Evidence of Murder (2 page)

Stuffing the envelopes into her camera bag, she stepped into the nursery, realized her mistake, and turned to go. But it had been seventeen years since Rachael had been an infant, so she tiptoed up to the gleaming white crib. Mothers never lost their professional curiosity about other people’s children.

Jillian’s daughter slept soundly on pink sheets printed with the word
Princess
, her little face scrunched, concentrating on some dream or the condition of her diaper or merely the new act of breathing. Light-colored down spread over her skull and both hands made loose fists, the fingernails impossibly small. Her skin was perfect and her bed smelled of baby powder and warmth.

I should feel something right now. Hope, sorrow, empathy. Anything.

But I don’t.

She left the room, backing away from the sleeping child as if the softest footfall might disturb her, though the men’s voices only twenty feet away did not.

The Kovacics’ bedroom lacked the immaculate quality of the nursery. The bedclothes had been pulled up in a quick attempt at neatness; satin sheets—what else?—slipped haphazardly from beneath a chocolate velour cover. The matching nightstands had been segregated—a pink ribbon, a book of crossword puzzles, and a jumble of earrings on hers, a handheld video game and a ball cap on his. Jillian’s dresser held bottles of perfume and several framed photos, which Theresa glanced at. For a professional model—
and I use the term loosely
—there were no posed shots, just candid snaps of a blond woman, Evan, the baby, and various other people,

Theresa searched for a hamper. The toothbrush, hairbrush, and razor should be able to give them all the DNA they would need to compare to the body, if and when a body turned up, but it never hurt to make sure.

She opened the closet. Jillian’s half bulged with low-cut blouses and clingy dresses in every color of the rainbow. Evan’s half consisted of sweatshirts, T-shirts, and extreme-cold wear. Quilted nylon pants with FASTER emblazoned in yellow down one leg indicated a skier—no, not a skier, she mentally corrected upon spying a snowboard partially out of its duffel bag on the floor. Next to it sat a plastic laundry basket. Evan had obviously continued to pitch his T-shirts and briefs at it during the three days Jillian had been missing, making the basket only half of the time, because she had to dig down past three sets of men’s underclothes and a few dress shirts to find more feminine items. Theresa pulled out a skirt, a V-necked sweater, and the requisite thong underwear, an article of clothing she could never bring herself to try. It looked like sheer torture. She dropped two of these in a fourth manila envelope; vaginal secretions would provide plenty of skin cells—epithelials—for DNA analysis. They might also reveal sperm that didn’t belong to Evan, if there were some boyfriends or ex-clients in the picture, but Theresa couldn’t see how that would be relevant. If the underwear was here and Jillian wasn’t, then any wayward sperm on it probably didn’t coincide with the crime. If there had been a crime. If Jillian hadn’t simply found marriage and motherhood too confining, and left them behind with her pink towels.

Theresa stood, listening to her knees creak. She couldn’t see what else to do. If Evan had killed his wife, he would hardly be letting Theresa poke around unsupervised. She saw no bloodstains or evidence of new paint or carpeting, which might imply a cleanup job. Jillian hadn’t left any threatening letters or indiscreet photos lying around, though Theresa hadn’t gone through her drawers and didn’t intend to. She had come strictly to collect items for future DNA analysis and had no desire to see what ex–professional escorts stored in their bedroom drawers, what people who had a marriage, had a love, had a life kept close at hand. She had no desire to ponder the contrasts between their situation and hers.

Time to get back to the lab, where the cases were no more fascinating but at least the victims were demonstrably dead. No doubt Jillian would come home after an argument with her mother or new boyfriend or whoever she had gone to.

Inertia kept Theresa from moving, long enough to take another look at Jillian’s pictures. She had been pretty, certainly, with clear, dewy skin and blond hair falling past her shoulder blades. Even in the hospital delivery room, wet with sweat and exhausted, she glowed as she held her newborn up for the camera. She beamed in her wedding dress, next to the tuxedoed Evan. She either hadn’t gained much weight with the baby or had lost it quickly, Theresa thought with a twinge of jealousy. She herself gained and lost the same five pounds every week.

