Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  “We knew each other in college. We were . . . friends.”

  David paused as if he meant to proceed cautiously. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry into your personal life. I thought it was some political conflict.”

  “In a way, maybe it was.” She watched the snow alight on the windshield. “But it’s been a long time, and we both got married. Perhaps we made the right decisions.”

  “Is his wife from Cleveland?”

  “She’s from Chicago. Her parents have a piece of almost every radio station built since the turn of the century. They make the Forbes list every year.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

  The mayor’s house nestled in understated wealth on the border of Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. November winds had left the greenery largely untouched. The driveway, already filled with cars, curved in front of the house. David parked behind a champagne Rolls-Royce and turned off the ignition.

  “You’re not alone, you know.”

  She glanced at him quizzically. He flushed and looked away, as if already regretting having said anything at all.

  “About second-guessing past decisions,” he explained. “I know all about that.”

  The inside foyer seethed with well-dressed black men, all of whom stared at the two. The mayor’s personal assistant, Will Brown, introduced himself in order to show Evelyn upstairs. David was to wait in the kitchen. She glanced back from the landing. He hadn’t moved, his eyes still on her. Feeling oddly comforted, she continued on.

  On the second floor Evelyn found herself tiptoeing, hoping she had managed to scrape all the mud off her shoes. She half expected to hear Mrs. Pierson keening her loss, but the upper floors were silent. She felt a deep pang of sympathy when she thought of Danielle, a mother who no longer had a daughter.

  Will escorted her into what was obviously Darryl’s private office, a large room where utilitarian filing cabinets were crammed alongside his passions: books, original paintings, and African sculptures. He huddled behind his desk as if marooned in an unfamiliar place.

  Evelyn took a deep breath and sat a few feet from him on an antique straight-back chair that creaked at even her slight weight.

  “Darryl.”

  He turned to look at her, a person different from the man she had met the night before, from the boy she had known in college. His eyes were hollow, without vitality. She couldn’t speak, just stretched out a hand, which he took and squeezed.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry,” he said, his voice stronger than she expected, although it quavered every few words as the pain rolled through. “I can see it in your face, and I’m going to hear that phrase from so many people in the coming weeks that I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it.”

  “Okay,” she said, not trusting herself to say more.

  He let go of her hand. “Tell me,” he said, words carefully precise, “was my baby raped?”

  She hesitated only a moment before saying, “I don’t think so. I can’t know until the autopsy”—then caught her breath when she saw him wince at the word—“but we saw no indication of it in the first case. Therefore I think it’s unlikely.” She finished with more confidence than she felt.

  He didn’t ask about the first case, and she wondered if the chief of detectives had told him of the similarities between his daughter’s case and that of the other girl. Would it be more comforting to know that it didn’t happen just because her name was Pierson? Or more galling that it might be a completely random crime?

  “I need to know how this happened. I need to know who did it and see him punished. I have to, Evelyn.”

  She knew now why he asked for her. He could deal more easily with anger than with pain. Why not use the investigation as an excuse to put off grief for another day? “We’ll find out, Darryl. He had to leave clues.”

  “You have to catch him, Evelyn,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “Promise me you will.”

  “Darryl, I’m a forensic scientist. I’m not the investigating officer, I’m only part of the overall effort.”

  Darryl lurched from his chair and collapsed on one knee next to her, taking her hand in both of his. It would have been a comical gesture had it not been born of such obvious agony. “Promise me.”

  She never made promises. They seemed too risky, too big a chance. What if you couldn’t deliver? It was better not to disappoint, not to open yourself to the guilt of having failed. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” she whispered.

  “Just promise me you’ll find him. You don’t even have to catch him or convict him. Just tell me who he is.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she tried, knowing he wouldn’t be satisfied with that. Darryl had never been satisfied with half measures.

  “Promise me.”

  It seemed to her that his face held all the pain of every parent’s fears, of every demon that haunts in the small hours of the morning when you listen for their foot on the step, of every life cut too short, leaving a bewildered agony in its wake. “I promise.”

  And then the shrill beep of her pager cracked the air; startled, she pulled her hand away. Darryl barely noticed, just returned to his seat, his current objective accomplished.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, looking at the digital display. Then she looked again. Her home phone number glowed at her. She had left her cell phone in the car.

  She had been reluctant to come; now she felt reluctant to leave. “Darryl, is there a phone I can use?”

  He nodded as if his neck hurt and he had to move it slowly, and got to his feet as if his body felt the same way. “In the hall.” He put his hand on her elbow to guide her and said, “Thanks for coming, Evelyn. You didn’t have to.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You’ll keep me posted?” he said, with an insistent squeeze to her elbow.

  “Of course,” she said with less certainty. He turned to face her.

  “I know everything’s supposed to go through the ME, but this is different. This is my daughter. Don’t bother with channels. Just call me whenever you know anything. Anyone here will put you through.”

