“It’s about time.” Rachael slammed her textbook shut and had her coat on before her mother even thought about taking hers off. “They’re leaving at seven and you know how cranky Dora gets if she has to wait for me.”
“Huh?”
“Skiing tonight! Can I borrow twenty bucks too? In fact, can I just have it, since I kind of lost track of what I owe you so far? Forget the skis, I’ll just rent some. Come in, into the garage, go go go!”
Theresa did not mention that she had just solved another teenager’s murder, or how precious life could prove to be, or that Rachael should be glad she still breathed instead of fretting about a social engagement. Theresa merely slid her body back into the driver’s seat, which had managed to cool to frosty in the approximately ten seconds since she had left it, and pulled out onto the road. “Skiing?”
Rachael tossed an impossibly large sack over the seat back-no doubt containing her boots, gloves, scarf, phone, makeup, and probably her iPod, so that she could add the peril of deafness to an already hazardous sport. “You never pay attention, Mom. Remember the birthday party last weekend? Dora and Jenna said I should come on this ski trip with them? Gun it, you can make this light.”
Theresa hit the brakes on purpose. Since Rachael had gotten her license, it had become important to demonstrate safe driving skills. “When will you be home?”
“Probably eleven.”
“More like ten.”
“No, eleven.”
“How about nine thirty?” The light changed, and they moved forward.
“Why ten?”
“What part of ‘school night’ don’t you understand?”
“Okay. But it’s your cousin who’s going to pick us up, so if I’m home late you’ll have to take it up with her.” Rachael had mastered the art of the preemptive strike.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You know, if I had my own car, this wouldn’t even be an issue.”
Theresa, however, had mastered the art of selective hearing. “Uh-huh. Are you dressed warm enough?”
“Warmly. It’s an adjective, l-y.”
“Do you want a ride or not?”
“I’m perfectly warm.”
She eyed her daughter’s pants. “They don’t look like snow pants.”
Rachael bubbled up at the interest. “Exactly! They’re new. They’ve got this cottonlike fabric but it’s practically waterproof, like good nylon.”
“Nylon isn’t waterproof. It’s the weave and the treatment-”
“But it’s thin and flat, so you don’t have to look like a toddler in a snowsuit. They’re great. You can tell I have a butt in them.” She put her hands underneath her as if making sure.
“Actually, I was okay with not being able to tell.”
“Well, of course. You’re a mom. You’d have me in a burka if you could.” For all her fondness for the new pants, however, she seemed to be wrestling with them, wrenching both arms behind her back until one hand emerged with a small white tag. “Man! That thing was driving me crazy.”
“That’s not true about the burka. I just don’t get this skiing-at-night thing. It’s bad enough you have to hurtle down a snow-covered hill, but you have to do it in the pitch dark as well? What keeps you from running into trees? Or each other?”
“Um, maybe the huge floodlights they have along the slopes? They’re lit up like a Walmart. And I have a light stick.”
They pulled onto her cousin’s street. “But do the trees have light sticks?”
“There they are! I told you Dora would be ticked if I got here late.”
She dropped the clothing tag into the ashtray and dragged her large bag forward from the backseat. The car had not yet come to a complete stop before the passenger door opened. “See you, Mom.”
Theresa snatched her daughter’s arm and held it, arresting Rachael in midflight. “Be careful.”
Rachael tried to pull her arm away. Perhaps annoyance and overexcitement made her say, in the callous way children can have, “There won’t be any bank robbers on the ski slopes, Mom.”
“I mean it. That’s a large area, it’s dark, and it’s very cold out.”
“Okay.” Rachael took the time to look into her mother’s eyes and repeat the word before making her escape.
Theresa watched Rachael join her relatives, then waved to her cousin, now shepherding the girls into a minivan. She hadn’t been worried about bank robbers, only broken bones and bad sprains and frostbite.
Not to mention that the last girl she had seen in a snowy woods had been very, very dead.
Arriving home for the second time that evening, she grabbed the junk from her car and dropped it on her kitchen table, fed the dog, changed into the heaviest set of pajamas she had, and poured a shot of vodka into a glass of flavored diet water. Then she sat down to open bills, grateful that none was overdue. Still, how to afford college in another year…
She threw the bills on the table. The square, shiny piece of fabric Rachael had ripped from her pants scooted away and Theresa caught it before it sailed off toward the floor. Years as a fiber analyst made her read it: MADE IN CHINA. NYLON/TENCEL.
Tencel.
Evan snowboarded. Evan liked to have the latest innovation, the coolest stuff, and, Theresa would bet, pants that showed he had a butt.
Drew, of course, could also own a pair of Tencel pants, but so far he had seemed to live in knit jersey and have no interest in sports. Jogging pants were not likely to be made of Tencel, and police officers wore wool uniforms at this time of the year.
She thought of calling Frank to tell him she needed to get into Evan’s pants, but doubted he would see the humor. Or the probable cause. She’d need more than a fabric tag for that. She needed the last item on her list. Means.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 10
“I’m surprised you come in this early,” Theresa said, bouncing from one foot to the other. The raw wind had cut through her coat in just the ten steps from her car to the front door.
