“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