“Is that all you’re going to do?” Evan Kovacic asked from the doorway, nodding at her camera bag with its protruding envelopes. “I mean, is there anything else I can give you that would help find her?”

What could she say?
That’s it unless a body turns up?
She glanced at Frank, who stood behind Evan, but before Frank could take over the husband’s eye fell on the photos. “She’s so beautiful. And not just on the outside. I know she would never have left us, not voluntarily. She loved Cara. She loved me.”

Theresa followed his line of sight to the photos.
Thanks a lot, Jillian. Thanks for dragging me across town for five minutes of work, thanks for perpetuating men’s fantasies of women as nothing but pretty playthings, thanks for leaving your daughter to be raised by a guy who looks as if he can barely take care of himself. Great job.

Theresa caught her cousin’s eye, trying to signal:
Let’s get out of here
.

Frank ignored her. “Mr. Kovacic, when you returned on Monday, the door was locked? Everything in place?”

“Yes. Jerry and I—Jerry Graham, he’s my partner—we’d been at a software association meeting at Tower City all day. We got back about three in the afternoon.”

“Who else would have been on the premises?”

“No one except Jillian and Cara. We’re still setting up shop here, Jerry and I. We’ve got one programmer starting at the beginning of the month and another a week after that, and as soon as we get the manufacturing equipment set up, we’ll take on another designer and about four techs—”

“Was the outside door unlocked? The lobby door downstairs?”

“Yeah, probably. We’re in and out all day between this building and plants one and two—where we’ve begun setting up the equipment—so we don’t bother locking it. We haven’t had any problems with trespassers, and when we renovated we put in a good dead bolt on the apartment door. Though I doubt Jilly would have had it set during the day. I don’t know. I guess anyone could have walked right in—”

Frank headed the man off before his mind could travel too far in that ominous direction. “You’ve searched the entire property?”

“I sure have. Twice. It’s not as hard as it sounds, the buildings are empty for the most part, except for where we’re stocking all the equipment in number one and setting up the manufacturing process in number two. But Jerry and I searched every inch. We can look again now, if you want.”

Theresa frowned at Frank. He said, “The officer taking the report did a walk-through with you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sure he would have noticed anything out of place.” Like a dead body.

“I can’t see why Jillian would have gone wandering around dusty old buildings anyway. It’s been so cold, and she thought the dry air was bad for her skin. She was always so careful about her skin.” He picked up his wedding picture. “It was all she had, really, her looks.”

That didn’t sound very nice. Theresa wondered if he always managed to be so tactful, or only when under stress. Yet his eyes filled with tears as he gazed at the photo.

He added, as the level of desperation in his voice climbed steadily, “I know wherever she is, she’ll be worried sick about Cara and me. That’s why you have to find her. She knows I can’t raise a baby all by myself.”

This should have been poignant, but sounded flat and tinny to Theresa’s ears. She did not read anything into that reaction; everything sounded flat to her these days. But then he asked, “Are you two going to do the investigation into Jillian’s disappearance?”

“We’ll be working on it,” Frank assured him. “With the Lakewood police.”

Evan Kovacic had smooth skin and short, manicured fingernails; he had tucked the shirt in, so that now he looked like a frat boy who’d grown up to be pleasant and reasonably responsible. But his eyes—the color of the irises dark and solid, and hard as marble—swept her from the red hair that hadn’t seen a grooming product in months to the scuffed Reeboks she wore to cushion her feet during the eight-hours-without-sitting days. He was assessing her competence, Theresa thought, and finding it lacking. Well, screw him.

But then he managed a smile. “Great.”

Taught to be polite. Or a lack of confidence in me somehow reassures him. How much does he really want us to find Jillian?

She let her brain wander on this path for one brief moment. Jillian and her former job had become an embarrassment to the young entrepreneur. Marriage had not changed Jillian’s personality or lifestyle and both had worn him down. He had a good idea where she was—holed up with a boyfriend, on a bender, under the Carnegie bridge with a needle in her arm—and didn’t need that publicity. Having had a few days to think about it since making the original report, he now knew that he didn’t want her back, but as legal husband and nice guy felt obligated to keep up the pretense.

