Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  Evelyn stepped back through the hallway, feeling like an executive who had negotiated an indecent number of stock options on the eve of an IPO. If the girls had been drugged at all, it might turn out to be a mundane sedative, but now that she had gotten Ed interested, he would leave no chemical compound unturned.

  Two steps into the lab and Tony bellowed her name from his office door. She found him backed into his favorite chair and armed with coffee; the phone cord, wildly twisted, gave mute testimony to the chaos of the past day. He looked at her almost desperately.

  “Where the hell have you been? Ever hang up on me again and you’re fired,” he added absently. “Jonathan did the autopsy on the Pierson kid.”

  “I know, I just talked to him.”

  “They still don’t have an ID on that first girl, but Riley’s got some bug up his butt about it and says he needs you this morning. You’ve got to go over the Pierson clothing first, though, and you’d better find every single fiber and hair on it because if this case doesn’t get solved fast we’re all going to be swaying from spikes. The prosecutor came out here this morning—but of course you weren’t here—and the mayor called here personally. I talked to him, but he asked for you. Now why did he ask for you?”

  Bright blue eyes with an animal intuition peered at her. Tony might be annoying, but he wasn’t stupid. And he had a prodigious instinct for pain, embarrassment, and scandal. She reminded herself, like a mantra, that Tony had hired her fresh from her second round of college, after she’d applied to every other crime lab in the area. No matter what, she owed him. So she answered calmly. “We knew each other at college.”

  “Oh? Friends?”

  “More or less,” she said, dismally aware that her casual tone would only raise his suspicions. “We hadn’t seen each other for years until the other day. The press are ravenous over his daughter. Incidentally, Jason all but physically threw me at them this morning.”

  “Whatever. We have to assume that the same guy who got Pierson killed that first girl. You’ve got to find some trace evidence to connect them.”

  She nodded, knowing that to argue that she had no control over the existence or nonexistence of evidence would be pointless. Tony didn’t believe in inconvenient facts.

  “So get her clothing done this morning. What did you get on the first girl’s clothes?”

  “Nothing yet. It had to dry before I could check for fibers.”

  “I’m sure it’s dry by now,” he said, heavily sarcastic.

  “But since then it’s been one thing after—”

  “Get that done this morning. If there’s any hairs, get them to Marissa for DNA. And get everything on Pierson done super-rush-rush. Riley will be here in half an hour.”

  “In other words, I need to be in three places at once?”

  “Exactly.” He grinned, as if admitting his lack of reason made it okay, then bellowed “Marissa!” with window-rattling force.

  Marissa stalked in, her outstanding looks managing to radiate the mood of someone who hadn’t had enough sleep and regretted last night’s Oreo binge. “What?”

  “Any sperm?”

  “Not last night, thanks for asking.”

  “I mean on the Pierson kid!”

  “No.”

  “No, no sperm, or no, you don’t know?”

  “No, no sperm. Nothing, nada, zip. No acid phosphatase, either.” A positive acid phosphatase test indicated the presence of semen. As the serologist/DNA expert, Marissa analyzed the samples of bodily fluids Evelyn collected from the evidence, the victim’s clothing, and the crime scenes. She spent her days both without leaving the lab and in proximity to Tony, and swore to Evelyn that the combination made her claustrophobic. “I suppose we don’t know how long she was in the water?” she asked Evelyn.

  “Not long enough to drown, which would have been quick at that water temperature.”

  “So it could have been washed off, but not likely. Any semen in the vagina should have still been there.”

  “Well, that will give her family some comfort,” Evelyn said.

  “No sperm on the first girl, either,” Tony thought aloud. “We’ve got a serial.”

  “But she was submerged for a day or two,” Evelyn protested. “In her case it could have been washed away. We can’t know for sure.”

  “Two pairs of cement shoes? Yeah, I think we know for sure.”

  “But we don’t know for sure that Destiny had cement—”

  “If you’d come to work instead of staying home playing with your kid, you’d know some things,” Tony said. “Divers found the cement bucket that Destiny had been in—under the bridge. So yes, I do know for sure.”

