The Boyfriend Read Online Free PDF

you, Dad?”
    “No,” he said. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “It’s a nice thing to do. Talk to you soon.”
    “Thanks, Holly,” said Jason.
    Jack Till went out the front door to the porch. He pretended to stop and look at his cell phone’s screen, but used the moment of immobility to study the block, searching for men in cars that were parked or moving slowly, any sign of someone watching from a window, or anything that seemed to have changed since last week. There was nothing, so he went down the steps and walked briskly around the corner to his car.

4
    Jack Till sat in his apartment, opened his laptop, went online, and looked at the ads for escorts. He studied the ads until he had some familiarity with the services offered and a sense of the prices and the vocabulary. He’d found that his sense of how the business worked dated back to his time as a police officer, so it seemed a generation out of date. When he had last worked on a homicide that had to do with prostitution it had been a world of pimps and madams.
    He was ready to look at the material Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton had given him. He opened the thick manila envelope. There were family photographs of Catherine as an athlete—taking a credible starting dive at a swim meet, jumping high in a soccer game to head the ball toward the net. He could tell it was Catherine because of the slightly curly strawberry blond hair. She reminded him of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. And there was her graduation picture from UCLA.
    The parents had not been able—never were able—to cull the information they gave Till to keep it relevant. They had probably wanted to include her grades, but had resisted the impulse. They wanted to demonstrate to him that their daughter’s life had been valuable.
    In a folder inside the envelope, isolated from the material that reflected her real life, was the information that probably mattered—about the life of Tamara Saunders. Tamara was the name Catherine had used. She was five feet eight and weighed 119 pounds. Her skin was very white and, on her shoulders and forearms, freckled. There had to be freckles like Catherine’s on Tamara’s nose and forehead, but nobody would have known, because Tamara always wore makeup that made her skin look as clear and unmarked as porcelain. Her eyes were hazel, and big. She seemed to appear miraculously each day at four p.m., and continued to exist until around three a.m., when she turned off her telephone and pushed the last client out the door.
    His reading of the ads persuaded him that she’d had at least some notion of the danger her work put her in. She said she was available for in-calls only until she got to know a client, and that she did subject clients to “moderate screening.” That was unexpected good news. If she had kept some record of the ones she had cleared and agreed to see, the rest of his search would be simpler. He hadn’t heard or read anything that appeared to be her notes, but maybe the police had kept them. The more the police knew, the more they kept to themselves. Making a great case in the newspapers would only persuade the killer to run farther and hide deeper.
    He looked at more of the material but found no other reference to screening. He stared at the ads again, and then he noticed the necklace. It was a thin gold chain with a gold oval disk at the end; the disk had a row of small diamonds along the rim, and a bigger diamond off-center near the middle. There was a matching ankle bracelet around her left ankle. The smaller diamonds appeared to be about a quarter carat each, so the set would have cost at least a couple of thousand dollars, and possibly much more.
    He looked at a list that the Hamiltons had received—the items the police were holding. No jewelry. The necklace and anklet must have been stolen. He looked at the list again. No cash was found in her apartment. He thought about the life of an escort. How likely was it that the killer had just come in