Theresa hadn’t dated since Paul’s death, to say the least, hadn’t thought about dating, refused to even consider thinking about dating. And yet when she entered her home that night, her daughter waiting for her at the kitchen table, drumming her seventeen-year-old fingers, Theresa felt as if she’d been out on a date, had returned past curfew, and was now in very big trouble.
“Hi,” she chanced, trying to remind herself that she was the mommy and Rachael was the little girl, not vice versa. She failed. “I forgot about your concert, didn’t I? How did it go?”
“Super,” Rachael deadpanned. “Working late?”
“Yeah.” Theresa removed her coat and hung it on the hook next to the door, and, talking too fast, said, “I questioned Evan’s business partner’s girlfriend and then the business partner. Did you play that Mozart piece after all?”
“You don’t question people.” Her daughter repeated what Theresa had said herself during numerous forensic-themed TV dramas. “You work with evidence. Cops question people.”
“Well, I was questioning them about the evidence, I suppose, the evidence being Jillian. Look.” She held up a plastic case containing the borrowed Polizei disc. “I brought you something.”
Rachael’s expression did not change as she stood up. “I don’t play video games.”
“Please.”
Her daughter stopped, halfway out of her chair.
“I need your help.”
She had been through so much, her daughter, during what should have been her carefree high school years-her parents divorced, her grandmother gone back to work, she’d endured a constant stream of cocktail waitress potential stepmothers, gotten used to a stepfather only to lose him before the title became official, and then watched her mother drift through an eight-month depr-funk, present in body only, the mind out of reach. Theresa didn’t have to be Freud to know that everyone has a breaking point and she was pushing her daughter toward hers.
Rachael held out her hand. “Hand it over.”
The girl opened the lower doors on the entertainment unit and dragged out a passel of wires. The game cartridge fit into the designated slot on a console Theresa had paid a lot of money for but very little attention to, until now. Rachael changed the TV channel and a blue screen appeared, with START GAME written in blood-drenched letters.
Theresa’s stomach grumbled but she didn’t dare leave her neglected daughter’s side; at least Rachael would have eaten-interests and talents often skip a generation and Rachael had inherited her grandmother’s respect for food. Theresa perused the game case instead. The background summary, which repeated what Don had already told her, spoke of a castle, a treasure, murderous vampire guards. The hero, a brawny young man with spiky blond hair and a gleaming plate of armor on his chest and back, had only his trusty sword and a glowing amulet that glowed more brightly when he took the right path. He could, however, pick up other trinkets along the way-a crossbow with flaming arrows; ropes; lock picks; a drinking/fighting buddy or two; and even a bull mastiff, as both a pet and a formidable weapon. By the third paragraph, even Theresa wanted to play the game.
Two things she found particularly interesting. The hero had not come to the castle to find the treasure. He had no interest in the treasure; he had arrived to rescue his brother from the castle’s innermost keep before the evil overlord of the vampires could absorb his life energy.
She also found the location of the castle intriguing. Evan described it as “on the banks of a frigid blue lake, enveloped by dead trees and pelting winds of doom.” It echoed the location of Jillian Perry’s body, except that Lake Erie always appeared more green than blue. And the “winds of doom” part. Gusts from the lake could be wicked, particularly when walking on East Ninth, but dooming seemed a bit strong.
She watched as Rachael made her way from the boat up the steep mountain pass, dispatched a band of heavily armed-well, bad guys, for want of a better descriptor-and entered the castle. The vast hall shone with golden candelabra and stained glass, and Theresa could have spent some time merely sightseeing, but Rachael and her horde pressed on.
After dying for the fourteenth time, however, the teenager grew tired and threw the joystick aside. “There’s no way over this chasm without falling. You’ll have to take over, Mom. I’m going to bed.”
“Already?”
“It’s eleven twenty, and I have school in the morning. At least that’s what you always tell me when I’m watching Letterman.”
“You’re right.” Theresa yawned. “Turn in. And Rachael?”
“Yeah?” Her daughter paused, one foot on the bottom step.
“I’m sorry I missed your concert.”
“Don’t worry about it. We didn’t play any good songs anyway.”
“That doesn’t matter. I should have been there.”
Rachael smiled. “I’ll let it go this time.” Then she went up to bed, and Theresa gave silent thanks that if her ex-husband had to pass one characteristic on to their progeny, it had been the ability to let anger go as quickly as it had come. Theresa, on the other hand, could nurse a grudge until it graduated from college, got a job, and bought a house.
She lowered her aging knees to the carpet and reached for the joystick.
The bones in her spinal column began to protest shortly after finding the portrait gallery and its hidden door, from which stairs wound up to the east tower, and her shoulder blades had begun to chime in when Rachael materialized at her elbow.
