Evidence of Murder Read online

  “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.

  CHAPTER 28

  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.

  CHAPTER 29

  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.

  “Hey!” she heard Jerry say, but not because he realized her treachery. More likely he had found the end of the rubber hose that ran from the second nitrogen tank to the manufacturing hood. She had sliced through it upon her arrival.

  “It’s a camera,” Evan said, and she heard a crashing sound that made her wince. Leo would make her pay for that Canon, and they didn’t come cheap.

  Then she turned and walked to the entrance. Cara had begun to fuss, but quieted when Theresa removed her from the gym bag and warmed the infant against her shoulder. Behind her, the chain link rattled with fury.

  She turned. Evan pulled at the fence as if he could rip it down with his bare hands. He couldn’t, of course; it had stood thus since before he was born. She watched for a moment to see if they might find some way out she hadn’t anticipated, but they didn’t. The fencing extended thirty feet upward, to the catwalk, and ended in a ceiling of more mesh.

  Theresa pulled her cell phone out of her sock and called Frank. He asked rather more questions than she considered necessary but eventually assured her that both the Lakewood and Cleveland police would be there in five.

  Her two prisoners were surprisingly quiet. Evan stared at her as if still blinded by the camera’s flash. She moved to the center of the floor so she would not have to shout, but stayed far enough away to have a head start. Just in case.

  “The cops will arrive in a few minutes,” she told them.

  “How-? How did you-?”

  She patted the baby’s back. “It’s like this-you remember how on the second level of the castle you find out you have to have the silver ax and so you go all the way through the first level again looking for it before you finally ask the dwarf and find out the silver ax is in the second-level dining room all along, behind the queen’s portrait?”

  He stared.

  “I decided to plant my weapons in advance.”

  “And take out the nitrogen,” Jerry muttered.

  “Yeah, that too. What’s ironic, Evan, is that you might have killed me anyway by turning on the vacuum and sucking out the oxygen. But once Jerry opened the regulator to what should have been your murder weapon, I became supplied with all the clean air I needed.” She didn’t add that she had not counted on Jerry being there, and if one of them had stayed with her while the other investigated the camera flashes, she might now be dead. Of course, if Jerry had not proved as murderous as his partner, the camera diversion would not have been necessary.

  “Lucky for me I can fake dazed and helpless. Jillian really was helpless when you put sleeping pills in, what, her dinner? Did she pass out or just get sleepy enough to go to bed? Then you redressed her, neglecting to tuck her polo shirt into her jeans, underneath the sweatshirt-which, by the way, is how most women dress themselves in cold weather. Then you brought her out here. What did you do, lower the oxygen levels until she couldn’t have regained consciousness if she wanted to, then left her alive long enough for the pills to metabolize and indicate a lower dose? I think that’s what the jury will find most heinous, how you let her lie in there for hours, allowing her blood chemistry to destroy the evidence. Hours during which you could have changed your mind. What did you do? Watch TV? Play Minesweeper?”

  “Jillian was a whore! Nobody cared about her! Not even you-I saw it on your face when you first came to the apartment. You were there, what, five minutes?”

  Theresa nodded, accepting her culpability in the previous events.

  “I hadn’t gotten rid of anything yet. I hadn’t washed the snowboard bag or thrown out the towels I used to wrap her arms-”

  She interrupted. “Why? So that the rubber bands wouldn’t leave bruises?”

  “Or the sleeping pills. I left them right in the medicine cabinet, hiding in plain sight. But you never looked.”

  What she had said before remained true, that none of these things would have seemed suspicious even if she had noticed them, not without the additional information from Jillian’s body. But, as before, this did not comfort her. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Evan-” Jerry Graham said.

  “Shut up. She still can’t prove it. Let the cops show up. This woman’s deranged and traumatized, and it’s our word against hers-and there are two of us. Just shut up.”

  Theresa shifted Cara to her other shoulder, catching the distant wail of a police car siren. “No, there’s the video too.”

  This did not cow Evan, it merely confused him. “What?”

  “Your surveillance tape. You have two cameras mounted in the corners of this building. Your assault on me has been caught by electric eye. Your own electric eye.”

  “Good luck. Those files are password protected.”

  “They’re also transmitted by remote. Running wires in this ancient building would have been too difficult, wouldn’t it? Do you know-well, I’m sure you do, given what you do for a living-that wireless video can be intercepted by another router? I borrowed one from a friend who uses it for hostage situations. Of course I told him I needed it to tape my daughter’s school talent show tonight without paying forty dollars to the PTA. I also had to promise to have dinner with him, but that’s another story.”

  “What are you talking about?” Graham complained. He had his hands on his knees, slightly bent over from the waist, as if he were about to throw up.

  “Ever sit in your backyard with your laptop and use your neighbor’s expensive wireless DSL? I did something similar, I have to confess. Your surveillance video
is showing up on the laptop in my car, and being recorded by same.”

  “Really,” Evan said, displaying a ghost of his trademark smirk. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I saw this interior plain as day before I scaled your fence.”

  He nodded. “Not bad. Unfortunately for you I turned the cameras off before I came out here. You have no video. You have no proof.”

  Theresa nodded and patted the baby’s bottom. “That was probably wise of you, given what you had in mind. I had a bad feeling you might. After all, Captain Alastair shoots a spear into the raven guarding the east hallway to keep him from squawking while he plants the dynamite in the rain barrel. Same concept.”

  Evan’s smirk began, reluctantly, to recede. “So-”

  “So I installed a backup. It’s up there.” She swung one arm wide, pointing to the corner of the building behind her. If they looked closely, they would see the small camera taped to the catwalk railing. The police car siren sounded close enough to be in the parking lot. In fact, it sounded close enough for the car to come through the wall any moment now. “I had to borrow that from my friend too. I hope that doesn’t add a lunch or something.”

  “Another camera,” Evan said quietly, as if to himself.

  “Plus, mine is better. It has sound as well as video.”

  Jerry’s legs gave out and he sank in slow motion to the floor. Evan, on the other hand, straightened up.

  “I learned from you, Evan. Think of every possibility and plan for it. Take risks when they’re necessary”-Theresa shifted the baby to her arms, feeling her own face crack in a smile at seeing the tiny girl’s wide eyes and rosebud lips-“and they’re worth it. You do that in your game. You did that in your murder. You really made only one mistake.”

  As the door burst open behind her, letting in the frozen air and the sound of running feet, Evan asked, “And what was that?”

  She told him, “You pissed me off.”

  She slipped into the thinly cushioned seat next to her mother just as the lights in the auditorium dimmed after the intermission.