Getting onto his boat, however, looked like a killer. She would have to leap from an icy dock to an icy deck, over a two- to three-foot expanse of frozen lake. In the summer, child’s play. In the winter, a great way to break a hip.
It occurred to her to use one last niggling prick to her psyche to get her to make this leap: Her career had become troubled, but coming out of this situation with a healthy baby and no bloodshed would make her a hero. All the sarcastic supervisors and defense experts in the world wouldn’t be able to change that.
Please, God, don’t let that be my only reason.
And while we’re at it, don’t let Drew kill me. That would upset my mother.
“Drew! It’s Theresa. I’m coming aboard.”
He slid open the door just an inch, enough to say, “All right, come on. Don’t slip.”
“Easier said than done,” she grumbled as she bent her knees. She made it with two inches to spare, though her bottom smacked the rear gunwale and the impact reverberated throughout her bones. The boat swayed in its hammock.
Drew slid the door open another inch, and Theresa pushed it farther to enter, actually grateful for the rush of warmth and the shelter from the constant icy wind. She sniffled, rubbed her hands, and let her pupils expand to take in the darkened interior.
The houseboat had not changed much since her first visit, except perhaps for a fresh dusting of clutter on the uppermost layer of the surrounding surfaces. Drew wore his standard baggy pants and the knit, zippered jacket. He bounced with an internal mania but his eyes were clear and dry. Cara, warmly bundled up in pink blankets in his arms, cried in sporadic bursts. His left arm supported her back and head. He held her legs in the crook of his right arm and a Luger in that hand.
Theresa drew in a deep breath. Now that she had arrived, she hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do except to remain calm and keep Drew talking instead of acting. “Has she eaten lately?”
Drew glanced down at the baby in his arms as if unsure of how she’d gotten there. “I don’t know. I forgot to ask the babysitter when I-took her. I got some stuff, though. Look.”
He gestured with the gun’s barrel to his kitchen counter, littered with diapers, formula, and a stuffed tiger. Theresa cleared off the stove, found a pan, filled it with water and heated up the formula, turning her back to him without hesitation. She had nothing to fear from Drew Fleming. Or so she told herself.
The activity did not slow her heart rate, but she managed to keep her voice steady when she faced him again. “I know how worried you are about Cara, Drew, but you have to know that this was not a good idea. It only makes you look unstable.”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
“And by default it makes Evan look more innocent.”
“The court made him her official guardian. If she dies, he gets the whole account. Why would he wait?”
“He wouldn’t dare do anything to Cara now, not with all the scrutiny over Jillian’s death.”
“There is no scrutiny!” He gave the baby an agitated rocking, prompting another startled cry from the infant. “Your department released the body. The police aren’t investigating. No one cares about Jillian except you and me.”
Theresa swirled the formula in its warm water bath, wondering how much to tell him. “I’ve found something out, though. I think I know how he did it.”
This appeared to stun him, so she made a grab for the baby in case he dropped her, thinking too late that sudden movements were not a good idea. But he handed the baby over without a pause and focused on this new information. “You do? How?”
She told it simply and slowly, with plenty of pauses for transferring the formula into a bottle and finding a comfortable seat so that the baby could drink without movement and, Theresa hoped, sleep. She emphasized the painlessness of Jillian’s death, well aware that dwelling on how his loved one came to leave the earth might push him to his own personal brink.
“So she just went to sleep?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
Now his eyes filled with tears. “It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not.”
“She was too young.”
Unbidden, the memory of the marble floor came, with Paul’s blood spreading in a dark pool. He had not simply gone to sleep. He had to sit and wait, soaked in his own fluids, knowing what that seepage meant and able to tick off every last second of his life. Did he think of me? Did he think of his first wife, dead of cancer before her thirtieth birthday?
Who did he regret leaving more?
An unworthy question, but humans are such unworthy animals.
Cara pushed the bottle away, finished, not bothered by Theresa’s inner upheaval. The baby had most likely felt nothing else from the adults around her for the past week, and had grown used to it. “Drew, we have to-”
“It’s worse on us. The survivors, me, you-even your mother. Your father died when you were young, didn’t he?”
“How did you know that?”
“I found a bio that Cleveland magazine did on you last year.”
