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.”
“They didn’t believe you, did they?”
“They didn’t think a judge would feel strongly enough about it.”
“Poor, poor Theresa. First your fiancé gets killed, your one fan drowns, and now your coworkers think you’ve lost your mind. You’ve been abandoned on all sides, haven’t you? You can’t prove I killed Jillian. You’ll never be able to prove I killed Jillian.”
“I know.”
He blinked.
She didn’t wait for him to catch up. “I know now that I can’t prove it. Hairs and fibers don’t mean a thing because you cohabitated. The plaster that settled to the bottom of your snowboard bag when you knocked it into the wall removing her from the apartment, that could have gotten into Jillian’s pockets during some home-improvement project. The blackberry bush caught on your snow pants and ripped some Tencel fibers off, putting you in the woods by Jillian’s body, but we have lots of skiers in this area who might own pants like those. The diatoms from your car tires can be found in any lakeside parking lot. I’m sure you threw out the sleeping pills.”
He said nothing.
“But it doesn’t matter in the long run. Death by nitrogen suffocation can’t be physically proved, not at this point. I can’t prove murder.”
He watched her without expressing the slightest sign of relief at her admission of failure.
“At least not in a criminal court.”
He no longer came toward Theresa, but stayed between her and the door, a tower of muscle and flesh. She didn’t move anything but her mouth in case it startled him into attacking, like a cobra or a rabid dog.
His curiosity won out. “What are you doing here, then?”
“Remember O.J.?”
“Huh?”
“I said I couldn’t prove murder in a criminal court. A civil court, however, is quite different. Almost everything is admissible, and even more so in family court, where the only concern is the well-being of the children. I didn’t have enough to win Cara’s freedom during your first round at guardianship. I will have enough for the second. I have Jillian’s means of death, a death that could only have been engineered by you. I have the fibers I just collected from the hood. Most important, I have Cara’s father.”
Lot’s wife, formed into a salt sculpture, couldn’t have been any more still. She could swear Evan had stopped breathing. With his voice strangled and low, he asked, “Cara’s father was some john. Jillian didn’t even know which-”
“Jillian didn’t have johns. She had knights in shining armor who would take her back to their castle to love and live, happily every after. At least that was what she hoped, but until you-or so she thought-it had never happened. The knight she tried out before you fathered Cara. Nicholas Cannon. Your source of capital. Attendee of numerous trade shows and meet-and-greet cocktail parties, keeping an eye on his investments, scouting out new ones.”
Evan seemed to absorb this in the blink of an eye, without it angering or even annoying him. “Interesting. But he doesn’t know, right?” “According to Vangie, his armor was tarnished when Jillian realized he did not have marriage in mind. He didn’t consider her a queen or a princess or anything but a reasonably priced consort to help him get over the death of his wife. Jillian gave up. One month later she told Georgie about her pregnancy. Let’s put two and two together here. You’re the engineer, you should be able to do that.”
“So can a financier. Jillian pushed out a kid who might be his and he doesn’t even ask about it? Obviously he doesn’t care.”
“But did he know? I’m guessing you don’t talk about your-family-much in the work setting. Too busy showing off, a wunderkind, a bad boy playa of the digital world. Cannon might know about Cara. Then again, he might not.”
Her chattiness on the topic finally caught his attention. “You haven’t told him.”
“I plan to, tomorrow morning-”
“What makes you think I’m going to let you walk out of here?”
“-unless we can come to an arrangement.”
Finally, surprise. “You want to make a deal?”
“I’ll apply for guardianship myself. Let me take Cara, and you keep the money. As her guardian I will invest it in your company on her behalf. You’ll be able to pay Griffin Investments what you owe them for financing the factory. By the time she’s twenty-one, that account will be ancient history and Cara will never know it existed. Once that is taken care of, we can see if a paternity test proves my theory, and if Cannon wants to be a father to his daughter. Even if he doesn’t, Cara will still be alive and you won’t have a baby on your hands.”
He considered this. For about ten seconds. “You want to make a deal.”
“You want the money. I want Cara and myself to live past this evening. Everyone wins.”
Another long pause as he thought. Examining all the angles. Probing for booby traps. Then he said, “That’s like asking Alastair to make a deal with the vampires. There can only be one winner.”
“This isn’t a stupid game, Evan!”
The gym bag on the floor trembled and let out a soft coo.
“You’re right,” Evan said. “It isn’t.”
Theresa felt the blood drain from her face so quickly the skin seemed to burn. She had been right. She hadn’t even known how right she was. “You brought her out here to kill her.”
“First things first,” he said, and lunged.
CHAPTER 28
She had time to turn back and start to run toward the opposite door, remembering too late that she hadn’t gotten the chain off and it would take her too long to negotiate the gap. He would be on her long before that. That left the catwalk, or the cage around the nitrogen tanks. Over the sound of her frenzied breathing she could hear his pounding steps behind her, and knew she’d never make it up the steps ahead of him.
With one outstretched hand she pulled the wire-mesh gate closed behind her. It slammed shut with enough force to shake the wall of fencing and the catwalk it was attached to overhead. It shook again as Evan slammed into it from the other side.
Nose to nose through the loose chain link, he said, “You’ve got nowhere to go.”
“Maybe this castle has a secret passageway,” she hissed.