“Like I said, I’m the next of kin.”
“Let me guess. Your sister inherited some money when Rachel was killed.”
“I–I, uh, don’t really know. I don’t know much about that.”
“You went to her bank to withdraw money when she was arrested, didn’t you?” I asked. “Any idea how much was in her account?”
“Oh, no. This isn’t about money,” Daniel said, shaking his head.
“Did Naomi have a will? You know who her lawyer is?” Mike had a laundry list of questions ready to pop.
“Sure she had a will. Ever since her mother — since Rachel was killed so suddenly — Naomi was always spooked about being… well, like, ready to die.”
“Who’s the lawyer?” Mike asked, opening dresser and night-table drawers with his vinyl-gloved hand.
“How the hell would I know?” If I’d thought Daniel Gersh was jumpy ten minutes earlier, he was bouncing off the walls by now.
Mike turned back to the small rolling bag he had removed from the closet earlier and hoisted it onto the couch.
“You’ve got no business touching that,” Daniel shouted, circling the kitchen counter and moving to the middle of the room.
“I think I’ve got a better claim to it than you have at the moment,” Mike said, bending over to unzip it. “The luggage tag says it belonged to Naomi. Did she keep it loaded or was that you, planning how to take some of her things away while I waited at the front door?”
Mike threw back the lid. The suitcase was practically full. I could see a checkbook on top of a stack of other papers. He picked it up and lifted the cover. “Well, well. It’s Naomi’s. Three thousand, seven hundred, ninety-six dollars and change in her checking account, packed and ready to go.”
Daniel’s hands were flailing. “It’s not what you think, Detective. I didn’t want anybody stealing anything from here.”
Mike laid the checks on the arm of the sofa and started to dig through the rest of the things. I didn’t see any items of clothing, but there were spiral notebooks, manila file folders, and, crammed among them, what looked like the kind of ritual prayer shawl that had started the brouhaha at the Wailing Wall.
Mike opened one of the pads and began to read aloud. It was a diary that Naomi had written in the period after her mother’s death. The language was full of despair, appropriate to the dreadful circumstances of the bombing.
He set it aside and picked up several volumes, flipping through two or three of them before coming to a more recent period that documented her stay in New York. He held up the pages to reveal that strips had been torn out of the journal — paper that matched the scraps on the kitchen countertop.
“What’s with this, Daniel? What have you got to hide?” Mike asked, circling back to the sink with the notebook.
Daniel had no intention of answering. Before Mike or I could get anywhere near to stop him, Naomi’s brother turned and bolted out the door of the apartment.
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
“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
