fishing in a canal spotted a rusted, overturned van in the water not far from the roadway. When the police wrecker pulled it out, they found the bones of five teenagers inside. They’d been missing for eighteen years.
Richards was on her own on this one, some kind of a mission to keep women safe on the planet, tilting at Cervantes’s windmills I thought, but I wasn’t going to say it to her face.
“OK,” I said. “What makes O’Shea stand out in these disappearances?”
She again set her face.
“Two of the girls who’ve gone missing were definitely seen with him and a third one, maybe,” she said.
I nodded.
“He’s been in all of the bars where these girls worked just before they vanished and seems to have a circuit of places that he rolls through on a regular basis. Maybe trolling.”
He’s Irish, I thought, but didn’t say it.
“He’s had opportunity and he’s an ex-cop who would know enough about how things work to get away with abducting these girls without leaving an obvious trail.”
She stopped and was looking down at the table, maybe assessing how flimsy her evidence sounded when it was spoken out loud and left hanging out there. I stayed silent, knowing there had to be more.
“He’s been involved in this kind of thing before, Max,” she said, finally meeting my eyes.
Few people could surprise me the way Richards could.
“What? In serial abductions?” I said. “Jesus!”
“Not serial,” she quickly corrected. “But the disappearance of a woman known to him and to other cops in your old city of brotherly love.”
I must have been staring. Nothing in my memory even hinted at the kind of case she was talking about.
“I’m sorry, Max. I know you don’t exactly keep up with news from home,” she said, giving me a break. “A few years ago there was a hell of a dustup in your old division. Somebody sent in an anonymous letter accusing four local officers with having sexual relations with a young counter clerk at a local twenty-four-hour convenience shop. Faith Hamlin, an adult, physically, but the background on her was that she was working with a preadolescent IQ.”
I shook my head, not sure I even wanted to hear.
“Faith worked the overnight shift at the store. Someone dropped a dime on the eleven to seven patrol crew that included O’Shea, said they were all getting sexual favors behind the counter or in the back room while on duty. Internal affairs probably would have deep-sixed the allegations, but the letter was full of names, times, dates.”
“Was the girl the one who wrote the complaint?”
“No.”
“But she substantiated it?”
“No,” Richards said. “IA interviewed her but according to the reports, she denied everything. No sex, no inappropriate actions by the cops, all of whom she said she knew by name, but they’d only been nice to her and protected the place at night while she was working.”
“OK,” I said. “So they drop it, no complainant, no crime.”
“Except a couple of days later, she disappears,” Richards said. “Gone.”
Richards caught me staring again while I tried to put the scenario together in my head. Preposterous? No. I’d heard the same kind of shit before. Cop groupies. Gangbangs. The tales got passed around in the locker rooms all the time. It was the victim and the disappearance that twisted this one.
“Don’t tell me IA still dropped it?” I finally said.
“No. Actually I was quite impressed with the investigation that they did. Some woman is running the show up there and she’s tough,” Richards said. “They ground down all four guys, including O’Shea. Polygraphed three of them and got confessions on the sex acts but they all said they didn’t know where Faith was and had no part in her disappearance.”
“Three of them?” I said, knowing the answer. O’Shea refused the polygraph and quit. The investigation never turned up a body or signs of a crime. They had nothing to hold him on.
“He got a Florida driver’s license eighteen months ago and gave an address down in Hollywood,” Richards said. “He’s been working security jobs on and off with Wachenhut and the Navarro Group, mostly pulling guard duty at marinas and car dealerships.”
“Come to Florida. Shed your overcoat and your problems. Hell, cruise the beach and pluck oranges off the trees,” I said.
I caught her watching me, a grin pulling at one corner of her freshly glossed mouth.
“Max, you sound like the CliffsNotes of The Grapes of Wrath.”
“OK,” I said. “I’ll plead to intellectual plagiary. But what you’ve got is still