Evidence of Murder

by Lisa Black

  Drew got to his feet with an agitated twitch. “The way I see it, there are two possibilities. One, Evan murdered Jillian to get Cara’s money. Two, Evan drove Jillian to-” He stopped, gulped, went on. “Suicide. So how can we stand back and let someone like that raise her child?”

  We? Again Theresa felt as if she tottered on a precipice, balancing between the safety of not getting involved and the possibility that Cara could be in danger. Instead of jumping, she tried to calm Drew-and herself-with reason. “But they’d only been married a few weeks.”

  “I can show you.” He dove for the table in front of her, rummaged around in the slippery piles of comics, and came up with a pink vinyl photo album. He plopped it on Theresa’s knees, startling her into spilling the coffee on her jeans.

  She set the mug down after Drew cleared a spot among the comic books for the wet bottom. The photo album had a Hello Kitty emblem in one corner but no other markings. It had one subject: Jillian Perry.

  Photos of Jillian on the houseboat, at the beach (in a maternity bathing suit), the grocery store, a few with endless racks of comic books behind her, obviously Drew’s shop. At the hospital, a scrunched-up, red-faced Cara in her arms. Aside from the baby, no one else. In a few shots, other people stood near Jillian but Drew had cropped them out, cutting people off to just a sliver of human. Only Jillian remained.

  “See?” Drew seated himself next to her on the couch, too close, reaching over to turn the pages faster to point out photos in which Jillian appeared as especially lovely. “See how happy she was? She glowed when Cara was born. Just glowed. Here’s her old apartment, before she moved in with Evan. She made the curtains in that nursery by hand. They matched Cara’s eyes, see?”

  “Uh-huh.” She really wished he’d move over.

  He flipped another page. “Now this is after the wedding.”

  He missed a photo op like Jillian in a veil? “Did you go?”

  “To the wedding? Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t take any pictures?”

  The muscles in his cheek tightened to cords. “Nah. Look at her face. This is a week after the wedding.” He pointed out a photo of Jillian on the deck of the boat, a comely Eskimo in a pink parka, the baby a bundle of swaddling against her chest. Jillian smiled, but only smiled. No glow, and even a tiny line of worry above her eyebrows.

  “Perhaps she was uncomfortable. It had to be freezing out.”

  “And here.” Jillian by her car, obviously the same day, inserting her key into the door lock, only the barest of smiles and a discomfited one at that.

  Jillian in her apartment, scrubbing a pan in the sink. Jillian holding Cara, with a smile, yes, but a tired one, apprehensive around the corners. The carefree grin of the earlier photographs had been erased. If Jillian hadn’t been afraid of something, she’d at least been very, very concerned.

  Still, Theresa thought it might not be wise to encourage Drew to blame Evan. That might invite further disaster. “Having an infant is exhausting, Drew. I can attest to that.”

  “She could have given perky lessons to Disney employees two months after Cara’s birth. All of a sudden, at five months, she’s tired? The only thing that changed was Evan.”

  “And her apartment. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping well in a new place. Maybe Cara wasn’t. That’s the way it is with babies, Drew, one month isn’t necessarily like the next. And marriage is a big change.”

  He sat close enough for her to notice the ink stains on his fingertips, and that perhaps he should launder his clothing more often. “She went from smiling to not in just a few days. Maybe I haven’t walked down the aisle myself, but I know that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

  She studied the photographs, the creepily plentiful photographs. The change in Jillian’s mood did seem apparent…but there could be many reasons for that. Perhaps Jillian didn’t like living on the old factory grounds, or couldn’t sleep with the noise of the train tracks nearby. Perhaps Cara had developed a health problem, even something mild, that Jillian worried about but did not discuss with the childless Drew. And the first few months, the first year, of marriage were the hardest. She might have had a habit of calling her old friend after a good blowout with her husband. And perhaps Drew had kept only pictures that proved his theory, that Jillian had married the wrong man.

