First Class Killing (20 page)

When he got to the close-ups of her face, I reached up and touched the bruises on my throat. Her nose was broken, and she had a gash that looked as if she’d bitten through her lower lip. One eye was pinched shut by the cauliflowered mass around it, but the other gazed out from behind dark and bruised tissue.

“Harvey…”

“She died of a broken neck.” He continued with the parade of grotesque images.

That her spine had been snapped at its most vulnerable point was obvious from the awkward way her head hung from her shoulders. An unbroken arc of pale skin pressed against the smooth curve of muscles and tendons that ran from the base of her left ear to the hollow of her throat. Absent blood and bruises, it gleamed under the camera’s flash, obscenely undamaged to be hiding such a catastrophic rupture beneath. My heart shuddered against its vulnerability, this last part of her that still looked like her, offered up by the exaggerated tilt of her head, undefended by arms that lay still at her sides.

I reached over and stopped him from putting any more down. “Harvey, enough.”

He stared down at me, looking more vigorous than I had ever seen him. His strength was fueled by his anger. I had waited until I had flown back to Boston from Chicago to give him the news of my attack, thinking it might go better in person. I might have been wrong about that.

“How could you not tell me? How could you keep this from me? Why did you not call me right away?”

“I didn’t want to upset you.”

“A large man attacked you in your hotel room in a strange city and tried to kill you. Why would that upset me? I told you your plan was too risky.”

I wanted to pull my feet up in the chair and curl myself around my legs. This day had already been difficult enough. I had worked my trip home as scheduled, moving through a world of strangers like a big, raw nerve, wondering which of them might, without warning, raise a hand or a weapon and try to hurt me. It had taken a lot of energy. I wasn’t sure I had enough in reserve to properly defend my incautious and possibly stupid behavior.

“You told me the fake date was too risky. This was something different. Besides, he wasn’t trying to kill me.”

“Alex, please.” He took a step back to lean against his desk. “Even you cannot be this obtuse.”

“There was something odd about this whole thing. He left me on the bed, Harvey. After I passed out—”

“After he choked you to unconsciousness.”

“—he put me on my bed with my head on a pillow, and he left a glass of water for me on the nightstand.”

“How gracious. A turndown service to go with the strangling.”

“He was there to deliver a message, one that made no sense to me. He said he wanted me to leave someone alone, a guy named Arthur Margolies, and to destroy the videos. I looked up Arthur Margolies. He’s a big frequent flier on OrangeAir out of Chicago.”

“So?”

“I think he was after Monica and not me.”

“What? Why?”

“I think he’s a client of the hooker ring—of Monica’s, specifically—and I think she’s trying to extort him using videos. Probably sex videos.” I looked up at him. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“None of this makes sense.”

“Maybe not, but I have to try to make sense of it so I can continue to function. I don’t think this guy was after me, which means I don’t think he will come after me. That’s important.”

He crossed his arms and hunched his shoulders. He didn’t look to be in the mood for new theories. He liked the one where we all stayed locked in our houses afraid for our lives, because that was more or less what he did every day anyway. “You believe the last-minute switch confused your attacker?”

“I believe he was set up on the trick, the man who was supposed to be hiring Monica for the evening. How, I don’t know. Maybe he had inside information that Reverend Cole was her scheduled date. It would have been easy enough for someone to check his reservation and see what hotel he’d booked. The big guy saw me come out, followed me to my hotel, and attacked me—by mistake. I got a message that was supposed to be for Monica.”

He reached down and began kneading the muscles in his thigh. “What does Monica say?”

“Good question. She was supposed to work the trip home with us, but suddenly she’s on emergency leave. I’m pretty sure he was after her and not me, and she knows it.”

“Do you think she switched dates on purpose?”

“I don’t know. I plan to ask her.”

I looked over and saw that his leg was beginning to shake. It started quietly but quickly turned into a jack-hammer. He gripped his balky quadriceps with both hands. I jumped up and tried to give him the closest seat—mine—but he wanted to go around to his desk chair. I helped him around the desk and held his chair so it wouldn’t swivel as he sat down in it.

