I work the early morning shift, just for tips. I don’t work at night anymore,” she said and I winced at the words. She knew what I knew. Nothing good happens at night.
“Colin comes over to check on us and he plays sometimes with Jessica, but I’m a single mom,” she said, sounding proud of the designation.
“Don’t you know that people in Philadelphia are worried about you?” Richards said. “That your family doesn’t even know you’re alive?”
“No, they aren’t,” she said with a finality that locked down any further conversation. “Colin was the only one who ever really cared and it’s better this way.”
I thought she was just echoing O’Shea’s words but then we watched as she snagged her daughter and folded her arms around her and put her face in the child’s hair and whispered something in her ear that made both of them laugh.
“You’re sure?” Richards said, and Faith nodded, her cheek moving up and down against the little girl’s ear while she looked straight into our faces.
CHAPTER 30
Richards couldn’t start the car. We sat outside the apartment in silence and looked straight ahead, putting mental dominoes in a row.
“OK, Max,” she finally said. “Was that the truth?”
“That was her. I saw her portrait in Philly, on the wall of the store where she worked. It’s only been three years. That’s her.”
“Damn,” Richards said, and all I could do was agree.
She finally turned the ignition. The start of the motor was something, an action at least, while we both tried to line up where to step next. We started back in the direction of the Galleria, to my truck.
“You know I’m going to have to report this,” Richards said and her voice held as much question as statement. “I mean, she’s officially missing, and we found her.”
I knew what that report meant, both to Faith Hamlin’s life and to Colin O’Shea’s, and so did she.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, pulling out my cell phone. “But do you think we could wait until we get Colin’s side of all this before you do that?”
I flipped open the phone but paused. Richards chewed the side of her lip and then nodded. I punched in the numbers to O’Shea’s cell.
“You’re not going to pull an ‘I told you so’ on me are you, Max?” Richards said while I listened to the ring in my other ear.
“No,” I said. “And you wouldn’t have done it to me, either. There are more important moves to make here.”
I was now hearing a recorded voice telling me that the customer I was trying reach was unavailable at this time. I left a message for O’Shea to call me as soon as possible.
“Morrison?” she said and I nodded while we sat at the light.
From memory I replayed my conversation with Marci the bartender, her admission that she had been seeing Morrison for a few months, that the romance had gone wrong and that the officer had raped her. The word itself caused Richards to recoil.
“She told you this?”
“Yeah. I thought I was going to talk her into opening up on some kind of drug connection the two of them had,” I said. “I told her about the missing bartenders and that we were looking at Morrison as a possible supplier who might have been responsible for their disappearance.”
“We, Max?”
“Yeah,” I said, ignoring the question. “Then she just spilled it. She said she didn’t fight him and it might have saved her life.”
“And let me guess, she’s not willing to press charges and testify,” Richards said.
I didn’t have to answer. I watched her hands flex on the steering wheel. She was controlling her anger, keeping it at bay while she ran the scenario. She might even have been seeing the image of a dead deputy lying facedown in her front yard, the gun still in her hand.
“The rape took place out in the Glades, Sherry,” I said, trying to pull her back. “Some spot out off the Alley.”
She reconnected her eyes to mine.
“But she couldn’t lead you to it, right?” she said and I must have had some look of stupidity on my face again.
“So somehow you get it in your head to tail the guy? How long did you think you’d have to pull that off?”
“It wasn’t that blind,” I said, defending myself. “I talked with Marci and got her to pass on a lie to Morrison that we had physical evidence on one of the missing bartenders.”