Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“Just wash the outside?”

He attacked the hazy wax covering the paint with the limitless energy of youth. “Full detail. And before I leave tonight too. You see anyone else still stuck here? No, they’re home with their dinners. Lucky for him I need the overtime-”

“What does that mean, full detail?”

“Why you want to know? You thinking of bringing your car here?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Do you vacuum the inside?”

“Inside, cargo area, Armor All the dash, scrub the tires. At least he ain’t got no whitewalls. Anything else you want to know?”

“Then you throw out the vacuum bag?”

“No vacuum bag. There’s sort of a filter in that big thing there that gets replaced every so often. Don’t know, it ain’t my job.”

“You scrub the tires?”

“Get the treads clean as a whistle. Mr. Kovacic insists. That’s us. Service above and beyond. Anything else you want to know, lady?”

“How many people ask for their tires to be scrubbed?”

“You takin’ a survey?”

“Sort of.”

His biceps tightened and relaxed in sequence as he finished up the passenger door. His entire body language spoke of his annoyance, and yet he remained either too polite or too incurious not to respond. “Only him, that I know of.”

“Is this the first time he’s brought his car here?”

“Hardly. Every week. He thinks a lot of that car, I guess.”

“But this is the first time he’s asked for the tires to be scrubbed.” That sounded like circumstantial evidence to her.

“Nope. Insists on that every time.”

Maybe not.

“Says the salt ruins the rubber. It don’t, you know.”

“Would you mind if I removed some of the dirt for you? Just the stuff in the tires, and the lint on the upholstery.”

He drew himself up to his full height, a good head taller than hers. “You some clean car fairy or something?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then what…exactly?”

“I work for the medical examiner’s office. I want to collect any loose hairs, fibers, soil from Mr. Kovacic’s car. It will be less for you to vacuum up, look at it that way.”

His shoulders fell a bit, and the lines in his forehead smoothed out. “You mean, like clues? You looking for clues?”

“Yes.”

“You a detective?”

“No, I’m a forensic scientist.”

He nearly broke into a smile. “Like you work with all those test tubes and stuff. Like you get DNA out of a bloodstain. Right?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“Let me get the keys.”

She retrieved her crime scene kit from her car and met him at the Escalade. The young man held up a key fob shaped like the triangular Star Trek logo and jangled its four keys in triumph.

“Thanks.” She smiled and introduced herself.

“My name’s Antwan. You know if you put a scratch on this thing, it’s my ass, right?”

“I won’t get anything scratchy anywhere near it, I promise. I’ll tape the trunk and the seats and then vacuum, and then I’ll clean the treads. But I’ll use a plastic scraper for that. It won’t damage the rubber.”

He unlocked the doors and opened the rear hatch for her. “What are you looking for?”

“I’ve been asking myself that all week,” she muttered as she placed a strip of clear tape on the carpeting in the empty cargo area. Evan either kept an obsessively clean car or else he removed his personal items prior to dropping it at the car wash.

“You think he killed somebody?”

She moved the piece of tape up and down, from left to right, getting a fresh piece when the adhesive became clogged with detritus. If she said yes, was that slander? If she didn’t say he did kill someone, only that she thought so…really, she needed her own attorney just to help her with these issues. “I don’t know. I’m only trying to reconstruct what happened over the last week.”

“I saw on TV, they used a light. This light attached to a box with a hose.”

“An alternate light source. We use that mostly to find semen.”

He snickered at her matter-of-fact use of the term. “And you’re not looking for that here?”

“Nope.”

“So you don’t think he raped nobody.”

“No, I don’t. Really, this is quite routine-”

“Doing your job in a car wash?”

She moved on to the backseat, repeating the taping action, not relishing the thought of examining all those strips of tape, now stuck to sheets of clear acetate. Long hours at the stereomicroscope could get hard on the eyes. Long hours at any microscope could get hard on the eyes.

Antwan followed her. “Are you going to spray that stuff that makes blood glow? What’s that called?”

“Luminol?”

“That won’t ruin the leather, will it?”

“It wouldn’t hurt it, but I’m not going to use luminol anyway. Just tape and a vacuum, as I said.”

“So you don’t think he murdered anybody either? What are you doing here?”

This was why she tried not to converse with people on the job. “I’m not looking for any blood.”

“So he offed someone without blood?” The young man put a hand to his chin. “Hmm. That’s cool. Are you looking for hairs? I saw hairs on the Discovery channel. They have that special DNA in them, right?”

“Mitochondrial.” She finished the taping and hooked up the vacuum. At least the noise put a stop to the kid’s questions, for a while.

Nothing about Evan’s car stood out as suspicious, but then, why would it? If involved at all, it had only been as a cargo transport, moving Jillian’s body from the apartment to Edgewater Park. The best she could hope for would be some hairs of Jillian’s where they shouldn’t normally be, like in the cargo area. But even that wouldn’t prove anything, not really.

And diatoms in the tires. She folded the nylon netting from the vacuum’s filter and sealed it in a manila envelope, taking care not to lose any of the trapped fibers and dirt. Then she turned to the tires. The sky grew darker than pitch and Antwan’s overtime meter continued to click, but he had stopped complaining.

It took a while, but she cleaned out every valley of every inch of each tire’s circumference accessible to her with a plastic probe, trying not to leave even a scratch in the rubber that Kovacic could complain about.

“Did he run her over?” Antwan guessed. He did not seem upset that Theresa refused to confirm or deny any one scenario; instead he seemed to enjoy brainstorming as to what her little foray implied. “Like a hit-and-run? Left the scene of an accident?”

“No. Look, I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything about an open investigation-mostly because I’m not even sure it is an investigation. It’s more of a fact-finding mission. I’m trying to-”

“Reconstruct the events, yeah, you said. But let me ax you this. You’re going to want to keep your little project between us, right? As in don’t mention nothing to Mr. Kovacic, right?”

Was he going to blackmail her? “I can’t ask or tell you what to say or not say. I have no authority to do so.”

“Neat answer, but you’d rather I didn’t, right?”

She honestly didn’t know. Perhaps if Evan felt pressured, he’d make a mistake. In any event, she could not hide her actions. In forensics, mistakes could be dealt with, but covering up, even appearing to cover up, even covering up nothing, would kill your career faster than being found with kiddie porn. It was the Point Beyond Which One Could Not Go. “I’m not going to ask you to tell him or not tell him or not tell your boss or anyone else. I’m not hiding anything here, Antwan. I can’t.”

He kept nodding with a knowing smile, and it worried her. “Yeah, yeah, I got that. But let me ax you this-this place you work, the M.E.’s office, what would I need to work there? A college degree?”