Evidence of Murder (27 page)

“Jolly?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Tell her she looked beautiful, throw in a joke, that sort of stuff. What did you think I meant, force a little Ecstasy down her throat until her mood lightened?”

“Just checking.”

“Not that she wouldn’t do a tablet or two once in a while. But it was never much with her, and stopped totally when she got pregnant. She wouldn’t even drink, then. Nothing but diet ginger ale. For these types of things”—he jerked his head toward the party room—“I’d have to make arrangements with the bartenders in advance for that damn diet ginger ale. The clients don’t want teetotalers around. It makes them feel vulnerable.”

“Interesting.”

Apparently she didn’t sound interested enough, because he straightened and pressed his empty glass into her free hand. “Speaking of clients, I need to get back to mine. If you’ll excuse me, Ms.—”

“Did she say anything more about her father? Her parents?”

“Not to me, and I didn’t ask. He wasn’t the first irate parent I’d encountered and probably won’t be the last. This isn’t an easy business, you know.”

“Then why don’t you get into another line of work?”

He glanced toward the party again. Clouds must have gathered outside and the dimmed light softened the lines in his face. “But I meet so many interesting people.”

I’ll bet
. She reviewed the number of expensive suits in the room. Interesting people who then owed him not just the bill but a favor, a consideration, an understanding in exchange for mutual discretion. “Did Evan Kovacic ever contact you or have any problem with Jillian’s job?”

“He called looking for Jillian once or twice, but that’s all. Not at all like Daddy.”

“He was never a client of yours?”

“Nope, never met him.” That fit with Shelly’s statement, that she had introduced Jillian to Evan. “And you know, that’s a good point. Why don’t you just ask Jillian’s
husband
all your questions?”

She tried to formulate a good answer to that, and failed.

He took his hand off the doorknob. “Oh, I get it. You think hubby killed her.”

Daddy and hubby. George liked his diminutives. “I don’t know yet. I’m working on it.”

“How’d he do it, then? I thought she froze herself to death. Or that serial killer got her.”

“I’m working on that too.”

“All that hard work, and for a government salary.” He pulled the door open, holding the heavy wood with one hand and cocked his head toward the party inside. “Have you ever considered a sideline? Some of the guys get tired of nothing but legs and a giggle. You could wind up with quite the following—”

“No, thanks.”

“Do it for the free booze, then.”

She laughed.

“Suit yourself.” He passed through the door and made a beeline for the group of people, his form breaking up into a kaleidoscope of colors behind the decorated glass panels before the swinging door had time to hit him in the buttocks.

The young man reappeared from farther up the hallway, hustling along as fast as he could with a tray of empty, tinkling champagne flutes, and accepted two more from her with an unhappy sigh.

“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.

Evan’s attorney began, setting forth the facts of Cara’s birth, Evan’s marriage to Jillian, and Jillian’s death, adding that no one else had applied for guardianship except for Drew, who had no legal relationship to the infant. Then it was Drew’s turn to speak. He did this horribly, stammering, stumbling, and dwelling for far too long on how much he had truly loved Jillian. The judge glanced at his watch more than once, and finally interrupted. “Mr. Fleming, I granted an expeditious hearing because I understood there to be some emergency as to the well-being of a child. Do you have any facts to present to indicate that Mr. Kovacic would be an unfit father?”

“Only that he killed Cara’s mother, Your Honor.”

Everyone became very still, except the judge. He seemed merely confused. “I’m sorry,
what
did you say?”

“He murdered Jillian.”

Now Evan’s attorney sprang up. “Your Honor, this is the purest and vilest slander—”

The judge stopped looking at his watch. “How is he supposed to have killed—”

Drew shouted over the other men. His voice changed, as Theresa knew it could, stress breaking the words into dangerous shards. The judge caught the change and stared. “That’s the only reason he wants Cara, for her money. Then he’ll kill her—”

“Your Honor, we intend to file charges against Mr. Fleming for these baseless allegations—”

“They were married three weeks, Your Honor.” Drew sucked in a breath, obviously working hard to get his voice under control. It worked, somewhat. “Three weeks, and a perfectly healthy young mother ends up dead?”

“—a felony charge of slander and harassment—”

The judge appeared thoughtful, or at least curious. “How did she die?”

“Ask her.” Drew pointed at Theresa, in the second-to-last row of seats. “She knows.”

All four men in the room, plus the bailiff and court reporter, stopped and stared at her.

“And who is she?” the judge asked.

She could only hope that Drew would not introduce her as Wonder Woman.

The walk to the witness stand took forever. She passed Drew on his way back to his seat, and successfully resisted the urge to slap him on the back of the head. She had no idea what to say, and wished for Don, or at least Leo, and thought what a funny story this would make to tell Paul over dinner, if, of course, Paul were still alive to hear it.

The bailiff swore her in. She took her seat.

“Yes, Your Honor?” she replied when he said her name.

“Has Mr. Kovacic been charged with the murder of his wife?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Is he a suspect in her death?”

How to answer that? “He is to me” didn’t seem reasonable…though she
was
a death investigator and she
did
suspect him, which didn’t seem quite legitimate…such was the self-esteem, still, of a female raised in the twentieth century…. With no other strategy in sight, she bunted. “The investigation by the Cleveland Police Department, to my knowledge, has not been completed.”