“Just me,” Vangie said, pulling a set of keys out of a slouchy gold lamé bag. “Georgie doesn’t roll in until ten or so. But the phones get going right about eight.”
Theresa followed her through the opened door, so grateful for the warmth inside that she spoke without thinking, “I wouldn’t think your clientele got up that early. Um, I mean-”
Vangie only laughed as she divested herself of bag, coat, scarf, and gloves. “Partiers aren’t morning people. Party planners, on the other hand, are definite A types. Georgie said you might be looking for me.”
“I need to ask more about Jillian, any tiny detail you can tell me.”
The young woman swept long curls out of her face and switched on a coffeemaker. She had obviously set it up the prior evening because it immediately began to perk. “There are two kinds of girls who work here, the kind who know exactly what they’re doing and the kind who have watched too many movies.”
“They think they can work a few jobs and then marry Richard Gere or Ed Harris?”
“Exactly. Jillian was in the second group.”
“And did she meet a-”
Vangie watched the dark liquid drip into the pot. “She thought she did, once. He was an older guy, plenty of money, successful. Just like Daddy.”
“What happened?”
“She was wrong.”
Dr. Christine Johnson found her waiting by the loading dock. Theresa greeted the younger woman with, “This is it.”
“This is what?”
“The moment of truth. I need a cause of death on Jillian Perry and I need it right now.”
The doctor shifted a tote bag to her other shoulder as they fell into hurried steps on the way to the elevator. “Tell me about it. Stone has been pestering me for two days for a conclusion. I said I’d settle for ‘unknown means,’ but he hates to do that unless it’s a decomp.”
“Yeah, I know.” The moving metal box creaked and moaned and took an inordinate amount of time to reach the second floor. “Why don’t you take the stairs?”
“My thighs don’t want to.”
Theresa eyed the woman’s slim waist. “You wait until you turn thirty, missy. Your whole metabolism suddenly turns against you. You’ll be taking the stairs in skyscrapers to work off one more calorie.”
“You’re just a bundle of cheer this morning, aren’t you?”
“There’s more. Evan got custody of Cara. He is officially her next of kin. That baby’s days, maybe minutes, are now numbered unless we can prove murder.”
“Okay, shut up. I mean it. Not another word until I get a cup of coffee.”
Theresa complied, even waiting until after settling her body onto the ammo locker in the miniature office, a steaming cup held up to her sinuses. “Even the phytoplankton refuse to help me. I collected soil samples from parking lots at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and at the building on Old River Road where Evan had his business meeting the day Jillian disappeared, but it didn’t do me any good. I got Emily at the Natural History Museum to come in early today and take a look at it all, but the types of diatoms in each sample don’t vary enough to be significant.”
“Mmm,” Christine said into her coffee cup.
“I guess it depends on water depth, light, whether there are rocks or sand at the water’s edge…the ones from Old River Road show some differences, probably from the industrial influences along the river. So now Evan will probably sue me for cleaning tires without a license and it didn’t even do me any good. Which leads me to you, missy. Can you go over your findings again? Maybe something will ring a bell.”
“My findings were all negative. No pulmonary emboli to indicate an overdose of narcotics. According to the tox report, she had nothing more than a mild sleeping pill in her system, nothing that would depress her breathing until she died or make her sleep through a trip to the freezing woods. Plus, there was no amylase in the vitreous humor, no elevated levels of catecholamines, to indicate death by freezing. But there again, there might not be.” She ran her hands through her hair, which only encouraged the waves to become unruly. “I found some cerebral edema but that could mean a lot of things.”
“So her heart just stopped?” Theresa asked.
“Yes…well, no.” Christine picked up a manila folder already placed front and center on her desk, and flipped through a few pages. “Hearts don’t stop for no reason. There’s no sign of infarction. She might have stopped breathing first.”
“As if she were smothered?”
“No imprint of her teeth on the back of her upper lip, no petechiae. It’s pretty hard to smother an adult unless she’s already unconscious, and there’s no reason she would have been unconscious, no knockout drugs, no blow to the head, no seizure.”
Theresa had grown used to dead victims telling her who they were, what they had done, and how they died. But Jillian could not. Perhaps it was time to look at the situation from the other end. “Evan is an engineer with a degree in chemistry. He had time to plan and clean up. He has tools and equipment in the factory outbuildings. Maybe he came up with that holy grail, an undetectable poison?”
Christine rolled her eyes. “Sure. And maybe he teleported Jillian to the woods when he was done. I ran all the poison assays. Even if we couldn’t identify it, there would be some sign of one. Elevated levels of amines or metals.”
Theresa recalled the miles of electrical cords that had snaked across the concrete floor of the factory building. “Electric shock?”
“It would leave burns and signs in the heart. Come on, you know that as well as I do.”
“I’m grasping at straws here. The only thing we’re relatively sure of is that she stopped breathing.”
“Yeah. Everyone stops breathing. Just before they die.”
“But no one cut off her oxygen.”
“Not by strangling, smothering, or putting a plastic bag over her head, no,” Christine confirmed.
