"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 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 circumstantial."
She went silent for several beats and again was looking beyond me.
"He's got this way about him," she said, shifting back to my eyes. "It's this quiet confidence. He's not one of those 'Hey, baby. Let's party' kind of guys. He's good-looking, smart and knows just the right things to say to these kinds of women to lure them, get them to let their guard down."
The quizzical thought running through my head must have been on my face because she answered before I could ask how she'd managed to get all her detailed observations.
"He tried to pick me up," she said and then seemed to wait for my reaction.
"In a bar?"
"Yeah. While I was working on the case."
"You went undercover?"
"Yes," she said.
"As a bartender to try and get someone to abduct you?"
"That's a blunt way to put it, but yes, basically to get a feel for what these girls were seeing and maybe get lucky enough to pull a suspect list together."
"Let me guess," I said. "O'Shea made you?"
"Yeah. Probably before he actually asked me out," she said. "Picked me up after work on our first date and when I got into his car he asked if we needed to stop at the P.D. so I could punch out my time card."
She was shaking her head at the memory.
"Hey, hard to pull that on a good cop. And the guy was a good cop when I knew him," I said.
She seemed to gather herself.
"But not when you didn't know him, Max. His department file showed three reprimands for undue use of force during arrests. He lost time while he was in an employee health services program, which probably meant he was drying out someplace even before the Faith Hamlin case."
The waitress came by. I nodded my head to another refill and took a long sip. I'd hate to see what my own department file would show. It had already made me a suspect once in South Florida.
I looked up at her and maybe she could see the doubt in my face, or maybe she thought she needed to put an exclamation on her motivation.
"His wife filed a domestic abuse charge against him, Max," she said, and her mouth went tight into a line. "He's not without some bit of a warm-up."
I let the words sit. I knew where her head was at, and there wasn't anything to say.
"You want me to talk to him," I said, more statement than question.