The Price of Innocence (21 page)

Along with the usual solvents, however, the fire marshal had listed iodine. Iodine was not particularly flammable in itself, and she knew it could be used in one of the several routes to crystal meth. Why had she had run into iodine – and nitrogen – at every turn lately? A deep sniff of the broken glass didn’t bring any of the Bingham building and its nitrogen triiodide odors to her nose – but then it had had twenty-five years to dissipate. She folded the paper to funnel the broken shards back into the bag, sealed it and went on to the next.

The second bag held another piece of apparatus – a metal clamp designed to encircle a rod, brace or glassware at each end, while able to pivot in the middle so that the items could be maintained at any given angle to each other. Standard chemistry lab fare; Theresa had a pile of them in the lab upstairs. Not the kind of thing one would normally find in a dorm room.

A clump of bluish material like melted plastic clung to one of the rounded brackets, and she considered pulling it off for further study. But she thought better of it. The plastic most likely belonged to some item of clothing or upholstery destroyed in the fire and identifying its compounds would not be of any help so many years later. Besides, she could not warrant consuming any of the meager evidence left out of mere curiosity.

And why
was
she so curious? Why was she doing this?

Because she felt guilty about Marty and Frank felt guilty about Lily. And if David Madison had any skeletons in his closet she wanted to know about them.

And the curiosity might not be so mere. Lily had suggested that Marty’s death related to his college days, and now Lily was dead.

The third bag measured only two inches across. Inverted over a clean piece of paper it coughed up a ring, a blackened, dented piece of metal barely recognizable as jewelry. Theresa switched on the magnifying lamp attached to the table. Her eyes, having passed their fortieth birthday, had begun to grow balky in tight quarters.

Designed as a plain band for the most part, about one-quarter of the circumference had an overlay of a vine-like decoration, broken at one end and tapering down to two wispy tails at the other. She rubbed at it with one gloved finger, offsetting some of the tar. The vines didn’t meander but entwined each other in a uniform manner, with equal space on each side, up to a leaf at their top, which protruded slightly from the edge of the ring. It seemed somehow familiar.

She turned the ring on its side and recognized the design. The two vines weren’t vines, they were snakes, surrounding a central rod with wings at the top – a caduceus, sometimes used as a symbol of the medical profession. Perhaps the unfortunate McClurg had been a pre-med student. Or the ring belonged to a doctor father.

The paint can apparently contained a piece of the victim’s clothing – denim cloth, of course, what else did students wear? The can seemed to weigh almost nothing and she did not open it. It seemed unlikely that a scorched piece of denim would prompt any insights and she did not want to release the compounds that a sealed paint can could easily contain, even for a quarter of a century – just in case the idea came up to re-analyze the evidence.

She put the can back in the box and picked up the papers. The fire marshal’s report stated the obvious: that the ring had been found with the victim’s body, having probably been on one of his fingers before the bones were crushed by the collapsing upper floor, and that the clamp and the glassware would have been used in a chemical process such as methamphetamine production. The situation seemed clear to the report’s author. Analysis indicated a healthy amount of toluene with smaller amounts of acetone on the denim. No wonder the kid died. He had been soaked in solvent when the place went up.

Given the extreme volatility – the report used those exact words, extreme volatility – of the environment, the fire expanded quickly. Too quickly for him to get out, she surmised, though the report did not go out on such a limb and left the reader to imagine the scene for themselves. Perhaps the glassware exploded, spraying him with solvent. Perhaps he’d been overcome with fumes before that point.

It did point out that there were no indications of a secondary point of origin, or the presence of any sort of booby trap. It had been an accident, pure and simple.

She read the report through again but still had only Lily’s vague insinuation that Marty had anything to do with this fire or Joseph McClurg. Theirs had probably not been the only meth lab operating at that time. So why would McClurg’s parents or siblings or ex-girlfriend blame Marty Davis for this death, or come to extract revenge twenty-five years later?

