Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“I know what you mean, kid,” she told him.

She pulled out of the parking garage onto East Eighteenth and headed south to Euclid, stopping at the corner to wait for the light and to see what currently played at the Playhouse Square theaters. She hadn’t taken Rachael to a show since the Christmas Nutcracker Suite two years before.

So Daddy had been very angry about Jillian’s work as an escort. But that had been several years ago and Jillian’s body had turned up only last week. Evan had not been very angry, but three weeks after marrying him, Jillian died.

Once again, Theresa decided to keep her money on Evan. He had the more immediate motive, a window of opportunity, means…

Her Nextel rang. She peered at it, found the Talk button and pushed it, drifting far enough into the next lane while doing so to earn an irritated honk from a gold SUV. “Hello?”

“I see you’re not at work. I’m not even going to ask why you’re not at work.”

“Hi, Leo. I’m-”

“I said I wasn’t going to ask. Actually, it’s all right that you’re out and about, since you can out and about yourself right over to the old courthouse. You’re wanted in court.”

She groaned. Testifying in court might be the most important part of her job, the end product of all her work, but it was also a colossal pain in the neck. “I didn’t have any subpoenas for today.”

“You do now.”

“But what case? And why the old courthouse?” Criminal cases were always heard high on top of the modern and hideously decorated Justice Center.

“It’s family court. Drew Fleming is calling you as a witness in the custody case.”

She nearly sideswiped the SUV again.

“Can he do that?” she said into the phone.

“The subpoena arrived here with your name on it. Since you haven’t personally received it, I suppose you could, technically, not show up in courtroom number three without receiving a contempt charge. But given how often we in forensics have to work with the court system, and how Mr. Kovacic has recently tarnished your reputation with same, I don’t suggest it.”

“You have got to be freakin’ kidding me.”

“I am not,” he assured her, “freakin’ kidding you.”

“How do I get myself into these things?”

“I wonder that often myself. How you get yourself into these things, I mean, and why you’ve chosen to drag the lab with you on what is looking more and more like a personal vendetta. We cannot be seen to take sides, have I made that sufficiently clear?”

“Yes.”

“Not, apparently, clear enough!” He hung up.

Theresa made two lefts to head back downtown. She wasn’t even sure where to park for the historic county courthouse since she rarely went there. The parking garage eventually turned up, underground, entirely too ominous for her tastes-parking garages had to be a rapist’s dream, isolated, dimly lit, with limited points of egress…when would the powers that be finally figure out that parking garages should be lit with lights designed to blind, like an operating room or a night baseball game? Nevertheless, she managed to get to the ground floor without any felonies inflicted upon her, to be immediately distracted by the sweeping architecture.

From the middle of the marble staircase she stopped to stare at the stained-glass depiction of Law and Justice, and noticed too late the man who paused beside her.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Richard Springer said. The defense expert who had complained about her to the medical examiner appeared dressed for court, in a conservative blue suit and with a leather briefcase.

Theresa had had too long a day for subtlety. “You aren’t here for Evan Kovacic, are you?”

“Never heard of him.”

“Good.” She continued up the stairs to the third floor and followed the signs.

Springer came along. “I suppose you’ve heard that we aren’t going to have to face off on the witness stand after all.”

“No one told me.” Theresa stopped walking when she found courtroom number 3, but still did not look at her temporary companion. If she ignored him, he might go away.

“The charges were reduced to statutory, time served.”

Now she looked at him. In fact, she stared in horror before sinking to the bench and resting her face on one upturned palm. After a moment, she felt a vibration in the wood. He had sat down beside her.

“Look, if it’s any consolation, it had nothing to do with your stupid shoe print.”

What did that matter? The scumbag was still walking free.

As if uncomfortable with the silence, he went on, “It had more to do with the fact that the judge at the preliminary hearing didn’t seem convinced by the girl’s story. It turned out she had neglected to mention quite a few things.”

She lifted her head slightly, still staring at the patterns in the marble tile. “Such as?”

“Such as, she invited him to her bedroom, and not for the first time, and that the weapon used was a rubber pirate dagger, a souvenir of the family’s last trip to Disney World. Basically she had to come up with a story for her parents, and then couldn’t stick to it.”

This did, she admitted to herself but not to him, make her feel better. But it didn’t make her any less guilty. Her work had been sloppy. “Thank you for telling me.”

He grinned, with a glint in his eyes that no doubt charmed most female members of any jury. “Does this mean you no longer consider me a whore?”

She could not hedge to that extent. “No, you’re still a whore. But I’m hardly perfect.”

This did not seem to be the answer he had expected, but didn’t appear to bother him either. He said only, “Until next time, then.” To her relief he did not offer to shake hands, but set off to his next perfor-testimony.

Drew passed him, coming up the hallway. He had given up the knit jacket for a navy blazer she suspected had last been worn for his high school graduation. “I tried to call you directly but it didn’t go through, I guess. Thanks for coming.”

“I didn’t have a choice. You had a subpoena issued in my name. Drew, what the hell are you doing?”

“I have to try to get Cara. You know he’ll kill her if I don’t.”

Other people bustled around them, their footsteps echoing on the cold marble, bouncing off the three-story-high ceiling. That was the hell of it-she did know. She felt absolutely certain. It was the only explanation that fit all the known facts. Evan had killed Jillian, almost perfectly so. How much easier would it be to kill Cara, a helpless, orphaned infant? “Do you have a lawyer yet?”

“No. I’ll represent myself.”

She put a hand to her face to stifle the groan. “Drew. You do understand that the odds of succeeding are very slim. You are no blood relation to Cara and you were not married to her mother.”

“But Evan killed her mother.”

“Do you have any proof of that?”

“No. But you do, right?”

“No, Drew, I don’t, that’s what-”

“Mrs. MacLean. Why am I not surprised to see you here?”

Evan Kovacic and his attorney had come up behind her. The attorney appeared as impeccably dressed and as unflappable as he had in the M.E.’s office. Evan wore a dress shirt and tie and appeared unhappy, either about her presence, the court case, or having to put on a tie.

She opened her mouth to tell him that she had received a subpoena and had to be there, realized it would not do her any good, and shut it again.

The attorney held the door open for all of them. “Shall we go in?”

Civil hearings were very different from what Theresa had become accustomed to in criminal trials. For one thing, she didn’t have to twiddle her thumbs in the hall until called to the stand. For another, there were no opening arguments, no posturing to be done for the jury’s benefit. Underneath a painting of the Pilgrims, and hemmed in by the darkly paneled walls, the judge asked each side why they were there and implied that their answers should be precise. No other spectators or participants appeared.