entire property?”
“I sure have. Twice. It’s not as hard as it sounds, the buildings are empty for the most part, except for where we’re stocking all the equipment in number one and setting up the manufacturing process in number two. But Jerry and I searched every inch. We can look again now, if you want.”
Theresa frowned at Frank. He said, “The officer taking the report did a walk-through with you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure he would have noticed anything out of place.” Like a dead body.
“I can’t see why Jillian would have gone wandering around dusty old buildings anyway. It’s been so cold, and she thought the dry air was bad for her skin. She was always so careful about her skin.” He picked up his wedding picture. “It was all she had, really, her looks.”
That didn’t sound very nice. Theresa wondered if he always managed to be so tactful, or only when under stress. Yet his eyes filled with tears as he gazed at the photo.
He added, as the level of desperation in his voice climbed steadily, “I know wherever she is, she’ll be worried sick about Cara and me. That’s why you have to find her. She knows I can’t raise a baby all by myself.”
This should have been poignant, but sounded flat and tinny to Theresa’s ears. She did not read anything into that reaction; everything sounded flat to her these days. But then he asked, “Are you two going to do the investigation into Jillian’s disappearance?”
“We’ll be working on it,” Frank assured him. “With the Lakewood police.”
Evan Kovacic had smooth skin and short, manicured fingernails; he had tucked the shirt in, so that now he looked like a frat boy who’d grown up to be pleasant and reasonably responsible. But his eyes-the color of the irises dark and solid, and hard as marble-swept her from the red hair that hadn’t seen a grooming product in months to the scuffed Reeboks she wore to cushion her feet during the eight-hours-without-sitting days. He was assessing her competence, Theresa thought, and finding it lacking. Well, screw him.
But then he managed a smile. “Great.”
Taught to be polite. Or a lack of confidence in me somehow reassures him. How much does he really want us to find Jillian?
She let her brain wander on this path for one brief moment. Jillian and her former job had become an embarrassment to the young entrepreneur. Marriage had not changed Jillian’s personality or lifestyle and both had worn him down. He had a good idea where she was-holed up with a boyfriend, on a bender, under the Carnegie bridge with a needle in her arm-and didn’t need that publicity. Having had a few days to think about it since making the original report, he now knew that he didn’t want her back, but as legal husband and nice guy felt obligated to keep up the pretense.
Or perhaps Theresa saw nothing but pain and deceit in her world these days, and this poor guy had made an effort to keep his self-possession while begging them to bring his wife back. Being left with an infant to raise wouldn’t make his busy days easier, and surely Jillian’s looks helped him tolerate any other foibles.
“Good-bye, Mr. Kovacic.” She left the room and the apartment, taking the stairs down.
Outside, the wind cut through her jacket in damp, knifelike slices. They were too close to Lake Erie to avoid the gusting air. Trees were bare, the sky an unrelenting gray. Patrons at the station across the street waited in their cars while gassing up. Unexpected sun in the morning had softened the top of the snow, but now it had frozen to a sheet of new ice once more, the inconsistency harder on living things than a low but steady clime would be. April wasn’t the cruelest month in Cleveland, Ohio. March was.
“What do you think?” Frank said, sauntering up to the unmarked police car, pulling his keys from his pocket and jangling them too loudly.
“About what? Whether this bimbo is coming back or not? How should I know?”
He waited for a truck to pass, then walked quickly into the street to the other side of the car. Once the doors had closed, he started the car before saying, “You saw the place. Neat, clean. She wasn’t some crack whore. The baby’s room is-”
“Immaculate,” Theresa said. “That could be the nanny, though. She must have been there all day every day for at least three days, right, if the husband’s been at work?”
“He works on the premises, but yeah, the babysitter’s been there. I didn’t find any trace of drugs,” Frank went on. “A little beer in the fridge, that’s it.”
“How did you get to look around the kitchen?”
“I had a few seconds while he went to see what you were doing. No prescription drugs in the kitchen cabinets or bathroom. Did you find anything in the bedroom?”
“I didn’t really look, just collected some underwear.”
He opened his mouth to make a comment, apparently remembered that Theresa was his first cousin, and shut it again. “I ran their financials too. Little bit of credit card debt-and who doesn’t have that these days?-and a car loan. I didn’t have time for more than the basic accounts, but when people run out it’s usually because of love or money.”
“Same reason they usually murder too.” She didn’t know why that popped out, since she doubted Jillian had left due to anything other than her own free will.
“Exactly,” Frank said.
He spoke as if she had proven some point of his, which irritated her. “Fine. Where is her car?”
“In their garage. The officer who took the original report said it was locked, no signs of damage, no signs of foul play.”
“And she’s not in the trunk,” she said.
“He checked.”
“Her purse? Cell phone? Any bank withdrawals?”
“Her purse is still there in the apartment. Phone, money, L’Oreal lipstick in Brilliant Pink still there. How about it, cuz? When was the last time you left home without your purse?”
“The third grade.”
“See why I think it’s weird? It’s as if she went out to get a paper and never came back.”
They passed Lakewood Park, and she watched the whitecaps kick up the surface of Lake Erie. At one time this case would have interested her, prompted her to a panoply of theories regarding the fate of Jillian Perry. But that was before watching her fiance bleed to death. Still, for Frank’s sake and to forestall that sympathetic look she had come to dread, she made an effort. “What about the nanny?”
“You’ve got a nasty, suspicious turn of mind,” he said, as if the fact delighted him. “Apparently Evan only hired her three days ago; she’s fifty-five and a friend of his mother’s. They never needed a babysitter before-they live at his company, and when Jillian worked, her jobs were mostly at night. I’ll look into it, though.”
They passed the Cleveland city limits, and Theresa grew tired of Jillian Perry and questions with no answers. “Okay. I’ve got DNA in case her body turns up. That’s all I can do for now, so let’s get back to the lab. I have to go over the clothes from that woman they found in the park yesterday, make up some more acid phosphatase reagent, run the FTIR samples, order more evidence tape, and maybe eat lunch before Leo comes up with something else to dump on me.”
“I’ll take you to lunch.”
She gave him a skeptical look. Her cousin could be generous to a fault in large ways, but had never in his life volunteered to pick up a check. “What do you want?”
“At Pier W. It’s on the water.”
Especially not at expensive restaurants. “I know where it is. We went there for my senior prom. What do you want?”
“The salty wind in your hair-”
“Lake Erie is freshwater, and glaciers give off warmer air at this time of the year. What do you want?”
“Come with me to talk to Georgie, Jillian’s boss. The escort-service guy.”
“I’m not a freakin’ cop, Frank. I’m a scientist. I work with microscopes and fibers. I don’t interrogate people, and not even lunch at Pier W is worth chatting with a pimp!”
“He’s not a pimp,” he corrected her, while pointedly missing the I-90 on-ramp. “He’s a businessman. Come on, this guy is never around women he can’t intimidate or pay off. He won’t know what to do with you sitting there.”
“Don’t you-”