Unless it turned out Marty Davis had been one of those other students treated for burns at the scene, and someone had decided, albeit belatedly, that Marty bore responsibility along with the scars Theresa had seen on his arm.

Theresa picked up the ring again. Twenty-five years. Perhaps McClurg had fathered a child just before his death. He or she would now be at a perfect age for violence – young enough to feel reckless, old enough to have the brains to track down the target.

Theresa wet a cotton swab with some distilled water and scrubbed at the inside surface of the ring. Perhaps she’d get really lucky and there would be some sort of engraving … but the only marking told her that the ring had been made from sterling silver. She folded up one of the preformed boxes for the swab and sealed it up anyway, having already collected it. She’d give it to Oliver later, and invent an intriguing enough story to make him test it. Or maybe the truth would suffice.

Leo appeared at her elbow, having shimmied in on little cat feet designed to give no warning to loafing staff. ‘What’s that? Stuff from Bingham? You know you’re supposed to turn over any rubble to the Feds. They take a dim view of people filching their evidence.’

‘Relax. I had enough work there to keep me busy last night without trying to do their jobs for them.’ She explained, very briefly, about Marty Davis, Ken and Lily, the building on Payne Avenue and the dead student.

Leo listened without expression, and certainly without enthusiasm. ‘Let me get this straight. We had a building blow up last Monday and scatter our evidence to the winds where any Tom, Dick or Harry could contaminate it—’

‘That’s an exaggeration. It remained under the protection of the proper authorities at all time. We just weren’t those authorities, that’s all.’

‘—and then we had a cop shot, and then we had a few more suicides and a homicide just to round out the week, and all the clothing and evidence and accouterments from those cases are sitting in the drying room while you poke through a box from a twenty-five-year-old accidental fire?’

‘Just curious,’ she told him.

His face began to flush to an ominous shade of puce. Not the dangerous red yet, only the puce, but it meant she had better pull up.

‘OK, OK. I will take care of the clothing examinations and then—’

‘Not right now you won’t. Your cousin’s here. He says he needs to get enough for a search warrant on some guy named Terry Beltran and wants to borrow you for an experiment. I can only hope it involves needles, and maybe electric shock.’

She blinked at him. ‘My brain has been up all night and is distinctly unhappy about it, so I’m not tracking very well. You said Frank—’

‘His word, experiment. He’s in the lobby. I’ll take your box, and I took the liberty of bringing this down for you.’ He held out her tote bag with two fingers on the straps, as if the bag or the water bottle sticking out of the top might somehow contaminate him, which, given the places to which she dragged it, was not entirely impossible. ‘And then, Theresa – get some rest.’

Good Lord. For a moment there actual empathy flickered across Leo’s face.

Forget appearing tired, exhausted or even cadaver-like. Her looks had obviously deteriorated to a new, as yet unnamed category.

And she had a date tonight.

T
he house in Bratenahl where Marty Davis had died appeared exactly the same as when Theresa had last seen it, except for the two cars in the drive which hadn’t been there on her last visit. They belonged to the dead owner’s wife and son, the latter of whom did not appreciate their visit. ‘We just buried my father, you know,’ he said, a pale, slender man in his thirties. ‘Is this going to take long?’

‘I don’t mind,’ his mother, the nearly-ex-wife of the victim said. ‘This is kind of interesting. What’s going to happen?’

Theresa had been perfectly comfortable in the room with the dead man, but not with these two people watching her as if waiting for her to launch into a tap dance. She tried to explain, though it sounded lame even to her. ‘I was inside when the officer was shot. They want to see if I can hear a car pulling into the drive from this room, and also what the gunshot sounds like with and without a silencer.’

‘They’re going to shoot a gun out there?’ the son asked, despite the fact that Frank had gone over this with them twice already. An expensive education obviously didn’t guarantee a sharp mind.

‘Only blanks. It’s just the sound we’re looking for. I’m sorry to take up your time.’

