her to set him up?”
“It was just an attempt, Sherry. It might have stirred up something to cause him to make a mistake, give up a lead. O’Shea was covering her,” I said. “It didn’t work out and if Morrison did have someplace to go, he’ll stay the hell away from it now.”
We both went quiet as we pulled into the parking garage and up next to my truck.
“Maybe not,” Richards said and I looked at her. “I put a tracker on his patrol car the day after I told you about his file.”
Now I was staring.
“You know, those GPS trackers that the delivery managers and armored car guys use on their vehicles so they can monitor their fleets or individual drivers? It clocks their stops and mileage and maps out every damn place they go during the day.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know what they are. How the hell did you manage that?”
“Internal affairs,” she said. “Morrison was already on their screen. I just gave them a nudge. They called in his car for a bogus maintenance check and stuck the tracker in there the other day.”
“So you believed me,” I said.
“I was opening myself up to possibilities,” she said, not looking away. “I checked it this morning and last night after Morrison caught you up in his little DUI trap he went home to his residence until about midnight and then took this long drive out on Alligator Alley.
“He got about fifteen miles out past the toll booth and then turned north on some kind of trail, I’m guessing, because the map doesn’t even show a road. He stopped there for thirty minutes. Then it appears he turned around and came back.”
“Christ,” I said. “That’s where he takes them.”
I could feel the blood in my veins, the adrenaline chasing it. Sherry saw it too, the scenario, the possibilities.
“And you’ve got the coordinates of this place where he stopped?” I said, opening up my door.
“I’ve got a mapped printout. It’s in my briefcase.”
“You know where he is now?”
“I can find out,” she said.
I tried O’Shea again, got the recording. While I called Kim’s, Richards handed me the printout of Morrison’s trip to the Glades.
“I have a friend in dispatch,” she said and then made a call of her own.
When I finished I looked in at her and she raised a finger to me, said thank you to someone and clicked off.
“Marci didn’t show for her two o’clock shift,” I said. “It’s the first time she’s missed since she was hired and Laurie can’t get her on her cell.”
“Morrison checked in at roll call and will be on patrol for the next eight hours,” she said.
“All right, I’m taking this with me,” I said, waving the printout. I expected her to stop me, to tell me to wait for a crime scene team, to at least demand that she come with me.
“You make that run, Max,” she said instead, a sense of urgency in her voice. “I’m going to find this girl.”
CHAPTER 31
I was ten miles west of the tollbooth, doing eighty in the rain and watching both the darkening roadway slide out under my headlights and the truck’s odometer to mark the turnoff. Richards would be checking Marci’s apartment and the hospital E.R.s and doing it without having anything broadcast out on the police radio band. She’d keep checking with a friend at dispatch to confirm that Morrison was still working in his Victoria Park zone. I was out after physical evidence only.
My wipers were running a delayed beat, a one-step brush and then silent. Sunset had long been shrouded by the cloud cover. The rain was light but had turned the freeway into a ribbon of asphalt that shined wet in my lights and then dulled and disappeared out where the beams could not catch up to my speed. The hiss of tires slinging water up into the wheel wells sounded just above the deep rumble of my engine. When I’d stopped to hand the toll-taker a dollar I’d noticed the cameras and knew that there would be yet another piece of evidence against Morrison if he tried to deny his trips out here.
When the woman gave me change I tossed it into the cup holder and punched the trigger on my trip meter. I was now watching for 21.7, the exact distance Richards’s planted GPS tracker had recorded. As I got closer, I slowed to 50 mph, then 20. When the odometer crept to 21.5 I pulled