Evidence of Murder (9 page)

The last child stepped up, a look of disappointment on her face to see that all the pink roses had already been claimed. “I know it’s unlikely for all those reasons, but just suppose for one minute that somehow Evan killed his wife for Cara’s bank account. What now? If he’s automatically Cara’s next of kin and he’s willing to kill for money, where does that leave this kid’s life expectancy?”

“That’s quite a leap.” Nevertheless, he wore an unhappy expression as he folded up his paper plate. He didn’t like coincidences any more than Theresa did, and a strange death occurring in conjunction with an overwhelming motive was one hell of a coincidence.

“I mean, do you know how easy it is to kill an infant? You just put a pillow over its face. You don’t even have to press down.”

A ripple of silence moved outward from the aunt and the girl with the last piece of cake, to the children playing cards nearby, to Theresa’s mother and two cousins seated on the couch. If suicide did not seem an appropriate topic for a child’s birthday party, infanticide ranked somewhere off the charts.

Theresa gulped, grateful she had grown too old to be sent to her room.

The snow drifted down in small but constant flakes, bursting into brilliant white under the streetlights but fading to a hazy gray as it receded into the dark. It would have been pretty if Theresa hadn’t been trying to drive in it. She hit the brakes a little too hard for a red light and slid the last three feet to the stop line.

“Your aunt Claire asked me about that boy you found in the woods,” her mother, Agnes, said.

“Mmm.” Sometimes Theresa told her mother and daughter more than she should about open cases. Sometimes she said nothing and hoped they wouldn’t catch the news that day. Child deaths always fell into the latter group.

“She wanted to know if it had anything to do with the girl in the Cultural Gardens.”

“Huh? No, of course not—that wasn’t a girl but a grown woman, and she was strangled. The boy wasn’t.”

“But they were both outside, propped up against something. And now you’ve got this third woman. Claire thinks it might be a serial killer.”

“Claire’s imagination is running away with her.”

Rachael chimed in from the backseat. “No, they said that on the news too.”

The approached another red light. This time Theresa gave herself plenty of stopping distance. “The news media likes serial killers. They sell papers and increase ratings.”

“So it’s your testimony, Ms. MacLean, that we do not have a ravenous murderer on the loose in Cleveland, Ohio?” Rachael asked with the cadence she had picked up from one semester of Business Law.

“I deny it categorically.”

“He was near the zoo?” her mother asked. “I used to go swimming there when I was little.”

“They had a swimming pool at the zoo?” Rachael asked. Theresa merely nodded, having heard the tales of her mother’s childhood, tales from a time when children could roam the city without cell phones or worried parents.

“The only place
to
go swimming was Brookside Park. They had a round cement pool, and you had to pay a dime or something to get in. My brothers and sisters would take me along. We’d walk all the way from Natchez Avenue.”

“Even Aunt Claire?”

“Aunt Claire turned all the boys’ heads.”

Rachael was silent for a while, no doubt trying to picture a hot summer in 1935, and her grandmother as a little girl. “That was a fun party.”

Theresa agreed while becoming deeply suspicious. Whenever her teenager expressed such an old-fashioned sentiment, it meant she wanted either to borrow the car or go on a ski trip with her numerous first cousins once removed.

Rachael continued, “Dora’s going to come to the talent show next week, even. I need to hang with her more often. We haven’t been to her mom’s in, like, forever.”

“We stopped by at Thanksgiving.”

“Mom, that was four months ago.”

“Oh.” Had it really been that long?

“We need to get out more.”

How diplomatic. The
we
instead of
you
. “I know.”

Theresa’s mother, in the passenger seat, said absolutely nothing. Theresa, no doubt, had often been a topic of conversation between Rachael and her grandmother; this struck Theresa as both heart-warming and deeply humbling.

Into the silence, Theresa asked, “Are you still thinking about electrical engineering?”

“Huh? As a major?” Rachael caught up to the leap in topics. “Yeah. Those guys make bucks. Why, do you have another college to check out?”

