Evidence of Murder (20 page)

“It’s not going to be an open casket,” the deskman told Theresa as he helped her wheel Jillian’s gurney into the hall. “She’s already marbled.”

The long wait for her ride to the funeral home had not been kind to Jillian. Aside from the scruffily sewn-up gashes from her shoulders to her navel and the one along the back of her head, the skin had mottled with uneven dark patches as the flesh underneath decomposed. “She’s headed for cremation?”

“Soon as they pick her up. We got the court form this morning.”

As expected, Drew had been found to have no legal claim on the body, and disposal of Jillian fell to her lawfully wedded spouse. Theresa had only a few more minutes with her biggest piece of evidence, and she didn’t even know what to look for.

“Shove her back in when you’re done,” the deskman told her, and left her to it.

Theresa could have examined the body inside the cooler room—it wasn’t that uncomfortably cold—but she hated the idea of that steel door slamming shut behind her. Being shut in with dead bodies did not bother her. But being shut in at all, that was intolerable. Besides, she needed better lighting.

If she couldn’t prove Evan killed Jillian, perhaps she could prove he moved the body.

Though it still seemed precarious to her, driving your murder victim to a dump site. One thing she had learned from living in a college dorm: whatever ungodly hour of the night you might be awake and about, someone else would be up too. Evan might have conceived of an untraceable poison or undetectable manner of death, but all it would take to unravel his plan would be one bored night-shift clerk watching the factory from the window of the 7-Eleven or one homeless park dweller with a sturdy parka and insomnia.

But Theresa had also learned from reading every tale of true crime she could get her hands on that if the perfect crime existed, it had not yet been discovered. Every murder involved some risk. And in Polizei the young captain had no choice but to jump over the river at the end of the tunnel from the dining room. It had taken her two solid hours of play to give up the hope of finding a way around it. She had to leap into the abyss. The alternative was to stop playing.

And Evan would not stop playing. Not now, with world domination within his grasp.

So he would take that risk, that one, unavoidable risk, and drive to Edgewater Park in the middle of the night. With Jillian in the passenger seat? The backseat? The cargo area? The answer might lie upstairs, in the material she had collected from Evan’s vehicle. But would he take his car? Why not Jillian’s? If the bored 7-Eleven clerk saw her car in the area, then that would support the theory of suicide…except, how did the car get back to the carbon company, idiot?

Besides, Jerry had said that Jillian told him the locks on her car had frozen shut. Her car might have been unavailable or too risky to use.

His car, then. Was there anything left on the body to show it had been transported?

The body had been washed, autopsied, and washed again, so the odds of finding any trace evidence had gone from slim to none. Theresa had already collected samples of the not entirely natural blond hair to compare to hairs found on the clothing. She wasn’t sure what else to do. Other than berate herself for not having gotten on board with the homicide theory earlier…maybe there would have been something to find, at the scene, at the apartment, maybe Evan had made some slip that she would have noticed, had she been paying attention.

“Sorry, Jillian,” Theresa said aloud, startling herself. She didn’t usually talk to her victims. It didn’t pay to get on a first-name basis with people who could not respond. Still, she persisted. “I won’t let Cara go the same way. I won’t.”

Jillian’s blue eyes had clouded. As before, her perfect nails showed no signs of a struggle; however, bluish circles had developed on the forearms, which had not been there before. It could have been decomposition artifact, but the color didn’t seem consistent with the other patches on the body.

She left the body in the hallway, with a piece of paper reading DON’T TOUCH on top of the body bag.

“Her
again.” Christine stood up from the microscope, the movement releasing a light wave of perfume through the tiny office. “I’ll be happy to take a look if it will help you figure out what killed her.”

“That’s your job, missy,” Theresa told her as they pounded down the back staircase like unruly schoolgirls.

“I gave up.”

They reached the ground floor and Theresa held up Jillian’s left arm. “Is this a bruise?”

Christine examined the dead woman’s skin. Then she pushed the gurney into the autopsy room—crowded, but the most brightly lit room in the building. Three other doctors, three dieners, and three dead people paid no attention to them. Once more Christine examined the skin.