“Are you all right?”

He nodded, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his forehead. I went back to my seat, and the two of us sat in silence. The only sound was the sharp ticking of the old mantel clock that kept perfect time because Harvey wound it religiously. His great-grandfather, a clockmaker, had brought it from Poland.

“This man,” he said quietly, “he could have done worse to you.”

“But he didn’t. I’m fine.”

“Alex.” He folded his handkerchief, looking more bereft than angry. “Am I so little comfort to you?”

I sank back into my seat and closed my eyes. I was mentally, physically, emotionally, and every other possible way exhausted. Did he really want to talk about this now?

“Please,” he insisted. “Say what you are thinking.”

I had to work hard to figure out what I was thinking and how much of it I could say. “I care about you, Harvey, and I hate seeing you this way. I didn’t call you because I didn’t want you sitting here by yourself in the dark…worrying.”

“You were afraid you would make me sick?” His eyes blinked rapidly, and I could tell by the way he tried to hold himself that his body was still in turmoil. “My disease causes my symptoms, not you. Let me make my small contribution, even if it is only to sit in my house by the phone and worry about you.”

“That’s not your only contribution.” It was hard for me to look at him. He was trying in his clumsy way to talk about something important, to sort out our roles and what we were to each other and maybe what we should be. It made me want to be truthful. “I didn’t call anyone, Harvey.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I never do. When I’m in trouble, I deal with it myself. It’s not you. It has nothing to do with you being sick. I’m just not someone who takes comfort easily from anyone. I’ve always been that way. I can give it, but I never learned how to take it.” I wanted again to pull my feet up into the chair. This time I did it. “It’s one reason I’m still alone.”

He let out a sigh that seemed to calm him. “I suppose we have that in common, then.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way, but he was right. Harvey bristled at the thought of accepting help from anyone. “You are important to this case,” I said. “You are important to me. While I’m out there, I’m always asking myself, what would Harvey think? Mostly it’s in the sense of ‘Harvey will kill me if I do this.’ ” That elicited a hesitant grin. “I don’t take direction well, and I always think I’m right about everything, but that doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

He seemed all right with that. I waited a few moments to make sure. Sometimes it took him a few minutes to get his thoughts out. He was still; he wasn’t shaking anymore, and his breathing was steady. The subject seemed to be closed. Thank goodness.

I pulled one of Robin’s pictures back in front of me. “What’s the story with this? I thought it was a homeless man.”

“The official story was that Robin Sevitch went out for a long walk, roamed too close to a dangerous area, and was beaten to death by this homeless man. He was convicted.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “There are doubts in some quarters, however, that he was, indeed, the guilty party.”

“Really?” I put my feet down on the floor and sat up straight. “What did you find out?”

“I told you I had a hard time getting anyone to talk to me.”

“Right, right. Civic black eye and all that. How did you get the file?”

“The gentleman who was the lead detective on the case is now a private investigator. He kept his own file. He suspected Miss Sevitch was murdered by someone she knew. He thinks it was a trick, but he was pressured heavily to go with the homeless theory, and ultimately the man confessed.”

“Who pressured him?”

“It was never clear to him where it came from. He went to great lengths to impress upon me that the Omaha PD is a conscientious and professional organization. This was not a case of incompetence.”

“Was she robbed?”

“All of her money and identification was in her hotel room.”

“Was she raped?”

“It did not appear so.”

“This homeless man, what was supposed to be his motive?”

“He is a man with a low IQ, borderline schizophrenic. He had no motive, none that he could give, anyway.”

I flipped through the pictures. It was certainly possible one person could beat a perfect stranger that savagely for no good reason. “Did this homeless man have a history of violence?”

“No.”

“Okay, so that makes no sense at all. Let’s try the trick theory. Was there any sign of struggle in her hotel room?”

“No.”

“So maybe she went with this person voluntarily. Was she killed in the ditch?”

“Yes.”

“These hookers are high-class. They don’t typically have dates in drainage canals. She wasn’t raped, but had she had sex?”

