Evidence of Murder (32 page)

“It’s solid.” He put his hand on the phone.

Theresa thought of the freezing water churning below the stiff surface. Lake Erie was the shallowest of the Great Lakes…it froze fast but thawed fast too. Plunging into the frigid green—“I won’t go. I can’t, Drew, I’m scared. And I won’t let you take the baby over it either.”

“It’s the only way. Cara is all I have now.” He picked up his phone. “And you.”

“Theresa,” Chris said in her ear.

Drew held the receiver to his ear but made no move to dial a number. The expression on his face smoothed to bland shock, an unblinking surprise. “It’s dead.”

They had heard his plan over the microphone and taken the simplest of precautions. They had cut his phone service. He could not contact the friend at the airport.

She allowed herself the tiniest sigh of relief. Drew remained more stunned than angry; he had no way to determine the presence of the microphone, probably assumed that cutting his communication would be standard procedure for the situation, which, of course, it was. “Drew, all you want to do is keep Cara safe. So do we.”

“There is no we, Theresa. They’ll take her away from us and give her back to Evan. They did it once and you can’t give them a reason not to do it again.”

“But—” Words came with difficulty, mostly because she agreed with him.

He picked up the small nylon backpack and strapped it on. “Let’s go.”

All right, she thought. Screw the hostage-negotiation manual. Chris might not be allowed to lie to him, but I can. I can lie through my teeth. “I can get them to put Cara in protective custody and give me a search warrant to examine the factory’s nitrogen tanks. I’ll find the hoses and things he used to pump the gas from the tanks to the plastic hood. He won’t have any way to explain that—”

“Circuit boards,” Drew said, reaching over his head to add a box of 9-millimeter ammunition to the backpack.

“What?”

“The nitrogen hoods are for soldering the circuit boards for the game hardware. Here’s another blanket for Cara. We don’t want her to catch cold.”

Theresa blinked at him.

He zipped the pack shut, and carefully, chillingly, clicked off the safety on the gun. “Soldering in an oxygen atmosphere will allow metal oxides to form on the contacts of integrated circuits and capacitors. Then they don’t conduct as well and you’ll have problems with the board. They have to be soldered in a nitrogen atmosphere. Everyone knows that.”

“Not everyone,” she corrected, absently wrapping the sleeping Cara in a small wool blanket. So Evan had, again, a perfectly reasonable explanation for the nitrogen hood, though perhaps not for the solder on Jillian’s shirt. “But if I can find any trace of Jillian inside the hood—hairs, pink fibers, a fingerprint—he can’t explain that away as the standard manufacturing process.”

“He won’t let you in.”

“I’ll get a warrant.”

“If you could have, you would have already.” Drew was not stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid.

Lie. “My cousin is the detective in charge of the investigation, Drew. I will
get
a warrant.”

“Come on. Let’s go.” He motioned at her with the gun.

Her patience with him began to wear thin. “That gun is older than you and me put together. Are you sure it even shoots?”

He pointed it at a window and fired. The deafening boom blasted the thin houseboat walls and glass and tufts of canvas spattered everywhere. She turned her face away, shielding the baby.

He had fired out a porthole window facing north, toward the dock where the police had massed.
Frank is out there,
she thought.
Chris!

Cara screamed.

“Drew! What did you do that for? They’ll think you fired at—”

But he was already in motion, as if he heard gunshots every day, moving toward the front cabin, Luger in his right hand, grabbing Theresa with the left. The coffee table bit into both her shins and then her feet got into gear, and she found herself in Drew’s bedroom. A wooden set of thin steps led to the upper deck. Cara still screamed.

Theresa had only a moment to see past the bright hole in the ceiling, glowing with the hazy afternoon light, to notice how Drew had decorated his bedroom. The walls, the mirror, even the ceiling had been covered with cards and Post-it notes and photographs, but mostly photographs. Of Jillian. Jillian smiling, Jillian washing her car, Jillian with Cara, Jillian on the boat. Close-ups, midrange, some so far away that Jillian herself had probably been unaware of the camera’s presence.