  Chapter 12

  EVELYN PRODDED THE RECALCITRANT stone as if the outer surface might flake off and reveal a hidden treasure. Something like the killer’s driver’s license would be nice. “Another chlorine bucket. Same brand as the other one. How did she get out?”

  “Don’t know,” Jonathan said. “I wish we could ask her. But it couldn’t have been too tough, her legs are in pretty good shape and there’s no skin left on the cement.”

  “How’d she get out of the chains?”

  “I repeat, I don’t know. They’re wound around each other just like in the first girl, but only Destiny’s wrists show ligature marks, so the rest of the chains couldn’t have been very tight.”

  “I’m glad they got divers out there. Usually something like that takes a week to authorize.”

  “This is the mayor’s daughter, Eve. If calling out the National Guard would help, it would be done. We will spare no expense,” he added grimly. “This is top priority like nothing’s ever been top priority before.”

  “I get the feeling you’re trying to tell me something.”

  “I’m trying to tell you to watch your back. This case is a career maker or a career crash-and-burner. If we don’t get this guy, you might end up Tony’s sacrifice to the angry gods. Or the angry city council.”

  “Yo, doc.” The deiner, or autopsy assistant, poked his head into the exam room. “Hate to interrupt you two an’ all, but there’s a suicide here and a suspicious death on its way.”

  “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she groused. “My father said it was no rest for the weary.”

  After she had collected gunshot residue from the suicide victim’s hands and sent the unlucky soul to Autopsy, examined the suspicious death and found nothing suspicious about it—but no one had wanted to get close enough to tell after the body had spent several days decomposing—finished her cup of cold coffee, and fended off two reporters who had somehow gotten past Greg, Riley appeared, looking only slightly less wrinkled than the corpse. “Come on, time to go.”

  “Well, just let me red-tape this stuff—”

  “We’re in a hurry, Evelyn.” The odor of cigarettes wafted off his clothing, stronger even than the rotting-flesh smell currently filling the hallways.

  “You and everyone else. I can’t just drop—”

  David appeared in the doorway. “Evelyn—”

  “What?”

  “I heard about your daughter,” he said. “How is she?”

  Evelyn’s face melted into a smile. “She’s okay. Everything went fine. Where are we going in such a hurry, gentlemen?”

  “To see our resident mob boss.”

  “Which one? Ashworth or the other guy I hear about now and then—Garcia?”

  “Ashworth.”

  “A social call?”

  “We picked up one of his guys on a drug charge, and he’s told us some interesting things about the Big M. Such as a lot of talk about that girl in the river, and the fact that his daughter dropped out of sight last week and Daddy isn’t saying word one to anybody about where she went.”

  “Incidentally,” Evelyn asked as they passed the Museum of Art lagoon, “why am I here?”

  “Don’t get metaphysical on me,” Riley muttered.

  “I mean, why am I coming alo
ng? Interrogating mob bosses is not my job.”

  “Well, I thought you might want to give it a whirl. It can be a lot of fun, especially when they make comments about sending their goons after your wife and kids someday while you’re at work.”

  Evelyn snuggled deeper into her parka. The backseat of the Grand Marquis felt warm enough to bake croissants, but still she was cold to the bone. “I don’t think I want that to be part of my job. How about I wait in the car?”

  “You’ve seen our dead girl cleaned up. We haven’t because we missed the autopsy and we can’t get the photos because your developer has gone on the blink again.”

  “Second time in six months. But we’re going to go digital next year, so the ME doesn’t want to put a lot of money into it.”

  “I want you to take a look at a picture of his daughter and see if she might be victim number one. I also want you to check out his carpeting fibers. I know all you can do is eyeball the color, but—”

  “Fibers?”

  “Fibers that match what you found on the two dead girls.” He shot an impatient glance at her in the rearview mirror. “Tony said you had fibers.”