‘That’s all right.’ The mother appeared more rounded, in both appearance and effect, yet avoided so much as glancing at the chair where her husband had died. She kept her back to it and watched out the window, informing them all as to what the officers were doing. This might affect the experiment – if Theresa’s mind was alerted that a car had pulled into the drive, wouldn’t she be more likely to hear it only because she knew it was there? What did they call it, that by observing a phenomenon you could not help but affect it? Was it the Rosenthal effect? Or Heisenberg?

Theresa kept her back to the window and purposely gazed at the chair, as if she and the dead man’s ghost were partners in this endeavor. There were people who said they could talk to the dead – and if ever there was a line of work for which that would be an advantage, this would be it.

‘Why didn’t you guys do this when you were here the first time?’ the son asked. ‘I had to cut an appointment short for this.’

‘You didn’t have to be here,’ his mother pointed out.

‘I need to keep an eye on things.’

‘Like the silver?’

Theresa could answer the first question: because Frank had received a tip that Terry Beltran, the paroled felon who bore a grudge against Marty Davis, had lost his driver’s license and been reduced to getting around via bicycle. The question of whether Theresa had or had not heard a vehicle drive into the yard suddenly took on more importance, and Frank wanted a definite answer. Theresa had argued that, either way, the results would not be conclusive – she could miss a plane buzzing the house if sufficiently involved in work – but he had wanted to try.

On top of that, Mr Beltran’s recently paroled former cellmate had been a talented gunsmith who specialized in making silencers. His burgeoning business in the illegal and the untraceable was how he came to be Terry Beltran’s cellmate at the Youngstown state pen in the first place.

Of course, she would not be mentioning a suspect by name to these two civilians, and so said nothing. They continued without her input anyway.

The mother said, ‘You’re wasting your time, trying to guard your trinkets from me. Your father and I were still married. It’s all mine now anyway.’

‘Not if he got specific in the will.’

‘Your father wouldn’t make out a grocery list. What on earth makes you think he could be bothered to write a will?’

‘No one was talking last time I was here,’ Theresa pointed out. ‘It was quiet.’

The faces of mother and son, eerily similar, made it clear that the police department and its dead cop did not figure highly on their list of priorities, but they fell into a cooperative and most likely short-lived silence. Through the stillness Theresa heard the unmistakable sound of an internal combustion engine making its way toward the house.

It sounded distinct and louder than she expected. On her first visit she had been busy with the dead man, her thoughts, as usual, spinning in their own orbits, but still it seemed to her that she would have heard a car if it had approached. It was hard to tell, to adjust for the everyday autopilot of all functioning humans. One could drive home from work and not remember anything on the route, have a conversation and completely forget it five minutes later. Could she have heard the car, and her mind filtered it out as background noise?

She didn’t think so. Her mind would have listened, worried that a hysterical family member had appeared on the radar. To the best of her knowledge, then, the killer did not approach by car. At least that had been—

‘I hear that,’ the mother said. ‘You can’t miss it. I’d always know when he came home.’

The son said, ‘This place always had crappy insulation. The wind off the lake in the winter can kill you.’

A gunshot cracked through the air, startling her, making the mother jump and the son gasp. Yes, she would have heard that, too.

So the killer had used a silencer, which worried her. Silencers were common on TV but not so much in real life. They could be made at home but only for a single use, and did not work at all the way TV portrayed. The bang made as a gun is fired results not so much from the bullet leaving the barrel, but from the fireball of burning gunpowder behind it. The gases from that fireball burst out of the end of the barrel with a loud noise. A silencer gives these gases a contained place to go, which contains some of the noise but not all. Gunshots by no means become truly silent, not a discreet
phut
but more like the slam of a car door. The gun also needed to be an automatic (the gaps in a revolver’s chambers defeat the purpose of a muzzle silencer), and she had not found an ejected casing.

In addition the bullet, usually moving at supersonic speeds, creates its own little sonic boom. The safety slug could have been a low-powered round designed to travel at subsonic velocity. It had been used in relatively close quarters and designed to stay in the first target it struck, so a lot of power would not be necessary.