Free Evidence of Murder by Lisa Black

his shoulder. People had opted out of much less screwed-up lives than hers. Every year more people killed themselves than were killed by others. She started to push off the conference table with both hands. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Fleming, but you will not be able to claim the body, unless Mr. Kovacic decides not to—”
    “You’re not listening,” Drew Fleming said flatly. Coldly. The weepiness evaporated from his eyes and they turned to ice in less time than it took her to notice. He enunciated his words, as if for someone not very bright. “I have a pretty plot in Riverside, under a tree, that she can have. Evan will just cremate her—and that will destroy all the evidence.”
    Theresa had stopped halfway through the act of rising, her body obeying the instinct to retreat from the odd man, knees half bent in a way that worked her thighs. “Evidence of what?”
    He couldn’t maintain the icy control, and the timbre of his voice climbed upward. “Murder! Evan murdered her, of course!”
    “What makes you say—”
    “Why else would she be here? That’s what you investigate, right? Murders?”
    “The medical examiner’s office investigates all deaths, Mr. Fleming, natural deaths, homicides, suicides—”
    His hands, on the table, clenched into fists. “He murdered her.”
    She tried to speak gently. Fleming seemed to be more tightly wound than could be considered healthy, both for himself and others. “We will know more when all the tests are completed, Mr. Fleming, but it appears that Jillian died of exposure. No one harmed her.”
    This did not convince him. In fact, her words did not even seem to penetrate. Fine, straight hair fell in his face as he shook his head. His skin had been white from the cold when he first arrived and hadn’t grown any rosier during his visit, only emphasizing the deep blue irises and red veins in his eyes. “I don’t know how he did it, but he did. Don’t let him fool you. He fooled her too, at first.”
    She worked to hold on to her patience. “Why would Evan Kovacic want to kill his wife, Mr. Fleming?”
    Again the stare, the aura of surprise at how little she knew about the life of Jillian Perry, at her seeming incuriosity about a woman who had apparently been the most fascinating woman to ever walk the planet. “You mean you don’t know about the money?”
    “What money?”
    A touch of color finally pricked his skin, a pinkish hue almost like a faint glow of triumph. “Sit down.”
    She sat.
     
     
     

Chapter 7
     
     
    “So get this,” Theresa told Frank while shifting her niece’s one-year-old to her other hip. She had driven directly from work to her cousin’s middle child’s tenth birthday party in Parma, and now stood in an overwarm, overcrowded house with a marauding horde of sugar-crazed children, a passel of widowed aunts, and the harried generation—her generation—caught in between. As long as she ignored the claustrophobic air, the warmth felt good, and her mother beamed to see her at a family function. She had avoided far too many of them in the past nine months, and family was everything to her mother. Everything.
    “Jillian’s grandparents left a huge amount of money to her baby, Cara. Like a million and a half huge.”
    Frank shoveled another spoonful of potato salad into his mouth despite having made the comment earlier that potato salad was a summer dish and there was something weird about eating it in March. “So Jillian was rich? Then she didn’t marry for the money.”
    Theresa’s niece reappeared and collected her son. He took a handful of Theresa’s hair with him, but at least the danger of a spit-up had passed. Theresa began to rethink the glories of a large family gathering. “According to Drew, she’s never drawn on the money. It’s sitting in an account, waiting for Cara. Jillian paid her bills with her salary from Beautiful Girlz. Her parents disowned her, more or less. They didn’t care for her choice of careers, and