“How could a hit man have known about the cards?”
Wesley replied reluctantly, “Pat Harvey doesn’t gather information or investigate situations alone. She has aides, a staff. She talks to other politicians, any number of people, including constituents. It all depends on who she divulged information to, and who out there might have wished to destroy her, assuming that’s the case, and I’m not saying it is.”
“A paid hit disguised to look like the early cases,” I considered. “Only the hit man made a mistake. He didn’t know to leave the jack of hearts in the car. He left it with Deborah’s body, inside her purse. Someone perhaps involved with the fraudulent charities Pat Harvey is supposed to testify against?”
“We’re talking about bad people who know other bad people. Drug dealers. Organized crime.”
He idly stirred his coffee. “Mrs. Harvey’s not faring too well through all this. She’s very distracted. This congressional hearing isn’t exactly foremost on her mind, at the moment.”
“I see. And I suspect she’s not exactly on friendly terms with the Justice Department, because of this hearing.”
Wesley carefully set his teaspoon on the edge of his saucer. “She’s not,” he said, looking up at me. “What she’s trying to bring about isn’t going to help us. It’s to put ACTMAD and other scams like it out of business but it’s not enough. We want to prosecute. In the past there’s been some friction between her and the DEA, also the CIA.”
“And now?” I continued to probe.
“It’s worse, because she’s emotionally involved, has to rely on the Bureau to assist in solving her daughter’s homicide. She’s uncooperative, paranoid. She’s trying work around us, take matters into her own hands. Sighing, he added, “She’s a problem, Kay.”
“She probably says the same thing about the Bureau.”
He smiled wryly. “I’m sure she does.”
I wanted to continue the mental poker game to see if Wesley was keeping anything else from me, so I gave him more. “It appears that Deborah received a defensive injury to her left index finger. Not a cut, but a hack inflicted by a knife with a serrated blade.”
“Where on her index finger?” he asked, leaning, forward a little.
“Dorsal.” I held up my hand to show him. “On top, near her first knuckle.”
“Interesting. Atypical.”
“Yes. Difficult to reconstruct how she got it.”
“So we know he was armed with a knife,” he thought out loud. “That makes me all the more suspicious that something went wrong out there. Something happened he wasn’t expecting. He may have resorted to a gun to subdue the couple, but intended to kill them with the knife. Possibly by cutting their throats. But then something went haywire. Deborah somehow got away and he shot her in the back, then maybe cut her throat to finish her off.”
“And then positioned their bodies to look like the others?”
I asked. “Arm in arm, facedown, and fully clothed?”
He stared at the wall above my head.
I thought of the cigarette butts left at each scene. I thought of the parallels. The fact that the playing card was a different brand and left in a different place this time proved nothing. Killers are not machines. Their rituals and habits are not an exact science or set in stone. Nothing that Wesley had divulged to me, including the absence of white cotton fibers in Deborah’s Jeep, was enough to validate the theory that Fred’s and Deborah’s homicides were unrelated to the other cases. I was experiencing the same confusion that I felt whenever I visited Quantico, where I was never sure if guns were firing bullets or blanks, if helicopters carried marines on real business or FBI agents simulating maneuvers, or if buildings in the Academy’s fictitious town of Hogan’s Alley were functional or Hollywood facades.
I could push Wesley no further. He wasn’t going to tell me more.
“It’s getting late,” he commented. “You have a long drive back.”
I had one last point to make.
“I don’t want friendship to interfere with all this, Benton.”
“That goes without saying.”
“What happened between Mark and me-” “That’s not a factor,” he interrupted, and his voice firm but not unkind.