Evidence of Murder (19 page)

And diatoms in the tires. She folded the nylon netting from the vacuum’s filter and sealed it in a manila envelope, taking care not to lose any of the trapped fibers and dirt. Then she turned to the tires. The sky grew darker than pitch and Antwan’s overtime meter continued to click, but he had stopped complaining.

It took a while, but she cleaned out every valley of every inch of each tire’s circumference accessible to her with a plastic probe, trying not to leave even a scratch in the rubber that Kovacic could complain about.

“Did he run her over?” Antwan guessed. He did not seem upset that Theresa refused to confirm or deny any one scenario; instead he seemed to enjoy brainstorming as to what her little foray implied. “Like a hit-and-run? Left the scene of an accident?”

“No. Look, I’m sorry I can’t tell you anything about an open investigation—mostly because I’m not even sure it
is
an investigation. It’s more of a fact-finding mission. I’m trying to—”

“Reconstruct the events, yeah, you said. But let me ax you this. You’re going to want to keep your little project between us, right? As in don’t mention nothing to Mr. Kovacic, right?”

Was he going to blackmail her? “I can’t ask or tell you what to say or not say. I have no authority to do so.”

“Neat answer, but you’d rather I didn’t, right?”

She honestly didn’t know. Perhaps if Evan felt pressured, he’d make a mistake. In any event, she could not hide her actions. In forensics, mistakes could be dealt with, but covering up, even appearing to cover up, even covering up
nothing,
would kill your career faster than being found with kiddie porn. It was the Point Beyond Which One Could Not Go. “I’m not going to ask you to tell him or not tell him or not tell your boss or anyone else. I’m not hiding anything here, Antwan. I can’t.”

He kept nodding with a knowing smile, and it worried her. “Yeah, yeah, I got that. But let me ax you this—this place you work, the M.E.’s office, what would I need to work there? A college degree?”

“At least a bachelor’s in the natural sciences, biology, chemistry, or general forensic sciences, yeah. That would be good.”

“So if I got one—I’m going to Cleveland State in the fall—I could apply for a job like yours?”

She couldn’t help but smile. Forensic junkies. They were everywhere. “Certainly.”

“And you’d remember this little favor, if I did?”

She pulled out her card and handed it to him. “There’s no guarantee. Lab staffs are a lot smaller than you’d expect from watching TV, and everything depends on the budget, but if there’s anything I can do to help, a tour of the lab, explain the application process, don’t hesitate to call me.”

He studied the card carefully before storing it in his back pocket. “Thanks.”

“No, Antwan. Thank
you
.”

On her way home, she stopped at Don’s house and borrowed his copy of Polizei. The time had come for her to enter Evan’s game.

Theresa hadn’t dated since Paul’s death, to say the least, hadn’t thought about dating, refused to even consider thinking about dating. And yet when she entered her home that night, her daughter waiting for her at the kitchen table, drumming her seventeen-year-old fingers, Theresa felt as if she’d been out on a date, had returned past curfew, and was now in very big trouble.

“Hi,” she chanced, trying to remind herself that she was the mommy and Rachael was the little girl, not vice versa. She failed. “I forgot about your concert, didn’t I? How did it go?”

“Super,” Rachael deadpanned. “Working late?”

“Yeah.” Theresa removed her coat and hung it on the hook next to the door, and, talking too fast, said, “I questioned Evan’s business partner’s girlfriend and then the business partner. Did you play that Mozart piece after all?”

“You don’t question people.” Her daughter repeated what Theresa had said herself during numerous forensic-themed TV dramas. “You work with evidence. Cops question people.”

“Well, I was questioning them about the evidence, I suppose, the evidence being Jillian. Look.” She held up a plastic case containing the borrowed Polizei disc. “I brought you something.”

Rachael’s expression did not change as she stood up. “I don’t play video games.”

“Please.”

Her daughter stopped, halfway out of her chair.

“I need your help.”

She had been through so much, her daughter, during what should have been her carefree high school years—her parents divorced, her grandmother gone back to work, she’d endured a constant stream of cocktail waitress potential stepmothers, gotten used to a stepfather only to lose him before the title became official, and then watched her mother drift through an eight-month depr—funk, present in body only, the mind out of reach. Theresa didn’t have to be Freud to know that everyone has a breaking point and she was pushing her daughter toward hers.

Rachael held out her hand. “Hand it over.”

