Theresa didn’t know what else to do except go back to work. She could do nothing more for Jillian Perry. She had examined every fiber, tested every hair, wrung as much information as she could out of her own coworkers. She had reached a dead end, and now Evan had custody of Cara. Game over.
Several reporters had gotten wind of her testimony-no doubt through Evan’s lawyer, who wanted to portray her as irrationally biased-and called to ask about it. They were, as always, referred to the M.E.’s office. None called to ask any more about serial killers, since the semen in Sarah Taylor had come back to an East Cleveland man with a history of sexual assault. If he didn’t come up with an ironclad alibi or at least some good answers to questions the officers had for him, he would probably be arrested for her murder.
And he had a dog. A large Doberman pinscher.
That left the boy, Jacob Wheeler, on her slate. Not much had been turned up about him. His habits and movements remained sketchy, shrouded by the veil of secrecy teenagers maintained in the face of authority figures. When kids did talk, they didn’t say much. Jacob had been a loser, poor and uninteresting, but with just good-enough grades and friends to avoid close scrutiny by a post-Columbine school administration.
Theresa had found nothing of interest on his clothing, so now she pulled out the plaster cast she had made of the shoe print behind the tree. She had not been trained as a shoe print expert, so the cast would have to be sent to the state lab, but they would not accept it until they had a suspect’s shoes for comparison. It did not match Jacob Wheeler’s; one did not have to be an expert to tell that much.
The treads were quite clean, as the snow had been too deep to allow dirt to penetrate and now had melted. Still, some deposits remained. She set the cast tread side up underneath her stereomicroscope, fully aware that the work served only to distract her mind from Evan’s custody of Cara. The odds of finding anything significant amid all that snow were slim to none, and at any rate, she had no items from a suspect for comparison.
With the lens brought into focus over the rough, undulating plaster surface, she began to see tiny pebbles of stone, sand size when not magnified. Some were pretty, but not helpful to anyone but a forensic geologist. A piece of something yellow that crumbled into dust when touched-oops-also defied identification. Two fibers stuck to a piece of tar had evidently chosen that moment to release themselves from the bottom of the shoe, and were fixed to the plaster. Upon closer examination, they were covered in the gunk Theresa had sprayed into the print so that the plaster, which warmed as it set, would not completely melt the shoe print before the cast hardened. She cleaned that off the fibers and mounted them.
She identified one as black cotton, and the other one as an orange-colored trilobal-shaped synthetic.
Orange.
Jacob’s bedroom had orange carpeting, and trilobal had always been a popular shape for flooring textiles. It hid dirt well. Perhaps the killer had been in Jacob’s bedroom. That would not be surprising; they had always assumed that Jacob met someone he knew in the woods. It seemed an unlikely spot for a mugging.
She pulled her head back from the stereomicroscope to take another look at the cast. The length of it seemed rather small. A girlfriend? His mother?
He had certainly been a trial. But would his own mother fracture his skull and then leave him to freeze to death in the woods?
Maybe. It wouldn’t be the first time.
She took another look at the yellow, crumbly substance and scraped some of it into a glassine fold. It could be a tortilla chip, Jacob’s last meal. Suppose, during their argument, he had swept some to the floor…
But the shoe print seemed too big for the tiny woman, and at the scene she had worn hiking boots, which would have deeper and more complicated treads than this print.
Then there was the scrap of paper in Jacob’s hand. Possibly a comic book.
She picked up the phone. “Frank? No, I’m not calling about Jillian Perry.”
They didn’t need a search warrant to enter the house Jacob Wheeler had shared with his mother. Ellen Wheeler welcomed them in. Anything to help find out what had happened to her son.
The cluttered little home hadn’t changed much during the intervening days. The dust had thickened on the end tables and a sludge had formed at the bottom of the coffeepot, as if Ellen had done nothing else in the intervening time except drink caffeine and stare out the front window, as she did now, waiting for her son to return home.
“Thanks for letting us come by,” Frank said.
She didn’t turn from the window. “He’s gone. It doesn’t matter.”
The boy’s bedroom hadn’t changed any either. It remained a testament to the untidy habits of teenage boys, where clothes, food wrappers, papers, and CDs remained where they had been dropped. Theresa pulled on latex gloves with the uncomfortable feeling that Ellen Wheeler had fallen into a catatonic depression, or else intended to preserve the place like a shrine.
Well, I don’t blame her. If anything happened to Rachael I’d probably leave-
Don’t think that.
There were certain thoughts that could not be permitted to enter her head if she wanted to keep working in this field, and putting herself in the shoes of victims topped the list.
Frank entered the room behind her. “Still don’t know where to begin, huh?”
“Sort of.” She had been looking for anything that seemed out of place, that didn’t have the same amount of dust as its neighbors. That was silly, though, since Jacob had been living in the room nearly up until the minute of his murder, so not enough time would have elapsed to show a difference in dust deposited on relevant items. Like, say, a comic book.
Still, three things leaped to the eye: the wound-up cord to his video game joystick, a printed flyer at the foot of his bed, and a neatly stacked pile of comic books on the nightstand. They stood out as the only neatly stacked pile of anything in the room.
