A Killing Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 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