triggered the shutter via the remote. She kept her finger pressed down now, without release, hoping to slow their progress by blinding them.
They found this exasperating, to judge from their annoyed shouts; the noise evidently covered the sound of her feet as she reached the mesh gate, swung it shut, closed the hasp, and locked it with a padlock-which had been the second item hidden beneath the conveyor belt.
“Hey!” she heard Jerry say, but not because he realized her treachery. More likely he had found the end of the rubber hose that ran from the second nitrogen tank to the manufacturing hood. She had sliced through it upon her arrival.
“It’s a camera,” Evan said, and she heard a crashing sound that made her wince. Leo would make her pay for that Canon, and they didn’t come cheap.
Then she turned and walked to the entrance. Cara had begun to fuss, but quieted when Theresa removed her from the gym bag and warmed the infant against her shoulder. Behind her, the chain link rattled with fury.
She turned. Evan pulled at the fence as if he could rip it down with his bare hands. He couldn’t, of course; it had stood thus since before he was born. She watched for a moment to see if they might find some way out she hadn’t anticipated, but they didn’t. The fencing extended thirty feet upward, to the catwalk, and ended in a ceiling of more mesh.
Theresa pulled her cell phone out of her sock and called Frank. He asked rather more questions than she considered necessary but eventually assured her that both the Lakewood and Cleveland police would be there in five.
Her two prisoners were surprisingly quiet. Evan stared at her as if still blinded by the camera’s flash. She moved to the center of the floor so she would not have to shout, but stayed far enough away to have a head start. Just in case.
“The cops will arrive in a few minutes,” she told them.
“How-? How did you-?”
She patted the baby’s back. “It’s like this-you remember how on the second level of the castle you find out you have to have the silver ax and so you go all the way through the first level again looking for it before you finally ask the dwarf and find out the silver ax is in the second-level dining room all along, behind the queen’s portrait?”
He stared.
“I decided to plant my weapons in advance.”
“And take out the nitrogen,” Jerry muttered.
“Yeah, that too. What’s ironic, Evan, is that you might have killed me anyway by turning on the vacuum and sucking out the oxygen. But once Jerry opened the regulator to what should have been your murder weapon, I became supplied with all the clean air I needed.” She didn’t add that she had not counted on Jerry being there, and if one of them had stayed with her while the other investigated the camera flashes, she might now be dead. Of course, if Jerry had not proved as murderous as his partner, the camera diversion would not have been necessary.
“Lucky for me I can fake dazed and helpless. Jillian really was helpless when you put sleeping pills in, what, her dinner? Did she pass out or just get sleepy enough to go to bed? Then you redressed her, neglecting to tuck her polo shirt into her jeans, underneath the sweatshirt-which, by the way, is how most women dress themselves in cold weather. Then you brought her out here. What did you do, lower the oxygen levels until she couldn’t have regained consciousness if she wanted to, then left her alive long enough for the pills to metabolize and indicate a lower dose? I think that’s what the jury will find most heinous, how you let her lie in there for hours, allowing her blood chemistry to destroy the evidence. Hours during which you could have changed your mind. What did you do? Watch TV? Play Minesweeper?”
“Jillian was a whore! Nobody cared about her! Not even you-I saw it on your face when you first came to the apartment. You were there, what, five minutes?”
Theresa nodded, accepting her culpability in the previous events.
“I hadn’t gotten rid of anything yet. I hadn’t washed the snowboard bag or thrown out the towels I used to wrap her arms-”
She interrupted. “Why? So that the rubber bands wouldn’t leave bruises?”
“Or the sleeping pills. I left them right in the medicine cabinet, hiding in plain sight. But you never looked.”
What she had said before remained true, that none of these things would have seemed suspicious even if she had noticed them, not without the additional information from Jillian’s body. But, as before, this did not comfort her. “No. I didn’t.”
“Evan-” Jerry Graham said.
“Shut up. She still can’t prove it. Let the cops show up. This woman’s deranged and traumatized, and it’s our word against hers-and there are two of us. Just shut up.”
Theresa shifted Cara to her other shoulder, catching the distant wail of a police car siren. “No, there’s the video too.”
This did not cow Evan, it merely confused him. “What?”
“Your surveillance tape. You have two cameras mounted in the corners of this building. Your assault on me has been caught by electric eye. Your own electric eye.”
“Good luck. Those files are password protected.”
“They’re also transmitted by remote. Running wires in this ancient building would have been too difficult, wouldn’t it? Do you know-well, I’m sure you do, given what you do for a living-that wireless video can be intercepted by another router? I borrowed one from a friend who uses it for hostage situations. Of course I told him I needed it to tape my daughter’s school talent show tonight without paying forty dollars to the PTA. I also had to promise to have dinner with him, but that’s another story.”
“What are you
“Ever sit in your backyard with your laptop and use your neighbor’s expensive wireless DSL? I did something similar, I have to confess. Your surveillance video is showing up on the laptop in my car, and being recorded by same.”
“Really,” Evan said, displaying a ghost of his trademark smirk. “Are you sure about that?”
“I saw this interior plain as day before I scaled your fence.”
He nodded. “Not bad. Unfortunately for you I turned the cameras off before I came out here. You have no video. You have no proof.”
Theresa nodded and patted the baby’s bottom. “That was probably wise of you, given what you had in mind. I had a bad feeling you might. After all, Captain Alastair shoots a spear into the raven guarding the east hallway to keep him from squawking while he plants the dynamite in the rain barrel. Same concept.”
Evan’s smirk began, reluctantly, to recede. “So-”
“So I installed a backup. It’s up there.” She swung one arm wide, pointing to the corner of the building behind her. If they looked closely, they would see the small camera taped to the catwalk railing. The police car siren sounded close enough to be in the parking lot. In fact, it sounded close enough for the car to come through the wall any moment now. “I had to borrow that from my friend too. I hope that doesn’t add a lunch or something.”
“Another camera,” Evan said quietly, as if to himself.
“Plus, mine is better. It has sound as well as video.”
Jerry’s legs gave out and he sank in slow motion to the floor. Evan, on the other hand, straightened up.
“I learned from you, Evan. Think of every possibility and plan for it. Take risks when they’re necessary”-Theresa shifted the baby to her arms, feeling her own face crack in a smile at seeing the tiny girl’s wide eyes and rosebud lips-“and they’re worth it. You do that in your game. You did that in your murder. You really made only one mistake.”
As the door burst open behind her, letting in the frozen air and the sound of running feet, Evan asked, “And what was that?”
She told him, “You pissed me off.”
She slipped into the thinly cushioned seat next to her mother just as the lights in the auditorium dimmed after the intermission.
“You didn’t miss her. There are four acts before her and her friends.”