“My father died of an aneurysm. It’s different.”
Was it? Did it make her pain over Paul any worse than her mother’s had been? And why had the similarity never-
“At least Jillian could die with hope. We have to live without it.”
She could feel the tears filling her eyes, a wave that seemed to start at the back of her head-not for the dead, but for the living she’d been too wrapped up in herself to think about lately. She bit her lip to divert the tears, which never worked. “Drew-”
“We could help each other.”
She shook her head as if to clear her hearing. She hadn’t taken off her coat and now the cabin seemed a bit too warm. “What?”
“We understand each other, you and I. The kind of grief that will last the rest of our lives. If your fiancé had a child, you’d do anything for that child, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.” The word erupted before she’d finished hearing the question.
“He didn’t-right? But I have Cara. In a way Cara is even more important than Jillian, since Jillian chose Evan. But Cara is innocent. I’ll give anything for her, even my life, to keep Evan from harming her. And you’ll help me, won’t you? You wouldn’t be here now if you didn’t feel that way.” He sprang from his chair and neatly sidestepped the coffee table in two paces, dropping the gun on the corner and collapsing to his knees in front of her as if proposing marriage. Or begging. “You have to help me save her. You’re the only one who can.”
“That’s what I said, Drew, I only need a little more time and I can-”
“It won’t work. Even if you can prove she died from the nitrogen, you won’t be able to prove he did it. He’ll have thought of every detail. It’s what he does for a living. It’s how he fooled Jillian in the first place.” He reached out and slowly took the baby bottle out of her right hand, holding her fingers in his. She fought the instinct to pull away. “I have a snowmobile. The stockbrokers who own that Grady-White two spaces up leave it under their hull with the keys in it because they come out every weekend. It’s got gas-I checked. We can get over the water before the cops even know what’s happening, be at Burke Lakefront Airport in ten minutes. A friend of mine loads cargo onto air express planes and there are two leaving this afternoon, for Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Depending on which one we take-”
“Drew!”
“My boss at the bookshop can get my funds to me, and I packed my most valuable editions to take along and sell. We won’t be millionaires, but at least we’ll be safe.” His eyes danced in the hazy indoor light, and she thought that maybe she was afraid of Drew Fleming, just a little.
“Drew, I can’t-”
Her phone rang. Drew jumped back, dropping her hand.
Breathe, she told herself. In and out. “I think I should answer that.”
Drew looked around for his gun as if trying to remember where he’d left it.
“It’s just a phone, Drew. And if it keeps them from approaching us-”
He reached over the table and picked up the Luger, but then moved to the window, peering out from behind faded canvas curtains. “Yes, answer it.”
She pulled out the phone, which showed an unfamiliar number. “Hello?”
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Chris Cavanaugh said. The Cleveland Police Department’s star hostage negotiator, whose star had dimmed only slightly in the months since the bank robbery.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“How is everyone in there? How’s the baby?”
“Just fine.”
“We’re going to get through this okay, Theresa,” he said with that firm, deep tone of voice that brought to mind his dimples and his utter self-possession, and which would be so terribly comforting to someone on the brink of panic. But somehow it always had the opposite effect on her.
“I know that. Unlike our last encounter, Chris, I am not in any danger here. Drew is not going to harm me or Cara. He just wants to talk.” She enunciated her words carefully, turning her head so the man at the window would be sure to hear her.
“Does he want to talk to me?”
She asked. Drew shook his head. “No, he doesn’t.”
“But it’s okay with him if you stay on the line?”
She inquired. “He says it’s fine.”
“What does he want?”
“He wants Cara removed from Evan Kovacic’s custody.”
“Yeah, your cousin filled me in on your theory. We’ll have to find a compromise.”
“You’re good at that.”
“I hope someday you can speak to me without sneering.”
Tears pricked at her eyes again. Why could she not concede an inch to this man? “I’m-look, I’m-”
“Never mind. One thing, though. Don’t listen to Drew about grief. He’s wrong. It doesn’t have to last the rest of your life.”
Her brief thawing iced over again. “How would you know?”
She hung up.
“What’s the matter?” Drew asked, leaving the window. “What did he say?”
