looked over. Meagan smiled at him and raised her eyebrows. I signaled the hostess that we were ready to sit down for dinner and paid the bar bill.
Meagan was true to her word on answering any questions I had about the departments’ and internal affairs’ investigation into the Faith Hamlin case. While we ate she described how IA isolated the officers on the differing shifts and found discrepancies in the night crews’ stories of how often they stopped at the market and who had actually been the last to see Hamlin. Although good cops usually have well tuned bullshit detectors when they’re talking to mopes on the street, it doesn’t mean they’re good liars themselves. Despite the polygraphs that three of the cops had passed, Meagan’s investigators had done searches of all the officers’ homes and cars, looking for any sign of Hamlin or DNA that could have indicated she’d been transported, dead or alive, by any of them. Nothing. They also crunched the time lines down on each man, making them give details on their whereabouts during every minute that they weren’t on duty from the time Hamlin was last seen. Two of the guys were married and took the biggest hit. The media was all over the story. No one escaped being flayed in public. But O’Shea took the brunt. He was the only one who refused to cooperate. He stonewalled. He’d told them to charge him or leave him the fuck alone. He demanded a search warrant be served on his home and vehicles. He knew enough about the law to argue to a judge that the department had no evidence of a crime, that Faith Hamlin could have done anything from simply walking away from the embarrassment of the situation to throwing herself off the Ben Franklin Bridge. There were no indications of a crime and no body. Though she might have had the mind of a thirteen-year-old, Hamlin was legally an adult.
“So what does your gut tell you, Meagan?” I said when I ran out of questions. “Colin killed her and dumped her over in the Jersey Pine Barrens?”
“I don’t have the kind of instinct you always seem to think you have, Max. Hell, he could have chopped her up and stuck her in a barrel. It’s been done before. And by guys a lot smarter than him. He might have had nothing to do with her. None of the other three ratted on each other. They just came clean,” she said, not letting the conversation spoil her appetite for the veggie wrap she worked her way through.
“But you know the old saying: If you got nothing to hide, why not talk?”
“Shit,” I said, shaking my head because she knew better and every cop worth a damn knew better. A lot of people went to jail for crimes they didn’t commit because they talked when they should have shut up. The only thing that let some cops and prosecutors live with that was the belief that it made up for the crimes the guy did do.
“So, Max. Speaking of talking,” Meagan said, folding her napkin and resting her chin on the backs of her hands. “What have you got for me?”
I didn’t hold out on her. I gave her the details of my meeting with O’Shea, including his admission that he’d dated a couple of the bartenders that had gone missing. I told her he’d been working private security and even detailed his participation in the alley fight.
She smiled at a thought, but didn’t comment.
“Do you have an address for him?” she said.
“I’m sure detective Richards has an address, but I wasn’t exactly tailing the guy, Meg.”
“They have a trace on his phone or surveillance of some kind?”
“Not that I know of. As far as I know they’re in the same bind you were in. No crime, no warrants, no taps or manpower.”
“I don’t know, Max,” she said, folding her napkin on the table. “If that’s all you have I’m not sure this was much of a trade.”
I took my wallet out of my pocket without looking up at her, guessed at the bill total and put a few twenties on the table and slid my chair back.
“Yeah, it’s not going to get you any captain bars,” I said, getting petty by matching the dig.
“Oh, the jealous good ole boys’ club got your ear already,” she said.
“Hey, you’ve always been a multitasker, Meg. You find out what happened to your girl and get promoted for