Lisa Black - Evidence of Murder

“As if she were smothered?”

“No imprint of her teeth on the back of her upper lip, no petechiae. It’s pretty hard to smother an adult unless she’s already unconscious, and there’s no reason she would have been unconscious, no knockout drugs, no blow to the head, no seizure.”

Theresa had grown used to dead victims telling her who they were, what they had done, and how they died. But Jillian could not. Perhaps it was time to look at the situation from the other end. “Evan is an engineer with a degree in chemistry. He had time to plan and clean up. He has tools and equipment in the factory outbuildings. Maybe he came up with that holy grail, an undetectable poison?”

Christine rolled her eyes. “Sure. And maybe he teleported Jillian to the woods when he was done. I ran all the poison assays. Even if we couldn’t identify it, there would be some sign of one. Elevated levels of amines or metals.”

Theresa recalled the miles of electrical cords that had snaked across the concrete floor of the factory building. “Electric shock?”

“It would leave burns and signs in the heart. Come on, you know that as well as I do.”

“I’m grasping at straws here. The only thing we’re relatively sure of is that she stopped breathing.”

“Yeah. Everyone stops breathing. Just before they die.”

“But no one cut off her oxygen.”

“Not by strangling, smothering, or putting a plastic bag over her head, no,” Christine confirmed.

Behind the plastic reality ball and the electrical cords, behind the group of spectators, there had been tall metal cylinders, high and round, like small grain silos. They had been painted the same color as the walls and therefore blended into the background, obviously left over from the factory’s previous owners, the carbon makers.

“What if they-he-removed the oxygen from the air?”

“Come again?”

What had the chipped paint on the side of the tank read? She closed her eyes and concentrated.

N 2. The cylinders might be empty. Then again, they might not.

“What about nitrogen? He has rows of gas tanks there. What if he filled the air with nitrogen?”

Christine frowned. “I’m not following you. Like he opens all these air valves and floods the room with nitrogen? It would have to be an awful lot, and why wouldn’t it kill him and the baby?”

“They weren’t there.”

“It isn’t like gas, you know, like putting your head in the oven. Nitrogen won’t kill you in and of itself. Only if the oxygen content of the air fell too low to sustain life.”

“But that would kill her?”

“Sure.”

“Without leaving any signs?”

The doctor plucked a bayonet off her desk and balanced its two ends between her hands as she thought. “I’d have to check the literature, but as far as I know, yeah. Nitrogen is a natural component of the blood, so the toxicology would seem normal. But how do you get an apartment airtight enough to flood it with nitrogen? It wouldn’t chase the oxygen out…though I suppose it would be no trick for him to rig a timer to the tank. He could take the baby and leave, come back when the gas has been turned off, and open the doors and windows. It wouldn’t leave any sign in the apartment. Or the car. A car would make a handy little gas chamber, almost completely airtight.”

“It works well enough with carbon monoxide,” Theresa agreed, wishing she’d taken a closer look at the windows on Evan’s Escalade or Jillian’s car. She could have swabbed them with a little alcohol, run the swabs on the FTIR to look for adhesives. But-“The tanks I saw aren’t portable. Maybe it wasn’t done in the apartment. Maybe he took her out to the factory.”

“Again, how does he turn her atmosphere anaerobic? Set up some kind of oxygen tent? And why is she-”

Theresa had a vision of the clear plastic frames over the assembly table. “He already has one. Big enough for a body to fit, and it already has piping outlets built into it. Damn, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.” She explained the factory setup to Christine.

“Great. So Jillian lies on this table while Evan attaches nitrogen at one end and a vacuum at the other and reduces her oxygen levels until she passes out.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why does Jillian go along with this? She didn’t struggle. Aside from those vague bruises on her forearms, she’s got no defensive wounds. She didn’t break her nails clawing at the glass. She just laid there and died.”

“You said she had a sleeping pill in her system.”

“I can’t believe it would be enough for her to sleep through being carried to another location and placed in a gas chamber.”

Theresa shuddered. “How long would it take?”

“Not long at all. Once the amount of oxygen in the air gets under twenty-five percent, she’d be unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes.”

“And no chance that she’d sleep through that.”

“I can’t see how. Once her lungs began to gasp, she’d wake up, unless she had way more narcotics in her system than we found.”

Theresa stood up, dying to act on the information and no longer able to withstand the handle of the ammo locker pressing into her bottom. “But suffocation by nitrogen would produce your autopsy findings. Or lack thereof.”

“I’ll need to do a little research, but I believe so. What, you think your cousin’s going to give you a search warrant based on an educated guess?”

“Maybe. Now that I know what to look for.”

“And what would that be? A tube leading from the nitrogen tanks to this hood you were talking about?”

“No, I’m sure he could explain that, and if he couldn’t he would have gotten rid of the hookups by now. No, I mean hairs, fibers, fingerprints, anything that would show Jillian Perry died while stretched out in that Plexiglas cocoon.”

Frank answered on the second ring. “Where are you?”

This seemed like an odd way to open a conversation. “At the lab, of course. Look, I know you’re sick of hearing about Jillian Perry-”

“You have no idea how sick. You haven’t heard?”

The coffee floating around in her empty stomach began to boil. “Heard what?”

“Drew Fleming kidnapped Cara.”

She nearly broke off the phone’s flip top pressing it to her ear, as if proximity might make his words more sensible. “What?”

“He went to the apartment and pointed a gun at the nanny. He made her pack a diaper bag for him with stuff for Cara, bundled up the baby, and left.”

She noticed the wind behind Frank’s voice, whining across the surface of his phone. “Is he on his boat?”

“We’re there now. He says he’ll shoot anyone who steps onto the dock.”

“Is he trying to get away?”

“That’s going to be a little difficult with a foot of ice on top of the water. He could ice-skate a good distance, but that boat ain’t going anywhere.”

She sat down in a task chair; not the best choice as its wheels started to scoot away and she nearly slid off. “So he has no way out.”

“Best case, he figures that out and realizes that he loved Jillian too much to kill her child. Worst case-”

“He decides to take her with him. There’s not a lot of difference between those two choices, Frank, when you realize that the only reason he took Cara is because he believes Evan intends to murder her.”

Silence on the other end, save for the bitter wind. “That’s not good.”

“I’m coming down there.” She flipped the phone shut before he could protest.

Of the knot of cars in the otherwise deserted parking lot, at least half had their engines running, patrol officers taking advantage of the tradition that their vehicles must be ever ready for action by keeping them ever warm. But Theresa had lived through the gas shortages of the late seventies and couldn’t bring herself to do that. Besides, Leo would have killed her if he’d found out.