“I was still in the office working the phones and the computer using her social security number to trace her folks in Minnesota but they’d both died—her mother when Marci was young and her father of a heart attack three years ago. Then Laurie called me and said she’d just shown up for work, begging to make up her time on the night shift.”
Instead of sounding relieved, maybe even giddy over Marci’s safety and my report on what we’d gotten from the Glades site, Richards sounded wary.
“So where are you now?” I said, slowing as I moved into a more populated section of Broward County. I didn’t need to get stopped now.
“I’m at Kim’s. I pulled a stool back into the hallway and I’m watching her work. She keeps answering the phone and looking out the windows,” Richards said. “I’m not letting her out of my sight and if Morrison comes in here I’m going to arrest his ass myself.”
“Look, Sherry,” I said. “If that happens, call for backup first, OK?”
“Right,” she said, and the phone clicked off.
It was one in the morning when I got to the bar. My jeans were wet up to the middle of my thighs from the swamp. My shirt was smeared with muck and I thought I could still smell the stench of death in the material. I parked in a spot on the back side of the shopping center and walked through the pool-room entrance. Richards was still sitting in the hallway that linked the two rooms, her back up against the wall. Another patron was making his way to the men’s room and said to her: “Hey, honey. You still here? I told you I’d be glad to give you a ride home.”
“My boyfriend will be here any minute,” she answered.
“That’s what you said an hour ago, sweetheart.”
“I was being polite,” she said and then noticed me walk in. “And I still am.”
The guy shrugged and slid by me.
“What’s up?” I said, looking beyond Richards to see Marci behind the back bar, working at the register, closing out the paper tabs that were piled there.
Even here in the shadows I could see the gray in her eyes. She’d let this whole mess boil too long in her head.
“I woke up the damn prosecutor and he said the evidence is circumstantial,” she said, the bitterness snapping off the words. “He said we’ll have to take it to a grand jury if we want to go after a cop.”
I put my back to the wall opposite her and leaned into it. I was tired.
“He said if forensics comes up with a blood match out there in the morning, maybe. If we run a photo spread past some other women who pick him out as trying to take them out there, maybe. The fact that he might have driven his squad car out there to look at the stars isn’t criminal. Even if you’re right and those are my girls out there, it’s still circumstantial. No judge will order an arrest warrant.”
Everything she said, I’d heard before and she had probably heard every time she’d gone to the same prosecutor’s office for the last several months on her disappearing girls. She was looking at the floor, trying to hide her tears. I was looking down, trying to think of something to say.
“He raped me.”
We both looked up at Marci. She’d come out from behind the bar and was standing in the hallway opening. Her arms were folded across her chest. Her chin was up and she did not try to wipe the tears from her cheek.
“He raped me out there in the Everglades, where he goes. I went to the sexual assault treatment center today. That’s where I was. I thought they would just go and arrest him but they didn’t.”
Richards and I looked at each other but let her continue.
“They taped an interview and made me sign a sworn statement and when I asked them what they were going to do they said they had to send everything to some internal office because it was a cop and that they’d get back to me. I thought that meant a couple of hours so I stayed away from my place all day and they never called but he did,” she said and a tremble was setting up in her voice and a paleness I had seen before when I had first told her of Morrison’s motives.