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.
CHAPTER 24
Of the knot of cars in the otherwise deserted parking lot, at least half had their engines running, patrol officers taking advantage of the tradition that their vehicles must be ever ready for action by keeping them ever warm. But Theresa had lived through the gas shortages of the late seventies and couldn’t bring herself to do that. Besides, Leo would have killed her if he’d found out.
She took nothing but her ID, her cell phone, and her ChapStick, and followed the chaotic trail of the shoe prints in the snow. At the crest of the hill, she saw figures conversing in pairs or triplets, standing by the marina entrance, the gas pumps, and lined up along the pier. The fifty-foot finger of dock that led to, among others, Drew’s houseboat remained clear.
As she grew closer, she noted Frank out on the pier and Evan standing with his lawyer near a group of what looked like plainclothes police officers. She meant to walk past the man without speaking, but he felt differently.
She had never been a physical girl, taking on running and scuba diving for their calorie-burning qualities only; otherwise, she never joined pickup games of baseball or touch football. But now she learned what a flying tackle was. Or at least what one felt like.
Evan struck her from the side, his momentum carrying them several feet before dropping her to the frozen ground. The snow provided very little cushion as his full weight flattened her, and her head managed to find the one narrow strip of concrete sidewalk in the area. The air left her lungs and threatened not to return. She could not comprehend his words as his face appeared above her, framed by the sky, which, she only now noticed, had turned blue.
With breath came hearing. “You bitch! You put him up to this! He’s going to kill my baby and it’s all your
