Lisa Black: Evidence of Murder

“He just didn’t seem that bad to me.”

A stop sign gave him a chance to turn and face her. “For five years he worked from a crib in the warehouse district. During that time I fished two of his girls out of the Cuyahoga-and his fiancée, Diana? Found her in a Dumpster behind Tower City. Don’t let him fool you. Not for one second.”

Her sinuses ached even more. “Then what’s your plan here? Did you think you could ask him if he killed Jillian and he’d say yes, here’s where you’ll find her body?”

“You never know, cuz.” The huge stone men holding up the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge looked down upon them as they passed. “You never know.”

“His affect when he talked about that other girl, Diana, seemed totally different from when he spoke of Jillian. If the idea that Jillian is dead didn’t come as a surprise, then he’s a hell of an actor. Plus, Jillian’s picture hung on the wall with the others, but another girl’s partially overlapped it. That doesn’t speak of any elevated status.”

“This guy isn’t about sentiment, Tess. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“What did Vangie say?”

“She backs up her boss, says Georgie didn’t pay more attention to Jillian than to any of the other girls. And that this Drew’s last name is Fleming. He’s been calling Jillian for over a year. Vangie thinks they might have met at a ‘company function,’ as she puts it, but she’s not sure. She’s never met him. She thought he sounded sweet at first, but now hears his voice in her sleep and is damn sick of it.”

“And what did Vangie think of the husband?”

“That Evan is the catch of a lifetime. Not the politest guy on the phone, but his income made him worth it.” Frank let her ponder this through downtown Cleveland and out to University Circle. After maneuvering the Crown Vic through the tight parking lot behind the county medical examiner’s office, he paused behind the loading dock to let her out. “So where’s your money? On the husband or the stalker?”

She stepped into the half-frozen air once more, pulling her camera bag from the passenger-seat floor. “My money is on Jillian getting tired of washing dishes and changing diapers. Girls who work for guys like Georgie don’t come from happy backgrounds and they don’t lead stable lives. You’ll find her crying on the shoulder of the persistent Drew.”

“Then why would Drew be calling Georgie?”

“Some other guy, then. Hey.” She leaned in and peered at her cousin. “Weren’t you going to buy me lunch?”

He turned his watch toward her. “It’s already one thirty, cuz. I don’t want to get you in trouble with Leo.”

She narrowed her eyes with a technique she had worked on until it flustered most men and some women. “I’m going to tell your mother you took me to visit a pimp.”

“He’s not a pimp,” Frank corrected her before driving off. “He’s a businessman.”

Theresa didn’t wait to watch him leave, but merely pulled her coat closed long enough to get through the back door and into the loading dock area. The smell of the building greeted her along with its warmth, but she had long grown used to the mix: the tinny smell of blood, the sharp odor of formalin, and the month-old garbage tang of decomposing flesh. A white-coated deskman blocked her way as he helped two funeral-home transport men to zip the M.E.’s white plastic body bag into a plush burgundy one so that the dead could be dressed for the trip with a little more dignity. The deskman moved to let her pass with a quiet “good afternoon.” It occurred to her that it had been eight months and her coworkers still treated her gently. This was an unfair burden on them; M.E. staff members, who spent all day around the dead, were never solemn except in the presence of family members and news reporters, and not even the latter most of the time. Her mother was right. She had to get her life back to normal. Or at least learn to fake it more convincingly.

One of these days.

She took the elevator instead of the stairs and hung her coat up just before the trace department supervisor found her. Leo had two inches of height on her but thirty less pounds, as if his nervous system had taken over and sucked the juices from all other body tissue. He waved a sheaf of papers. “We have a problem.”

This didn’t impress her coming from a man whose personal-threat assessment level remained permanently stuck on red. “I’m a little busy, Leo. I have to photo and tape the clothing from yesterday’s homicide-that woman they found in Rockefeller Park.”

“She came in yesterday morning and you’re just now getting to her clothing?”

“It was drying.”

“Yeah, right. Richard Springer wrote the judge and said you refused to comply with the court order for defense testing.”

Theresa headed for the coffeemaker, and not even Leo dared to get in her way when on that path. Of course, since Leo insisted on keeping the machine in his office, this move didn’t get rid of him either, and he followed. Springer, a defense-hired expert, had visited the lab weeks before to perform his own examination of fiber evidence.

“He said you were uncooperative.” Leo rattled the sheets for emphasis.

“Because I let him make his own slides? How else would he know they were from the real evidence unless he prepared them himself? It’s not my problem if he doesn’t like to get his fingers in the mounting media.”

“He says you created a, let me quote this here, ‘unfairly prejudicial work environment.’ What the hell does he mean by that?”

“Probably that I told him his client is guilty as hell.” She stirred in creamer with a wooden stick; they used to use the sticks for blood enzyme work, now supplanted by DNA. She continued to order the sticks. They made great coffee stirrers.

The secretary strolled in, caught a glimpse of Leo’s face, dropped some typed reports on his desk, and sidled right out again, not even risking an empathetic glance in Theresa’s direction.

“Terrific. Nothing like demonstrating an inability to be objective.” Leo crossed his arms and stared her down. “Is that what he’s referring to when he says you were blatantly hostile?”

“Well-” She sipped her coffee as if trying to remember, when of course she remembered perfectly. The human mind seemed perverse in that way; it recalled moments of misery with photographic precision, but pictures of happy times got fuzzy around the edges. Or maybe it was just her.

“Well, what?” Leo demanded.

“I may have wondered aloud how he shaved in the morning, what with the difficulty he must have looking at himself in the mirror.”

Leo’s mouth twitched, almost in a grin, but he stifled it. “And you thought he’d just let that slide? You think the judge will wink at a charge of interfering in a criminal defense?”

“He got to do the analysis he wanted to do. No court in the world says I have to be friendly.”

“Not friendly is a world away from outwardly hostile.”

She twirled the loose knob on Leo’s barrister’s bookcase. The books and papers inside pressed against the glass as if pleading for escape. “This was after he started asking where I went to school, how long I’d been in forensics, why I hadn’t poured a cast of the shoe print found under the window, crap like that.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Why didn’t you pour a cast of the shoe print?”

“Because it was two o’clock in the morning, because the budget wouldn’t allow us to order more dental stone, because it wasn’t a homicide so we had a live witness.”

“And maybe you just didn’t care.”

She stirred her coffee.

“Not caring is a dangerous condition in this line of work.”