Flesh And Blood by Jonathan Kellerman

“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 but papers on the desk. That made me wonder about something else.

“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. Used stickers from the bookstore at Santa Monica College.

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, Used stickers from the U bookstore—the charges I’d just seen on her Visa. Fifty grand a year but she watched her pennies.

Turning to the journals, I opened the first plastic box and found a collection of thirty-year-old issues of Developmental Psychology, each bearing the faded stamp of a Salvation Army thrift shop on Western Avenue and a ten-cent price tag. No receipt, no date of sale. 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 Toward a Psychology of Being, I found a Goodwill receipt dated six years ago. A few scraps from the same time span turned up in other volumes.

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 Cub three weeks before Shawna Yeager’s disappearance. Disconnected Orange County number—the Newport Beach pizza parlor. Same area code, but this number was different.

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.

Intim. proj.

Right up Lauren’s alley? What she considered a “research job”?

But Lauren hadn’t needed the money.

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 faked intimacy for cash.

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