Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“Actually, I was okay with not being able to tell.”

“Well, of course. You’re a mom. You’d have me in a burka if you could.” For all her fondness for the new pants, however, she seemed to be wrestling with them, wrenching both arms behind her back until one hand emerged with a small white tag. “Man! That thing was driving me crazy.”

“That’s not true about the burka. I just don’t get this skiing-at-night thing. It’s bad enough you have to hurtle down a snow-covered hill, but you have to do it in the pitch dark as well? What keeps you from running into trees? Or each other?”

“Um, maybe the huge floodlights they have along the slopes? They’re lit up like a Walmart. And I have a light stick.”

They pulled onto her cousin’s street. “But do the trees have light sticks?”

“There they are! I told you Dora would be ticked if I got here late.”

She dropped the clothing tag into the ashtray and dragged her large bag forward from the backseat. The car had not yet come to a complete stop before the passenger door opened. “See you, Mom.”

Theresa snatched her daughter’s arm and held it, arresting Rachael in midflight. “Be careful.”

Rachael tried to pull her arm away. Perhaps annoyance and overexcitement made her say, in the callous way children can have, “There won’t be any bank robbers on the ski slopes, Mom.”

“I mean it. That’s a large area, it’s dark, and it’s very cold out.”

“Okay.” Rachael took the time to look into her mother’s eyes and repeat the word before making her escape.

Theresa watched Rachael join her relatives, then waved to her cousin, now shepherding the girls into a minivan. She hadn’t been worried about bank robbers, only broken bones and bad sprains and frostbite.

Not to mention that the last girl she had seen in a snowy woods had been very, very dead.

Arriving home for the second time that evening, she grabbed the junk from her car and dropped it on her kitchen table, fed the dog, changed into the heaviest set of pajamas she had, and poured a shot of vodka into a glass of flavored diet water. Then she sat down to open bills, grateful that none was overdue. Still, how to afford college in another year…

She threw the bills on the table. The square, shiny piece of fabric Rachael had ripped from her pants scooted away and Theresa caught it before it sailed off toward the floor. Years as a fiber analyst made her read it: MADE IN CHINA. NYLON/TENCEL.

Tencel.

Evan snowboarded. Evan liked to have the latest innovation, the coolest stuff, and, Theresa would bet, pants that showed he had a butt.

Drew, of course, could also own a pair of Tencel pants, but so far he had seemed to live in knit jersey and have no interest in sports. Jogging pants were not likely to be made of Tencel, and police officers wore wool uniforms at this time of the year.

She thought of calling Frank to tell him she needed to get into Evan’s pants, but doubted he would see the humor. Or the probable cause. She’d need more than a fabric tag for that. She needed the last item on her list. Means.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10

“I’m surprised you come in this early,” Theresa said, bouncing from one foot to the other. The raw wind had cut through her coat in just the ten steps from her car to the front door.

“Just me,” Vangie said, pulling a set of keys out of a slouchy gold lamé bag. “Georgie doesn’t roll in until ten or so. But the phones get going right about eight.”

Theresa followed her through the opened door, so grateful for the warmth inside that she spoke without thinking, “I wouldn’t think your clientele got up that early. Um, I mean-”

Vangie only laughed as she divested herself of bag, coat, scarf, and gloves. “Partiers aren’t morning people. Party planners, on the other hand, are definite A types. Georgie said you might be looking for me.”

“I need to ask more about Jillian, any tiny detail you can tell me.”

The young woman swept long curls out of her face and switched on a coffeemaker. She had obviously set it up the prior evening because it immediately began to perk. “There are two kinds of girls who work here, the kind who know exactly what they’re doing and the kind who have watched too many movies.”

“They think they can work a few jobs and then marry Richard Gere or Ed Harris?”

“Exactly. Jillian was in the second group.”

“And did she meet a-”

Vangie watched the dark liquid drip into the pot. “She thought she did, once. He was an older guy, plenty of money, successful. Just like Daddy.”

“What happened?”

“She was wrong.”

Dr. Christine Johnson found her waiting by the loading dock. Theresa greeted the younger woman with, “This is it.”

“This is what?”

“The moment of truth. I need a cause of death on Jillian Perry and I need it right now.”

The doctor shifted a tote bag to her other shoulder as they fell into hurried steps on the way to the elevator. “Tell me about it. Stone has been pestering me for two days for a conclusion. I said I’d settle for ‘unknown means,’ but he hates to do that unless it’s a decomp.”

“Yeah, I know.” The moving metal box creaked and moaned and took an inordinate amount of time to reach the second floor. “Why don’t you take the stairs?”

“My thighs don’t want to.”

Theresa eyed the woman’s slim waist. “You wait until you turn thirty, missy. Your whole metabolism suddenly turns against you. You’ll be taking the stairs in skyscrapers to work off one more calorie.”

“You’re just a bundle of cheer this morning, aren’t you?”

“There’s more. Evan got custody of Cara. He is officially her next of kin. That baby’s days, maybe minutes, are now numbered unless we can prove murder.”

“Okay, shut up. I mean it. Not another word until I get a cup of coffee.”

Theresa complied, even waiting until after settling her body onto the ammo locker in the miniature office, a steaming cup held up to her sinuses. “Even the phytoplankton refuse to help me. I collected soil samples from parking lots at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and at the building on Old River Road where Evan had his business meeting the day Jillian disappeared, but it didn’t do me any good. I got Emily at the Natural History Museum to come in early today and take a look at it all, but the types of diatoms in each sample don’t vary enough to be significant.”

“Mmm,” Christine said into her coffee cup.

“I guess it depends on water depth, light, whether there are rocks or sand at the water’s edge…the ones from Old River Road show some differences, probably from the industrial influences along the river. So now Evan will probably sue me for cleaning tires without a license and it didn’t even do me any good. Which leads me to you, missy. Can you go over your findings again? Maybe something will ring a bell.”

“My findings were all negative. No pulmonary emboli to indicate an overdose of narcotics. According to the tox report, she had nothing more than a mild sleeping pill in her system, nothing that would depress her breathing until she died or make her sleep through a trip to the freezing woods. Plus, there was no amylase in the vitreous humor, no elevated levels of catecholamines, to indicate death by freezing. But there again, there might not be.” She ran her hands through her hair, which only encouraged the waves to become unruly. “I found some cerebral edema but that could mean a lot of things.”

“So her heart just stopped?” Theresa asked.

“Yes…well, no.” Christine picked up a manila folder already placed front and center on her desk, and flipped through a few pages. “Hearts don’t stop for no reason. There’s no sign of infarction. She might have stopped breathing first.”