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.