Evidence of Murder (35 page)

He watched her without expressing the slightest sign of relief at her admission of failure.

“At least not in a criminal court.”

He no longer came toward Theresa, but stayed between her and the door, a tower of muscle and flesh. She didn’t move anything but her mouth in case it startled him into attacking, like a cobra or a rabid dog.

His curiosity won out. “What are you doing here, then?”

“Remember O.J.?”

“Huh?”

“I said I couldn’t prove murder in a criminal court. A civil court, however, is quite different. Almost everything is admissible, and even more so in family court, where the only concern is the well-being of the children. I didn’t have enough to win Cara’s freedom during your first round at guardianship. I will have enough for the second. I have Jillian’s means of death, a death that could only have been engineered by you. I have the fibers I just collected from the hood. Most important, I have Cara’s father.”

Lot’s wife, formed into a salt sculpture, couldn’t have been any more still. She could swear Evan had stopped breathing. With his voice strangled and low, he asked, “Cara’s father was some john. Jillian didn’t even know which—”

“Jillian didn’t have johns. She had knights in shining armor who would take her back to their castle to love and live, happily every after. At least that was what she hoped, but until you—or so she thought—it had never happened. The knight she tried out before you fathered Cara. Nicholas Cannon. Your source of capital. Attendee of numerous trade shows and meet-and-greet cocktail parties, keeping an eye on his investments, scouting out new ones.”

Evan seemed to absorb this in the blink of an eye, without it angering or even annoying him. “Interesting. But he doesn’t know, right?” “According to Vangie, his armor was tarnished when Jillian realized he did not have marriage in mind. He didn’t consider her a queen or a princess or anything but a reasonably priced consort to help him get over the death of his wife. Jillian gave up. One month later she told Georgie about her pregnancy. Let’s put two and two together here. You’re the engineer, you should be able to do that.”

“So can a financier. Jillian pushed out a kid who might be his and he doesn’t even ask about it? Obviously he doesn’t care.”

“But did he know? I’m guessing you don’t talk about your—family—much in the work setting. Too busy showing off, a wunderkind, a bad boy playa of the digital world. Cannon might know about Cara. Then again, he might not.”

Her chattiness on the topic finally caught his attention. “You haven’t told him.”

“I plan to, tomorrow morning—”

“What makes you think I’m going to let you walk out of here?”

“—unless we can come to an arrangement.”

Finally, surprise. “You want to make a
deal
?”

“I’ll apply for guardianship myself. Let me take Cara, and you keep the money. As her guardian I will invest it in your company on her behalf. You’ll be able to pay Griffin Investments what you owe them for financing the factory. By the time she’s twenty-one, that account will be ancient history and Cara will never know it existed. Once that is taken care of, we can see if a paternity test proves my theory, and if Cannon wants to be a father to his daughter. Even if he doesn’t, Cara will still be alive and you won’t have a baby on your hands.”

He considered this. For about ten seconds. “You want to make a
deal
.”

“You want the money. I want Cara and myself to live past this evening. Everyone wins.”

Another long pause as he thought. Examining all the angles. Probing for booby traps. Then he said, “That’s like asking Alastair to make a deal with the vampires. There can only be one winner.”

“This isn’t a stupid game, Evan!”

The gym bag on the floor trembled and let out a soft coo.

“You’re right,” Evan said. “It isn’t.”

Theresa felt the blood drain from her face so quickly the skin seemed to burn. She had been right. She hadn’t even known how right she was. “You brought her out here to kill her.”

“First things first,” he said, and lunged.

She had time to turn back and start to run toward the opposite door, remembering too late that she hadn’t gotten the chain off and it would take her too long to negotiate the gap. He would be on her long before that. That left the catwalk, or the cage around the nitrogen tanks. Over the sound of her frenzied breathing she could hear his pounding steps behind her, and knew she’d never make it up the steps ahead of him.

With one outstretched hand she pulled the wire-mesh gate closed behind her. It slammed shut with enough force to shake the wall of fencing and the catwalk it was attached to overhead. It shook again as Evan slammed into it from the other side.