Theresa explained about the high-tech career expo at Kovacic Industries. Rachael could not be defined as a video-game junkie, but she would be majoring in science, and any sort of career-development exposure could not hurt for a high school senior currently working on picking a college.

“Oh.” Rachael slumped a bit into the gloom of the backseat, only her eyes visible in the rearview mirror. “You want to use me as cover to investigate a guy in one of your cases.”

Was that what she was doing? If so, Frank would kill her…though attending a public career fair could hardly be considered either an official investigation or bad parenting…“I thought of it as killing two birds—more like multitasking. You’ve been debating about engineering instead of the natural sciences.”

“Yeah. It’s just that you haven’t voluntarily left the house, except for work, church, and the grocery store, for months. And now, all of a sudden—”

Nine months, to be exact. Theresa concentrated mightily on a red light, avoiding her daughter’s all-too-knowing and compassionate stare. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been out of it….” Her tongue stumbled over the useless euphemism for grief, for the selfish desire to make the world go away by ignoring its occupants, including the one she had brought into it.

Agnes said, “That sounds like fun. I have the afternoon shift at the restaurant tomorrow anyway. You two could eat out.”

That decided Rachael, her eyes in the rearview mirror regarding her mother as carefully and without judgment as a doctor, a therapist—or a parent. As if she were the mother and Theresa the child, to be guarded and cared for until strong enough to take care of herself. “Sure. I think that’s a good idea.”

To help the case?
Theresa thought.
Or me?

“Mrs. MacLean.”

Evan Kovacic didn’t seem overjoyed to see her, but then he didn’t seem dismayed, either. More like confused, and she could well understand that. She stood out in the crowd of people inside one of the cavernous National Carbon Company buildings. Almost all the other attendees were younger, had at least one body piercing in addition to earlobes, and had never in their lives tucked in a shirt.

“Your Web site said the event was open, and my daughter is considering an engineering degree. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, not at all. This is your daughter? Wow.” He shook Rachael’s hand, and the way he looked her up and down made it clear that his “wow” was not for the fact that Theresa had a daughter Rachael’s age. It seemed to be for Rachael’s bra size, all too apparent in the tight, strategically torn T-shirt Rachael had insisted on wearing under the pretense of “dressing the part.”

Rachael smiled, even blushed, and Theresa questioned her own game plan. Involving her daughter in an investigation might not be the smartest thing she’d ever done. In fact, it was a
horrible
idea, and what kind of mother—and he was still checking her out, the—
do something!
“I also never had a chance to express my condolences. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Did it take him a split second too long to tear himself from her daughter’s form and snap back to the reality of a dead wife? Or did it just seem that way to a protective mother?

“Yes, of course. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I’m glad you came.” He turned to Rachael again, but this time with a professional tone in his voice. “We have over twenty-five technology and digital-media firms represented here, with demonstrations every half hour on the main dais—over there, under the lights. It’s cool you’re here, we need more girls in the field. It’s still very male dominated.”

“Math doesn’t bother me,” Rachael boasted.

He raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony. “It’s not that so much, it’s that the technology has always lent itself, first and foremost, to shoot-’em-up scenarios. The very first video game was called Spacewar, and was something like Asteroids. The first one for home use was Pong. The industry’s goal became to do the same actions over and over, only faster, and girls get bored with that a whole lot more quickly than boys do. So most games are still designed by boys, for boys.”

“You need more complications,” Rachael surmised.

He smiled, looking cynical and amused and remarkably more attractive than he had yet so far. For the first time, Theresa had a glimpse of what his wife must have seen in him besides a steady income. He was not stupid, this Evan. “Exactly. Complications are what make life interesting.”

“Did Jillian help you with the design? Give you a female perspective?” Theresa asked.

This question seemed to confuse him as much as her presence. “Jillian?”

“Evan!” A slim black man held to the back of a display board for Beachwood IT Solutions, snaking multicolored cables over the front of it. He gestured for Evan’s assistance.

