the cheek or uncomfortable moment.
“Not a problem,” I said. “You know my motto: Have coffee, will sit and muddle.”
I wrapped my fingers around the cup.
“Habits that never die,” she said.
“Not until I do,” I said and watched her. “You look great. Still running?”
My direct compliment, even if she got it a lot from others, brought a tiny flush of color to her cheeks.
“Cycling, actually. A friend of mine got me into it. So we put in sixty or seventy miles a week. I’m enjoying it. It’s a lot less damaging on the knees. You’d like it.”
I tried to imagine myself in some bold-colored, skin-tight jersey and wearing a helmet with a little mirror sticking out the side. I didn’t respond.
“You look like you’re still canoeing,” she said, giving her own shoulders a hunch and closing her fists in a mock muscle pose. I had kept some upper body mass on my lean, six-foot-three-inch frame.
“You do still have the Glades place, right?”
“Yeah. In fact I’m heading out back out there today.”
“OK.” She shifted her voice. “Let me tell you about this case, then.”
I watched Richards’s eyes while I sipped coffee and listened to her words. She’d been working on the disappearance of three women. All of them had vanished over the last twenty months. Their only connection was that they had worked as bartenders at small, out-of-the-way taverns in Broward County, they had no local family connections and their work histories were transient and sketchy. She hadn’t found any long-term boyfriends, at least none appeared to be looking for them, and there had been no apparent signs of foul play at the apartment addresses the women had given their employers.
“So where’s the FBI on these cases?” I asked, knowing the feds usually get their fingers into missing persons investigations if they show any overt signs of criminality.
“No interest,” she said. “Too busy looking for weapons of mass destruction.”
Sarcasm did not become her.
“These are women in their mid-twenties out living on their own. They keep hours that have them in and out of their apartments at all kinds of weird hours. Folks they work with rarely even know their last names. Hell, I got one set of parents that didn’t even know their daughter was in Florida.”
She suddenly looked very tired.
“You talked to parents?”
She nodded and then waited, waving off the waitress who’d approached with an order pad poised.
“I’ve been volunteering at Women in Distress, you know, the center and shelter for domestic abuse victims.”
This I knew. When we had still been dating, Richards had taken in a friend, a woman who was being abused by a fellow cop. They’d spent late nights talking, discussions that hadn’t included me. There had been some kind of kinship, maybe even a shared experience. Richards had become a protector of sorts, and furious.
The boyfriend had come to an ugly end on Richards’s front lawn and the angry look in her eye at the time had not left my memory. It was heated and righteous and remorseless and now as she told her story, I thought I saw it flicker behind her gray irises, under control, but still there.
Afterward she’d taken her friend to the center, and then joined as a volunteer to “do something,” she’d said at the time. Several times before we finally drifted apart I’d tried to ask her out and she’d begged off because she was “at the shelter.” I never called it an obsession. People do what they need to do.
“Amy Strausshiem was the most recent girl to disappear,” Richards started, setting her jaw, putting her game face on like she always did when she was determined not to show emotion. “Her mother came into the shelter. The woman had been to a dozen city police departments. She’d tried to talk the newspapers into running a story. She’d been to dozens of bars in the area, tacking up posters. She’d been to drug clinics, homeless shelters and the goddamn morgue, Max.”
Her eyes had moved on to a spot somewhere behind me, unfocused.
“All I could do was listen, no different than anybody else had done. I’m a detective but I’ve got no bodies, no ransom notes. These aren’t children, or Alzheimer’s patients or Saudi immigrants. Nobody gives a damn. They’re just young women who are gone.”
I knew that it was true of nearly any big metropolitan area. South Florida’s missing girls were no different. Even the famous ones—Beth Kenyon, Colleen Parris, Rosario Gonzalez, Tiffany Sessions—were never found. Hell, in 1997 a man