Nose to nose through the loose chain link, he said, “You’ve got nowhere to go.”

“Maybe this castle has a secret passageway,” she hissed.

If only that were true, but this was not the castle in Evan’s video game. Behind the tanks lay only a solid brick wall. Added to that, she had no way to secure the gate. It had retained its hasp, but not its padlock, and even if it had, it would be positioned on the other side. Evan’s side. Only her fingers through the mesh and her too-worn shoes pushed against the floor held it closed.

And Evan pulled.

She held it, bracing one foot against the bottom of the fence.

Evan pulled harder. He was much larger than she was, and stronger. The gate began to open.

The latex gloves did little to keep the thin mesh wire from biting into her fingers. She needed to grab the piping, the frame of the door, where she could get a better grip and more leverage, but she didn’t dare let go of the mesh long enough to do so.

The gap widened by another inch. Her fingers began to slip.

With one thrust Evan jerked open the door, his body flying into the fencing as he got behind it. Pulling it shut no longer remained an option. She turned to run without knowing where to go.

Theresa hadn’t taken half a step when she felt his hand grab her jacket, yanking her backward. His arms closed around her from behind, pinning her elbows to her hips.

She shouldn’t have turned. Straight on, she could have gone for his groin or his eyes, something, anything. This way she had nothing but her legs, trying to hit a target behind her.

He dragged her from the cage. She kicked her feet around wildly, forcing him to struggle to keep his balance. He staggered, with her, toward the row of machinery.

The far door opened. Evan halted, and Theresa stopped struggling, stunned by this unexpected event.

Jerry Graham stepped in from the cold. His jaw fell open, and for a moment no one moved. “Evan! What are you doing?”

“Help me!” Theresa shouted. She had not counted on Graham showing up, not at all. But perhaps neither had Evan.

“Grab her legs,” Evan instructed his partner.

“Evan—what? What are you doing?”

“She broke in here to get more evidence. She’s going to take Cara away.”

Theresa repeated, “Help me. He’s going to kill me, the same way he killed Jillian.”

Graham stared at his friend. “You killed Jillian?”

“This is our chance. Cara’s bank account will get us through the backstretch. We’re going to make it.”

“He’s going to kill Cara too, by smothering her in the nitrogen hood. She’s there in that bag.”

Jerry Graham’s gaze dropped to the small duffel at his feet, which rocked a bit. A faint wail did not convince him and he pulled the opening wide to see inside.

Then he straightened. Slowly.

“Evan,” he said, as if begging his partner to program all this code in a way that would make the picture clear. “Evan, come on.”

“Help us,” Theresa said again.

Evan’s grip on her had not loosened, not by a nanometer. “We need the money, Jerry. If Cannon had agreed to finance the factory as well as the game, we would have been okay. But there isn’t any other way to make the payments on this place
and
start up production on the sphere, and the game isn’t going to be done for two months, at best. You know that.”

Graham stared at him.

“This is our chance, Jerry. We’ll be on top. Your products, my code. Leading the world.”

Graham gave no sign of agreeing, disagreeing, or even comprehending.

“Help us,” Theresa said, despair gathering in the pit of her stomach, weighing her down.

“Now
get her legs
.”

Theresa hoped, as the man left Cara in the gym bag and came toward them, that he would help her. She continued to hope even as he paused to unlatch the nitrogen hood and raise its Plexiglas lid, and up until he came closer and bent down to grab her ankles.

Jerry Graham was not going to come to Cara’s rescue. He had made his decision.

She drew her legs in and used Evan as an anchor to punch Jerry with both feet. His breath came out in a whoosh and Evan stumbled backward, letting go of her arms to steady himself.

Remaining on her feet gave her a few seconds of lead time. She sped past the nitrogen hood and toward the open door. Leave Cara? Pick up Cara? She had to—but then they’d—

Evan tackled her, much as he had that morning. But this time she wouldn’t land on snow.

