Silent Mercy

TWELVE

“HEY, Loo,” Mike said, wasting no time calling to let the lieutenant know that Gersh had skipped out on us. “I guess Daniel thought I was getting ready to throw him into the lion’s den. Make sure somebody runs background on him and gets to his crib before he makes it home.”

“Have you got extra gloves?” I asked.

Mike pulled a pair out of his rear pants pocket and handed them to me so I could begin to do an informal inventory of the items in the suitcase, looking for leads to move the investigation forward.

The notebooks were in no particular order, but each one had Naomi’s name and a date — month and year — printed on the first page. They seemed to cover the last five or six years of her life and were a mixture of scribbled recollections of a day’s events, paragraphs filled with serious reflections, and collages of news stories or photographs pasted into the pages.

“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.