Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

Frank snagged a piece for himself, earning a glare from the next child in line. “Am I missing something here? Jillian wasn’t murdered.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“You said yourself there wasn’t a mark on her. She committed-” A sharp glance from their aunt stopped him. Children’s birthday parties were not the place to discuss suicide. “She did it herself.”

Theresa persisted, disinclined to stifle herself for a traditional family gathering. The last traditional family gathering she had attended had been Paul’s funeral, and memories of the warmth, the crowd, the discomfort filtered back to her. “I won’t be positive until the toxicology results come back. What if she had too much stuff in her bloodstream to walk, much less walk two miles?”

“If she did, I’ll look into it. Until then, there’s nothing I can do. You really think the husband murdered her?”

“He said ‘had.’”

“Beg pardon?”

“When I complimented the decorating. He said Jillian had talent, not has talent. We didn’t even know she was dead and he’s already using the past tense?”

“Some people always mix up their tenses.”

“True. And I’m not discounting that this Drew guy worshipped a woman who just married another man. But a million and a half is one heck of a motive.”

“Evan Kovacic seems to have plenty of money, and according to the tech geeks at work, he will soon have so much of it he could buy IBM.”

“Yeah, I figured that out from his Web site too. Apparently Cleveland has become the Silicon Valley of the East, lots of companies I’ve never heard of and can’t figure out what they do. Hence the career day tomorrow.”

“A million and a half is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what investors have given him. I’d still bet on Georgie-he always gets my radar pinging. But I can’t do anything for the next day or two. The chief put me on the Cultural Gardens homicide because Sanchez and O’Malley are swamped, so I’ve got fifteen witnesses to interview tomorrow.”

The last child stepped up, a look of disappointment on her face to see that all the pink roses had already been claimed. “I know it’s unlikely for all those reasons, but just suppose for one minute that somehow Evan killed his wife for Cara’s bank account. What now? If he’s automatically Cara’s next of kin and he’s willing to kill for money, where does that leave this kid’s life expectancy?”

“That’s quite a leap.” Nevertheless, he wore an unhappy expression as he folded up his paper plate. He didn’t like coincidences any more than Theresa did, and a strange death occurring in conjunction with an overwhelming motive was one hell of a coincidence.

“I mean, do you know how easy it is to kill an infant? You just put a pillow over its face. You don’t even have to press down.”

A ripple of silence moved outward from the aunt and the girl with the last piece of cake, to the children playing cards nearby, to Theresa’s mother and two cousins seated on the couch. If suicide did not seem an appropriate topic for a child’s birthday party, infanticide ranked somewhere off the charts.

Theresa gulped, grateful she had grown too old to be sent to her room.

The snow drifted down in small but constant flakes, bursting into brilliant white under the streetlights but fading to a hazy gray as it receded into the dark. It would have been pretty if Theresa hadn’t been trying to drive in it. She hit the brakes a little too hard for a red light and slid the last three feet to the stop line.

“Your aunt Claire asked me about that boy you found in the woods,” her mother, Agnes, said.

“Mmm.” Sometimes Theresa told her mother and daughter more than she should about open cases. Sometimes she said nothing and hoped they wouldn’t catch the news that day. Child deaths always fell into the latter group.

“She wanted to know if it had anything to do with the girl in the Cultural Gardens.”

“Huh? No, of course not-that wasn’t a girl but a grown woman, and she was strangled. The boy wasn’t.”

“But they were both outside, propped up against something. And now you’ve got this third woman. Claire thinks it might be a serial killer.”

“Claire’s imagination is running away with her.”

Rachael chimed in from the backseat. “No, they said that on the news too.”

The approached another red light. This time Theresa gave herself plenty of stopping distance. “The news media likes serial killers. They sell papers and increase ratings.”

“So it’s your testimony, Ms. MacLean, that we do not have a ravenous murderer on the loose in Cleveland, Ohio?” Rachael asked with the cadence she had picked up from one semester of Business Law.

“I deny it categorically.”

“He was near the zoo?” her mother asked. “I used to go swimming there when I was little.”

“They had a swimming pool at the zoo?” Rachael asked. Theresa merely nodded, having heard the tales of her mother’s childhood, tales from a time when children could roam the city without cell phones or worried parents.

“The only place to go swimming was Brookside Park. They had a round cement pool, and you had to pay a dime or something to get in. My brothers and sisters would take me along. We’d walk all the way from Natchez Avenue.”

“Even Aunt Claire?”

“Aunt Claire turned all the boys’ heads.”

Rachael was silent for a while, no doubt trying to picture a hot summer in 1935, and her grandmother as a little girl. “That was a fun party.”

Theresa agreed while becoming deeply suspicious. Whenever her teenager expressed such an old-fashioned sentiment, it meant she wanted either to borrow the car or go on a ski trip with her numerous first cousins once removed.

Rachael continued, “Dora’s going to come to the talent show next week, even. I need to hang with her more often. We haven’t been to her mom’s in, like, forever.”

“We stopped by at Thanksgiving.”

“Mom, that was four months ago.”

“Oh.” Had it really been that long?

“We need to get out more.”

How diplomatic. The we instead of you . “I know.”

Theresa’s mother, in the passenger seat, said absolutely nothing. Theresa, no doubt, had often been a topic of conversation between Rachael and her grandmother; this struck Theresa as both heart-warming and deeply humbling.

Into the silence, Theresa asked, “Are you still thinking about electrical engineering?”

“Huh? As a major?” Rachael caught up to the leap in topics. “Yeah. Those guys make bucks. Why, do you have another college to check out?”

Theresa explained about the high-tech career expo at Kovacic Industries. Rachael could not be defined as a video-game junkie, but she would be majoring in science, and any sort of career-development exposure could not hurt for a high school senior currently working on picking a college.

“Oh.” Rachael slumped a bit into the gloom of the backseat, only her eyes visible in the rearview mirror. “You want to use me as cover to investigate a guy in one of your cases.”

Was that what she was doing? If so, Frank would kill her…though attending a public career fair could hardly be considered either an official investigation or bad parenting…“I thought of it as killing two birds-more like multitasking. You’ve been debating about engineering instead of the natural sciences.”

“Yeah. It’s just that you haven’t voluntarily left the house, except for work, church, and the grocery store, for months. And now, all of a sudden-”

Nine months, to be exact. Theresa concentrated mightily on a red light, avoiding her daughter’s all-too-knowing and compassionate stare. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been out of it…” Her tongue stumbled over the useless euphemism for grief, for the selfish desire to make the world go away by ignoring its occupants, including the one she had brought into it.