He carried a briefcase. The older detective was shaking his head. “The answer’s right here,” Kristof said, tapping the briefcase, which Dal now realized was a laptop computer case. “Hugo Hutka’s,” he said. Dal was aware that the two detectives’ trip the previous morning to visit the widow of the man whose phone number had appeared several times on Senator Zajic’s phone records had turned up nothing, the woman having moved out several weeks earlier. “We followed some leads, found the widow living with her brother’s family. She told us she’d reported her husband’s accident to the police as suspicious, but they’d basically brushed her off.” Dal thought it interesting the way Kristof referred to “they,” when the “they” was actually “we,” including the detectives presently standing in the office of the chief investigator of homicide. Not on my watch, Dal thought, though this just didn’t work.