  Evelyn silently sentenced her boss to the inner circles of the Inferno. “Tony gets a bit ahead of himself. Honestly, Riley, I’ve been in this business ten years and I’ve never attended an interrogation. What’s going on?”

  She could see only his eyes in the rearview mirror, but they looked murderous. “I need a reason to get a body search warrant. If we could just compare his DNA, we could either eliminate him or arrest him.”

  “I’m not going to know for sure just from looking at a picture of this girl—”

  “I don’t need sure, just an educated guess. Besides, this guy has had cops at his heels all his life. We don’t impress him anymore. Just having an unknown factor like you in the room might throw him off guard. I need help, okay, Evelyn?”

  A strained silence lasted for over ten minutes before she changed the subject. If Riley wanted to drag her along while questioning a suspect, she didn’t mind. It might be interesting. “By the way, have you been able to trace Destiny’s movements? The paper said she attended her father’s fund-raiser, but what then?”

  “That’s a good question.” David turned to talk over the back of his seat. “Apparently the Piersons left the dinner and went home. Destiny intended to go out with a girlfriend, Laurie.”

  “On a school night?”

  “She said they had to ‘study.’ It seems that Danielle is pretty indulgent and Destiny got good grades, so they cut her a lot of slack. Besides, Destiny had an attitude, according to the kitchen staff, who know everything that goes on in that house. She didn’t take the word no very well. She didn’t fight it, she simply ignored it. Typical rich kid.”

  Evelyn bit her lip.

  “Well, she and this Laurie had no intention of studying and hit a teen club on Prospect. They met up with some other schoolmates, boogied, probably drank a little—nothing serious according to Laurie. She insists neither of them were high. No one gave them a problem, no creepy guys followed them around, nothing. Just another night among the young and wealthy. Then they decided to walk to a Denny’s two blocks away and get something to eat. Somewhere between the Beat Club and Denny’s, Destiny disappeared.”

  “And no one saw this happen?”

  “There were eight kids in various stages of mild intoxication strolling along on a dark night. As they walked they spread out over half a block or so, and not one of them distinctly remembers where Destiny fell in this line. Laurie walked with two girls and assumed Destiny was somewhere behind them. A boy said she might have been bringing up the rear. He had been talking to her when they left the club, but then he had a small argument with another boy and they started bouncing around, throwing shadow punches at each other. He lost track of Destiny, whether she was in front of them or behind them. We talked to all eight kids, and I’m sure they’re covering up some drinking and smoking, but they all had the same story about Destiny. No one noticed she was missing until they’d already sat down in Denny’s and ordered.”

  Riley shook his head as he turned a corner. “Kids.”

  “They didn’t go back and look?”

  David spoke. “They’d already ordered.”

  Evelyn sighed and wondered uncomfortably what Angel would do in the same situation.

  “Actually, Laurie, who isn’t quite as stupid as she sounds at first, grabbed one of the boys and made him walk back with her. They ran, because they didn’t want to miss their food, but they did go a little way into each alley they passed and called her name. They stuck their head into the club, which had wall-to-wall people and a bouncer who didn’t speak English. So they just went back to Denny’s and convinced themselves that she’d gone back to the club. She had been chatting up a boy there, and they thought maybe she’d gone back for him and stayed.”

  This time Evelyn shook her head.

  “It didn’t matter anyway,” David said to her. “This guy took Destiny and went. He knew what he was doing.”

  “What about the boy at the club?”

  “We haven’t found him. The kids described him as a white boy, older than them, dressed ‘plain,’ which means he doesn’t know his designers, nice enough. He started talking to Destiny about cars, and they seemed to hit it off. But two of the kids said this boy had already left when they started out for Denny’s. Three others didn’t think he had. The whole place is lit only by colored dance-floor lights and the music is so loud you couldn’t hear a bomb go off, so who knows?”

  “So this kid could have slipped something in her drink.” Evelyn could think of several date-rape drugs.