And one of her. Theresa. A snap of her leaving the medical examiner’s office, her face slightly obscured by a blanket of falling snow. It lay on the coverlet, on top of a newspaper and yet more pictures of Jillian.

“Go up,” Drew shouted, thrusting her elbow forward with such force she had no choice but to comply. She braced herself with one hand, holding the baby with the other. She had no desire to poke her head out into the open when surely the SWAT forces were now flowing down the wooden planks, ready to neutralize the threat.

Don’t shoot me, she prayed. Don’t shoot me.

The pocket mic. Say it aloud, idiot.

She pulled herself up, advancing step-by-step on the steep ladder. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me.”

“Don’t worry, they won’t.” Drew came directly behind her, his head bumping her bottom.

She exploded onto the empty front deck of the houseboat. The wind made her eyes tear but felt sweet and refreshing after the stuffy indoor cabin. The front of Drew’s boat fell off into open space, like a catamaran, without the protection of side gunwales. She did not feel secure enough to stand on the snow-covered and trembling deck. No shots rang out, though the cops had advanced. Over the tops of the storage lockers cluttering the deck, she saw the dark forms only three boat slips away. They stopped when Drew emerged.

“Don’t shoot us,” she shouted.

“Get down on the ice, Theresa,” Drew instructed, and pulled Cara from her arms.

“What? But—”

With his back against the lockers, he pushed her with his feet, so quickly that she slid across the snow-covered deck before she even had time to think about grabbing for a hook or a railing. Then suddenly she was falling free, loose for a very short moment before the frozen ice met her, hard enough to break bones.

Her left hip, leg, and arm hit first, but her neck managed to keep her skull from striking the surface. The breath left her lungs for the second time that hour.

“Catch,” Drew shouted from above her.

“Wha—?” She had barely managed to struggle to a sitting position before a cloth bundle hit her face, then tumbled into her arms—Cara, her wailing renewed. The gunshot had been bad enough, but falling through open space had really upset the infant. Her face glowed bright red in anger and fear. Theresa hoped her nose hadn’t been broken by the falling child.

Drew managed to land on his feet, with only one foot skidding a bit. The bulky houseboat now hid them both from the SWAT team.

“Come on.” He pulled her to her feet, with some difficulty. She had put off getting new shoes and the tread on these had worn nearly smooth. The snow gave some traction, but the driving wind kept the coating of it to a thin sheen.

“Are you crazy? You just shoved me off a boat, and Cara too. What if I had dropped her?”

He pulled her arm. If she wanted to stay on her feet, she would have to move as well, planting her soles as flatly and solidly as she could.

She was on the lake. On the ice. On the treacherous Lake Erie ice, from which they pulled two or three dead sportsmen every winter. It had to be a certain thickness to support weight, but how could you know what that thickness was? Surely it must vary according to water flow and depth and sunlight—

Drew held the gun pointed at her, either to convince her to cooperate or because the natural position for a right-handed person in cold weather would be to keep the arm crossed on the chest, the barrel pointing to the left. He had his left hand wrapped around Theresa’s upper arm like a vise.

“Point that gun away from me.”

He didn’t. Perhaps that required too much coordination in a stressful situation. Perhaps he meant to keep the gun right where it was.

They dodged through the vacant slip next to them, the SWAT team’s thunderous approach making the wooden dock quiver.

“Point that gun away from Cara, Drew.” She put every bit of authority she could muster into her tone.

“They’re not going to separate us,” he told her.

“I won’t let you hurt her.”

“They won’t separate us. Here’s the snowmobile.”

Theresa ducked her head to avoid the sharp V of the Grady-White’s hull. “I’m not getting on this, Drew, not with Cara. The ice will collapse and we’ll drown.”

He turned the key. The motor, damn its well-tuned mechanical soul, roared to life without a flutter.

“It’s been right at thirty-two for two days now—”

“It will take a lot longer than that to thaw this lake, Theresa.”

“How do you
know
that? The depth varies so much and there’s got to be warmer water coming up the river—”

Abruptly he pushed, and she fell back on the seat, one hand clutching at the controls to keep from falling over backward. Cara’s screams had subsided into mere crying, but this movement startled her anew.