Evan excused himself and trotted over, darting between the milling young people.

“You think he killed his wife?” Rachael’s tone, and the way she followed the man’s large form, made it clear she thought her mother way off the mark on this one.

Theresa felt ready to agree. “I didn’t say that. She may not have been killed at all. But I have a lot of questions without answers and wanted to see this place. Come on, let’s look at the exhibits.”

A banner reading NEOSA—NORTHEAST OHIO SOFTWARE ASSOCIATION was hung along the far wall. At least fifteen booths lined all sides of the hall, each decked out with colorful displays and plenty of video and stereo equipment. A cacophony of sight and sound, letting everyone know that things were happening, and they were happening in Cleveland.

Theresa followed her daughter around the booths, knowing that Rachael would not have to feign interest in the career options presented. Only some of the firms present dealt with video games; they also met a woman from the fastest-growing bioscience firm in the country and watched a man demonstrate how to turn lake water into drinking water almost instantly. Theresa’s mind wandered through a Web-development display, but she forgot why she had come when they found a compendium of items useful to law enforcement, including a wireless camera shaped like an egg that could be tossed through windows to provide a 360-degree video of the room.

Halfway through the room they found Kovacic’s own booth. Rachael tried out a demo version of Polizei while Theresa read the display board. A photo of Evan and the slim black man, shorter than Evan and wearing a New Mexico sweatshirt, had been affixed to the center top. The caption identified the other man as Jerry Graham, Evan’s business partner. The brief bio said the two were both originally from Cleveland, but had met in class at MIT. Jerry concentrated more on hardware and had a patent pending on a virtual-reality helmet. Neither bio mentioned wives or other family. Perhaps they figured personal details would not be of interest to their young and largely male clientele. They did mention their favorite foods (fresh perch, beer, edamame, and more beer), hobbies (snowboarding, spelunking, and miniature golf), and favorite place to pick up girls (the E3 Summit).

“It’s the most popular PC game in the world right now.” This information came from an older man wearing a tie, the first such item she’d seen that day. He also wore his short hair neatly combed, which set him apart from most of the other males in the room, even more so than the tie.

“PC game?”

He leaned toward her slightly, as if to protect her secret from the crowd. “You’re not a game player, are you?”

“Not since I finished Riven.”

When he stopped laughing, he explained, “PC games come on CDs and are played on the computer. As opposed to console games, which are put in cartridges that get plugged into a home system and are played on your television.”

“Oh.”

“Polizei is available in either format. But I keep telling Evan to design an MMO version—a massively multiplayer online game. That’s where the real money is these days. You don’t just have millions of people buying one cartridge. You have millions of people paying to play it, the same people, month after month.”

“You know Evan Kovacic?”

“I finance him. Cannon, Jennings, and Chang.” He pulled a card from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Venture capital.”

His business card repeated this information, and identified him as the first of the three names. “You lent Evan the money to buy this factory?”

“Mostly we lent Evan money to produce the next version of Polizei. He could have done that in his living room and then outsourced the hardware, but apparently he has bigger plans.”

Over his cologne, Theresa caught a whiff of motive in the air. “You’re worried about your investment?”

“I always worry about our investments. That’s my job. But I don’t think this one can lose.”

Rachael looked up from the demo monitor long enough to swat her mother’s arm. “This is cool, Mom!”

The man tilted his head toward the girl. “See what I mean? We’ll get our money back in spades once Evan’s up and running. But I still think he could do an MMO at the same time.”

The man in question interrupted them. From the dais at the end of the room, he announced into a microphone, “The time has come for me and Jerry, your humble hosts, to demonstrate our wares. But to do that, we’re going to have to take a quick walking tour of the currently underutilized Kovacic Industries campus. Zip up your coats and follow me.”

Theresa turned to the financier. “What
are
his bigger plans?”

“You’re about to see.”

“Did you come here to find out?”