Theresa couldn’t wait. “Is it decomp?”

“No, I don’t think so. But there’s only one way to be sure.” The young pathologist donned latex gloves, unwrapped a fresh scalpel, and plunged the blade into Jillian Perry’s flesh.

“Eew!”

“You can’t say ‘eew.’ You work at a freakin’ morgue.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t say ‘eew’ when it’s warranted.” Nevertheless, Theresa leaned closer to the exposed muscle.

Christine pointed out the tiny blood clots, visible—with difficulty—against the darkened tissues. “There are some abrasions here. I’d say this is a bruise.”

“But it didn’t show up at autopsy?”

“Sometimes they do that.” She picked up Jillian’s other arm.

“What do you think it means?”

“By itself, probably nothing. It’s vague and nonacute…unlikely to have occurred in some life-and-death struggle. There’s a bit forming on this arm as well—see here? Almost sort of a streak, a pattern about an inch wide. See it?”

“No.”

“Along here.”

The strip of discolored flesh ran at a slight angle across the undersurface of Jillian’s right arm, the differences in color so difficult to distinguish that they could have been a trick of the light. Theresa would never have noticed it without the pathologist’s more discerning eye.

“Someone tied her arms. Left over right, the binding against the outer surface of the left arm and the undersurface of the right. Not very tight. Not very tight at all.”

Christine positioned the dead woman’s arms over her stomach, then abandoned them to slide back onto the steel gurney with gentle thuds. She unzipped the body bag the rest of the way and examined the feet.

“Now what are you doing?”

“When someone’s arms are tied, their legs usually are as well. Doesn’t make much sense to do one without the other.”

“We need to get a gurney in here,” a diener interrupted. One of the autopsies had been completed, and the finished corpse had to be removed from the steel table. Jillian’s gurney partially blocked the door.

“Yeah, yeah,” Christine muttered.

Theresa pushed the wheeled contraption. “Anything there? Do you have to—aw. Now I have to say ‘eew’ again, and I know how that annoys you.”

“I’m going to have to amend my report. Evidence of binding of both hands and feet. Here, just above the ankles. But why such light bruising? She didn’t struggle at all.”

“It could have been some sex thing,” Theresa brainstormed.

“It would have been difficult to have sex with her ankles crossed, and we found no sign of sexual activity, forcible or nonforcible. No state of undress, no bruising or tears, no semen. Yet someone tied her very gently.”

“Maybe she was unconscious? That’s why she didn’t struggle against the bonds.”

“Then why tie her?”

“In case she woke up?”

“Then why not tie her tighter?”

Every question made Jillian’s death seem more bizarre. “Because he knew she wasn’t going to wake up. Could she have been dead already?”

Christine said no, but without certainty. “These shouldn’t form after death. Bruises are weird, though. You can never be sure. Besides, if she was already dead, why tie her up?”

The room suddenly seemed too bright, and overcrowded with death. “He didn’t tie her limbs together to keep her from escaping. He tied them together to make her body easier to transport.”

The two women stared at each other over Jillian Perry’s body, ignoring the talk, movement, and slicing scalpels around them. “So she didn’t walk into those woods on her own.”

“It explains a lot,” Theresa said. “Why her shoes were clean—”

“Why no frostbite on the extremities, or rime around her mouth.”

“Why she showed no signs of depression…because she wasn’t depressed. Because she wanted to live.”

Another deskman entered the autopsy suite, glancing at the busy tables with distaste before asking Christine, “Are you two guys finished? The guy from the crematorium is here for her.”

“In a sec. Help me turn her over.”

The two women examined Jillian’s dorsal surface, but found no more bruising. They had to release the body. Theresa could only hope they hadn’t missed anything else. Surely all bruising would show by now. It had been over a week…

Christine began to zip up the bag. “Uh, Theresa? She has to go now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You’re holding her hand.”

With a start, Theresa released the cold fingers, and watched the dead woman disappear under a layer of clean white plastic.

“I need a search warrant,” Theresa told her cousin. She could hear other voices in the background, and the city sounds of cars and wind.