  “Darryl, I—”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m asking you to take a risk, but I’ll keep everything you tell me confidential. No one will know.” He held her gaze, sounding more like the Darryl she had known. “I wouldn’t ask you to toss your job down the tubes. Just tell me everything. I’ll make damn sure no one ever knows where it came from. I just have to know, Evelyn. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “I have to be with Danielle, now,” he added, and the thought brought tears to his eyes. “God, I— and the boys are so confused, they just keep asking where their sister went. Here’s the phone. You can find your way out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Evelyn.” He grasped her shoulder, and for a moment his face began to slide into grief. Then he choked out, “Thank you,” and left her alone.

  In the hallway she picked up the receiver on a beautifully crafted phone on a beautifully crafted desk and without thinking dialed 9 for an outside line. What a crazy life to have five lines on your home phone, to have to grieve with a near-total lack of privacy.

  Angel answered. “Mom?”

  “Yeah, hon, what’s the matter?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the mayor’s house.” Evelyn mentally skipped over the whining note in her daughter’s voice. “What is it?”

  “The mayor’s house? What are you doing there?”

  “Why did you page me?” she snapped. “What’s wrong?”

  “Mom.” Now Evelyn heard the tremulous overtones. “I need you to come home. I feel really sick.”

  Chapter 8

  DAVID WAITED FOR EVELYN in the car, cold but more comfortable than he would have been inside, surrounded by Cleveland’s elite. The smell of all those expensive suits made him woozy. The last time he had been in the presence of that much deli
cate tailoring he had barely avoided going to jail.

  Maria Hardin had been one of his truly bad decisions, but as many times as he looked back, he couldn’t imagine making any other. A well-kept hothouse flower with jet-black hair and bottomless eyes, she had faultless skin over a frame of iron. Her marriage to his Special Ops commander didn’t even slow him down.

  Though his father still fumed over David’s decision to throw away college to join the Marines, his military training got him into Special Operations. True, he had exaggerated his armed forces experience—while the world churned over the Iran hostage rescue and the Grenada invasion, David spent most of his career at a desk at Fort Bragg—but he figured he could keep up until he learned more. He listened to the other guys, read all the manuals, and pulled off a spectacular hostage rescue in his third week. It seemed as if things were finally going his way. Then one of the guys threw a party and David met Maria.

  She did nothing to indicate that she made a habit of seducing her husband’s subordinates. They simply had a short conversation about hibachi grills, and he was completely, consummately lost.

  He pursued her with a single-mindedness that curtailed his job training and worried his coworkers. Men who barely knew him felt compelled to take him aside and try to talk some sense into him. He didn’t listen. He hardly heard them.

  When he finally convinced her to make a surreptitious visit to his apartment, he called in sick and spent the whole day cleaning. He washed and folded laundry that hadn’t seen a machine in weeks. The windows were spotless. Even his retriever, Harry, got a bath, which the dog clearly considered over-the-top. David stood in the living room, wondering if he had enough time to repaint, when the doorbell rang.

  She stepped into his apartment for the first time. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  David had always believed, had to believe, that Maria felt torn. At least she said as much to him, that she could no more stop herself than he could.

  “I do love you,” she said four weeks later during a stolen ten minutes at Tower City mall. “But I love him, too.”

  “I wish you didn’t.” It would be their last private moment together.

  Several days later three inept bank robbers dressed in Halloween masks tried to make a withdrawal from the downtown National Bank. A teller tripped the alarm before the first one reached the red ropes. They collected the money in a floral print pillowcase and ran outside to see four police cars, lights blazing, the sidewalk blocked, and made a hasty retreat back into the bank.

  David found himself on the roof with Maria’s husband, visible to office workers in a few neighboring towers but hidden from the road. Rod monitored the radio traffic. The police officers on the street reported that customers were lying on the floor in the front area as the negotiators attempted to call the robbers on the assistant manager’s phone.

  “What now?” David asked over the rising wind. The sun warmed his back but not his heart. Worry prickled the back of his neck.

  “Now we wait. There’s nothing we can do for the moment. By the way,” Rod said casually, turning, “how long have you been fucking my wife?”

  David never found out how he knew, whether Maria had told him or someone else had. But he saw no doubt in his supervisor’s eyes, and even less in the semiautomatic SIG-Sauer P226 in his right hand. It had fifteen rounds of 9-millimeter Luger full-metal-jacket cartridges and Rod could fire the entire clip in less than eight seconds. David stood very still, both dignified and ashamed by the sympathy in his own voice. “I’m sorry. But I love her.”

  “Did you really think you’d ride off in the sunset and I’d just let you go? Be a big man about it?”

  “I—”

  “I hate to tell you, but I ain’t that big. Nobody’s that big. Not over someone like her.”

  “I know—”

  “Did you know,” his supervisor said, as if addressing a class of rookies, “that nine-millimeter bullets, properly loaded, travel at a rate of four thousand feet per second? And if one hit your body it would pass straight through, so long as it didn’t get stuck in the skull, the spine, or the pelvic bone?”

  David’s pores began to weep sweat.

  “I mean, we’re in the middle of a shootout situation here, and unless I miss my guess—”

  “Rod—”

  “—those morons down there can’t go out, so they’ll come up. All sorts of bullets could fly.”

