Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  But Riley didn’t ask, and David didn’t volunteer. Riley gave the wheel a jerk and turned into an elongated driveway.

  Mario Ashworth’s house served as a monument to both his construction skills and his inability to keep a low profile. White pillars flanked the entranceway, one corner of the house bloomed with a latticework of balconies, and the grass remained green even under a dusting of snow. Two Mercedes and a BMW waited in the circular drive. Riley’s battered Grand Marquis fit the decor as well as a Dumpster would have. Riley, however, didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed. He bounced up to the oversize front door and rang the bell. Five times.

  It opened to reveal a towering man with perfect black skin and a perfect black suit. The word smooth had been invented for this man. Although it wasn’t even Thanksgiving yet, the foyer’s gleaming marble tile and sixteen-foot ceiling already exhibited Christmas decorations. The huge man holding the door seemed no less intimidating with a twig of mistletoe hovering above his shining pate.

  “Good evening, Marcus,” Riley boomed. “We’re here to see your boss.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No. I have a badge.” The man had obviously seen too many badges to be impressed by them. He shut the door gently and left them to wait on the doorstep like delivery boys, which David felt sure bothered Riley not at all. It didn’t bother him much, either. A fancy house did not a righteous man make.

  “Who was that?” David asked.

  “Ivan Marcus. The right-hand man. You don’t want to turn your back on him if you want to keep both your kidneys. He’s left guys coughing up their own blood and been home in time to play Barbies with his daughter. Without changing either his clothes or his expression.”

  David resolved to keep that in mind as Marcus showed them into a small room off the main foyer. The dark colors, the rows of books, and a bowl of orchids on the edge of a mahogany desk all befit the house of a very rich man; only a haphazard pile of blueprints on the blotter and Mario Ashworth himself seemed out of place. At least a million dollars cycled through his organization every month and the guy—in a maroon sweatshirt, faded blue jeans, and faded blue eyes—looked like a frazzled soccer dad.

  “Mr. Ashworth.” Riley made it a statement instead of an inquiry. He dropped his lanky form into a leather armchair of butter-soft calfskin, which even David could guess cost more than his monthly salary, and pulled out a notebook and a pack of cigarettes.

  “No smoking,” Ashworth said.

  David remained standing, browsing the books and pictures haphazardly arranged on custom cherrywood shelves. Forcing Ashworth to divide his attention between the two of them might unnerve him, make him more talkative. He had read that in a textbook. Of course it might just tick the guy off.

  Ashworth drummed a pencil on his desk blotter, fast enough to blur. He slumped back in his chair and stared at Riley a moment before speaking. “I’m very busy today, so let’s make this quick. What do you think I’ve done now?”

  “You and I are already acquainted, and this, by the way, is Detective David Milaski. I take it you often have visits from Cleveland PD?”

  “About every other week.”

  David listened as he peered at a baseball signed by Babe Ruth. The guy had the great Bambino’s signature sitting on his shelf. Next to it sat an ornate pewter frame bearing the picture of a young woman with dark hair to her waist. She perched on a wrought-iron bench in front of a flower-laden archway, and looked completely out of place there. Her rebellious look, tight clothes, and sultry lips would have been more at home in a brothel. A very classy brothel.

  Meanwhile, Riley made a show of consulting his notebook. “Are you building a shopping plaza over on West Thirty-fifth?”

  “Yes,” Ashworth answered, his eye on David.

  “Would you know anything about a dead body found there?”

  “On my site?”

  “Near there.”

  “How near? Five blocks over?” he asked, annoyance bubbling through the words.

  “Near,” Riley repeated.

  “A construction worker? Some kind of accident?” The news channels would not break the story until five, so Ashworth could not have heard about the girl’s body from TV. To David, the man seemed genuinely perplexed.

  “No.”

  “Look, Officer—”

  “Detective,” Riley snapped. Marcus, seated in the corner, didn’t move, didn’t seem to breathe.

  “Whatever. I have a lot of projects at the moment, and I don’t know every single thing that goes on. I wasn’t informed of any accidents—”

  “Who is this?” David interrupted, holding up the photo frame.

  “My daughter, Ivy. She’s eighteen, too young for you.”

  Ivy. From the photo, her eyes confirmed her name. They bored into him, twining through his body, taking his lust for granted. “Where is your daughter?”

  “She’s not here. Would you put that down, please?” He turned back to Riley. “Just because I’m a successful businessman and you only make whatever scraps the taxpayers want to throw your way—”

  “Are you sure you mind if I smoke?” Riley interrupted, with a sweet smile.

  “Yes.”

  “Where is she?” David asked again, his persistence surprising himself and, it seemed, everyone else. Even Marcus turned to look at him with eyes so cool they seemed dead.

  Ashworth threw the pencil down. “What the hell does my daughter have to do with anything? Just leave her out of it!”

  “All I’m asking is where she is.”

  “She’s on a driving tour of New England. We used to make that trip every fall, look at the trees, smell the ocean. What the hell is it to you?”

  “Isn’t eighteen a little young to be roaming the countryside?”

  “Maybe in Podunk, Iowa, or wherever you came from. People with means grow up a little faster.”

