Frank said, “Yeah, and one of their employees slipped her his number. Maybe Jillian did take on side jobs.”

“Why? She obviously didn’t need the money. It could have been for a number of reasons, for that matter-a future contact for Georgie, or even Evan. He’s sponsoring a tech show at the factory tomorrow. I got that off his Web site.” As her aunt lit tiny pastel candles, Theresa asked, “What if Drew tried to get custody of Cara?”

“Applied for guardianship? Why would he do that? Does he want the baby?”

“Probably not. He seemed more interested in Jillian than her child.”

“He’d have to prove that Evan is unfit, or at least that he’d be a better guardian than Evan would.” He sneaked a finger into the frosting before his aunt could slap it away.

“You haven’t heard him discourse on the many ways in which he truly loved Jillian and Evan truly didn’t.”

“He’ll need more than that. This guy sounds like a loony tune.”

“He’s harmless,” Theresa said, but without conviction.

“Jeesh, Tess, how do you figure that? What you’ve described sounds exactly like your classic call-twenty- times-a-day, leave-notes-on-your-car stalker.”

She knew this to be correct, but still felt oddly protective of the weepy man. “Because I dated guys like him. Nerdy, sweet, too shy for their own good. The biggest mistake I made was marrying the one who wasn’t nerdy and shy. I don’t think Drew’s dangerous.”

Frank considered this, since he had met every boy she had ever dated, but still shook his head. “You don’t know that. Obsession can be a very dangerous thing.”

They paused to sing “Happy Birthday,” a chorus of happy and only slightly off-key voices. Theresa stammered through the third line; she had forgotten whose birthday it was, but consoled herself with the thought that the lack of oxygen in the room had starved her brain cells.

The birthday girl ripped into the wrapping paper like a human chain saw. Theresa’s aunt returned to cut the cake. Theresa didn’t envy her the job of dividing the swirls of colored frosting among close to fifteen panting children with strong views on the particular decoration to which they were entitled. She turned again to Frank. “Yes, obsession can turn violent. But so can greed, and the idea of that much money makes me look at Jillian’s marriage in a new light. What happened when you told Evan?”

“I said we found her body, he started crying, that was about it. I offered victim-assistance services, he declined. He asked all the standard questions, where, when, how did she get there. The usual.”

“And he said she disappeared while he was at work on Monday?”

“Yeah. She was doing the breakfast dishes when he left at nine thirty, gone when he got home about three.”

“What had she been wearing?”

“He couldn’t remember. At least not when I spoke to him today-it might be mentioned in the initial missing- person report.”

“Strange.”

“Not really. Do you remember what Rachael wore to school today?”

Theresa handed a slice of cake to a redheaded boy. “The same shirt she has on now, but her black jeans, which are way too tight and I hate them.”

“Yeah, but you’re female. I wouldn’t be able to recall what my date wore the last time I went out even if you promised me Indians tickets to do it.”

“But you’re not married to her,” Theresa argued.

“Married?” the aunt asked.

“Indians tickets?” the redheaded boy asked. Theresa stuck a fork in his cake for him to use and ushered the next child forward.

She said again, “It just seems weird. This guy marries an escort who’s had someone else’s child, someone else’s very wealthy child, and three weeks after the wedding the wife is dead?”

Frank snagged a piece for himself, earning a glare from the next child in line. “Am I missing something here? Jillian wasn’t murdered.”

“We don’t know that yet.”

“You said yourself there wasn’t a mark on her. She committed-” A sharp glance from their aunt stopped him. Children’s birthday parties were not the place to discuss suicide. “She did it herself.”

Theresa persisted, disinclined to stifle herself for a traditional family gathering. The last traditional family gathering she had attended had been Paul’s funeral, and memories of the warmth, the crowd, the discomfort filtered back to her. “I won’t be positive until the toxicology results come back. What if she had too much stuff in her bloodstream to walk, much less walk two miles?”

“If she did, I’ll look into it. Until then, there’s nothing I can do. You really think the husband murdered her?”

“He said ‘had.’”

“Beg pardon?”

“When I complimented the decorating. He said Jillian had talent, not has talent. We didn’t even know she was dead and he’s already using the past tense?”

“Some people always mix up their tenses.”

“True. And I’m not discounting that this Drew guy worshipped a woman who just married another man. But a million and a half is one heck of a motive.”

“Evan Kovacic seems to have plenty of money, and according to the tech geeks at work, he will soon have so much of it he could buy IBM.”

“Yeah, I figured that out from his Web site too. Apparently Cleveland has become the Silicon Valley of the East, lots of companies I’ve never heard of and can’t figure out what they do. Hence the career day tomorrow.”

“A million and a half is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what investors have given him. I’d still bet on Georgie-he always gets my radar pinging. But I can’t do anything for the next day or two. The chief put me on the Cultural Gardens homicide because Sanchez and O’Malley are swamped, so I’ve got fifteen witnesses to interview tomorrow.”

The last child stepped up, a look of disappointment on her face to see that all the pink roses had already been claimed. “I know it’s unlikely for all those reasons, but just suppose for one minute that somehow Evan killed his wife for Cara’s bank account. What now? If he’s automatically Cara’s next of kin and he’s willing to kill for money, where does that leave this kid’s life expectancy?”

“That’s quite a leap.” Nevertheless, he wore an unhappy expression as he folded up his paper plate. He didn’t like coincidences any more than Theresa did, and a strange death occurring in conjunction with an overwhelming motive was one hell of a coincidence.

“I mean, do you know how easy it is to kill an infant? You just put a pillow over its face. You don’t even have to press down.”

A ripple of silence moved outward from the aunt and the girl with the last piece of cake, to the children playing cards nearby, to Theresa’s mother and two cousins seated on the couch. If suicide did not seem an appropriate topic for a child’s birthday party, infanticide ranked somewhere off the charts.

Theresa gulped, grateful she had grown too old to be sent to her room.

The snow drifted down in small but constant flakes, bursting into brilliant white under the streetlights but fading to a hazy gray as it receded into the dark. It would have been pretty if Theresa hadn’t been trying to drive in it. She hit the brakes a little too hard for a red light and slid the last three feet to the stop line.

“Your aunt Claire asked me about that boy you found in the woods,” her mother, Agnes, said.

“Mmm.” Sometimes Theresa told her mother and daughter more than she should about open cases. Sometimes she said nothing and hoped they wouldn’t catch the news that day. Child deaths always fell into the latter group.

“She wanted to know if it had anything to do with the girl in the Cultural Gardens.”

“Huh? No, of course not-that wasn’t a girl but a grown woman, and she was strangled. The boy wasn’t.”

“But they were both outside, propped up against something. And now you’ve got this third woman. Claire thinks it might be a serial killer.”

“Claire’s imagination is running away with her.”

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