Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“No,” he admitted, with more of that concerned tone, the one she’d heard almost every day since Paul died. At least now it had a different edge, as if he’d gone from worrying about her emotions to worrying about her mind.

“To design a game like this, you have to anticipate every single move a player can make, then design a response. You can limit responses so that no matter what decisions the player makes and in what order, he will eventually progress into the next room or figure out he has to pick up the magic shield or whatever, but there’s still a great deal of flexibility. The player can stop, go back, try to blast a hole in the wall instead of using the stairs, kill his own teammates. It’s like those TV shows that let the audience call in and vote on how the show should end, whether a character should live or die, but the game gives the player a choice like that every minute or so.”

“So he’s a planner.”

“He’s a planner extraordinaire. Anticipating a response and figuring out what happens as a result of it has been this guy’s life for the past ten years. I found out more about him on the Internet this morning. He was a chemistry major in college, but started hanging out in the computer lab and designed his first game before he even graduated.”

“How many cups of coffee have you had?”

“I lost count at six. Are you listening?”

“Attentively.”

“He worked for a subsidiary of Microsoft and then used Polizei to start his own company. He wants to expand into hardware, with Jerry Graham’s inventions, hoping that they can keep everything proprietary long enough to bankroll what he calls the third wave, a gaming empire to rival Xbox, Wii, and PlayStation.”

“He said that?”

“To Modern Science . He’s quite forthcoming about his ambitions, to judge from a few other articles I ran across, but that seems to be normal in that field. They’re mostly young men and they produce aggressive, kick-ass games, so a certain amount of verbal assertiveness is expected. Kind of like professional wrestling.”

“I see. And you’re taking this as evidence of-”

“Planning. Not just his games, but his own life, the course it’s going to take over the next twenty years.”

Don set his porcelain cup on the Formica with a gentle thud. “And you think he planned to kill his wife.”

“Just run with me for a minute. Jillian was tailor-made for him. He needed her money. Why, I don’t know exactly, since he’s got financing, but he’s behind schedule with the game sequel and that may have something to do with it. He found Jillian, abandoned by everyone in her life except for an obsessed fan and a very rich baby. I think he planned every last detail, anticipated that her death would look like an accident, or if not, a postpartum or parent-problem induced suicide. If that didn’t work, if by some strange twist we did start thinking homicide, he had Jillian’s former job to fall back on, that Drew or some ex-client stalked her. He even has these other two deaths that have the city thinking ‘serial killer.’ That will be his first suggestion if we rule anything other than accidental death.”

“Now you’re anticipating him.”

Some of her weariness got past the caffeine and she rubbed her eyebrows-not her eyes, of course, that caused wrinkles. “I’m trying. It’s not going to be easy. At least he couldn’t have counted on Drew contesting him for custody of Cara. As long as her inheritance is in question, she’s safe. But that won’t last. No judge is going to give custody to strange, unstable Drew. If Cara’s going to live to see kindergarten, I have to prove that Evan murdered her mother.”

“And you’re sure about this.” Don’s face made it clear he wasn’t. “You don’t just have a bug up your bu-have it in for this Evan guy?”

“Have I ever done that before?”

You’ve never been mourning a dead fiancé before, his face said now, but aloud he said, “That leaves you with one big problem.”

“I know.” She lowered her face to her hands, flat on the Formica, and felt the comforting pat of Don’s palm on the back of her head. “How did he do it?”

“It’s not going to be an open casket,” the deskman told Theresa as he helped her wheel Jillian’s gurney into the hall. “She’s already marbled.”

The long wait for her ride to the funeral home had not been kind to Jillian. Aside from the scruffily sewn-up gashes from her shoulders to her navel and the one along the back of her head, the skin had mottled with uneven dark patches as the flesh underneath decomposed. “She’s headed for cremation?”

“Soon as they pick her up. We got the court form this morning.”

As expected, Drew had been found to have no legal claim on the body, and disposal of Jillian fell to her lawfully wedded spouse. Theresa had only a few more minutes with her biggest piece of evidence, and she didn’t even know what to look for.

“Shove her back in when you’re done,” the deskman told her, and left her to it.

Theresa could have examined the body inside the cooler room-it wasn’t that uncomfortably cold-but she hated the idea of that steel door slamming shut behind her. Being shut in with dead bodies did not bother her. But being shut in at all, that was intolerable. Besides, she needed better lighting.

If she couldn’t prove Evan killed Jillian, perhaps she could prove he moved the body.

Though it still seemed precarious to her, driving your murder victim to a dump site. One thing she had learned from living in a college dorm: whatever ungodly hour of the night you might be awake and about, someone else would be up too. Evan might have conceived of an untraceable poison or undetectable manner of death, but all it would take to unravel his plan would be one bored night-shift clerk watching the factory from the window of the 7-Eleven or one homeless park dweller with a sturdy parka and insomnia.

But Theresa had also learned from reading every tale of true crime she could get her hands on that if the perfect crime existed, it had not yet been discovered. Every murder involved some risk. And in Polizei the young captain had no choice but to jump over the river at the end of the tunnel from the dining room. It had taken her two solid hours of play to give up the hope of finding a way around it. She had to leap into the abyss. The alternative was to stop playing.

And Evan would not stop playing. Not now, with world domination within his grasp.

So he would take that risk, that one, unavoidable risk, and drive to Edgewater Park in the middle of the night. With Jillian in the passenger seat? The backseat? The cargo area? The answer might lie upstairs, in the material she had collected from Evan’s vehicle. But would he take his car? Why not Jillian’s? If the bored 7-Eleven clerk saw her car in the area, then that would support the theory of suicide…except, how did the car get back to the carbon company, idiot?

Besides, Jerry had said that Jillian told him the locks on her car had frozen shut. Her car might have been unavailable or too risky to use.

His car, then. Was there anything left on the body to show it had been transported?

The body had been washed, autopsied, and washed again, so the odds of finding any trace evidence had gone from slim to none. Theresa had already collected samples of the not entirely natural blond hair to compare to hairs found on the clothing. She wasn’t sure what else to do. Other than berate herself for not having gotten on board with the homicide theory earlier…maybe there would have been something to find, at the scene, at the apartment, maybe Evan had made some slip that she would have noticed, had she been paying attention.

“Sorry, Jillian,” Theresa said aloud, startling herself. She didn’t usually talk to her victims. It didn’t pay to get on a first-name basis with people who could not respond. Still, she persisted. “I won’t let Cara go the same way. I won’t.”