She fell forward with Evan on top of her, her line of sight reduced to a jumbled array of wall, door, and floor. Evan’s arms around her at least protected her elbows, but her already-sore left hip smashed into the concrete with a shattering jar and the last bit of momentum rolled up from her body and into her head. Helpless to stop the flow, her skull hit the floor with a smack of finality.

Her eyes closed.

She heard voices, oddly muffled. The light, through eyelids barely cracked, hurt her pupils. The moving blobs of color that initially greeted her sorted out into Evan and Jerry.

There was nothing wrong with her vision. Their images had that bit of distortion because she was looking up at them through Plexiglas.

Her knees were drawn up and pressed against the top of the hood, immobilizing her legs. The conveyor belt and its gears and pulleys bit into her spine from neck to hip. Her left temple throbbed, sending jolts of searing pain through her brain at random intervals. Surely she had fractured her skull. Perhaps it would help if she didn’t try to think.

Jerry ducked out of sight for a moment, but she heard his voice. “Have you thought this through?”

“Of course I haven’t thought it through. I didn’t expect her to be here!”

A draft started up next to Theresa’s head, ruffling her bangs ever so slightly. Moving her neck hurt too much, so she relied on her peripheral vision to see a round hole through the glass wall of the hood. The air swept over her face and disappeared into that hole. A vacuum. They were sucking the air from the hood. Next step would be flooding it with nitrogen gas.

Evan continued to grumble, “I thought that cousin of hers would sit on her, at least for tonight.”

Jerry came back into view on the other side of the hood. “They’re not going to believe another suicide. What are you going to do with her?”

Theresa’s throat began to feel dry, or perhaps it only felt that way because she knew her oxygen supply now slipped out of that small hole.

“
We,
partner. What are
we
going to do?”

“Fine, what are we—?”

“I’m thinking a car accident. We’ll go down to the Metroparks, drive her car into a ditch. The roads are slick and she was pissed off. She bashed her head on the steering wheel. Any bruises and other stuff will be attributed to the crash.”

“The pathology won’t match.”

“Yeah, but in the absence of any specific cause of death, they’ll eventually write it off as a fluke. Just like Jillian. All their tests will be negative, and you can’t prove a negative.”

She placed one weak hand against the Plexiglas, pushed. Evan’s gaze turned downward, to her, but he made no move to interfere.

She pressed. The glass didn’t move. The latch didn’t even rattle.

“Throw the valve,” he told his partner.

Jerry hesitated one last time. “Isn’t there any way—”

“Turn it!”

Jerry’s hands moved toward the regulator mounted on the side of the hood, and she heard the sibilant hissing sound of air rushing in. Or rather, not air, but the gas that snaked through the series of hoses that ran up the trench in the floor, secure underneath their gratings, and over to the huge storage tanks in the corner. The nitrogen tanks.

She pressed again, squirming. The hood did not move.

Evan watched her, looking into her eyes—to watch the life fade from them, or merely to ensure the completion of the next logical step in this process.

“What was that?” she heard Jerry ask.

Evan looked away from her. “What?”

“That flash.”

She closed her eyes.

She heard their steps move away from the hood, toward the nitrogen tanks. Her right hand reached underneath her, pushed aside the rubber conveyor belt, and pulled out two items she had stored there. One was a flathead screwdriver, which she used to pop the hood latch loose from its hook while she pushed upward on the Plexiglas with her legs. With her left hand she continued to depress the shutter-release button on a tiny remote.

She rolled out of the hood, her worn tennis shoes making only the faintest slap against the concrete floor. Evan and Jerry were disappearing into the group of nitrogen tanks, their backs to her. She probably should have waited until they were completely out of sight, but she would not have that much time. Everything depended on the next three seconds.

Nestled in a dark corner behind the nitrogen tanks, her camera took a flash photograph every time she triggered the shutter via the remote. She kept her finger pressed down now, without release, hoping to slow their progress by blinding them.

They found this exasperating, to judge from their annoyed shouts; the noise evidently covered the sound of her feet as she reached the mesh gate, swung it shut, closed the hasp, and locked it with a padlock—which had been the second item hidden beneath the conveyor belt.