baby, and various other people,

  Theresa searched for a hamper. The toothbrush, hairbrush, and razor should be able to give them all the DNA they would need to compare to the body, if and when a body turned up, but it never hurt to make sure.

  She opened the closet. Jillian’s half bulged with low-cut blouses and clingy dresses in every color of the rainbow. Evan’s half consisted of sweatshirts, T-shirts, and extreme-cold wear. Quilted nylon pants with FASTER emblazoned in yellow down one leg indicated a skier-no, not a skier, she mentally corrected upon spying a snowboard partially out of its duffel bag on the floor. Next to it sat a plastic laundry basket. Evan had obviously continued to pitch his T-shirts and briefs at it during the three days Jillian had been missing, making the basket only half of the time, because she had to dig down past three sets of men’s underclothes and a few dress shirts to find more feminine items. Theresa pulled out a skirt, a V-necked sweater, and the requisite thong underwear, an article of clothing she could never bring herself to try. It looked like sheer torture. She dropped two of these in a fourth manila envelope; vaginal secretions would provide plenty of skin cells-epithelials-for DNA analysis. They might also reveal sperm that didn’t belong to Evan, if there were some boyfriends or ex-clients in the picture, but Theresa couldn’t see how that would be relevant. If the underwear was here and Jillian wasn’t, then any wayward sperm on it probably didn’t coincide with the crime. If there had been a crime. If Jillian hadn’t simply found marriage and motherhood too confining, and left them behind with her pink towels.

  Theresa stood, listening to her knees creak. She couldn’t see what else to do. If Evan had killed his wife, he would hardly be letting Theresa poke around unsupervised. She saw no bloodstains or evidence of new paint or carpeting, which might imply a cleanup job. Jillian hadn’t left any threatening letters or indiscreet photos lying around, though Theresa hadn’t gone through her drawers and didn’t intend to. She had come strictly to collect items for future DNA analysis and had no desire to see what ex-professional escorts stored in their bedroom drawers, what people who had a marriage, had a love, had a life kept close at hand. She had no desire to ponder the contrasts between their situation and hers.

  Time to get back to the lab, where the cases were no more fascinating but at least the victims were demonstrably dead. No doubt Jillian would come home after an argument with her mother or new boyfriend or whoever she had gone to.

  Inertia kept Theresa from moving, long enough to take another look at Jillian’s pictures. She had been pretty, certainly, with clear, dewy skin and blond hair falling past her shoulder blades. Even in the hospital delivery room, wet with sweat and exhausted, she glowed as she held her newborn up for the camera. She beamed in her wedding dress, next to the tuxedoed Evan. She either hadn’t gained much weight with the baby or had lost it quickly, Theresa thought with a twinge of jealousy. She herself gained and lost the same five pounds every week.

  “Is that all you’re going to do?” Evan Kovacic asked from the doorway, nodding at her camera bag with its protruding envelopes. “I mean, is there anything else I can give you that would help find her?”

  What could she say? That’s it unless a body turns up? She glanced at Frank, who stood behind Evan, but before Frank could take over the husband’s eye fell on the photos. “She’s so beautiful. And not just on the outside. I know she would never have left us, not voluntarily. She loved Cara. She loved me.”

  Theresa followed his line of sight to the photos. Thanks a lot, Jillian. Thanks for dragging me across town for five minutes of work, thanks for perpetuating men’s fantasies of women as nothing but pretty playthings, thanks for leaving y
our daughter to be raised by a guy who looks as if he can barely take care of himself. Great job.

  Theresa caught her cousin’s eye, trying to signal: Let’s get out of here.

  Frank ignored her. “Mr. Kovacic, when you returned on Monday, the door was locked? Everything in place?”

  “Yes. Jerry and I-Jerry Graham, he’s my partner-we’d been at a software association meeting at Tower City all day. We got back about three in the afternoon.”

  “Who else would have been on the premises?”

  “No one except Jillian and Cara. We’re still setting up shop here, Jerry and I. We’ve got one programmer starting at the beginning of the month and another a week after that, and as soon as we get the manufacturing equipment set up, we’ll take on another designer and about four techs-”

  “Was the outside door unlocked? The lobby door downstairs?”

  “Yeah, probably. We’re in and out all day between this building and plants one and two-where we’ve begun setting up the equipment-so we don’t bother locking it. We haven’t had any problems with trespassers, and when we renovated we put in a good dead bolt on the apartment door. Though I doubt Jilly would have had it set during the day. I don’t know. I guess anyone could have walked right in-”

  Frank headed the man off before his mind could travel too far in that ominous direction. “You’ve searched the entire property?”

  “I sure have. Twice. It’s not as hard as it sounds, the buildings are empty for the most part, except for where we’re stocking all the equipment in number one and setting up the manufacturing process in number two. But Jerry and I searched every inch. We can look again now, if you want.”

  Theresa frowned at Frank. He said, “The officer taking the report did a walk-through with you, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sure he would have noticed anything out of place.” Like a dead body.