I put my hands in my pockets. Neutral. Unthreatening. You learn body language when you are a cop.
“Somebody has to, Max. You haven’t talked to the mothers of these last two girls, who haven’t seen their daughters or heard from them for weeks or even months. They read me their last letters. They send pictures that are years old. High school portraits you get in those same envelopes with the gummy flaps and the sizes and package deals printed all over them. They want to show me Mother’s Day cards they got from a completely different state three years ago. They tell me their daughter’s hobbies. ‘Oh, she loves the beach and horseback riding.’
“They’re desperate, Max. And every goddamn agency that they get passed to next tells them until there’s evidence of a crime…”
She lowered her head and I took a step toward her and she put up a palm to stop me.
“I’m sorry, Max.” She looked up. “What do you have for me?”
I put my hands back in my pockets. I told her about the trip to Philly and the meeting with O’Shea’s ex-wife. Without getting into my background with Meagan, I gave her a rundown on my conversations with IAD.
“Christ, you’d at least think that hard-ass lieutenant up there would want to throw some help into this,” she said, and I had to work to sustain a poker face.
“The ex-wife says O’Shea never got threatening. Never physical. In fact, she of all people was sure he wouldn’t have the guts to carry something off like this and I gotta tell you, Sherry, I get the same vibe.”
She turned her face away and looked down the shadowed street and her lips were pressed into a whitening crease.
“Be objective, Sherry. You’ve got an ex-cop who liked to bounce from bar to bar, dates some bartenders, has a couple of failed trips with women and the capacity for violence with assholes on the street,” I said. “That’s a profile that could fit me and another two dozen guys in the business we’re in. Maybe he’s carrying some kind of guilty stink from what happened up in Philly, but you’ve got nothing on him.”
“We’ll see,” she said and pushed herself off the car with a flex of her thighs.
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve got a warrant to search his place,” she said, walking around to open the driver’s door. “One of your muggers from the other night is filing charges saying your buddy tried to kick him to death. He was bleeding and we think we might get some forensics from O’Shea’s boots to match it.”
I hoped my face didn’t look as stunned and stupid as it felt.
“What the hell does that have to do with missing women?” I said.
“You know the game, Max. Maybe we can squeeze him. You never know what a little pressure will bring out once you have somebody inside.”
She got in her car and started the engine and I stepped back as she pulled away. Maybe my former girlfriend hadn’t just used me. But that’s what it felt like.
After Richards left I walked back to my truck and sat in the parking lot watching the door to Kim’s, grinding, nowhere to be and not feeling like going back inside. At eleven I walked over to Big Louie’s, the Italian restaurant and pizzeria at the front corner of the strip mall. I got some manicotti and coffee to go. I may have even seen Carmine the delivery boy, an angular kid with coat hanger shoulders and a definite acne problem. He had a horselike face and a patch of peroxide blonde hair. He actually had some kind of tattoo on his calf that was impossible to decipher as it wrapped around a leg the diameter of a garden hose. If he tried to abduct one of the bartenders they would have slapped him silly.
Back in the truck I lowered the window to let the gathering odor of red sauce and garlic escape and had my dinner off the passenger seat. On occasion a lone man would approach the door of Kim’s and I would focus my small field glasses from the glove box on him. What the hell was I on surveillance for? Had walking around on my old beat for a couple of days put me back in the zone?
I took another bite of pasta and watched a couple bend their heads together at the corner, instantly thought