  David felt a hot sting flush his cheeks, but he persisted. “The fall foliage is over.”

  “So fucking what?”

  “So, Mr. Ashworth.” David returned the frame to its precise orientation. “We really need to talk to your daughter.”

  The room fell silent.

  For a moment Ashworth wavered, glaring at David with anger and just a fleeting glimpse of fear in his face. Silently he straightened his back and sat forward, setting his elbows on the blotter with care. “There is nothing about my daughter you need to concern yourself with. You got a problem with me, you talk to me. Leave her alone.”

  A shrill beep pierced the tense air. Riley glanced at his pager, frowning. “Well, Mr. Ashworth . . . thank you for your time.”

  As they drove away, Riley glanced at David. “Well, you made an impression.”

  “I always do. Usually a bad one.”

  “And what the hell would you know about the fall foliage in New England?”

  “I can’t tell from the picture—people look a lot different when they’re dead—but what if we just pulled Mr. Ashworth’s absent daughter out of the river?” He glanced at his watch again—two P.M. He tried to call the nursing home by five every afternoon. His father’s doctor had stressed the importance of routine.

  “I don’t know,” Riley muttered as they passed through large wrought-iron gates and turned onto a street lined by similar mansions. “We come in talking about a body that’s now resting on a slab at the morgue. You’d think if he didn’t know where his daughter was, he’d be a little more curious. A little more worried.”

  “Unless he put her there,” David pointed out.

  Chapter 6

  EVELYN PARKED IN FRONT of Milaski’s car and found his partner. Riley greeted her with a frown, either because he was hungover or because she didn’t get there quickly enough to suit him. She suspected the former.

  The scene appeared to be an instant replay of the day before, just in a different area of the park and with the main action taking place along the road; the bridge sat several hundred feet back. Instead of construction
workers, at least ten police officers of varying rank inhabited the fifty feet of grassy bank between the road and the river. Evelyn pulled on gloves and cushioned the expensive camera against her parka. The temperature had gone up a few degrees since the day before and hovered around freezing, which did nothing to make the outdoors more comfortable and meant that potential precipitation would be a toss-up between rain and snow.

  “This is weird, Evelyn,” Riley began as he lit a cigarette, the brief match flame representing the only source of warmth for miles.

  “Weird is what we do for a living.”

  “Don’t mess with my head, it’s too early for that. I mean, this is weird. We have a strangled girl next to the road. Okay, that’s strange right there, because he could have just rolled her down the hill and who knows how long it would have taken to find the body. But he leaves her by the road.”

  “Maybe he pushed her out of a car.”

  “Let me finish. And by the way, you might want to stay away from David Milaski.”

  “Thanks, Riley, but I already have an older brother.” Curiosity, however, got the better of her. “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s bad news. His last partner, Jack—never mind, it’s a long story, but the kid’s got quite a past to overcome and he’s not making much of an effort. Just trust me on this one, okay? Now, about this victim,” he went on before she could respond. “She’s black, not white like yesterday, but she’s about the same age and she’s wet, soaking wet, more than just dew. Don’t know about her face, we haven’t turned her over yet, waited for you. Her hair is frozen like a block of ice. She’s wearing nothing but a T-shirt, bra, and panties.”

  “Not good weather for that. You think she fell in the water?”

  “I think she came out of the water.”

  “Oh,” Evelyn said, in a tone usually reserved for tales of alien abduction.

  “There’s prints in the mud, coming up the bank. She had to tear through a number of bushes—scratched herself up pretty good—but the prints are definitely coming out of the water and going up the bank.”

  “She just decided to go swimming?”

  “Or he threw her in,” David Milaski said as he joined their huddle. Evelyn gave him a quick smile to hide her fresh scrutiny. So Milaski had a past with a capital P. Not her problem. She decided to ignore the weariness around his eyes and instead focused on his words as he said, “Maybe he pushed her in, but somehow she gets out of the water and he catches up to her again. That’s what I don’t get.”

  “What?”

  “Why he didn’t just kill her before he threw her in the first time?”

  “She didn’t freeze to death?” she asked, shivering, bouncing on her toes to keep the circulation going, part of a midwesterner’s daily aerobics.

  “He strangled her.”

  “This sounds completely different from yesterday’s homicide,” Evelyn pointed out.

  “You haven’t heard it all yet,” Riley said.

  “He strangled her with a chain,” David clarified. Evelyn gazed at him with a slight frown and he went on: “A thin stainless steel link chain. And there’s dried cement on her legs.”

  Evelyn’s eyebrows stretched into her forehead.

  “At least it looks like cement. Gray smears, clinging to her skin.”

  “Let me get this straight. You think he fitted her with a pair of cement shoes and she somehow escaped them?”

  “That’s what the evidence indicates,” David said a bit pompously.

  Evelyn’s overloaded mind gave protest. “The other victim was chained to the cement. How did she get out of that?”

  “I don’t know. But he had a piece of the chain left over for finishing this one off.”

