He closed the closet door. “Okay, add tax evasion to her hobby list… Over three hundred grand saved up by age twenty-five. Like Momma said, she took care of herself.”
“That first hundred plus the three fifty-thousand deposits is two fifty,” I said. “Where’d the rest come from, stock appreciation?”
He returned to the brokerage papers, trailed his finger to a bottom line. “Yup, ninety thou five hundred and two worth of ‘long-term capital appreciation.’ Looks like our girl played the skin game and rode the bull market.”
“That would explain the lie about having a job at the U,” I said, feeling a sad, insistent gnawing in my gut. “When she was arrested in Reno at nineteen, she called her father for bail money, claimed she was broke. Two years later, she deposited a hundred thousand.”
“Working hard,” he said. “The American way. She didn’t call Mom because Mom was poor.”
“That and she might’ve cared enough about Jane to keep secrets.” I took the brokerage packet from him, stared at zeros. “The first hundred was probably money she saved up. When she turned twenty-one, she decided to invest. I wonder if it came from multiple clients or just a few high rollers.”
“What makes you wonder?”
“A long-term client could be the reason she didn’t take her own car on Sunday. Someone sent one for her.”
“Interesting,” Milo said. “When the sun comes up, I’ll check with taxi companies and livery services. Gonna also have to canvass the neighborhood, see if anyone saw her getting into a car. If she was hooking up with some pooh-bah who wanted it hush-hush, he wouldn’t have had her wait right in front of her apartment. But maybe she didn’t walk too far.” He whipped out his pad, scrawled furiously.
“Something else,” I said. “Being in a cash business – wanting cash handy for expenditures – she could’ve been carrying a lot of money in her purse.”
He looked up. “A high-stakes mugging?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I suppose… In any event, the money stink has now grown putrid.” He placed the tax returns atop the desk. Nothing
“Where’s her computer?” I said.
“Who said she had one?”
“She was a student. Every college kid has a computer, and Lauren was an A student.”
He gave the dresser drawers another shuffle, found a pocket calculator, grunted disgustedly. Returning to the closet, he searched the corners and the shelves. “Nada. So maybe she was storing data someone wanted. As in trick book. As in a pooh-bah with a good reason to value his privacy.”
“Trick database,” I said. “She was a modern girl.”
He frowned. “I’ll ask Salander if he ever saw a computer. And I just thought of something else that should be here but isn’t. Birth control. No pills or diaphragm in her drawers.”
“No medical charges on her Visa either. So she either paid her doctor in cash or used the Student Health Service.”
“Call girls get checked up regularly,” he said. “High-priced entertainment would have to be especially careful. She had to be using some kind of protection, Alex – Let me check the bathroom again. Why don’t you take a look at her books meanwhile, see if anything pops out.”
Starting at the top of the left-hand case, I traced two and a half years of required reading.
Basic math, algebra, geometry, basic science, biology, chemistry.
Economics, political science, history, the type of fiction favored by English professors. Sections underlined in pink marker.
The neighboring case was all sociology and psychology – dog-eared textbooks and collections of journals stored in transparent plastic boxes. The volumes on the top shelf matched Lauren’s classes last quarter. More pink underlining,
Turning to the journals, I opened the first plastic box and found a collection of thirty-year-old issues of
The rest of the magazines were of similar vintage and origin: American Cancer Society thrift, Hadassah, City of Hope. In a copy of Maslow’s
Six years ago.
Lauren had begun her self-education at nineteen, nearly four years before she’d enrolled in junior college.
Intellectually curious. Ambitious. Straight A’s. None of that had stopped her from selling her body for a living. Then again, why should it? Knowledge can be power in all kinds of ways.
I took a closer look at the material Lauren had acquired before she’d gone back to school. Most of it centered on human relations and personality theory. No underlined sections; back then, she’d approached her books with the awe of a novice.
I shook each volume, found no loose papers.
Back to the required texts on the top shelf. Nothing illuminating or profound in the pink passages, just another student hypothesizing about what might appear on the final exam.
I was just about to quit when something in the margin of her learning theory book caught my eye. A neatly printed legend that matched the lettering I’d seen on her school papers.
INTIM. PROJ. 714 555 3342
Dr. D.
That flipped a switch: the “human intimacy” study that had run in the
There was no evidence Shawna had even seen the ad, let alone checked it out, but she had been a psychobiology major… living off savings.
Right up Lauren’s alley? What she considered a “research job”?
But Lauren
Maybe she’d been greedy. Or something else had attracted her to the ad.
Something personal, as Gene Dalby had suggested.
Intimacy. A beautiful young woman who
As in Dalby? No, Gene claimed to barely remember her, and I had no reason to doubt him. And his research was on politics, not intimacy.
Another of her teachers’ names began with a D – de Maartens. The psychology of perception. Lots of D’s.
Who was I kidding – I knew whose initial she’d jotted.
The last time I’d seen her, she’d paid for the privilege of unloading her anger – not unlike the pattern she’d adopted with her father.
Years later she’d thought of me, made the notation.
Wanting something from me? Never building up the courage to ask?
I thought of that last, angry meeting, Lauren flashing the wad of bills, unleashing the acid of recrimination. I’d always felt she’d been after more than that.
But what
