Missings, The Read Online Free PDF

Detectives often spent more time in court than on any other part of the job.
    The delay before trial gave him time to focus on his other workload. He had two open missing persons cases. One was a probable runaway. Chase suspected the seventeen-year-old boy would either come back home or turn up on another town’s police blotter. He hoped, for the sake of the kid, the first scenario won.
    The second one, the Rachelle Benavides case, worried him. That one had kept him at his desk far longer into the night than he’d wanted. He’d gone back to the Benavides home and talked with the father. Carlos Benavides was a quiet man with a defeated posture. As he considered all of the things that may have happened to his daughter, his already collapsed shoulders curled in toward his heart even more.
    Both the patriarch’s wife and daughter seemed surprised at his willingness to do whatever necessary without question. Chase knew about family secrets and miscommunication. He guessed those issues weren’t exclusive to one culture. He understood the feeling of helplessness Carlos Benavides must be experiencing at this moment. It sucked.
    Chase had spent the morning with Rachelle’s friends from school while Daniel interviewed the neighbors. They’d both come back to the station empty.
    For the thousandth time he hoped they would find no connection between the girl’s disappearance and the two other corpses discovered earlier. Both of those were also young. But they were male. Hispanic. One mutilated. One not. No IDs and no families looking for them—at least not through official channels. Only two facts connected Rachelle to the murder victims—age and origin. He hoped the fact that she was a she , that her family was clearly involved in finding her, and that at this point she was only missing, would be enough to keep her on one list and off another.
    Butz’s voice cut through his thoughts. “Waters, you got anything more on that missing? Not the boy, the wetback.”
    Chase pushed down the words he wanted to use to put Butz in his place. This wasn’t his battle to fight right now. He set his pen down and the silence stretched. He wanted to give Daniel a chance to say something. To give the Hispanic detective a chance to stand up and be strong for his heritage. He waited. Nothing. He wanted to kick Daniel—make him speak up, but Daniel’s position wasn’t Chase’s battle to forge either.
    When no one moved, Chase answered, “Rachelle Benavides is a young woman with close ties to the Hispanic community. She’s a part-time student at the college and not likely to be a runaway. She attended her economics class yesterday. Nothing unusual. Daniel and I have interviewed her family, her neighbors, and a few of her friends from school. Daniel is going through everything on her laptop but we don’t have anything yet. There’s no reason for her to have left on her own, and so far, there’s no evidence of foul play.”
    Chase paused, then: “What exactly did you mean by ‘wetback’, Lieutenant?”
    After an initial clueless look the man at least had the grace to flush crimson.
    “My apologies for not being PC ,” Butz said. He gave a perfunctory nod in Daniel’s direction. “Especially considering.”
    Chase closed his eyes and shook his head. The man was a relic. His pension couldn’t come soon enough. How he’d managed to hold on to his job for this long, particularly with an African-American chief of police, proved a testament to the collective bargaining system.
    “I don’t know how you cut opening a case when the spi—uh, señorita has been MIA for less than twenty-four,” Butz said. “If it weren’t for those other two DBs, you’d figure along with the rest of us that she was just movin’ on like those people do. You waited for the juvie white boy but not the Mexican. This world is gettin’ stranger and stranger.”
    “Lieutenant, I did not delay any search for the ‘juvie white boy.’ His parents didn’t