Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“Who’s everyone?”

“Her work, Evan-”

“You spoke to her husband?”

“Yeah. He’s in the apartment in the evenings, though I used his cell too.”

“He didn’t mind you calling?”

Drew Fleming seemed surprised by the question. “Why should he? She married him, not me. Anyway, no one knew where Jillian had gone and I knew she’d never just walk off and leave Cara. She was an excellent mother. Even if she’d had some kind of total freak-out and run away, she’d have told me.”

“But how did you find out that we’d found her body?” Theresa persisted.

“I checked in with Vangie at the agency, to see if they’d heard from Jillian, and she told me.”

“How did she know?”

“Evan called them.”

“He called Jillian’s boss? Ex-boss?” In the first few hours after learning his wife was dead? Most people would be too busy with family members and funeral arrangements. But then perhaps they didn’t have much family.

He snorted and gave a hopeless chuckle. “Yeah, but did he call me? No.”

Legal complications could no doubt ensue from questioning a witness without his lawyer or a reading of his rights, except that Theresa was not questioning a witness, she was gathering information about a victim’s history and possible state of mind. Therefore she asked without hesitation, “When did you last see Jillian?”

“Last Friday. I went to visit, she made lunch.”

“Was Evan there?”

“At work. Out in the barns, I guess.”

She left that for a moment, shuffling topics as she’d seen her cousin do. “How did Jillian seem that day?”

A burst of laughter floated up the hallway from the busy records department. Theresa’s stomach rumbled. Fleming seemed to be thinking back, and his eyes grew wet with each memory. “Fine. Cara had been spitting up a lot, Jillian worried about that, but she’d gained another pound and she had just had a checkup. Cara’s perfectly healthy, her doctor said so. She got a new pair of shoes-Jillian did-at DSW and she loved the color, but they rubbed on the back of her ankles, so she planned to take them back. She complained about not having any sunlight for so long, not that she gets that seasonal affective disorder or anything, but the gray skies get to everybody by this time of the year. Does it always smell like that in here?”

“Yes, it does. She didn’t seem upset or worried about anything in particular, then?”

“Just being married to Evan.”

“Why would that upset her?”

“Because he didn’t love her! He just wanted a piece of eye candy to show off to his clients and his friends, none of whom have matured past the age of thirteen. They play games all day, for Pete’s sake.”

“I wouldn’t think a woman with a newborn would be ideal eye candy.”

The man gave her a pitying look, as if sorry for anyone who could be that clueless. “Jillian would be eye candy if she had five newborns, if she were ninety, if she had leprosy.”

Theresa had seen Jillian’s picture, and felt he overstated the case. “You dated Jillian before she met Evan?”

His gaze dropped. His finger traced the fake wood grain on the table. “Not really, no. We were friends. We’ve been friends for four years, since we met at Tri-C.”

The local community college. His occasional lapse into the present tense when referring to Jillian didn’t surprise Theresa. Most people had trouble adjusting immediately after a death.

“Did Evan know you came by to visit his wife?”

“Sure.” Again the surprised tone.

“Jillian told him? And he didn’t mind?”

“Like I said, why should he? She married him, not me.”

Drew Fleming and Evan Kovacic, Theresa thought, were either very, very modern or very, very old-fashioned.

“You’re sure Jillian told him?”

“Yeah, always. Besides, I ran into him on my way out of the building that day.”

Drew showed up for lunch and was still there when Evan came in from work? Or did Evan pop in and out all day? “What happened?”

“Nothing. We said a few words.”

“About Jillian?”

“No, about Polizei.” At her blank look, he added, “His video game. The one that made all the money. He’s coming out with version two in a few weeks.”

“Polizei?”

“That’s Russian for ‘police,’ I guess. The character is a cop in the future and he takes his team to infiltrate this castle-I think it’s in Romania because there are vampires, and there’s a magic sword…it’s pretty cool.”

“Polizei is a German word.”

“Oh. Whatever. Evan can do games, I’ll say that for him.”

“I understand Evan is not Cara’s father?”

Drew blinked, apparently still lost in Romanian castles. “What? Oh, no, he isn’t.”

She waited for him to answer the obvious question. He didn’t. “Who is?”

“What? I don’t know. She never talked about him.”

“Uh-huh.” The desire to do right by the woman Theresa had initially dismissed began to seem a little silly. Jillian Perry had had one man’s baby, had a less-than-perfect marriage to another, and had a third coming by to let her cry on his shoulder. People had opted out of much less screwed-up lives than hers. Every year more people killed themselves than were killed by others. She started to push off the conference table with both hands. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Fleming, but you will not be able to claim the body, unless Mr. Kovacic decides not to-”

“You’re not listening,” Drew Fleming said flatly. Coldly. The weepiness evaporated from his eyes and they turned to ice in less time than it took her to notice. He enunciated his words, as if for someone not very bright. “I have a pretty plot in Riverside, under a tree, that she can have. Evan will just cremate her-and that will destroy all the evidence.”

Theresa had stopped halfway through the act of rising, her body obeying the instinct to retreat from the odd man, knees half bent in a way that worked her thighs. “Evidence of what?”

He couldn’t maintain the icy control, and the timbre of his voice climbed upward. “Murder! Evan murdered her, of course!”

“What makes you say-”

“Why else would she be here? That’s what you investigate, right? Murders?”

“The medical examiner’s office investigates all deaths, Mr. Fleming, natural deaths, homicides, suicides-”

His hands, on the table, clenched into fists. “He murdered her.”

She tried to speak gently. Fleming seemed to be more tightly wound than could be considered healthy, both for himself and others. “We will know more when all the tests are completed, Mr. Fleming, but it appears that Jillian died of exposure. No one harmed her.”

This did not convince him. In fact, her words did not even seem to penetrate. Fine, straight hair fell in his face as he shook his head. His skin had been white from the cold when he first arrived and hadn’t grown any rosier during his visit, only emphasizing the deep blue irises and red veins in his eyes. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Don’t let him fool you. He fooled her too, at first.”

She worked to hold on to her patience. “Why would Evan Kovacic want to kill his wife, Mr. Fleming?”

Again the stare, the aura of surprise at how little she knew about the life of Jillian Perry, at her seeming incuriosity about a woman who had apparently been the most fascinating woman to ever walk the planet. “You mean you don’t know about the money?”

“What money?”

A touch of color finally pricked his skin, a pinkish hue almost like a faint glow of triumph. “Sit down.”

She sat.

“So get this,” Theresa told Frank while shifting her niece’s one-year-old to her other hip. She had driven directly from work to her cousin’s middle child’s tenth birthday party in Parma, and now stood in an overwarm, overcrowded house with a marauding horde of sugar-crazed children, a passel of widowed aunts, and the harried generation-her generation-caught in between. As long as she ignored the claustrophobic air, the warmth felt good, and her mother beamed to see her at a family function. She had avoided far too many of them in the past nine months, and family was everything to her mother. Everything.