Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

The company occupied a second-floor suite in the Hanna Building at the corner of East Fourteenth and Euclid. At this time of day, just before the rush-hour race officially commenced, more people were leaving downtown Cleveland than approaching and Theresa found a vacant metered space. She dropped in a quarter, which might not suffice if the person she had come to see proved as talkative as Drew Fleming.

A revolving door took her through a little convenience store and out to the elevator banks, where she stared at the ornate ceiling before entering the car. The hundred-year-old building had been well maintained.

Except for the Delta Dynamics suite. No decor hid the chipped paint and the air smelled like plastic, but the heavy black girl at the counter beamed with welcome.

Theresa could have called Jerry Graham and asked for his girlfriend’s name, but Evan Kovacic had become her suspect, without doubt, without mitigation, and she saw no reason to announce her intentions to his camp. And so she stumbled through an explanation of who she needed to see, and why. “She’s a black woman, about my height, slender, very pretty.”

The receptionist nodded her encouragement, but did not fill in a name.

“I think she’s friends with, or is dating or something, Jerry Graham from Kov-”

“Shelly Peters.” The receptionist picked up her handset, dialed some numbers.

“Oh. You know Jerry Gr-”

“Everyone knows Jerry Graham. The guy’s brilliant. Shelly? Yeah, someone here to see you? Theresa MacLean. I don’t know. Okay.” She hung up, looked up, and went on. “Everyone who’s into video games, I mean, which is about seventy-five percent of the people here. Crazy, I say. We all work on computers all day long and then go home and play on them all night long. I swear I weighed one-twenty before I discovered Ultima Online. Now look at me. Way too big.”

She didn’t seem bothered by it, however, so Theresa did not comment. “What’s Ultima Online?”

“It’s an MMO-massive multiplayer online. Totally addictive. You never know what’s going to happen in there. It’s like its own world. Characters have businesses, merge, betray. Last month a bunch of people sent their characters to the castle at the same time and had a sit-down strike until the company gave them a release date for the upgrade.”

Theresa tried to picture this, and couldn’t. “You mean players went to the factory, or something?”

“No, in the game.”

“Revolt is written into the game?”

“No, the game just defines the world. After that, what happens depends on what the players do.”

“The players can do things the manufacturers didn’t design?”

The receptionist laughed. “Yeah, of course! The manufacturer is like God. Once he makes the world and lets people in, the people will do things he didn’t plan on. Just like human beings,” she added, her face growing serious as she pondered this philosophical insight. “They do all sorts of things He didn’t plan on. Sometimes bad things.”

The woman Theresa had seen kissing Jerry Graham appeared. She wore a formfitting pantsuit and her hair had come loose from its spikes, framing her face. She extended her hand and smiled. “I’m Shelly Peters. What can I do for you?”

Theresa introduced herself as a medical examiner’s office investigator, which was a lie and not a lie at the same time. Investigators had a specific position, different from hers, but on the other hand all forensic staff were to consider themselves investigators, not robots simply collecting and analyzing and doing only what they were told, according to Leo, so she felt safe with the statement. “We’re still working on Jillian Perry’s death certificate, and I’m trying to determine her state of mind prior to her death.”

Shelly Peters immediately stopped smiling. “It’s such a tragedy about Jillian. I can’t believe that would happen-it’s so weird. Why on earth would she-why don’t you come back to my office and we can talk there? I have some questions for you too.”

Theresa thanked the receptionist before following Shelly down a narrow hallway, dodging cardboard boxes. “Please excuse our mess,” the woman explained as they went. “We moved before the painters could get in here, and so we’re trying to unpack only what we absolutely have to have so that we don’t have to move it all again to get at the walls. But we’re so busy, that’s proving impossible, so there’s just stuff everywhere.”

The walls of her nine-by-nine office remained blank, but apparently Shelly could not resist installing a few items on her worn metal desk-a teddy bear, a bundle of silk flowers, and three framed photographs, one of herself and Jerry Graham. The rest of the office space had been given over to paper, keyboards, hard drives, two file cabinets, three loose monitors, and more paper.

“I don’t even have a place for you to sit,” she apologized. “You can try that stack of Office Depot boxes.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Theresa began, finding the cases of copy paper to be more comfortable than Christine’s ammo box. She had heard about Jillian from men; high time to get a woman’s perspective. “Were you close?”

Shelly seemed to think that over before answering. “We were friends. I saw quite a bit of her, with our men always being together. But we weren’t best friends or anything. I’ve only known her for, oh, two years or so. Maybe a little less.”

“Where did you meet?”

“At a trade show.” She gestured at their surroundings. “Delta handles all the data-management needs for trade shows. A lot of business gets done there, and the attendees need networking, Internet access, printers, et cetera, beyond what the hotels can provide and beyond what the vendor’s representatives are familiar with. They’re salesmen, not IT guys. So we come in, and not just in Cleveland. I travel all over the country. Anyway, I met Jillian at the Outdoors Expo. She was leaning on a Hummer and we got to talking.”

“We found the phone number for these offices on a piece of paper in her pocket. I assume you gave it to her?”

“Yeah, we had the phones installed only last week, so I wrote the number down when we were at dinner last Saturday, I think it was. I didn’t have a direct line. Still don’t, as a matter of fact,” she said, chuckling. “I wanted her to have it in case…”

“In case what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and from the look on her face, she really didn’t. “I just figured, all alone in that big place, with a baby, Evan and Jerry gone all the time either setting up those other buildings on the campus or downtown at meetings. You had to know Jillian, really. She always struck me as too sweet. Vulnerable, you know? Not dumb-she was smart enough to handle her own life and take good care of Cara-just too…sweet.”

“Did she seem depressed? Maybe have the baby blues?”

The woman smiled at the idea. “No, not at all. Cara enchanted her, totally. She thrilled at every single thing about that baby. She said she couldn’t wait for Cara to wake up from her naps because she missed her. That is why I can’t really believe Jillian killed herself.”

“I’m having a hard time explaining that too, how she could have frozen to death. Did she drink at all? Do any drugs?”

Shelly scowled, and Theresa held up her hands. “We’re not looking to prosecute anybody. I’m trying to find out why Jillian walked three miles from home in six degrees without a coat or hat.”

“I understand, and you must hear this a lot, but no, Jillian didn’t do anything like that. She’d have a glass of wine once in a while, after Cara was born, but nothing stronger than that. She didn’t even smoke. That was one of the reasons I introduced her to Evan, to get him away from all those nerdy little VG groupie girls. At least Jillian lived in the real world.”