  Or perhaps Jillian thought marriage would finally dampen Drew’s obsession with her, and that had not happened. After all, Evan did not appear in the photographs to prompt that touch of fear in Jillian’s eyes. Only Drew had been present.

  “You’ve known Jillian for four years, you said?”

  “Yeah, four years and a couple of months.”

  “Did you only recently get a camera? This album begins, what, five months ago?”

  He spoke without hesitation. “This is the current one. I have others, um, at least seven. Would you like to see them?”

  Eight photo albums of nothing but Jillian Perry. How had she walked that precipice of her own with this man for four years? Maintained a friendship without anger or despair? Kept him from falling into the abyss? Even marrying hadn’t helped. No wonder she had trouble smiling for the camera.

  All at once Theresa’s skin crawled. She had done enough investigating for one day. The album slid from her lap as she stood; Drew Fleming caught it, cushioned it from harm. “Sorry, no, I have to get going.”

  He grabbed her arm just above the wrist. “But I have some really good ones.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “You have to understand, Theresa.” His fingers tightened. “I’m trying to show you what happened to Jillian. I knew her better than anybody else.”

  Her thighs gave a twinge as she struggled to rise, her arm beginning to feel pinched. Afraid she didn’t want to know the answer, she asked, “What happened to Jillian?”

  His eyes were shiny, the blue glacier hard. “Evan did.”

  She breathed out in relief. For a moment she had expected a confession. Then she slid her arm from his fingers, stammered something about her daughter needing help on a school project, and thanked him for telling her about Jillian. She crossed the floor in four steps and pulled at the sliding door, her fingertips slipping from the shallow handle.

  “No problem.” He slid the door open for her and she escaped the cabin. Frigid air slapped her cheeks, woke her up. The deck swayed under her feet.

  Still think he’s harmless? Theresa asked herself.

  Now Drew looked up at the gray haze that represented the sky. “You’ll let me know what the doctors say, right?”

  “I’ll ask them to call you.” This didn’t guarantee that they would-normally medical information would be released only to the next of kin-but there was nothing she could do about that. From the rear deck she could see the copse of woods where the body had been found, and again felt that frisson of worry. Jillian Perry had practically died on her stalker’s stoop. “You said you thought that Jillian might have been coming to visit you?”

  Drew had already followed her line of sight. “Yeah. I mean, it’s right there. I could have seen her from here.”

  “Were you home all day on Monday?” A nice way of asking if he had an alibi for the time of the alleged crime.

  “No, I was at the shop. I’m open nine to seven.”

  “Did Jillian often walk here to visit you?”

  He thought about this, holding his body tighter in his too-thin coat. “No, she always drove.”

  “Always?”

  “Yeah. Jillian wasn’t into exercise, believe it or not, despite her figure. She always told me, ‘I’ll jog only if someone’s chasing me with a gun.’” The laugh faded from his lips as quickly as it had appeared; obviously he thought someone had chased Jillian, right into an icy death.

  She climbed onto the back of the boat. “Does this…craft…have a name? I don’t see one.”

  “It’s on the front.”

  She waited.

  “What else? It’s Jillian.” He shrugged as he said it,
with a wry smile that seemed so reasonable, so normal, that her anxiety dissipated like a wisp of hot air on an icy day. Drew Fleming was not the only man who had ever carried a torch for an unattainable woman. And if Drew Fleming had killed Jillian, why wouldn’t he sit back and let her be written off as a suicide? Why show up at the lab insisting on murder? Obsession could turn every bit as murderous as greed, but not as often. Greed remained the far more common motive.

  “Thanks for talking to me,” he added. “I’m just glad that someone else cares about her besides me and Cara.”

  Theresa placed one foot on the two-by-four, preparing to make the leap to solid ground. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and Jillian’s parents will win custody.”