Behind the plastic reality ball and the electrical cords, behind the group of spectators, there had been tall metal cylinders, high and round, like small grain silos. They had been painted the same color as the walls and therefore blended into the background, obviously left over from the factory’s previous owners, the carbon makers.
“What if they-he-removed the oxygen from the air?”
“Come again?”
What had the chipped paint on the side of the tank read? She closed her eyes and concentrated.
N2. The cylinders might be empty. Then again, they might not.
“What about nitrogen? He has rows of gas tanks there. What if he filled the air with nitrogen?”
Christine frowned. “I’m not following you. Like he opens all these air valves and floods the room with nitrogen? It would have to be an awful lot, and why wouldn’t it kill him and the baby?”
“They weren’t there.”
“It isn’t like gas, you know, like putting your head in the oven. Nitrogen won’t kill you in and of itself. Only if the oxygen content of the air fell too low to sustain life.”
“But that would kill her?”
“Sure.”
“Without leaving any signs?”
The doctor plucked a bayonet off her desk and balanced its two ends between her hands as she thought. “I’d have to check the literature, but as far as I know, yeah. Nitrogen is a natural component of the blood, so the toxicology would seem normal. But how do you get an apartment airtight enough to flood it with nitrogen? It wouldn’t chase the oxygen out…though I suppose it would be no trick for him to rig a timer to the tank. He could take the baby and leave, come back when the gas has been turned off, and open the doors and windows. It wouldn’t leave any sign in the apartment. Or the car. A car would make a handy little gas chamber, almost completely airtight.”
“It works well enough with carbon monoxide,” Theresa agreed, wishing she’d taken a closer look at the windows on Evan’s Escalade or Jillian’s car. She could have swabbed them with a little alcohol, run the swabs on the FTIR to look for adhesives. But-“The tanks I saw aren’t portable. Maybe it wasn’t done in the apartment. Maybe he took her out to the factory.”
“Again, how does he turn her atmosphere anaerobic? Set up some kind of oxygen tent? And why is she-”
Theresa had a vision of the clear plastic frames over the assembly table. “He already has one. Big enough for a body to fit, and it already has piping outlets built into it. Damn, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.” She explained the factory setup to Christine.
“Great. So Jillian lies on this table while Evan attaches nitrogen at one end and a vacuum at the other and reduces her oxygen levels until she passes out.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“Why does Jillian go along with this? She didn’t struggle. Aside from those vague bruises on her forearms, she’s got no defensive wounds. She didn’t break her nails clawing at the glass. She just laid there and died.”
“You said she had a sleeping pill in her system.”
“I can’t believe it would be enough for her to sleep through being carried to another location and placed in a gas chamber.”
Theresa shuddered. “How long would it take?”
“Not long at all. Once the amount of oxygen in the air gets under twenty-five percent, she’d be unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes.”
“And no chance that she’d sleep through that.”
“I can’t see how. Once her lungs began to gasp, she’d wake up, unless she had way more narcotics in her system than we found.”
Theresa stood up, dying to act on the information and no longer able to withstand the handle of the ammo locker pressing into her bottom. “But suffocation by nitrogen would produce your autopsy findings. Or lack thereof.”
“I’ll need to do a little research, but I believe so. What, you think your cousin’s going to give you a search warrant based on an educated guess?”
“Maybe. Now that I know what to look for.”
“And what would that be? A tube leading from the nitrogen tanks to this hood you were talking about?”
“No, I’m sure he could explain that, and if he couldn’t he would have gotten rid of the hookups by now. No, I mean hairs, fibers, fingerprints, anything that would show Jillian Perry died while stretched out in that Plexiglas cocoon.”
Frank answered on the second ring. “Where are you?”
This seemed like an odd way to open a conversation. “At the lab, of course. Look, I know you’re sick of hearing about Jillian Perry-”
“You have no idea how sick. You haven’t heard?”
The coffee floating around in her empty stomach began to boil. “Heard what?”
“Drew Fleming kidnapped Cara.”
She nearly broke off the phone’s flip top pressing it to her ear, as if proximity might make his words more sensible. “What?”
“He went to the apartment and pointed a gun at the nanny. He made her pack a diaper bag for him with stuff for Cara, bundled up the baby, and left.”
She noticed the wind behind Frank’s voice, whining across the surface of his phone. “Is he on his boat?”
“We’re there now. He says he’ll shoot anyone who steps onto the dock.”
“Is he trying to get away?”
“That’s going to be a little difficult with a foot of ice on top of the water. He could ice-skate a good distance, but that boat ain’t going anywhere.”
She sat down in a task chair; not the best choice as its wheels started to scoot away and she nearly slid off. “So he has no way out.”
“Best case, he figures that out and realizes that he loved Jillian too much to kill her child. Worst case-”
“He decides to take her with him. There’s not a lot of difference between those two choices, Frank, when you realize that the only reason he took Cara is because he believes Evan intends to murder her.”
Silence on the other end, save for the bitter wind. “That’s not good.”
“I’m coming down there.” She flipped the phone shut before he could protest.