“What for?”

“For the carbon company grounds. All the buildings, not just the apartments.”

“What are you looking for? Just some mustard, thanks.”

“You’re not eating a hot dog out of an aluminum cart parked on the sidewalk, are you?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Mystery meat and botulism—it’s quite a combination.”

“This poor guy’s standing outside in subfreezing temperatures, trying to eke out a living, and you’re criticizing his wares? He’s giving the radio a dirty look right now, and so am I.”

“I had to get up in the middle of the night and bring you ginger ale the last time you had food poisoning.”

“Well, I couldn’t call my mother—you know she needs her sleep. What do you want a warrant for, and how do you know that whatever you’re searching for is there?”

She outlined the conclusions of the morning. “I need to find evidence that Evan transported Jillian’s body to the woods. He must have carried her in something, something that wouldn’t attract attention. Even wrapping her in a blanket would have looked completely suspicious.”

“I thought she disappeared during the day.”

“Supposedly.”

“You think he had someone else move the body from the apartment while he was at the meeting? It would have been a perfect alibi.”

“Maybe. But this guy is used to creating his own world. He’s a control freak. I can’t believe he would trust an accomplice. He doesn’t seem to have any close friends other than Jerry Graham, who was at the meeting with him.”

“So you think it was Drew?”

“Swallow before you talk. Why would I suspect Drew?”

“Because he
wasn’t
at this meeting on Monday. He had all day long to move Jillian around before Evan came home, and he might have liked the idea of Jillian in his woods. He could sit on his boat and know she was there.”

The words gave her a shiver, and yet she protested, “Drew is no bigger than I am. Jillian weighed a hundred and ten pounds, and someone moved her three miles without dragging or damaging the body, without even getting her clothes dirty.”

“Maybe Drew had an accomplice.”

She hadn’t considered that idea. “I suppose it’s possible. I just don’t think so.”

“Because Drew’s one of those harmless stalkers.”

The sarcasm in his voice made her stubborn. “Yes.”

“And because you think Evan did it.”

“Two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds-if-he’s-an-ounce Evan, yeah. The one who stands to inherit all Cara’s money.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“I’m
pretty
sure.”

“Great. I’ve got to go assist with some interrogations, kiddo. I might lose this call in the elevator, so one more time, what do you want a search warrant for?”

“For fibers that match those found on Jillian’s clothing, fibers from some item used to transport her body. Ones that match what I found in his car, as soon as I have time to go through what I found in his car. I’ll have that done before you get the warrant, and then I’ll know what to look for.”

“Back up. Car?”

She explained her activities of the previous evening. From the sounds Frank made into the phone, her activities had caused him to choke on his hot dog.

“You’re asking me for a search warrant, Theresa, so I assume that means you understand the concept of one.”

“Yeah.”

“You searched Evan’s car without a warrant.”

“I didn’t search it. I removed detritus.”

“So what? It’s still inadmissible evidence.”

“No. It’s abandoned property.”

A slight pause. “Come again?”

“The car wash attendant would have vacuumed and scrubbed away all the items I collected, and disposed of them. He had Evan’s permission to do so—in fact, his instructions to do so. It’s exactly the same as when you see the suspect drinking from a cup and toss it in the trash can, and then you pick it up and have us swab it for DNA. You can take abandoned property. The hairs and fibers from his upholstery and the dirt from his tire treads were abandoned property.”

“They hadn’t been abandoned yet,” he protested, but weakly.

“He had left them there for disposal. Therefore, abandoned.”

Her cousin remained silent long enough that she wondered if the Nextel connection, always tenuous, had been broken. “Interesting, cuz. I’m not sure it will work, but it’s interesting.”

“I’m also looking for narcotics or poisons or anything that would have made her unconscious or dead. We should probably grab the bank statements showing Cara’s account, as well. That’s his motive.”

“Question—what about Georgie? He’s also two-fifty if he’s an ounce, could carry a one-ten body without straining, and Jillian would have opened the door to him. She would have even hopped in his car and driven off to Edgewater Marina without a care.”