  “I told you-they’re not going to ask for it. They may not even know Jillian is dead, unless Evan told them. I certainly didn’t.”

  “They’ll be told. They’re the official next of kin, so they’ll have to at least be informed of Cara’s guardianship.”

  Drew frowned. “But Evan is already the guardian. Isn’t he?”

  The two-by-four bent under Theresa’s weight. It would hold her for a quick leap, but if she tried to balance on it for any length of time, it would bow too deeply, and she would fall to the frozen ice below.

  “Not exactly,” she admitted.

  CHAPTER 10

  MONDAY, MARCH 8

  Theresa picked at the red tape stuck to her fingertips. She had sealed up no less than fourteen bags from the victim of an early-morning shooting, including two pairs of pants and four shirts of varying thicknesses. This by no means represented the record. Layering remained the best way to stay warm through a Cleveland winter, and those who spent many hours out of doors, like drug dealers, had to dress for the weather.

  She tossed the last of the tape into the wastebasket, exited the amphitheater without watching where she was going, and bumped into the corner of a gurney parked in the hallway, sending it, with its occupant, sliding into Chris Cavanaugh. The Cleveland police department’s star hostage negotiator and all-around great guy, if you read his book jackets.

  “That’s a hell of a greeting,” he told her. Even the dim light in the hallway couldn’t mitigate the dimples, the twinkling eyes, the gloss of each dark hair receding from his forehead.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “That’s a hell of greeting too. I’m sorry you couldn’t make lunch on Wednesday. Maybe another time.”

  She didn’t respond, but he had already turned his head, watching through the open autopsy room door as two dieners swung a heavyset man onto a stainless-steel table in one well-practiced heave. The man appeared to be about forty, with a tattoo on one arm and a round, seeping hole in his chest.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again, but gently this time, guessing that she didn’t want to hear the answer any more than he wanted to say it.

  He continued to watch the activity around the dead man. “We had a domestic standoff this morning. It didn’t end well.”

  A snotty comment about his formerly perfect no-bloodshed record would probably put an end to the sporadic lunch invitations, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She thought about asking why he had come to attend the autopsy, but he would probably point out that detectives attended the autopsies of the cases they worked, so why not?

  Besides, she thought she knew why he had come. “That’s going to happen, you know,” was all she could think of to say. “Things going bad.”

  “I know.” He smiled and for a moment she could fool herself into thinking that she had cheered him up. The fact that she hadn’t was made apparent by his brisk tone when he said he supposed he shouldn’t keep her from her work and strode into the brightly lit autopsy suite as if counting on momentum to get him over the threshold.

  Pride or guilt? She couldn’t tell.

  And she didn’t care, right? The next door along the hallway led to the stairwell, and she climbed one flight to Christine Johnson’s office.

  The young pathologist had inherited the cubbyhole from a predecessor and wasted no time in filling its walls with medical texts and photos of her younger siblings. Theresa would have leaned on the writing counter-the office had room for only one chair-but it already swayed from the collection of knives, guns, and blunt instruments spilling over from a cardboard box. She leaned on the doorjamb instead. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  The doctor sat back in her chair and ran long fingers through her raven hair. “It has twenty-year-old carpeting and no window, but at least I don’t have to share it. I don’t share well.”

  “Really? You seem so sweet to me.”

  “You haven’t ticked me off yet.” Christine didn’t smile when she said this, either.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. I need to ask you about a case.”

  “The kid? I have something for you, by the way-here are the wood flakes I pulled out of his head wound.”

  Theresa took the tiny envelope, feeling the fold of glassine paper inside it. “So the killer hit him with a wood object? Like a baseball bat?”

  “I doubt it, the wound had some irregularities. But all I can really say is that it’s wood, and you’ll have to figure out the rest. Sign here and it’s yours.”

  Theresa signed the evidence form. “Actually I wanted to know about Jillian Perry. White female, came in late Friday?”

