The woman’s eyes were dark brown, wary, but not afraid. She looked straight into Richards’s face and then down to the badge, maybe the gun.
“Do you work with Colin?” she said, shifting her sight to take me in, but did not meet my eyes.
“Yes, in a way, we do work with him,” Richards said. “May we come in?”
“Uh, yes,” the woman said. “Yes.”
She closed the door and while she slipped the chain Richards and I exchanged raised eyebrows.
Richards stepped in and to the right, I moved automatically to her left, like an entry team. Inside, the sun struggled to lighten the place. I marked the pass-through serving opening to the kitchen first, then the short hallway. Nothing. When I scanned back to Richards she was looking past the woman to the windows and the long couch pushed flush against the wall. Her hand moved off the butt of her gun and I almost expected to hear someone yell, “Clear!”
Then I focused on the woman. It was after four now and she was dressed in some kind of uniform. Waitress, I guessed. She was barefoot and there was a stain on her apron. Her hair was pinned up but strands were leaking down onto her shoulders.
“My name is Sherry Richards. I’m a detective with the Broward sheriff’s office,” Richards said. “And this is Max Freeman.”
The woman nodded, looking at Richards and still avoiding my eyes.
“Hi,” she said again. “Um, Colin said you were going to come here, just to talk, he said.”
She stepped back and at first I thought she was just getting distance between us but then I realized she was shielding something. Behind her was a playpen. A child was standing up with her hands knuckled around the top bar.
“Well, what a beautiful girl,” Richards said, a lilt in her voice that was far too convincing to be faked. The woman turned as Richards took a step forward and a smile was coming into her face.
“Oh, this is Jessica,” she said, moving to the playpen. “She just woke up from a nap because Mommy’s home.” Richards sat down on the end of the couch and reached out to touch the girl’s hand. The woman bent and gathered the child up in her arms and held her on her hip, letting her look out at us. She had flame red hair and wide blue eyes and when the contrast with the woman’s coloring struck me, I stared closer at her face and knew who we’d been sent to meet.
“You’re Faith Hamlin,” I said, and the astonishment in my voice caused her to finally look into my face and she nodded.
“You’re the one from Philadelphia, right?” she said. “Colin told me. You were a cop.”
I nodded my head. Richards looked from me to the woman and her mouth had opened slightly but nothing came out.
Over the next hour Faith Hamlin told us her story, how Colin O’Shea had come to tell her that she needed to leave Philadelphia because the officers she knew from the store were in deep trouble and everything that she had done with them was going to come out in the newspapers. At first she told him she wanted to stay. She wanted to help them. She didn’t care what the news said.
“But when I told Colin that I knew I was going to have a baby, he said I had to leave and that he had to leave and that and everything would be better if we left together.”
She’d left with nothing, on Colin’s word, and they came here and he set her up in this apartment.
“He paid for everything and then he went back and said he’d come back when the police department was done with him. And he didn’t lie. We talked on the cell phone every day until he did come back.”
She was holding the girl on her lap until she fought her way loose and started a regular three-year-olďs search around the room for favorite toys to show company.
“Is Colin the father?” Richards said, looking up after being presented with a stuffed Barney.
Faith shook her head no and lowered her face for a second and then looked up at her daughter and smiled.
“No. She looks just like her daddy, but we don’t use his name here,” she said, going serious.
“So Colin doesn’t live here?” I said, and again she shook her head.
“Colin got me my job at the restaurant. He said it was under the table so no one could find me.