“You’ve changed in other ways as well.”
I pushed the point.
“I’m sure that is your perception.”
“You’re shutting me out, Benton.”
“I suppose I keep my distance because you ask questions that I can’t answer; so does Marino. And then I feel even more pressure. Do you understand?”
“1’m trying to understand,” I said.
“I can’t tell you everything. Can you let it go at that?”
“Not quite. Because that’s where we’re at cross-purposes. I have information you need. And you have information I need. I’m not going to show you mine unless you show me yours.”
He surprised me by laughing.
“Do you think we can strike a deal under these terms?”
I persisted.
“It looks like I don’t have much of a choice.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Yes, we did find a jack of hearts in the Harvey-Cheney case. Yes, I did have their bodies moved before you arrived at the scene, and I know that was poor form, but you have no idea why the cards are so significant of the problems that would be precipitated by word of them leaking. If it made the newspapers, for example I’m not going to say anything further about that right now.”
“Where was the card?” I asked.
“We found it inside Deborah Harvey’s purse. When a couple of the cops helped me turn her over, we found the purse under her body.”
“Are you suggesting that the killer carried her purse out into the woods?”
“Yes. It wouldn’t make any sense to think Deborah carried her purse out there.”
“In the other cases,” I pointed out, the card was left in plain sight inside the vehicle.”
“Exactly. Where the card was found is just one more inconsistency. Why wasn’t it left inside the Jeep? Another inconsistency is that the cards left in the other cases are Bicycle playing cards. The one left with Deborah is a different brand. Then there’s the matter of fibers.”
“What fibers?” I asked.
Though I had collected fibers from all of the decomposed bodies, most of them were consistent with the victims’ own clothing or the upholstery of the vehicles. Unknown fibers – what few I had found – had supplied no link between the cases, had proved useless so far.
“In the four cases preceding Deborah’s and Fred’s murders,” Wesley said, “white cotton fibers were recovered from the driver’s seat of each abandoned car.
“That’s news to me,” I said, irritation flaring again.
“The fiber analysis was done by our labs,” he explained.
“And what is your interpretation?” I asked.
“The pattern of fibers recovered is interesting. Since the victims weren’t wearing white cotton clothing at the time of their deaths, I have to assume that the fibers were left by the perpetrator, and this places him driving the victims’ cars after the crimes. But we’ve been assuming that all along. One has to consider his clothing. And a possibility is that he was wearing some type of uniform when he encountered the couples. White cotton trousers. I don’t know. But no white cotton fibers were recovered from the driver’s seat of Deborah Harvey’s Jeep.”
“What did you find inside her Jeep?” I asked.
“Nothing that tells me anything right now. In fact, the interior was immaculate.”
He paused, cutting his steak. “The point is, the MO’s different enough in this case to worry me a lot, because of the other circumstances.”
“Because one of the victims is the Drug Czar’s daughter, and you’re still considering that what happened to Deborah may have been politically motivated, related to her mother’s antidrug endeavors,” I said.
He nodded. “We can’t rule out that the murders of Deborah and her boyfriend were disguised to resemble the other cases.”
“If their deaths aren’t related to the others, and were a hit,” I asked skeptically, “then how do you explain their killer knowing about the cards, Benton? Even I didn’t find out about the jack of hearts until recently. Certainly it hasn’t been in the newspapers.”
“Pat Harvey knows,” he startled me by saying.
Abby, I thought. And I was willing to bet that Abby had divulged the detail to Mrs. Harvey, and that Wesley knew this.
“How long has Mrs. Harvey known about the cards,” I asked.