The girl opened the lower doors on the entertainment unit and dragged out a passel of wires. The game cartridge fit into the designated slot on a console Theresa had paid a lot of money for but very little attention to, until now. Rachael changed the TV channel and a blue screen appeared, with START GAME written in blood-drenched letters.

Theresa’s stomach grumbled but she didn’t dare leave her neglected daughter’s side; at least Rachael would have eaten—interests and talents often skip a generation and Rachael had inherited her grandmother’s respect for food. Theresa perused the game case instead. The background summary, which repeated what Don had already told her, spoke of a castle, a treasure, murderous vampire guards. The hero, a brawny young man with spiky blond hair and a gleaming plate of armor on his chest and back, had only his trusty sword and a glowing amulet that glowed more brightly when he took the right path. He could, however, pick up other trinkets along the way—a crossbow with flaming arrows; ropes; lock picks; a drinking/fighting buddy or two; and even a bull mastiff, as both a pet and a formidable weapon. By the third paragraph, even Theresa wanted to play the game.

Two things she found particularly interesting. The hero had not come to the castle to find the treasure. He had no interest in the treasure; he had arrived to rescue his brother from the castle’s innermost keep before the evil overlord of the vampires could absorb his life energy.

She also found the location of the castle intriguing. Evan described it as “on the banks of a frigid blue lake, enveloped by dead trees and pelting winds of doom.” It echoed the location of Jillian Perry’s body, except that Lake Erie always appeared more green than blue. And the “winds of doom” part. Gusts from the lake could be wicked, particularly when walking on East Ninth, but
dooming
seemed a bit strong.

She watched as Rachael made her way from the boat up the steep mountain pass, dispatched a band of heavily armed—well, bad guys, for want of a better descriptor—and entered the castle. The vast hall shone with golden candelabra and stained glass, and Theresa could have spent some time merely sightseeing, but Rachael and her horde pressed on.

After dying for the fourteenth time, however, the teenager grew tired and threw the joystick aside. “There’s no way over this chasm without falling. You’ll have to take over, Mom. I’m going to bed.”

“Already?”

“It’s eleven twenty, and I have school in the morning. At least that’s what you always tell me when I’m watching Letterman.”

“You’re right.” Theresa yawned. “Turn in. And Rachael?”

“Yeah?” Her daughter paused, one foot on the bottom step.

“I’m sorry I missed your concert.”

“Don’t worry about it. We didn’t play any good songs anyway.”

“That doesn’t matter. I should have been there.”

Rachael smiled. “I’ll let it go this time.” Then she went up to bed, and Theresa gave silent thanks that if her ex-husband had to pass one characteristic on to their progeny, it had been the ability to let anger go as quickly as it had come. Theresa, on the other hand, could nurse a grudge until it graduated from college, got a job, and bought a house.

She lowered her aging knees to the carpet and reached for the joystick.

The bones in her spinal column began to protest shortly after finding the portrait gallery and its hidden door, from which stairs wound up to the east tower, and her shoulder blades had begun to chime in when Rachael materialized at her elbow.

“Are you still playing?”

“You weren’t supposed to go over the chasm, you had to go under it. There’s a passageway—what are you doing up? Did I wake you?”

“Mom—I’m going to school. It’s seven A.M. Have you been playing
all night
?”

No wonder her back hurt.

“And then the wall opens up and there are three hallways. Two have steps going up or down, respectively, and the third seems to go straight ahead.”

“Did you get any sleep at all?” Don asked, peering at her over the edge of his coffee cup. They faced each other over the chipped Formica-covered table in the staff lunchroom, each trying to ignore the campfire odors that had seeped into their lab coats after wrestling all morning with the victims of a house fire.

She shook her head. Then her female instincts woke, prodded by the caffeine-infused steam and the sympathetic look in her coworker’s eyes. “Why? Do I look like crap?”

“Of course not. But you look tired.”

“Tired equals disheveled. Isaac Asimov said so. Never tell a woman she looks tired. Evan killed his wife, Don, I’m sure of it. He plans everything. He planned this whole
world
. It tells a story, you know—it’s not Asteroids, where you shoot at anything that moves and you can go in only two directions. This is a house, and you can choose which room you want to enter, and what’s in there might be there every time and it might not. You decide what to do—take the ax or leave it there, kill the guard or ask him to let you by. Do you see what that means?”

“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?”