“Are you still playing?”
“You weren’t supposed to go over the chasm, you had to go under it. There’s a passageway-what are you doing up? Did I wake you?”
“Mom-I’m going to school. It’s seven A.M. Have you been playing all night?”
No wonder her back hurt.
TUESDAY, MARCH 9
“And then the wall opens up and there are three hallways. Two have steps going up or down, respectively, and the third seems to go straight ahead.”
“Did you get any sleep at all?” Don asked, peering at her over the edge of his coffee cup. They faced each other over the chipped Formica-covered table in the staff lunchroom, each trying to ignore the campfire odors that had seeped into their lab coats after wrestling all morning with the victims of a house fire.
She shook her head. Then her female instincts woke, prodded by the caffeine-infused steam and the sympathetic look in her coworker’s eyes. “Why? Do I look like crap?”
“Of course not. But you look tired.”
“Tired equals disheveled. Isaac Asimov said so. Never tell a woman she looks tired. Evan killed his wife, Don, I’m sure of it. He plans everything. He planned this whole world. It tells a story, you know-it’s not Asteroids, where you shoot at anything that moves and you can go in only two directions. This is a house, and you can choose which room you want to enter, and what’s in there might be there every time and it might not. You decide what to do-take the ax or leave it there, kill the guard or ask him to let you by. Do you see what that means?”
“No,” he admitted, with more of that concerned tone, the one she’d heard almost every day since Paul died. At least now it had a different edge, as if he’d gone from worrying about her emotions to worrying about her mind.
“To design a game like this, you have to anticipate every single move a player can make, then design a response. You can limit responses so that no matter what decisions the player makes and in what order, he will eventually progress into the next room or figure out he has to pick up the magic shield or whatever, but there’s still a great deal of flexibility. The player can stop, go back, try to blast a hole in the wall instead of using the stairs, kill his own teammates. It’s like those TV shows that let the audience call in and vote on how the show should end, whether a character should live or die, but the game gives the player a choice like that every minute or so.”
“So he’s a planner.”
“He’s a planner extraordinaire. Anticipating a response and figuring out what happens as a result of it has been this guy’s life for the past ten years. I found out more about him on the Internet this morning. He was a chemistry major in college, but started hanging out in the computer lab and designed his first game before he even graduated.”
“How many cups of coffee have you had?”
“I lost count at six. Are you listening?”
“Attentively.”
“He worked for a subsidiary of Microsoft and then used Polizei to start his own company. He wants to expand into hardware, with Jerry Graham’s inventions, hoping that they can keep everything proprietary long enough to bankroll what he calls the third wave, a gaming empire to rival Xbox, Wii, and PlayStation.”
“He said that?”
“To Modern Science. He’s quite forthcoming about his ambitions, to judge from a few other articles I ran across, but that seems to be normal in that field. They’re mostly young men and they produce aggressive, kick-ass games, so a certain amount of verbal assertiveness is expected. Kind of like professional wrestling.”
“I see. And you’re taking this as evidence of-”
“Planning. Not just his games, but his own life, the course it’s going to take over the next twenty years.”
Don set his porcelain cup on the Formica with a gentle thud. “And you think he planned to kill his wife.”
“Just run with me for a minute. Jillian was tailor-made for him. He needed her money. Why, I don’t know exactly, since he’s got financing, but he’s behind schedule with the game sequel and that may have something to do with it. He found Jillian, abandoned by everyone in her life except for an obsessed fan and a very rich baby. I think he planned every last detail, anticipated that her death would look like an accident, or if not, a postpartum or parent-problem induced suicide. If that didn’t work, if by some strange twist we did start thinking homicide, he had Jillian’s former job to fall back on, that Drew or some ex-client stalked her. He even has these other two deaths that have the city thinking ‘serial killer.’ That will be his first suggestion if we rule anything other than accidental death.”
“Now you’re anticipating him.”
Some of her weariness got past the caffeine and she rubbed her eyebrows-not her eyes, of course, that caused wrinkles. “I’m trying. It’s not going to be easy. At least he couldn’t have counted on Drew contesting him for custody of Cara. As long as her inheritance is in question, she’s safe. But that won’t last. No judge is going to give custody to strange, unstable Drew. If Cara’s going to live to see kindergarten, I have to prove that Evan murdered her mother.”
“And you’re sure about this.” Don’s face made it clear he wasn’t. “You don’t just have a bug up your bu-have it in for this Evan guy?”
“Have I ever done that before?”
You’ve never been mourning a dead fiancé before, his face said now, but aloud he said, “That leaves you with one big problem.”
“I know.” She lowered her face to her hands, flat on the Formica, and felt the comforting pat of Don’s palm on the back of her head. “How did he do it?”
“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.