“What do you think, blondie? Can you tell if Naomi was packing up, or do you think Daniel was sniffing around for something?”
I was holding three of the notebooks but put them down to look around the apartment, starting in the bathroom. The toothbrush was still in the small plastic stand on the sink, and all the daily hygiene products were in place. In the medicine chest behind the mirror, a cosmetics bag — lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and mascara — was nestled between a box of condoms and a vial of pills: a mild tranquilizer packaged by a pharmacy in London. A nightshirt and robe still hung on the hook behind the door.
“The don’t-leave-home-without-them things of a young woman’s life seem to be accounted for,” I said. “I found this piece on the bathroom floor, at the base of the toilet bowl.”
“I feel like we’ve signed up for a high-stakes game of Scrabble.” Mike took the paper from me — it had portions of letters torn in half, written in the same boldface as the notes in Naomi’s books — and set it next to the others he had dried out. “What the hell was Daniel doing?”
“Let me take a stab.”
He moved aside and I tried to align the snippets to make any kind of sense, but it seemed too much of the paper was missing to tell a story. “What have you got?” he asked.
“An L ripped off alone, and another one with a T and an R on it. Here’s an S. This one is clipped at the edge, but it’s a U.”
“Trial. Maybe she was worried about her case.”
“Trial, trail, traffic, truck, train, tryst, triangle.”
“Lust,” Mike said.
“Rust. Struck. This is a task for another time. Max can do this in her sleep.” My brilliant paralegal, Maxine Fetter, could probably have cracked the World War II Enigma encryptions over a slow lunch period.
Mike started to put the dried scraps in envelopes while I went back to the suitcase. I carefully removed the prayer shawl and checked for stains like blood, knowing that the lab would do a proper search when it was delivered to them. I saw nothing unusual.
Beneath the notebooks were tracts on feminist theory in a range of theologies. I took a folder out of my tote and listed the volumes and authors, looking inside for any margin notes or dog-eared pages Naomi might have made.
Under the religious tracts were scads of photographs — old ones of Naomi as a child, posed between young adults I guessed were her parents. There were more recent shots of her with Daniel. The background was distinctly suburban, the yard of a home and an SUV with Illinois plates in the driveway.
Interior scenes showed both of them smiling at the camera across the table with a Thanksgiving turkey in the foreground. Daniel’s mother probably took the photograph — there was no other sign of her — and the handsome man leaning in behind Naomi and her brother, flashing a big smile, must have been the stepfather. Then in Daniel’s room, with Naomi standing at his shoulder while he was hunched over his computer, someone had snapped another remembrance.
The last trio of photographs was printed out on glossy four-by-six paper and worn from travel or repeated handling. I sucked in a gasp as I looked at it.
“This may be why Daniel’s mother called Naomi a pariah,” I said, studying the shots before I passed them to Mike.
The first two were pictures of Naomi, wearing only black bikini panties edged in lace, smiling from a bed in what looked like a guest room. The same suitcase we’d found in the apartment was sitting on the floor next to a chair.
“Mother of God,” Mike said, looking at the image. “You think that squirrely kid who just blew us off was actually in bed with his sister?”
“I doubt it. I’m guessing the reason Daniel’s mother wanted nothing more to do with Naomi is because of her newfound appreciation for the seventh commandment. Thou shalt not commit—”
“Adultery.” Mike finished the sentence for me and stared at the photos as I handed off the third one in the pile.
The naked man on the bed, smiling at the camera, was the same guy who appeared in the Thanksgiving dinner photo — arms around the half-siblings. Even without his horn-rimmed glasses and his clothes, Daniel’s stepfather looked handsome and happy.
THIRTEEN
“DO the notebooks go back as far as Naomi’s visit to Illinois?” Mike asked. We were both riffling through them to see what months and years were covered.
“Not any that I’ve found yet. How about the one you had with the torn-out pages?”
“That’s pretty recent. All about this winter and what she was up to.”
“Let’s make copies before you voucher it. What did Daniel rip from it?”
“The pages after Naomi was arrested in January. The half that’s left reads like a description of what she was doing with the other protestors. Has some names. Then a sweet bit about how she was grateful to Daniel. How she went to meet with him a couple of times.”
“Names?” I asked. “Her fellow protestors? Friends of Daniel’s?”
“Looks like he was ripping out most of what came after he got involved with her, whether to protect someone else or himself. You hoping to find an avenging angel here?”
“Anything that will help. We’d better do a run on Daniel’s father — who he is, whether he’s in the Midwest or traveling. Few things more personally virulent than an intimate partner gone bad. Is that your phone or mine?”
I dug into my bag, but Mike had answered his phone on the second ring. “Louder, Loo. I can barely hear you,” he said, sticking his forefinger in his other ear.
As he listened to Ray Peterson talk, he turned his back and walked away from me. “What do you mean ‘just now’? Where? Exactly where?”
There must have been a break in the case.
“We’re in Alphabet City. The vic’s apartment. I can be there in twenty if you can get uniform from the precinct here to secure the apartment. Hold tight, Loo, okay? I’ll check.”
Mike leaned over the sink and looked out the window, up and down the street. “Coop, you want to go out and give a yell to the cops in the patrol car?”
“Sure.”
“She’ll sit with the guys till Crime Scene gets here. It’s not a big job. I just want them to photograph the place and do a routine check.”
“Don’t even think about parking me here. Wherever you’re going, I’m with you,” I said, opening the door to summon the officers while Mike gathered the papers and books he wanted to bring along. “It’s Naomi, isn’t it?”
“Suit yourself,” he said as he nodded to me.
When I returned to take a last look around the small apartment, Mike was on the phone again, his back to the sink. I passed by him and he took a firm grasp of my forearm, stopping me in place until he finished his conversation.
We were face-to-face as he flipped his cell closed with his free hand. “You don’t have to prove anything to me by coming along, Coop.”
“What would ever make you think that was my purpose?” I said, raising my right hand to shield my eyes from the glare of the late-afternoon sun that streamed in over Mike’s shoulder, while trying to wriggle free from his grip. “It’s ridiculous. What’s eating at you today?”
I didn’t mean to sound as arch and strident as I did with just those few words.
“Easy, girl. I know you’ve got balls as big as any guy in the squad, and I know you can outthink me from here to the moon, but you don’t belong on the streets with all the garbage we’re used to chasing after and corralling. You should be in the courtroom, Coop—”