Her body moved, but the crime scene kit stayed on the outside of the fence, the legal side, and it took her another few moments to untangle the strap and convince it to follow her. She wondered what the residents of Birdtown would have thought of her if she had tried this one hundred years before, or what her Bohemian great- grandmother would say. Probably Come down from there this instant, young lady. Until she learned of a risk to the child, then it would be more like
These thoughts kept her mind off jumping the last six feet, her numb fingers no longer able to cling to the links. She scanned the property. She had entered from the far end of the factory grounds after parking on a side street called Magee. The covering of snow lay unbroken except for the triangular patterns of rabbits crisscrossing the expanse. She did not see any cameras at this end of the property and had never seen any outside cameras anyway, only inside. She trudged the seven hundred feet toward the second outbuilding, making little effort to keep out of sight. The brick structures hid her from the apartment building, and again, Evan would not have the manpower for surveillance. She felt certain he would be spending a quiet evening at home, free from witnesses, planning how best to announce the news of his stepdaughter’s tragic demise.
Or cleaning up any last trace of his wife’s murder, since a light shone inside the windows of her destination, building number two.
She pulled at one of the double doors, very gently, and watched for a while through the crack. Dim light from the ceiling lamps filtered down to the row of manufacturing equipment with the nitrogen hoods, but she did not see anyone inside.
The door opened several inches and stopped, chained from the inside. She set her burdens down to retrieve a bolt cutter from the backpack. The steel did not give easily, however, and after trying to cut the links, and then the padlock, she finally just loosened the coil of chain enough to create a gap no wider than ten inches. She managed to squeeze herself and her bags through it. Uncomfortably.
Inside, she entered the fenced area and tucked the crime scene kit behind one of the huge nitrogen tanks, then climbed to the catwalk. The windows were too high to look through, but at least she didn’t have to crawl below them to keep her figure from appearing in silhouette. From the hard case she removed the piece of equipment Chris had given her, affixing it to the corner of the railing with electrical tape. It took her a while, but this span of time convinced her that her arrival had gone unnoticed. Evan did not appear. If he had the camera’s monitor on, somewhere in the apartment building, he wasn’t paying attention to it.
The air felt cold, but the ancient radiators kept the temperature slightly higher than that of refrigerators. Freezing couldn’t be good for the equipment.
At the nitrogen tanks she took a moment to trace the path of the hoses on their way from the tanks to the manufacturing hoods, traveling beneath the grate in the floor. Then she retrieved her crime scene kit and approached the workstations.
There were manufacturing hoods in a row after the initial assembly area. They did not have gloves mounted in the sides for human hands but plenty of doodads inside to construct the circuit boards via computer. She had no idea how that would work and didn’t care. All she wanted to see was the inlet for the nitrogen gas.
The Plexiglas formed, now that she could examine it more closely, a tight fit. Jillian would not have had much room to move around, assuming she moved at all. But this meant there would have been ample opportunity for Jillian’s hair, skin, and the fibers of her clothes to catch on the belt and the robotic arms and the fittings. Theresa got out her camera.
This was the risky part. The flashes might show in the windows, alerting Evan to an intruder. However, the windows were awfully high, and only the rear windows in his apartment faced this building. As long as he hung out in his kitchen and living room, she should be all right. Unless Cara cried and he went to the nursery, of course. Unless he decided to leave the baby alone to come out and get some work done. Unless he retired early. After all, it had been quite a day for him. Then all he’d have to do would be to glance out his bedroom windows at the precise moment she snapped a photo.
She had to take the chance. Photographs might be her only evidence, and besides, to photograph before collecting had been too thoroughly ingrained for her to ignore.
A slight brushing sound startled her and she dropped to her knees, as if the row of equipment would hide her. Silly, since the row ran lengthwise through the building and she would be instantly visible on either side of it.
Nothing happened. Perhaps it had been the cat.
Perhaps Evan would stroll past the monitor and notice her working as the camera sent the images over the airwaves. She could have turned the cameras off or covered the lens with a glove, but had feared that a blank screen would be even more noticeable.
After some photographs of the general equipment, she got out a small halogen flashlight and opened a hood. The Plexiglas side swung silently into the air. First she examined the inside of the Plexiglas. If Jillian
Without any further discoveries, she repeated the process on the next hood. It proved cleaner than the first, so she returned to it. At least the first hood had a pink fiber, surely not a color that Evan wore. If it would only match Jillian’s polo shirt…
With her head thrust into the work area, a glistening spot on the frame caught her eye. The Plexiglas hood, when closed, fit into a metal track at the edge of the work area, and this track had a spot of oil or liquid about the size of a quarter. She rubbed it with a dry swab and packaged it, then repeated the process with a second swab. This she examined quickly before packaging. Tiny flecks of pigment stained the cotton, and it gave off the telltale whiff of phenol.
Suddenly some things made sense…or at least she had a theory. Skiers used light sticks for night activity. Glow sticks burst into light through a reaction of hydrogen peroxide and phenol, substances used similarly in DNA analysis. Evan would have been working in the dark, not wanting to draw attention to the factory’s lighted windows, with a light stick dangling around his neck, just as when snowboarding. He would have shoved Jillian into the hood and slammed it shut, catching the stick under the edge of the hood and cracking it. Then, when he pulled the unconscious Jillian from the hood, her arm brushed the liquid, leaving the stain on her sweatshirt.
Not conclusive, of course, but every little grain of circumstantial evidence could add up to a weight around Evan’s neck.
Then, under the belt, she found a hair. The end of it had wound around the pulley that guided the belt through a passageway into the next hood. She tried to untangle the thin strand, but even the Teflon tweezers couldn’t help her disassemble the mechanism.
The far door opened.
The hair broke.
Evan stood in the doorway, dressed in a bulky sweater and carrying a small black gym bag. He saw her instantly, and froze.
So did she.
The door swung shut behind him. The slight clap it gave as it closed seemed to her like the final beat of her heart, echoing into the empty night.
He set the bag down, slowly, without moving his head. He did not seem particularly surprised to see her, nor did he seem particularly disturbed. “Mrs. MacLean.”
She said nothing.
He took a step toward her, watching carefully, as if wondering when she would run and where. “What are you doing here?”
She did not run. “You know.”
“Collecting your precious trace evidence? Find anything?”
“Just the phenol from where you cracked your light stick.”
“Hmm.” Another step, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. “Yeah, I forgot about that. By the way, the cops standing there also heard you propound your theory. But I don’t see any of them here with a warrant.”
“No, you don’t.”
