“-when you know I can’t do it. You still have no probable cause. Certainly nothing that happened today implicates Evan, only the extremely unstable Drew Fleming. And personally, I’m not convinced that a guy that obsessed wouldn’t eventually get fed up and strike out at the object of his obsession.”
“It wasn’t Drew! It was Evan!” She watched Evan walk away, his back firmly turned on the entire incident, the prize in his arms. A prize worth a million and a half, enough to keep his empire afloat until the income from the new game began to roll in. She started after him. “We have to get that baby away from him right now.”
Frank moved forward with her, but held her elbow to keep her from outpacing him. “Don’t be ridiculous. Kovacic doesn’t need the baby dead to get at her money, and any judge would want more than a theory to have her removed.”
Chris, always the diplomat, added, “Besides, he’d be crazy to do anything to the kid now, and from what you’ve been saying, he’s anything but crazy.”
“That’s exactly the argument he would make if it came to trial, that he would never do anything so stupid. Maybe he’ll even say it’s his fault, that he put her to sleep on her stomach or he put her in his own bed and rolled onto her, but he’s had so much trauma lately that he couldn’t sleep and-add in crocodile tears for the media, and it will be a performance worthy of the red carpet. All he has to do is pop her into his easy-bake nitrogen oven and he’s all set. Instant crib death.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Can you keep him busy for a few hours while I look at the factory?”
Frank stopped trying to walk, spun her in a one-quarter turn and grabbed both her arms. “Evan did not kill Paul. Do you understand me? Evan did not kill Paul.”
The world seemed to pause. Even the biting wind off the lake seemed to quell itself. “What did you say?”
“I’m saying maybe a vendetta is easier to deal with than grief. I don’t know if you’re right or wrong-maybe Evan is some kind of master criminal-but I know that some fights you win and some you lose, Tess. We lost this one.”
She felt her face begin to crumple, but he would not relent, saying only, “Come on, let’s get in my car. Your ears have turned white.”
Both men tugged at her arms, and her worn shoes slid along the snowy ground. “But-what about Drew?”
“They’re doing all they can,” Chris reminded her, and indeed she heard the distant wuffwuffwuff sound of an approaching helicopter.
Evan had almost reached the end of the seawall, ready to step onto the solid ground of Whiskey Island. He turned there, and glanced back. Even at that distance she could feel the slap of his gaze as it found her.
For the first time that day, she began to shiver.
Theresa went home. Half a workday remained, but she didn’t care. Leo could fuss all he wanted, but she couldn’t imagine what she would be able to do at work if she did return. She had failed. Evan had Cara and there was nothing she could do about it.
Her mother plied her with oxtail soup.
Theresa thought, ate, and spoke with the detachment of extreme intoxication but without the corresponding euphoria. “I thought you served chicken soup for colds. Oxtail is for flesh wounds.”
“You seem wounded enough to me,” Agnes said.
“Mom.” Theresa had to focus on the words to get them out. “When Dad died-”
She paused for so long that her mother, as always, helped her out. “I had you. You and Jackie and David. I got through it. You will too.”
After her mother set off for an afternoon shift at the restaurant, Theresa took a cup of tea to her kitchen table and did nothing. Absolutely nothing.
By the time a knock sounded at her door, the tea had grown cold and her knees, drawn to her chin, had stiffened into place. It took her a minute to stand up, then another to walk with a numb bottom and a sore hip, and another to order her overprotective Lab into the basement. In the meantime, the person knocked again.
Chris Cavanaugh stood there, his face carefully composed into a mask of bad news.
She didn’t ask, merely waited.
“They found his body.”
“Oh.” She did not move, her hand on the knob. Her mind formed the intention of telling him that while it was nice of him to tell her personally, it did not mean that he needed to stick around, but her body confounded this intention by erupting into sobs. They began in her stomach and moved up to her face, until the tears, heated by rage, seemed to burn her skin.
Chris reached for her, but she managed to avoid him by stumbling blindly around her kitchen until she reached a counter. With her back to him, she choked out, “I really need you to leave.”
“I think you could use some company,” he suggested, his voice disturbingly close, behind her.
She gripped the Formica. “No. Thank you.”
It seemed to take forever for him to think this over, or perhaps it only seemed that way because a mental image came to mind of Drew’s limp body reeled into shore like a piece of flotsam, useless detritus that no one wanted, and this time the sobs convulsed her, bending her body until her forehead knocked against the dishes in the strainer.
“The hell with that,” she heard Chris say, and found her body gently turned until her face rested against his shoulder, his arms across her back, one of his hands in her hair.
It took a while for her heartbeat to slow until it nearly matched his, and her lungs to take in enough air to breathe in a more or less normal manner. But tears continued to come each time she pictured hopeless, hapless Drew, lying still on the frozen riverbank.
She made one last effort. “You can let go of me now.”
“In another minute.”
Always the negotiator. Well, didn’t the most effective negotiations involve both give and take?
“Chris, I need a favor.”
“Really?”
His fingers moved gently through her hair, and she wished he’d stop that even though it felt-“I need to borrow something.”
She heard a door open and shut, and before she could ponder why that might be and whether she should open her eyes and do something about it, Chris said, “Hi. I’m-”
“The hostage guy,” she heard Rachael say. “I remember.”
CHAPTER 27
Theresa threaded a strap through the handle of a crime scene kit and slung it over one shoulder, leaving her hands free. Then she began to climb. The worn tennis shoes that had served her so ill on the ice were an advantage here, allowing her toes to fit into the small diamonds of space in the chain-link fence. She slipped at least every other time, but made it to the top.
She had never understood why people considered barbed-wire fences so impenetrable. She had gotten over one with ease at seventeen, simply by noticing that the wire had a break at the opening, where the gate swung freely. She hadn’t been breaking into a place, of course, she’d been sneaking out of a roller rink, but…she wondered if Rachael knew how to get over a barbed-wire fence, and resolved not to ask.
Long before she reached the top, three things became clear to her: She had not been wearing heavy winter clothing the last time, she had not been carrying at least forty pounds of equipment in a backpack and a hard case, and she was no longer seventeen years old.
Not to mention the fact that her left hip still ached from falling off Drew’s houseboat.
She got her toes settled on the top of the gatepost and used the support to lift her leg over the three remaining rows of wire. Then she very carefully worked in reverse to swing her body onto the carbon company grounds. Very carefully. Layers of winter clothing protected her from the barbs, but if she slipped, they would cut her face to ribbons.
