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“Firstly, Chief Dublowski, let me say again how very grateful I am to you for making time to see me.”
“Not at all.” Harry Dublowski beamed. “Happy to help.”
“As I mentioned on the phone, I’m here about the Jennifer Hamlin murder investigation. It’s purely a personal interest.”
“You knew the victim?”
Alexia said carefully, “She was a family friend.”
Harry Dublowski stood up and waddled over to an old-fashioned filing cabinet in the corner of the office.
“Everything’s computerized these days,” he wheezed, “but I’m a sucker for hard copies. There’s something about the physical feeling of paper in your hand that helps you to think, right? Or maybe that’s just me.”
“No, no,” Alexia assured him. “I’m the same. I always insisted on paper briefing notes at the Home Office. I’m sure it drove the young staffers mad.”
Dublowski handed her the file, allowing his stubby fingers to brush against hers as he passed it over. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. De Vere, but this is strictly off the record. We’re not usually in the habit of showing information from murder investigations to the victims’ friends and relatives. And nothing can leave this room.”
“Of course not. As I said, I’m very grateful.” Alexia was already reading. She remembered Sir Edward Manning handing her the FBI file on Billy Hamlin, after Billy first reappeared in her life. Had that really been two years ago? It felt like yesterday. And yet so much had happened since then. So many terrible things.
“You never arrested any suspects?” She looked up at Chief Dubl
owski, her eyes a piercing ice blue.
“No.” His face darkened. “It was a frustrating case, to be perfectly honest with you.”
“How so?”
“Well, as you know, the young lady was abducted and held for some period of time before her death. That usually opens up more avenues for investigation. So we were hopeful at first.”
“What sort of avenues?”
“More time in which someone might have seen something—a car perhaps—or heard something. Maybe the girl screamed. Or maybe someone noticed something unusual about a certain residence or place of business. As a general rule of thumb, the more complicated a crime—if it occurs in more than one place, for example, or over a period of days—the more likely the perpetrator is to make a mistake. Clues are just mistakes by another name.”
“But that didn’t happen in this case?”
“No. This killer was careful. Careful and smart. And he didn’t fit the normal profile either.”
“Profile?”
“A homicide like this, where a young woman is targeted and killed so sadistically, we’d expect to see more crimes with the same MO. More girls washing up with similar injuries. More deaths by drowning. The start of a pattern. But it didn’t happen. Thank God, in one way, right? But it left us kind of nowhere with the Hamlin investigation. Forensics drew a blank on the corpse.”
“What about circumstantial evidence?”
Harry Dublowski shrugged. “The victim lived one hell of a quiet life.”
Alexia nodded. She knew this was true from her own, limited research on Jennifer. The girl had led the most uneventful, inoffensive existence imaginable. She’d never even gotten a parking ticket.
“What about her father?”
Harry’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What about him? You knew the dad?”
“A long time ago,” Alexia said hastily. “Like I said, I’m an old family friend. The last time I saw Jennifer’s father he expressed concern for her safety.”
If it seemed odd to Chief Dublowski that a high-ranking British politician had been family friends with an ex-con from Queens and his murdered daughter, he didn’t mention it. Instead he said matter-of-factly: “The father was an ex-con, a paranoid schizophrenic. No offense, but Jennifer’s dog woulda made a more reliable witness than her old man. The guy heard voices, and yes, some of ’em were about his daughter. He wanted my men to come and check them out for him. It was sad, really.”
“And did you? Check them out, I mean.”
“Oh, sure. We have to take all reports of threats seriously, even if they come from crazies. But he had no evidence. Nothing whatsoever. It was all in his head. Besides, all of that was at least a year before Jenny Hamlin was killed, maybe longer. Trust me, there’s no connection.”
