The Boyfriend Read Online Free

civilization. “I’m sorry for your terrible loss,” he said. He had said the words hundreds of times when he was a younger man with a gold badge. He had always meant it.
    He was sorry. He felt all of it—the way the death of a beautiful daughter would turn a family to stone, leave all of the survivors wishing they had died too, and make them unable to develop or even change after that. He could feel all the memories cut off at the instant when they’d heard she had died, sealed off as though behind glass. And he knew much more than they did about parts of it. For the first few hundred times, he had gone to the scene and seen the body and the mess, and smelled the coppery smell of all that blood. And as though he could ever forget, he had been duly provided with a full set of color photographs of the body as it lay there, and the whole of the place where it had happened.
    He had often been the one to arrest the person who had brandished the gun or surreptitiously held the unseen, often unimagined, knife. And he had heard all the excuses—and the confession and the recanting of it. He was always sorry. And then he had stopped. He had been a Detective 3 in Los Angeles for twenty-three years when he filed for retirement. He had become a private investigator, partly because he never wanted to look across a table again and see the same kind of faces shocked by the cruelty and unfairness of violent death.
    “Mr. Hamilton,” he said. “I have been a police officer, but that was long ago. I’m only a private investigator now. Almost all of my work is gathering evidence for civil cases.”
    “Please,” said Hamilton. “I’m not under the delusion that you’ll suddenly sign up again and fix this. I’d like some advice. Just advice.”
    “I think your best bet is to try to work with the detectives on the case. Try to make lists of her contacts, her acquaintances. If there’s a Facebook page, an address book, the detectives will talk to everybody, and they’ll try to develop leads. Finding the perpetrator will do nothing for your grief. But it will make you feel you may have saved someone else from going through this.”
    “We’ve already met with the detectives. They were very open about the way things were going to work. Our daughter Catherine was a professional escort, I believe that was the word they used. That means she had a variety of false names. She moved from city to city. She met and made herself vulnerable to many men, all strangers. The police have done four weeks of it. They’ve spoken with a few other girls. They’ve got the coroner’s report on how she died. They’ve examined her bank records, credit card bills, and so on. They’re done. It was a robbery. She was shot.”
    “How did she get involved in that work?”
    “We don’t really know. She graduated from college and got a job. She was very busy, didn’t come home much at first, and less after that. She never answered her phone so we got used to leaving messages. We had no idea she was doing this.”
    “Do you think she might have been forced into it?”
    Her mother spoke for the first time. “No. She was capable of calling the police. And she wasn’t the kind of kid to be vulnerable to coercion. She knew she had rights, and that there was plenty of help if she needed it.”
    “What about drugs?”
    The father said, “We don’t think that was it either. She didn’t take drugs in high school. She was an athlete—a gymnast—and they got tested before competitions and at random. She wasn’t with that kind of crowd in college. The coroner didn’t find any drugs in her system. And he went out of his way to say she looked healthy and well cared-for. No marks, nothing.”
    “These are the wrong questions,” said Mrs. Hamilton. Till could see that she had reached the point of madness. She had listened carefully and answered thoughtfully, but had heard nothing that mattered.
    Her husband put his arm around her shoulders and tightened