It crumpled in around his grief. Lew reached for the tray but pulled his hand back before Javi had to say anything to him. He rubbed it roughly over his face instead and dug his fingers up into his graying, well-cut hair.
“The, umm… keys are hers,” he choked out. “The earrings look like hers too. Little birds. She always wore those. I don’t… I don’t know about the clothes. She liked yellow. She was always wearing yellow. I, ah, I think I need to sit down.”
“That’s fine,” Javi said. He gave a quick nod of thanks to the tech and showed Lew back out into the hall. There was a long bench halfway down with an empty Coke can sitting on it, and he helped Lew to it. Lew sat down hard, folded over, and pressed the heels of his hands roughly against his cheeks.
“Maybe she was robbed,” he said. “That could have been what happened. She was robbed and maybe hit on the head? That would explain why she never came home.”
“Mr. Utkin—”
Lew straightened up and scrubbed his sleeve over his mouth. “I know,” he said. “I do know, but I don’thaveto know yet, right? I cannotknow.”
He sounded desperate for Javi to give him permission, and his face pled for that small kindness. Javi wanted children—or expected children—but the idea of being that vulnerable to something you couldn’t control terrified him.
“We’ll know more once they do the DNA test,” he said.
Lew nodded.
“Can you tell us anything that you didn’t tell Detective Stokes during the first investigation—”
“Investigation? Is that what you call it?” Lew asked bitterly. “They didn’t care about my daughter. They just wanted to write her off. You know how much money I donated when we were campaigning to unincorporate? A fuckload. Just so I didn’t have to see that uniform every day, remember how they let Birdie down.”
“Anything,” Javi repeated patiently. “Even something that didn’t seem like anything at the time. What about Birdie’s boyfriend? She was dating one of the Hartleys, wasn’t she?”
Regret pulled at Lew’s face. “I thought it would be good for her. He was a good boy—smart, ambitious, respectful. Kelly saw to that. Birdie said he was boring—she was probably right—but I pushed it. Not just me, her mom too. We thought he’d calm her down.” He hesitated, and his eyebrows burrowed together over his nose. “You don’t think he had anything to do with it? They said he had an alibi. Kelly—”
“I’m just trying to build a clearer picture,” Javi said. “Sometimes people leave things out because they think it’s irrelevant, or they worry that it might show the victim in an unflattering light.”
“She was fifteen,” Lew said. “The worst thing she’d ever done was skip curfew.”
“Her other boyfriend?” Javi said. “The one you didn’t like?”
“Hector?” Utkin shook his head. “I didn’ttrusthim. In my line of work, Agent Merlo, you meet people that aren’t… nice. You get to know the signs. Hector Andrews was bad news, and he would have hurt her one day, but not that night. Somebody had put him in the hospital.”
“Somebody?”
“One of his lowlife friends,” Lew said. There was a challenge in his voice, the expression his eyes somewhere between defiance and smugness. “That’s the thing about lowlifes, Agent. They’d stab you in the back for fifty bucks.”
“That the going rate for a bottle to the head?” Javi suggested quietly.
Lew pulled up short of a confession. He turned the corner of his mouth up in a sour, brief smile. “Let’s say that I wasn’t sorry to hear about it.”
“Do you have any idea where Hector is now?”
Lew grimaced and pulled his chin back into his neck. “I didn’t know where he was then. He was homeless. His family had lost their house and left, but he just hung around. I told Birdie. Something’s wrong with a man whose own family don’t want them. She didn’t listen.”
That was when Lew’s ability to lie to himself visibly ran out. He hunched in on himself, suddenly looking lost in his skin, and closed his eyes. His mouth folded down as he sniffed in a deep breath. No tears, but if Lew was having an affair with Kelly Hartley, he’d be crying on her shoulder later after a bottle of whiskey.
“I, umm… I should call my wife,” he said and wiped his hand over his mouth. “My ex-wife. Book flights for her and… and everything. Do you need anything else?”
“Not right now,” Javi said.
Lew nodded and stood up slowly. “You’ll let me know if….”
Javi nodded and put a reassuring hand on his arm. “We’ll let you know as soon as the results are back. Take care.”
“Why?”
Chapter Fifteen