  For such a pretty face, Christine’s could produce a scowl that would have stopped an army of advancing Huns. Perhaps Theresa had finally ticked her off.

  “Her,” the pathologist seethed.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s driving me crazy, that’s what. Insane. I sped up the tox results, looked at everything, histology sections, skin samples, history. Everything.”

  “Okaaay…and?”

  “And I can’t figure out why she’s dead.”

  “She didn’t freeze to death?”

  “She might have.”

  “Or OD?”

  “She might have. You can have a seat on my ammo locker, there.”

  Theresa sat on a small khaki-colored box next to the wall. With a handle on the top, it didn’t make for the most comfortable seating, but she’d been on her feet all morning. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked a freezing death before. Though I could have-if it’s not a homicide, I don’t pay much attention.”

  “I’ve seen a few, usually the homeless or drug addicts who tried to stay outside too long. Jillian Perry shows some of the signs of it, the bluish-white skin, slightly reduced lividity. It would have taken only a few hours-right next to the lake, which would put moisture and wind in the air and speed it up. She was slender and not warmly dressed; that would speed it up too. Were the branches around her broken as if she was stumbling around?”

  “Not really. I think she took the same path into the woods that we did. I noticed two broken branches that had ice on the broken parts, so it wasn’t the cop or Frank who broke them. Nothing else within sight.”

  “She didn’t have bruises, scratches, or tears in her clothes either, so she probably sat down before the disorientation set in. After that her heart would have stopped. Was she frozen to the ground when you found her?”

  “She was pretty stiff. It’s not like we had to chip her away or anything, but then several days had passed. The temperature rose and fell a few degrees.”

  “True.”

  The doctor drummed her fingernails, coated in a chocolate color that nearly matched her skin, on a copy of Medicolegal Investigation of Death for so long that Theresa finally interrupted, “So did she freeze to death?”

  The drumming stopped. “A few things bother me.”

  Theresa leaned forward, pressing her shoulders toward her knees. The handle of the ammo box deepened its impression into her buttocks.

  “Freezing is, by nature, not an obvious diagnosis. You don’t have any hard-core proof of it as a cause of death. Kind of like drowning-if you find someone in the water and no other signs, you assume they
drowned. You might find water in the lungs, or you might not. In freezing, you might find cherry-red lividity, petechiae in the peripheral muscles, abrasions of the skin, or you might not.”

  “And in Jillian?”

  “Nothing. The only unusual thing about her body was a kind of weird smell to the organs. But I could have been imagining that for all I know, so unremarkable was her autopsy. Meanwhile, I’m having tox check for amylase in the vitreous humor and elevated levels of catecholamines. That might tell us something.”

  “It might tell you something. I have no idea what you just said.”

  “Those are chemical indications of hypothermia. Sometimes. Did she have a white residue around her nose and mouth when you found her? Maybe it looked like she’d eaten a mouthful of snow?”

  “No. Though the temperature had warmed up some.”

  “But it never went above freezing all week. I checked. Most victims will have a white rime on their faces; their respiration freezes once outside the body.”

  The significance of that flooded Theresa’s brain, expanding the set of possibilities. “So she wasn’t breathing as she sat in the cold? She didn’t freeze to death?”

  “I don’t know. All these indications might be present, might not be. They don’t prove or disprove either way. Human bodies vary a lot in their responses; no matter how science advances, there’s still so much that we don’t know. That’s why if you’re going to bring me victims, give me a good shooting or stabbing any day. I know what to do with that.” She stroked the twelve-inch blade of a large knife serving as a paperweight.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Supposedly she walked to this spot by the lake?”

  “We found her car in the garage.”

  “Two or three miles away?”

  All this talk of cold made Theresa feel overwarm. “Depending on the route she took. That’s not very far, really, I jog two miles every day.”

  “Ever try it in six-degree weather with no hat or gloves?”

  “No.”

  “Want to know what your extremities would look like if you did?”