  David heard a bang and some muffled thuds, and then all three bank robbers tumbled through the stairwell door, blinded at first by the bright sun after the dim bank. The unlucky soul in the lead landed at Rod’s feet; the other two ducked back down the stairwell.

  Rod aimed, but not at the robber, now sprinting for the fire escape. It might appear that way from a distance, but the gun’s muzzle pointed at David’s chest. It could be done. Rod could get away with it.

  All of this shot across David’s brain in the split second it took for him to throw himself across the tar paper. The SIG-Sauer spit out a single round and the guy didn’t make it to the fire escape.

  David saw a red stain spread across the man’s chest. He stayed where he was. Let Rod explain how he “accidentally” shot David when he was on the ground. Let the secretaries see.

  Rod looked from the dying man to David and back again. Considering.

  When he looked again, his eyes weren’t quite as feverish. “Well, congratulations. You’ve stopped an armed robbery in progress.”

  They never spoke again, never mentioned Maria, never coordinated their stories. David told the well-dressed review board members that the man had tried to escape—even though they hadn’t even said “Stop!” and the guy probably would have wet his pants if they had. It must have been the same story Rod told because there were no repercussions. But it had been a bad shoot and he knew it, Rod knew it, and whether David chalked it up to paranoia or a good understanding of how much cops gossip, he had the firm belief that every other cop on the force knew it, too.

  He never returned to the Special Ops team. Before his mandatory postshooting leave expired, David transferred to Vice as a detective, a brilliant move in its way. The other cops, even those that knew of the affair, had to question why Rod would recommend promotion for the guy who banged his wife. Maybe they were wrong and David was innocent. How Rod had done it, David couldn’t guess. He must have called in some favors. A lot of favors.

  David never saw Maria again. He never told her what had happened, doubting, in the harsh light of day, that she would even believe him. He debated whether he should leave her alone to rebuild her marriage or if he should warn her that her husband’s jealousy, reasoned or unreasoning, could put her in danger. The point became moot when Rod, opting for an early retirement buyout, sent Maria ahead to a luxurious Florida condo and David was left with nothing but a torturous longing and a job he didn’t deserve.

  And now came Evelyn, an intriguing combination of attractiveness and resourcefulness. She could help him solve this case with forensic information, but how much use could she be if she spent all her time holding the mayor’s hand? Obviously she still loved the man, but David had held her while she cried and he couldn’t get the burning feeling to leave his arms. If still inclined to make impulsive, stupid decisions with his life, he had better learn to see them coming, and he could see this one from several football fields away. He would have nothing to do with Evelyn, either personally or professionally. He would finally, as his father had begged him, learn.

  He looked at his watch.

  Chapter 9

  EVELYN CROSSED HER ARMS and wondered why emergency rooms had to be kept at near refrigerator-like temperatures. She supposed it kept germ growth down, but did that balance the inadvisability of taking people who were already sick and freezing them to death?

  “How do you feel?”

  “Crappy,” her daughter said, her voice a pained hush. “Just like the last five times you asked.”

  “Sorry.”

  Angel curled up under t
he white sheets as if she couldn’t get warm, doubled over in pain. She had left the house without makeup and didn’t seem to care that her hair stuck out all over, two facts that worried Evelyn more than the doctors and nurses coming and going without telling her anything.

  Evelyn felt helpless and resented it. “How long have you been sick?”

  “I’ve been feeling kind of punky for a couple days, but it wasn’t anything much. Just today I started to feel really bad.”

  Evelyn and Angel were walled off by hanging curtains patterned in a pale blue; activity in the rest of the room manifested itself in the form of scurrying feet, voices ranging from unintelligible whispers to the hard, piercing shriek of a baby, and the faint ebb and flow of sirens. Evelyn had been staring at the wall, decorated with mounted boxes of gloves and oxygen hoses, for two hours.

  “What were you doing at the mayor’s house?” Angel said, her voice not much more than a whisper. Evelyn hoped her daughter just didn’t want to disturb the nurses and actually had the strength for more volume, but it was an idle hope. Angel never minded disturbing people.

  “Just work stuff.” Evelyn brushed a raven-colored strand off Angel’s flushed cheek. She didn’t want to tell her about someone else’s dead daughter, didn’t even want to raise the specter of death. Evelyn had two diametrically opposed approaches to the subject. On the job, death was commonplace, a normal part of the life cycle. But when it came to her family, she could not bear the thought of it. If this created some wear and tear on her psyche, too bad. “It’s not important.”

  “Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “It wasn’t anything fun, believe me.”

  It had to be appendicitis. It wouldn’t be a tumor. Why would it be a tumor? Their family had no history of tumors. But what about Rick’s? Maybe Angel had an ulcer. Maybe the divorce had so traumatized her that she had an ulcer. Would it be reported to Children and Families if parents gave their kid an ulcer? It would be a form of abuse, wouldn’t it?

  “Mrs. James?”

  “Yes!” Evelyn snapped to attention. “Yes!”