The half sheet of paper on the bed turned out to be a sort of program for Jacob’s funeral, held two days previously. No doubt Ellen had left it there as an offering to the shrine, or had perused it while surrounded by her son’s belongings, or whatever reasoning passed for sanity following the death of a child. The cord to the joystick stood out because, again, it was the only cord so wrapped. Perhaps she had begun to clean up before abandoning the idea, since the rest of the wires and accessories had simply been swept to the foot of the TV stand.
The comic book on top of the stack had a dramatic cover of black and blue with the figure of Batman in the foreground. Theresa picked it up and riffled the pages.
Chapter 1 had lost its bottom corner.
She set it on the bed carefully, as if it might explode, and then took a square of sealed plastic out of her camera bag. She needed to make sure-after all, Jacob might have been routinely hard on all his comic books.
She didn’t even have to take the torn piece out of its plastic evidence bag to see where it matched the torn page. That, in forensics parlance, was known as a jigsaw match, and considered an absolute identification.
Theresa wanted to cry.
“What is it?” Frank asked.
“I need to check one other thing.” She began to search the closets-Jacob’s, Ellen’s, and then the small one by the front door. On the floor, in a jumble of shoes and boots, she found a pair of rubber overshoes with plain tread lines crossing the sole.
Theresa glanced to her left, where Ellen Wheeler rested in an armchair, one hand holding up her head.
“Yes,” she said.
Theresa waited, still crouched. Frank, with that cop’s instinct, waited as well.
“Yes, those are the boots I wore when I killed Jacob.”
Theresa straightened slowly, still holding the comic book. “Is this what you argued about?”
“He stole it. He insisted he didn’t, but I know he didn’t have any money. He stole everything. I might have been able to cope if he’d at least told me the truth, but the constant lying wore me down.”
Unobtrusively, Frank pulled out a notebook and a pencil.
Ellen lifted her head from her hand, as if finding just enough strength to tell her story. She nodded at the boots. “My husband left those rubber boots behind when he left us. I can pull them right over my shoes.”
That explained why the size of the shoe print seemed too big for Ellen Wheeler, the depth of the print too shallow for the size of the shoe.
“I told Jake it had to stop. The same thing I’ve told him every day for the past four years, more or less. So finally he said it was my fault, that he wouldn’t have to steal things if I’d only give him more money, if I’d only be a decent enough mother to provide for him. I moved toward him. I would have tried to kill him with my bare hands right then if he’d given me the chance. I still want to, sometimes. But when I think about him before his teens, when we would spend the summers thinking up new things to do-”
“What happened then?” Frank prompted.
“He snatched the comic off the counter and started to leave. I pulled it out of his hands.”
Theresa said, “A piece ripped off. He had it in his fist.”
“Did it? I didn’t notice. He stalked out of the house. I put on my rubber boots and followed him, not difficult in the snow.
I was screaming at him. I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t notice-but then it wasn’t anything new. He kept walking away, ignoring me.” Her chin sank to her hand again. Frank scribbled a note, obviously not concerned with Miranda rights. Technically, since Ellen Wheeler had not been placed under arrest, they did not apply. But Theresa knew anyway that she would not recant her confession. Unlike Evan, Jacob’s mother had not tried to destroy the evidence of her guilt. She had brought it home and kept it safe.
“He always ignored me, as if I only existed on this planet to serve him. I gave him life. And then I gave him the best life I could provide. Why the hell did I deserve so much contempt?” She didn’t look to them for an answer. Theresa guessed she had given up expecting one.
“So you circled around the back of the tree to get in front of him.”
“Yes.”
“And picked something up?”
Ellen took a while to answer that one, a sob brewing underneath the skin of her face. “A piece of wood. A branch, I suppose, but it was fairly big. I don’t know why. I didn’t even know it was in my hand until I hit him with it.”
The sob began to leak out, in tiny but steady teardrops.
“What happened then?” Theresa prompted.
“He stood there and glared. I saw blood start to ooze from under his hair, but he didn’t seem hurt. Furious enough to kill me, though he didn’t raise a hand. I was so angry”-she looked to Theresa for understanding, one mother to another-“and at the same time I was horrified. I’d never struck him before in his life, never. I couldn’t believe it.”
Theresa had been there, so angry with her child that she had felt sickened at herself for such rage. But never, thank God, to the point of violence.
“I walked past him. He didn’t say a word. I threw the branch away somewhere, I don’t remember where, I just didn’t want to touch it anymore. I turned and looked back, but he didn’t follow me, didn’t want to come home. He had sat down next to the tree.”
Now she turned her face up to Frank. “That’s what happened, isn’t it? My baby sat down by that tree and just died. I came back here and drank coffee and let him freeze to death.”
His mouth worked once or twice before he found a gentle way to ask, “You didn’t go back to check on him?”
She wiped the moisture from her face with a quick, cat’s-paw-like gesture. “I wasn’t going to go chasing after him this time. He was going to have to face the fact that he needed me, or he could…freeze to death. The one time I decided to be firm with him and stick to it, and he died. He died.”
She let her head fall back against the armchair, spent. The story had ended. Theresa didn’t know whether she should feel sympathy or revulsion, or what would be wrong with both.
“Ellen Wheeler,” Frank began. “I’m placing you under arrest for the murder of Jacob Wheeler…”