She could hear Frank’s voice above it all: “Theresa!”

Drew straddled the seat behind her, reached around her, and twisted the handle. The snowmobile shot forward, over the ice.

Don’t crack, she mentally begged the ice.

Don’t shoot, she mentally begged the cops.

The rear of the snowmobile fishtailed as Drew turned the corner at the end of the line of docks. Then they were in the main marina area, the snowmobile’s belt churning away at the snow and ice. Her feet on the running board and Drew’s arms on either side of her were all that kept her from falling off.

Drew sped up as they approached the opening to the larger area within the break wall. Jumping would not be an option.

Okay, she thought. The ice is not opening up and the snowmobile is not sinking into the frigid depths, pulling you down like an anchor. Frank and the others must have heard the plan about Burke Lakefront Airport. They will be waiting for you there. Stay calm and keep Cara warm and you can get away from Drew then. As soon as you get off this bloody ice.

He kept the gun pressed into her left side, driving with one hand. She elbowed the barrel away from her, so that if his hand clenched, the bullet would not shatter her abdomen. With careful concentration, she pulled one leg up and over the seat so she could clench it between her knees and hold herself in place.

The wind drove into her face like straight pins. She would have spoken, tried to keep the listening cops—were they still listening?—apprised of their position, but her jaw had frozen shut.

She looked down at Cara, her tiny face barely visible through the petals of blanket. The baby had quieted, apparently fascinated by the gray clouds passing overhead.

They passed completely out of the marina. Through eyes closed to slits she scanned the shoreline; they raced past a set of red and blue flashing lights along Lake Road, but the lights fell behind when they rounded Whiskey Island. Then Drew turned the snowmobile a bit too sharply and they spun in a 360-degree circle. Three times.

When her stomach returned to its original orientation, she nestled her face as far into the collar of her coat as she could and thawed her jaw out enough to protest: “Drew! What are you doing?”

“Sorry.”

“Slow down!”

“It’ll be okay. I rode this thing before, once.”

Once?

Then the mouth of the Cuyahoga River came into view and she forgot all about pursuing cop cars and Drew’s lack of experience with wintertime vehicles and returned to the pressing need to get off this ice
now
.

The ice ahead became roughened, rocky. Then it stopped altogether.

The river had been opened for the cargo ships. The Coast Guard had cut up the ice, churned it out so that the water had become a pool of slush instead of a solid surface.

“Drew! The river!
Stop!
”

Her hysterical plea prompted both Drew and Cara to action. The baby burst out with a startled yell, and Drew cut back on the throttle.

Theresa took one arm from the child and put her fingers over Drew’s, trying to twist the handle toward them and lower the speed even further. “The river is broken up! We’re going to go into the water! Turn!”

Slowing or even stopping would not be enough, she knew. Several winters previously she had helped piece a man back together after he had not left himself sufficient clearance to stop before the shoreline. A snowmobile on ice was not the same as a car on asphalt. It had no brakes.

She pulled at the left handle to turn them toward the break wall. That direction took them farther from land, but better that than crashing into the rocky edge of Whiskey Island.

With both hands on the handlebars, Drew corrected their course, heading straight for the river opening to the north of the abandoned Coast Guard station. Only two hundred feet remained between them and the cold water.

“Stop! We’ll drown!”

“It’s frozen!”

Forty feet.

“The Coast Guard broke it up!” She found herself stretching out her foot, as if she could somehow create some resistance to their forward motion, anything to slow that inexorable headlong rush to death. “Stopstop
stop
!”

“We’ll make it!”

The river drew closer.

Twenty feet.

Theresa yanked the key from its slot and dropped the curled, brightly colored cord on the ice. Then she balled up her right fist and knocked Drew’s arm away from the throttle, cutting it back and changing their direction at the same time. The engine died, and silence roared in her ears, with only the swishing sound of the snowmobile against the ice as it spun out of control.

But it kept spinning toward the river.

“Theresa! No! We have to go!” Drew protested.