Lippman, Laura Read Online Free PDF Page B

therein:
After accompanying the strange boys to the beach party, Sally was found wandering down the highway, barefoot and confused…. Jimmy’s parents told him that it wasn’t his fault that Greg had befriended him and taken him fishing but made it clear to him that such friendships with older men were not natural…. She got in the stranger’s car—and was never seen again
.
    There were rumors, too—sightings of the girls as far away as Georgia, bogus ransom demands, fears of cults and counterculturists. After all, Patty Hearst had been taken just a year before. Kidnapping was big in the seventies. There was a businessman’s wife redeemed for a hundred thousand dollars, which had seemed like a fortune, a rich girl buried in a box with a breathing tube, the Getty heir with the severed ear. But the Bethanys were not wealthy, not in Kay’s memory, and the longer the story went without an official ending, the less memorable it had become. The last time that Kay thought about the Bethany sisters had probably been the last time she went to the movies at Security Square, at least a decade ago. That was it—Security Square Mall, relatively new at the time, something of a ghost town now.
    “Are you…?”
    “Get me a lawyer, Kay. A good one.”
     
CHAPTER 4
     
    Infante took the as-the-crow-flies route to the hospital, traveling straight through the city instead of taking the Beltway around it. Damn, downtown Baltimore was getting shiny. Who’d have thought it? He almost regretted not buying a place in town ten years ago, not that he’d still have it anyway. Besides, he had been raised in the suburbs—Massapequa, out on Long Island—and he had a soft spot for the jumbled secondary highways and modest apartment complexes where he lived up in Parkville. IHOPs, Applebee’s, Target, Toys “R” Us, gas stations, craft stores—to him this was what home looked like. Not that he had any intention of going back there, where it was now almost impossible to live on a police officer’s salary. He kept his allegiance to the Yankees and played the part of the brash Noo Yawkah for his colleagues’ amusement. But in his head, he knew that this town, this job, was right for him. He was good at what he did, with one of the better clearance rates in the department. “Baltimore punk is my second language,” he liked to say. Lenhardt was on him to take the sergeant’s exam, but then—people always thought you should do what they did.
Be a firefighter
, his dad said,
on the island
. His first wife had cajoled,
C’mon, watch
Law & Order
with me
. She wanted her favorite show to be his favorite show, her favorite meal to be his. She even tried to convert him to Rolling Rock over Bud, to Bushmills over Jameson. It was as if she were working backward, trying to create a logical match from one that had been all heat and desire from the jump. In that way she reminded Infante of himself in high school. He decided where he wanted to go to college—Nassau Community College, no major brain bust, that, it was all they could afford—then gave the guidance counselor the info that would make her computer spit out that school. That way his only option became a choice, instead of something that was forced on him.
    He breezed through the city, making the hospital in less than forty minutes. But it wasn’t good enough. Gloria Bustamante—the biggest ballbuster of any defense attorney he knew, male or female, straight or gay—was in the hospital corridor.
    Fuck me.
    “You look absolutely crestfallen,” the alcoholic old lizard said. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had cause to use that word in a sentence before, but now I see it—crestfallen. Like a blue jay whose little tuft is drooping in the front.”
    She pulled at her own forelock, a stray piece of red-brown hair that showed an inch of gray at the root. Bustamante was her usual wreck of a self—lipstick in and out of the natural line of mouth, suit missing a button. Her