“He wants to know what your demands are.” She pondered Cavanaugh’s words. The microphone pen in her pocket-she had forgotten about it. They had been listening to her conversation the whole time, which meant that they knew about Drew’s snowmobile escape route. She had to keep him calm and on the boat. But for how long?
“I heard you tell him. He said no, right?”
“No, he said we’d have to work out a compromise. I’m sure we can get protective custody for Cara. Families with Dependent Children always removes children from a home if there’s a chance of abuse, so it can’t be that hard-”
He sat across from her, the Luger held loosely in one hand. “But they won’t give her to me.”
“Not immediately, of course. She would be cared for by the state until this is settled, which should be only a few days.”
His eyes watched the infant in Theresa’s arms as she stretched in her sleep, one tiny fist protruding from the blanket. “I saw Jillian in her from the first day, when I visited the maternity ward. She has Jillian’s eyes. It’s as if Jillian lives on in her.”
“It always seems like that with parents and children, but it’s only true to a point and sometimes isn’t true at all. I know, I have a daughter. She’s an individual.” How to get out of this? Drew wouldn’t budge unless they took custody away from Evan, but the state had no obligation to remove the child unless the stepfather became a suspect in a crime, and she could not provide probable cause to prompt same, certainly not while holed up in a houseboat over a frozen lake. Catch-22.
“And being so close to her for a few hours like this,” Drew went on as if Theresa hadn’t spoken, “I don’t think I can let her go. I’ve already lost Jillian. I can’t say good-bye to Cara too.”
“But it’s not-”
“If somehow it came about that you had to say good-bye to Paul all over again, could you do it?”
The words pierced, like an ice pick to her gut. No. No, of course not.
Pull yourself together. “Cara is not Jillian, Drew. She’s a baby who needs a lot of attention and-”
The phone rang.
“I’m sorry, Theresa,” Chris told her without preamble. “I never manage to say the right thing to you.”
“One person out of a city of four hundred and fifty thousand isn’t bad, Chris.” Going to be bitchy to the last, aren’t we?
“I need to keep Cara,” Drew said to her, a touch too loudly, as if he wanted Chris Cavanaugh to hear him. “Yes or no?”
“Drew-” she tried.
Chris asked, “What does he mean, keep? Permanently? Another hour? I thought he just wanted her away from Evan.”
“Yes or no!”
“Drew, it isn’t that simple, you know that. You’re not a blood relative-”
“It’s going to be that simple.” He stood up and crossed to an old-fashioned black plastic telephone. “You and I and Cara are leaving. I have to carry this pack with the books, so you’ll have to hang on to her. They won’t shoot at us, not with you and Cara along.”
“Drew, you have to think of what’s best for Cara, and I’m sure that flying over partially frozen ice is not it.” She did not think about the open line in her hand, with Cavanaugh listening at the other end, and apparently Drew didn’t either.
“It’s solid.” He put his hand on the phone.
Theresa thought of the freezing water churning below the stiff surface. Lake Erie was the shallowest of the Great Lakes…it froze fast but thawed fast too. Plunging into the frigid green-“I won’t go. I can’t, Drew, I’m scared. And I won’t let you take the baby over it either.”
“It’s the only way. Cara is all I have now.” He picked up his phone. “And you.”
“Theresa,” Chris said in her ear.
Drew held the receiver to his ear but made no move to dial a number. The expression on his face smoothed to bland shock, an unblinking surprise. “It’s dead.”
They had heard his plan over the microphone and taken the simplest of precautions. They had cut his phone service. He could not contact the friend at the airport.
She allowed herself the tiniest sigh of relief. Drew remained more stunned than angry; he had no way to determine the presence of the microphone, probably assumed that cutting his communication would be standard procedure for the situation, which, of course, it was. “Drew, all you want to do is keep Cara safe. So do we.”
“There is no we, Theresa. They’ll take her away from us and give her back to Evan. They did it once and you can’t give them a reason not to do it again.”
“But-” Words came with difficulty, mostly because she agreed with him.
He picked up the small nylon backpack and strapped it on. “Let’s go.”
