Evidence of Murder

Jerry Graham stepped in from the cold. His jaw fell open, and for a moment no one moved. “Evan! What are you doing?”

“Help me!” Theresa shouted. She had not counted on Graham showing up, not at all. But perhaps neither had Evan.

“Grab her legs,” Evan instructed his partner.

“Evan-what? What are you doing?”

“She broke in here to get more evidence. She’s going to take Cara away.”

Theresa repeated, “Help me. He’s going to kill me, the same way he killed Jillian.”

Graham stared at his friend. “You killed Jillian?”

“This is our chance. Cara’s bank account will get us through the backstretch. We’re going to make it.”

“He’s going to kill Cara too, by smothering her in the nitrogen hood. She’s there in that bag.”

Jerry Graham’s gaze dropped to the small duffel at his feet, which rocked a bit. A faint wail did not convince him and he pulled the opening wide to see inside.

Then he straightened. Slowly.

“Evan,” he said, as if begging his partner to program all this code in a way that would make the picture clear. “Evan, come on.”

“Help us,” Theresa said again.

Evan’s grip on her had not loosened, not by a nanometer. “We need the money, Jerry. If Cannon had agreed to finance the factory as well as the game, we would have been okay. But there isn’t any other way to make the payments on this place and start up production on the sphere, and the game isn’t going to be done for two months, at best. You know that.”

Graham stared at him.

“This is our chance, Jerry. We’ll be on top. Your products, my code. Leading the world.”

Graham gave no sign of agreeing, disagreeing, or even comprehending.

“Help us,” Theresa said, despair gathering in the pit of her stomach, weighing her down.

“Now get her legs.”

Theresa hoped, as the man left Cara in the gym bag and came toward them, that he would help her. She continued to hope even as he paused to unlatch the nitrogen hood and raise its Plexiglas lid, and up until he came closer and bent down to grab her ankles.

Jerry Graham was not going to come to Cara’s rescue. He had made his decision.

She drew her legs in and used Evan as an anchor to punch Jerry with both feet. His breath came out in a whoosh and Evan stumbled backward, letting go of her arms to steady himself.

Remaining on her feet gave her a few seconds of lead time. She sped past the nitrogen hood and toward the open door. Leave Cara? Pick up Cara? She had to-but then they’d-

Evan tackled her, much as he had that morning. But this time she wouldn’t land on snow.

She fell forward with Evan on top of her, her line of sight reduced to a jumbled array of wall, door, and floor. Evan’s arms around her at least protected her elbows, but her already-sore left hip smashed into the concrete with a shattering jar and the last bit of momentum rolled up from her body and into her head. Helpless to stop the flow, her skull hit the floor with a smack of finality.

Her eyes closed.

She heard voices, oddly muffled. The light, through eyelids barely cracked, hurt her pupils. The moving blobs of color that initially greeted her sorted out into Evan and Jerry.

There was nothing wrong with her vision. Their images had that bit of distortion because she was looking up at them through Plexiglas.

Her knees were drawn up and pressed against the top of the hood, immobilizing her legs. The conveyor belt and its gears and pulleys bit into her spine from neck to hip. Her left temple throbbed, sending jolts of searing pain through her brain at random intervals. Surely she had fractured her skull. Perhaps it would help if she didn’t try to think.

Jerry ducked out of sight for a moment, but she heard his voice. “Have you thought this through?”

“Of course I haven’t thought it through. I didn’t expect her to be here!”

A draft started up next to Theresa’s head, ruffling her bangs ever so slightly. Moving her neck hurt too much, so she relied on her peripheral vision to see a round hole through the glass wall of the hood. The air swept over her face and disappeared into that hole. A vacuum. They were sucking the air from the hood. Next step would be flooding it with nitrogen gas.

Evan continued to grumble, “I thought that cousin of hers would sit on her, at least for tonight.”

Jerry came back into view on the other side of the hood. “They’re not going to believe another suicide. What are you going to do with her?”

Theresa’s throat began to feel dry, or perhaps it only felt that way because she knew her oxygen supply now slipped out of that small hole.

“We, partner. What are we going to do?”

“Fine, what are we-?”

“I’m thinking a car accident. We’ll go down to the Metroparks, drive her car into a ditch. The roads are slick and she was pissed off. She bashed her head on the steering wheel. Any bruises and other stuff will be attributed to the crash.”

“The pathology won’t match.”

“Yeah, but in the absence of any specific cause of death, they’ll eventually write it off as a fluke. Just like Jillian. All their tests will be negative, and you can’t prove a negative.”

She placed one weak hand against the Plexiglas, pushed. Evan’s gaze turned downward, to her, but he made no move to interfere.

She pressed. The glass didn’t move. The latch didn’t even rattle.

“Throw the valve,” he told his partner.

Jerry hesitated one last time. “Isn’t there any way-”

“Turn it!”

Jerry’s hands moved toward the regulator mounted on the side of the hood, and she heard the sibilant hissing sound of air rushing in. Or rather, not air, but the gas that snaked through the series of hoses that ran up the trench in the floor, secure underneath their gratings, and over to the huge storage tanks in the corner. The nitrogen tanks.

She pressed again, squirming. The hood did not move.

Evan watched her, looking into her eyes-to watch the life fade from them, or merely to ensure the completion of the next logical step in this process.

“What was that?” she heard Jerry ask.

Evan looked away from her. “What?”

“That flash.”

She closed her eyes.

CHAPTER 29

She heard their steps move away from the hood, toward the nitrogen tanks. Her right hand reached underneath her, pushed aside the rubber conveyor belt, and pulled out two items she had stored there. One was a flathead screwdriver, which she used to pop the hood latch loose from its hook while she pushed upward on the Plexiglas with her legs. With her left hand she continued to depress the shutter-release button on a tiny remote.

She rolled out of the hood, her worn tennis shoes making only the faintest slap against the concrete floor. Evan and Jerry were disappearing into the group of nitrogen tanks, their backs to her. She probably should have waited until they were completely out of sight, but she would not have that much time. Everything depended on the next three seconds.

Nestled in a dark corner behind the nitrogen tanks, her camera took a flash photograph every time she