“She had had sex recently, but she was a prostitute. There was no semen. The former detective believes the man wore a condom.”

“What about trace evidence and all that good stuff? Fibers and blood evidence.”

“You need something to compare to. If it was a trick, he could have boarded a plane and flown away. If he had no police record and no connection to the victim, it would be very difficult ever to find him.”

“This detective didn’t buy the homeless theory, either?”

“His biggest concern was the lack of motive.”

There was a motive. It just wasn’t his. “Was Angel in the area?”

“Unclear. If she was, she was never questioned. There was not a broad investigation. The man confessed, and that was that.”

“According to Tristan, Angel had reason to get rid of Robin Sevitch. Was it possible she could have hired this man?”

“No. There was no indication of anything like that.”

“She could have hired some pros to kill her.”

“Professionals,” he said, quite reasonably, “do not linger at the crime scene to beat their victims.”

“Is the homeless man in jail for this?”

He blew out a long and heavy sigh. “He is homeless no more. For life.”

I collected all the pictures into one pile. As I looked at them, it was hard not to feel the beating Robin had taken in my own face, in the fragile bones that would break, in the soft tissue that would bruise and swell under the pounding. Beaten to death connoted suffering. It was a brutality far more intimate than could come from the cold disgorgement of a bullet from a gun, or even from the ripping of a knife through flesh. A knife still separated killer from victim, if only by the length of its blade. Whoever murdered Robin Sevitch had walked away with blood on his hands.

Or hers.

“Can I keep these, Harvey?”

“Certainly. The photos must be returned.”

“So, where are we?” I asked. “We have less than a week before the review. We have one dead hooker, one live hooker who is possibly a blackmailer and possibly in hiding. We have a bunch of surveillance photos that prove very little. And we have Angel, who may or may not have gotten away with murder and may or may not call back, depending on whether I passed her test.”

“That is not all.” He gave me a tight little smile. “We have top swappers.”

“We do?”

“Indeed, we do. Would you care to see them?”

“Indeed, I would.”

He moved a large stack of files and reports from the corner of his desk to the middle of what was now his clean desk. He went through the stack like a blackjack dealer, laying exhibits and printouts and reports on the desk one by one. “This is a copy of the as-bid schedules for the Boston base over the past six months.” That was a particularly fat document. “This is the as-flown schedule.” Equally fat.

“You got those from Carl Wolff?”

“He had someone send them.” He put down a third document that was slender compared with the others. “This is the list of all the trips that were traded over the past six months, and these”—he laid down a single page—“are your so-called top swappers.”

“Cool.” I reached for it. “So, these are our hookers?”

He pulled it back. “These are flight attendants who do a high level of swapping during the month on average. I would hesitate to label them all prostitutes, primarily because you are on the list.”

“I am?” That was a surprise, although not really when I thought it through. It stood to reason that if I were following swappers around, I would have to do a high level of swapping myself.

“Step two, as you will recall, was to overlay the swap list with anyone who appeared to have more assets in her name than could be reasonably supported by her reported income. I used their W-2 salaries, which include all premiums.”

“That step would definitely eliminate me.”

“As it did several.” He pulled another single sheet from the file and dangled it in front of me. “This is the subset of names that resulted.”

“Then
these
are our hookers.” I snatched the page from him. There were thirty-five names on the list. Some of the names were surprises. Some weren’t. Most surprising of all were the names that weren’t there.

“Where’s Angel? Where are Sally and Ava and Claudia and Charlotte? None of them is on this list.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, why?”

“Their names come up in the financial filter, but they do not qualify on the swapper criteria. They fly the schedule, for the most part, as they bid it.”

“Why would that be?” I put the page back on the desk—it suddenly represented a major disappointment—and got up to stretch out stiff muscles and wander a bit. I ended up at Harvey’s bookshelves, staring blankly at some of the titles. Mostly he read biographies, history, and business books, but he did have a weakness for good science fiction. I liked looking at those best, because it was a part of him that was unexpected. Also because of the cool titles.