  Evelyn turned and looked at the river, deceptively peaceful in the frigid air, and she pictured what she had been trying hard not to picture. What would it be like to be trapped in a stone and dropped to your death by someone who had plenty of time as the cement hardened to decide to let you live? Would you hold your breath or would the icy water knock it out of you? Would you have a few seconds as you sank to the bottom, feeling the cold invade your bones, the only warmth provided by your burning lungs, time enough to give up all hope? Would the cold actually help, numbing your mind as well as your body? Or would it simply make the pain more intense? And what of that final surrender, that last spastic coughing death?

  And what would it be like to escape that, only to die anyway?

  “I want to see her,” Evelyn said, with a set to her jaw that hadn’t been there a moment before.

  Riley said, “This way.”

  The body lay under a tree, but there all pretensions of peacefulness were shattered. She rested on her right side, slightly facing the river as if she regretted leaving its glacial protection. The ends of the chain hung loose; he had simply pulled each end in the opposite direction until she died, and discarded the weapon along with the body.

  A young patrol cop wiped his nose on his sleeve, reddening a face that had not yet outgrown acne. “Here she is,” he said to her. “The victim, otherwise known as just another dead bitch.”

  Evelyn wasn’t offended by cop language—she’d heard much worse out of her own husband—but did get bored with it. She studied him as if looking through a microscope at what had turned out to be a quite disappointing specimen.

  “I don’t know if you’re just trying to be tough in front of your fellow officers,” she said in the voice of every child’s most feared grade-school teacher, “but when you’ve been a cop for longer than a week or two you’ll know that a setup like this is not just another anything.”

  His cheeks, which had been white with cold, now flushed to a healthy rose, and he invoked his right to remain silent for the rest of her visit.

  The girl’s arms and legs were covered with scratches, none very deep. Delicate diamond stud earrings still winked in the girl’s ears—ruling out robbery as a motive—and her hair was enviable even with icicles forming in its curls. The short-sleeve, purple shirt had been woven with threads of silver so that it shimmered as it clung. Her left arm lay in front of her, her right beneath her torso. A lightweight osteopathic brace encircled her left hand. White medical tape still clung to it, in defiance of the river’s currents. Evelyn’s stomach clenched.

  “Turn her over,” she whispered.

  The cops tugged at the ramrod-stiff body, the left arm stretching outward. Her eyes and tongue bulged in the usual aftermath of strangulation. The girl’s sightless eyes gazed up at Evelyn, uncaring, no longer interested in the emotions of others.

  One of the road cops said, “Hey, isn’t that—”

  “No.”

  David grabbed her shoulders as she swayed. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  She choked out the words from behind one palm. “It’s Darryl Pierson’s daughter. It’s Destiny.”

  “The mayor’s daughter?” David asked.

  “The mayor’s daughter?” Riley asked. “Oh, shit.”

  Evelyn couldn’t think, couldn’t react, couldn’t, for once in her life, be professional. She could only see Darryl swell with pride when he had mentioned his daughter the day before. How could he hear she was dead? How could he bear it?

  David put his arms around her as she listed into him, sobbing.

  Chapter 7

  THEY DROVE OUT OF the park, the bleak November trees forming a ghostly sentinel along the road. She watched them slip past her window in silence. So much had happened in a short time; it seemed like it couldn’t possibly still be the same day. She had volunteered to break the news to the Piersons—the last thing in the world she wanted to do, a ghastly task that had never before been hers, but she owed Darryl at least that much. However, the chief of Homicide insisted on a more official route and contacted the mayor’s right-hand man, who had also been a friend of the family for twenty years. Evelyn felt intensely relieved, and guilty because of it.

  She had remained at the scene to supervise the removal of
the body, averting her eyes from the curious glances of the other cops and the body snatchers. There was no precedent for Evelyn freaking out over a dead body. Someone would be on the phone to Tony within minutes, providing coffee-break fodder for him and Jason for at least two weeks.

  There were no clues to the killer: Grass around the body hindered footprints, and no tire tracks or any other evidence came to light. Divers were sent into the water, in case, as fantastic as it seemed, she had somehow escaped the deadly weight that had murdered the other still-unidentified female.

  Then the chief of Homicide called Riley to say that the mayor wanted to see Evelyn and they should hustle her over there right now, because this case would probably determine everything about the Cleveland Police Department for the next ten years or however long this guy remained mayor. Let’s stay on his good side.

  What would she say to Darryl? Why was she this horribly upset? She hadn’t given Darryl a thought for months at a time, and yesterday had been the first time in years she’d seen him other than on a TV screen. She did not still love him, and when it came right down to it she had never even met Destiny.

  Maybe because Destiny was his daughter, and Evelyn had a daughter as well. It so easily could have been Angel.

  The coffee threatened to come up.

  “You okay?”

  “No.” She took a deep breath, worrying her Egyptian mummy key chain as if it were a talisman. “I don’t know what to say to him. I never do this, this isn’t part of my job. This is your job.”

  “I don’t think he asked for you because of your job,” David said in a strained tone. “I think it’s because you’re a friend.”

  “Yesterday was the first time I’d seen him in person in about seventeen years.”

  He stopped for a light, the red color reflecting in his face. “Then—”