  “Possibly. No one remembers if she drank anything with this kid. The two boys had a short conversation with Destiny before they started their argument, and both insist that she did not seem at all drunk. She made some joke about the Terminal Tower being a phallic symbol, and walked and talked completely straight. How fast does that stuff take effect?”

  “Very fast. What did Laurie think?”

  “She noticed the kid, but didn’t think he was worth much attention. She can, and I quote, tell when Destiny is majorly hot for someone. She only mentioned him as a possible reason for why Destiny would suddenly disappear. Destiny didn’t have her car and no one else from their group left. So in her teenage mind she came up with the safest explanation she could. I think little Laurie got really scared really fast and didn’t want to face it. So she convinced herself that Destiny simply got another ride home.”

  “She didn’t tell anyone the girl had disappeared?”

  “She’s a teenager. She didn’t want to call the Piersons and say, ‘By the way, is Destiny there?’ and get her friend in trouble.”

  “What did the Piersons do when she didn’t come home?”

  “Destiny planned to stay over at Laurie’s and go to school from there. She did that often—Laurie lives within walking distance of the school. The school called when she didn’t show up for class but got an assistant, who, again trying not to get the boss’s kid in trouble, checked her room and car and asked all the staff before he went to Danielle. At the same time Laurie bit the bullet and called the Pierson house, and very shortly after that, we found the body and it all became moot. No one had even told Pierson that Destiny was missing before they told him she was dead. Danielle had tried to keep her baby girl from getting Daddy angry.”

  Evelyn sighed and pictured a household in chaos, the panic growing until stopped short by grief. She closed her eyes.

  “You okay?” David asked. “I bet you didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

  Riley gave her a dark look, a warning look.

  Evelyn remembered his advice but answered anyway. “I think my spine is permanently deformed. So where does Mario Ashworth come into all this? You think this guy killed his own daughter?”

  “I don’t know what to think. But he’s connected to the scene, she matches the description of the dead girl, a
nd by several reports, she’s missing.”

  “I don’t know. That girl didn’t look like a rich girl.”

  Riley snorted. “She was dead.”

  “The rich are different even when dead. She ignored her cuticles and her eyebrows needed plucking. Rich girls are usually better maintained.”

  Riley shook his head but didn’t argue. David looked pensive, as if wondering just how much maintenance a pair of eyebrows took.

  They pulled onto the long driveway.

  “Wow.” Evelyn took in every detail of the marble, the balconies, the perfectly rounded hedges. “I’m in the wrong line of work.”

  Ivan Marcus answered the door, appearing just as the detectives had described him—like a block of granite, but less friendly.

  Raised voices spilled out into the hallway toward them. Someone was angry.

  “Mr. Ashworth can’t be disturbed,” he said before Riley could open his mouth.

  The voices fell silent, and in another moment the man in question emerged defiantly from a doorway to the right. “Well, well, Cleveland’s finest. This really tops off a perfect day.”

  A girl slid through the doorway while trying, electron-like, to maintain a maximum distance from him. She had dark hair, stage-quality makeup, and a body in lush bloom under a scoop-neck sweater.

  “Cops,” she said coldly. “Good. Maybe you can get Daddy to tell you what he really does for a living.”

  Riley and David stared with horror at the girl, now stalking down the hallway. Riley recovered first. “Miss Ashworth.”

  She stopped, pirouetting on one foot with primitive grace.

  “Where have you been?” Riley asked her.

  She smiled the lazy smile of a cat at rest under a birdhouse. “Rehab. Nowhere I haven’t been before. They have a room with my name on it at Riverside. Daddy, of course, doesn’t approve of my frequent-flier status.” She continued on her way, leg muscles flexing under tight black pants, and disappeared into the rest of the house.

  Evelyn sized up Ashworth, whose face resembled a storm cloud about to be upgraded to tornado. She promptly forgot her desire to hide out in the car. “Am I the only one who finds it ironic that kids who are so big on honesty are the same ones who won’t tell you where they’ve been all evening?”