Or perhaps Theresa saw nothing but pain and deceit in her world these days, and this poor guy had made an effort to keep his self-possession while begging them to bring his wife back. Being left with an infant to raise wouldn’t make his busy days easier, and surely Jillian’s looks helped him tolerate any other foibles.

“Good-bye, Mr. Kovacic.” She left the room and the apartment, taking the stairs down.

Outside, the wind cut through her jacket in damp, knifelike slices. They were too close to Lake Erie to avoid the gusting air. Trees were bare, the sky an unrelenting gray. Patrons at the station across the street waited in their cars while gassing up. Unexpected sun in the morning had softened the top of the snow, but now it had frozen to a sheet of new ice once more, the inconsistency harder on living things than a low but steady clime would be. April wasn’t the cruelest month in Cleveland, Ohio. March was.

“What do you think?” Frank said, sauntering up to the unmarked police car, pulling his keys from his pocket and jangling them too loudly.

“About what? Whether this bimbo is coming back or not? How should I know?”

He waited for a truck to pass, then walked quickly into the street to the other side of the car. Once the doors had closed, he started the car before saying, “You saw the place. Neat, clean. She wasn’t some crack whore. The baby’s room is—”

“Immaculate,” Theresa said. “That could be the nanny, though. She must have been there all day every day for at least three days, right, if the husband’s been at work?”

“He works on the premises, but yeah, the babysitter’s been there. I didn’t find any trace of drugs,” Frank went on. “A little beer in the fridge, that’s it.”

“How did you get to look around the kitchen?”

“I had a few seconds while he went to see what you were doing. No prescription drugs in the kitchen cabinets or bathroom. Did you find anything in the bedroom?”

“I didn’t really look, just collected some underwear.”

He opened his mouth to make a comment, apparently remembered that Theresa was his first cousin, and shut it again. “I ran their financials too. Little bit of credit card debt—and who doesn’t have that these days?—and a car loan. I didn’t have time for more than the basic accounts, but when people run out it’s usually because of love or money.”

“Same reason they usually murder too.” She didn’t know why that popped out, since she doubted Jillian had left due to anything other than her own free will.

“Exactly,” Frank said.

He spoke as if she had proven some point of his, which irritated her. “Fine. Where is her car?”

“In their garage. The officer who took the original report said it was locked, no signs of damage, no signs of foul play.”

“And she’s not in the trunk,” she said.

“He checked.”

“Her purse? Cell phone? Any bank withdrawals?”

“Her purse is still there in the apartment. Phone, money, L’Oreal lipstick in Brilliant Pink still there. How about it, cuz? When was the last time you left home without your purse?”

“The third grade.”

“See why I think it’s weird? It’s as if she went out to get a paper and never came back.”

They passed Lakewood Park, and she watched the whitecaps kick up the surface of Lake Erie. At one time this case would have interested her, prompted her to a panoply of theories regarding the fate of Jillian Perry. But that was before watching her fiancé bleed to death. Still, for Frank’s sake and to forestall that sympathetic look she had come to dread, she made an effort. “What about the nanny?”

“You’ve got a nasty, suspicious turn of mind,” he said, as if the fact delighted him. “Apparently Evan only hired her three days ago; she’s fifty-five and a friend of his mother’s. They never needed a babysitter before—they live at his company, and when Jillian worked, her jobs were mostly at night. I’ll look into it, though.”

They passed the Cleveland city limits, and Theresa grew tired of Jillian Perry and questions with no answers. “Okay. I’ve got DNA in case her body turns up. That’s all I can do for now, so let’s get back to the lab. I have to go over the clothes from that woman they found in the park yesterday, make up some more acid phosphatase reagent, run the FTIR samples, order more evidence tape, and maybe eat lunch before Leo comes up with something else to dump on me.”

“I’ll take you to lunch.”

She gave him a skeptical look. Her cousin could be generous to a fault in large ways, but had never in his life volunteered to pick up a check. “What do you want?”

“At Pier W. It’s on the water.”

Especially not at expensive restaurants. “I know where it is. We went there for my senior prom. What do you want?”

“The salty wind in your hair—”