All right, she thought. Screw the hostage-negotiation manual. Chris might not be allowed to lie to him, but I can. I can lie through my teeth. “I can get them to put Cara in protective custody and give me a search warrant to examine the factory’s nitrogen tanks. I’ll find the hoses and things he used to pump the gas from the tanks to the plastic hood. He won’t have any way to explain that-”
“Circuit boards,” Drew said, reaching over his head to add a box of 9-millimeter ammunition to the backpack.
“What?”
“The nitrogen hoods are for soldering the circuit boards for the game hardware. Here’s another blanket for Cara. We don’t want her to catch cold.”
Theresa blinked at him.
He zipped the pack shut, and carefully, chillingly, clicked off the safety on the gun. “Soldering in an oxygen atmosphere will allow metal oxides to form on the contacts of integrated circuits and capacitors. Then they don’t conduct as well and you’ll have problems with the board. They have to be soldered in a nitrogen atmosphere. Everyone knows that.”
“Not everyone,” she corrected, absently wrapping the sleeping Cara in a small wool blanket. So Evan had, again, a perfectly reasonable explanation for the nitrogen hood, though perhaps not for the solder on Jillian’s shirt. “But if I can find any trace of Jillian inside the hood-hairs, pink fibers, a fingerprint-he can’t explain that away as the standard manufacturing process.”
“He won’t let you in.”
“I’ll get a warrant.”
“If you could have, you would have already.” Drew was not stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid.
Lie. “My cousin is the detective in charge of the investigation, Drew. I will get a warrant.”
“Come on. Let’s go.” He motioned at her with the gun.
Her patience with him began to wear thin. “That gun is older than you and me put together. Are you sure it even shoots?”
He pointed it at a window and fired. The deafening boom blasted the thin houseboat walls and glass and tufts of canvas spattered everywhere. She turned her face away, shielding the baby.
He had fired out a porthole window facing north, toward the dock where the police had massed. Frank is out there, she thought. Chris!
Cara screamed.
“Drew! What did you do that for? They’ll think you fired at-”
But he was already in motion, as if he heard gunshots every day, moving toward the front cabin, Luger in his right hand, grabbing Theresa with the left. The coffee table bit into both her shins and then her feet got into gear, and she found herself in Drew’s bedroom. A wooden set of thin steps led to the upper deck. Cara still screamed.
Theresa had only a moment to see past the bright hole in the ceiling, glowing with the hazy afternoon light, to notice how Drew had decorated his bedroom. The walls, the mirror, even the ceiling had been covered with cards and Post-it notes and photographs, but mostly photographs. Of Jillian. Jillian smiling, Jillian washing her car, Jillian with Cara, Jillian on the boat. Close-ups, midrange, some so far away that Jillian herself had probably been unaware of the camera’s presence.
And one of her. Theresa. A snap of her leaving the medical examiner’s office, her face slightly obscured by a blanket of falling snow. It lay on the coverlet, on top of a newspaper and yet more pictures of Jillian.
“Go up,” Drew shouted, thrusting her elbow forward with such force she had no choice but to comply. She braced herself with one hand, holding the baby with the other. She had no desire to poke her head out into the open when surely the SWAT forces were now flowing down the wooden planks, ready to neutralize the threat.
Don’t shoot me, she prayed. Don’t shoot me.
The pocket mic. Say it aloud, idiot.
She pulled herself up, advancing step-by-step on the steep ladder. “Don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me.”
“Don’t worry, they won’t.” Drew came directly behind her, his head bumping her bottom.
She exploded onto the empty front deck of the houseboat. The wind made her eyes tear but felt sweet and refreshing after the stuffy indoor cabin. The front of Drew’s boat fell off into open space, like a catamaran, without the protection of side gunwales. She did not feel secure enough to stand on the snow-covered and trembling deck. No shots rang out, though the cops had advanced. Over the tops of the storage lockers cluttering the deck, she saw the dark forms only three boat slips away. They stopped when Drew emerged.
“Don’t shoot us,” she shouted.
“Get down on the ice, Theresa,” Drew instructed, and pulled Cara from her arms.
“What? But-”
With his back against the lockers, he pushed her with his feet, so quickly that she slid across the snow-covered deck before she even had time to think about grabbing for a hook or a railing. Then suddenly she was falling free, loose for a very short moment before the frozen ice met her, hard enough to break bones.