Evidence of Murder Read online

  “My father died of an aneurysm. It’s different.”

  Was it? Did it make her pain over Paul any worse than her mother’s had been? And why had the similarity never-

  “At least Jillian could die with hope. We have to live without it.”

  She could feel the tears filling her eyes, a wave that seemed to start at the back of her head-not for the dead, but for the living she’d been too wrapped up in herself to think about lately. She bit her lip to divert the tears, which never worked. “Drew-”

  “We could help each other.”

  She shook her head as if to clear her hearing. She hadn’t taken off her coat and now the cabin seemed a bit too warm. “What?”

  “We understand each other, you and I. The kind of grief that will last the rest of our lives. If your fiancé had a child, you’d do anything for that child, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.” The word erupted before she’d finished hearing the question.

  “He didn’t-right? But I have Cara. In a way Cara is even more important than Jillian, since Jillian chose Evan. But Cara is innocent. I’ll give anything for her, even my life, to keep Evan from harming her. And you’ll help me, won’t you? You wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t feel that way.” He sprang from his chair and neatly sidestepped the coffee table in two paces, dropping the gun on the corner and collapsing to his knees in front of her as if proposing marriage. Or begging. “You have to help me save her. You’re the only one who can.”

  “That’s what I said, Drew, I only need a little more time and I can-”

  “It won’t work. Even if you can prove she died from the nitrogen, you won’t be able to prove he did it. He’ll have thought of every detail. It’s what he does for a living. It’s how he fooled Jillian in the first place.” He reached out and slowly took the baby bottle out of her right hand, holding her fingers in his. She fought the instinct to pull away. “I have a snowmobile. The stockbrokers who own that Grady-White two spaces up leave it under their hull with the keys in it because they come out every weekend. It’s got gas-I checked. We can get over the water before the cops even know what’s happening, be at Burke Lakefront Airport in ten minutes. A friend of mine loads cargo onto air express planes and there are two leaving this afternoon, for Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Depending on which one we take-”

  “Drew!”

  “My boss at the bookshop can get my funds to me, and I packed my most valuable editions to take along and sell. We won’t be millionaires, but at least we’ll be safe.” His eyes danced in the hazy indoor light, and she thought that maybe she was afraid of Drew Fleming, just a little.

  “Drew, I can’t-”

  Her phone rang. Drew jumped back, dropping her hand.

  Breathe, she told herself. In and out. “I think I should answer that.”

  Drew looked around for his gun as if trying to remember where he’d left it.

  “It’s just a phone, Drew. And if it keeps them from approaching us-”

  He reached over the table and picked up the Luger, but then moved to the window, peering out from behind faded canvas curtains. “Yes, answer it.”

  She pulled out the phone, which showed an unfamiliar number. “Hello?”

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” Chris Cavanaugh said. The Cleveland Police Department’s star hostage negotiator, whose star had dimmed only slightly in the months since the bank robbery.

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “How is everyone in there? How’s the baby?”

  “Just fine.”

  “We’re going to get through this okay, Theresa,” he said with that firm, deep tone of voice that brought to mind his dimples and his utter self-possession, and which would be so terribly comforting to someone on the brink of panic. But somehow it always had the opposite effect on her.

  “I know that. Unlike our last encounter, Chris, I am not in any danger here. Drew is not going to harm me or Cara. He just wants to talk.” She enunciated her words carefully, turning her head so the man at the window would be sure to hear her.

  “Does he want to talk to me?”

  She asked. Drew shook his head. “No, he doesn’t.”

  “But it’s okay with him if you stay on the line?”

  She inquired. “He says it’s fine.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants Cara removed from Evan Kovacic’s custody.”

  “Yeah, your cousin filled me in on your theory. We’ll have to find a compromise.”

  “You’re good at that.”

  “I hope someday you can speak to me without sneering.”

  Tears pricked at her eyes again. Why could she not concede an inch to this man? “I’m-look, I’m-”

  “Never mind. One thing, though. Don’t listen to Drew about grief. He’s wrong. It doesn’t have to last the rest of your life.”

  Her brief thawing iced over again. “How would you know?”

  She hung up.

  “What’s the matter?” Drew asked, leaving the window. “What did he say?”

  “He wants to know what your demands are.” She pondered Cavanaugh’s words. The microphone pen in her pocket-she had forgotten about it. They had been listening to her conversation the whole time, which meant that they knew about Drew’s snowmobile escape route. She had to keep him calm and on the boat. But for how long?

  “I heard you tell him. He said no, right?”

  “No, he said we’d have to work out a compromise. I’m sure we can get protective custody for Cara. Families with Dependent Children always removes children from a home if there’s a chance of abuse, so it can’t be that hard-”

  He sat across from her, the Luger held loosely in one hand. “But they won’t give her to me.”

  “Not immediately, of course. She would be cared for by the state until this is settled, which should be only a few days.”

  His eyes watched the infant in Theresa’s arms as she stretched in her sleep, one tiny fist protruding from the blanket. “I saw Jillian in her from the first day, when I visited the maternity ward. She has Jillian’s eyes. It’s as if Jillian lives on in her.”

  “It always seems like that with parents and children, but it’s only true to a point and sometimes isn’t true at all. I know, I have a daughter. She’s an individual.” How to get out of this? Drew wouldn’t budge unless they took custody away from Evan, but the state had no obligation to remove the child unless the stepfather became a suspect in a crime, and she could not provide probable cause to prompt same, certainly not while holed up in a houseboat over a frozen lake. Catch-22.

  “And being so close to her for a few hours like this,” Drew went on as if Theresa hadn’t spoken, “I don’t think I can let her go. I’ve already lost Jillian. I can’t say good-bye to Cara too.”

  “But it’s not-”

  “If somehow it came about that you had to say good-bye to Paul all over again, could you do it?”

  The words pierced, like an ice pick to her gut. No. No, of course not.

  Pull yourself together. “Cara is not Jillian, Drew. She’s a baby who needs a lot of attention and-”

  The phone rang.

  “I’m sorry, Theresa,” Chris told her without preamble. “I never manage to say the right thing to you.”

  “One person out of a city of four hundred and fifty thousand isn’t bad, Chris.” Going to be bitchy to the last, aren’t we?

  “I need to keep Cara,” Drew said to her, a touch too loudly, as if he wanted Chris Cavanaugh to hear him. “Yes or no?”

  “Drew-” she tried.

  Chris asked, “What does he mean, keep? Permanently? Another hour? I thought he just wanted her away from Evan.”

  “Yes or no!”

  “Drew, it isn’t that simple, you know that. You’re not a blood relative-”

  “It’s going to be that simple.” He stood up and crossed to an old-fashioned black plastic telephone. “You and I and Cara are leaving. I have to carry this pack with the books, so you’
ll have to hang on to her. They won’t shoot at us, not with you and Cara along.”

  “Drew, you have to think of what’s best for Cara, and I’m sure that flying over partially frozen ice is not it.” She did not think about the open line in her hand, with Cavanaugh listening at the other end, and apparently Drew didn’t either.

  “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.

  CHAPTER 26

  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.