Shadows Still Remain

“I was taking a nap,” she says, music seeping out from behind her.

“With Al Green playing?”

“I haven’t seen Artis since that one incident,” she says.

“That one little incident,” says O’Hara, “where he slapped you around and held a knife to your throat.”

“Like I said, I haven’t seen him.”

“But if you do, you’d call us, right?”

“No question.”

When their shift ends, Krekorian parks their black piece of crap Impala in front of the precinct house and heads to his own piece of crap Montero in the lot. O’Hara runs inside to use the bathroom before her forty-minute ride home. Slumped in one of the filthy plastic chairs just inside the door is a brown-haired white kid in a gray hooded sweatshirt about the same age and loose-limbed build as Axl, and when she gets back down the stairs she can’t help looking at him again. Like Axl, he looks like the kind of shy kid who could sit there all night, before getting up and saying anything to the desk sergeant.

“How long you been here?” asks O’Hara.

“An hour. I need to report a missing person.”

“Who?” says O’Hara.

“Francesca Pena. She’s nineteen, a sophomore at NYU, five foot nine, short black hair, about one hundred eighteen pounds.”

As O’Hara looks down at him in his chair, the kid takes out a well-thumbed snapshot of a very pretty teenage girl with long jet-black hair and bottomless brown eyes. “That’s before she cut it,” he says, touching the picture. “When she smiles, she’s got a beautiful gap between her teeth.”

“She your girlfriend?” asks O’Hara, looking wistfully over the kid’s shoulder at the door.

“Not anymore. Just friends. That’s why I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home Wednesday night. We’re not a couple anymore. That’s cool. But we had planned to spend Thanksgiving together and I knew she was looking forward to it. Now it’s Friday, and she still doesn’t answer her phone.”

“You roommates?”

“No, I’m visiting. From Westfield, Mass. Francesca’s from Westfield too.”

A handsome kid, thinks O’Hara, but with that fatal transparent sincerity that drives girls away in droves. Wednesday night, Pena probably hooked up with someone sarcastic and cutting and didn’t have the heart to tell him she was blowing him off for their Thanksgiving dinner. It’s amazing how many girls disappear at the start of weekends and reappear Sunday night. But O’Hara brings him upstairs to the detective room anyway. Partly, it’s because he’s not Dolores Kearns, and she can’t imagine him two days from now looking through her like a pane of glass. Mostly it’s because she misses Axl.

Without taking off her coat, she sits him down by her desk, turns on her computer and takes down his information. Name: David McLain. Age: nineteen. Address: 85 Windsor Court, Westfield, Massachusetts. Since he arrived in the city, he’s been staying with Pena at 78 Orchard Street, 5B. He gives her the numbers for his cell and Pena’s.

“How long you been visiting?” asks O’Hara.

“Three weeks. I’ve been working as a barback a couple nights a week at a place on First and Fifth called Three of Cups.”

“Don’t you want to go to college yourself?” she asks, not sure why she’s talking to the kid like a guidance counselor.

“Maybe. I had a pretty good chance for a soccer scholarship till I let my grades slip.”

With his forlorn expression and downtrodden posture, McLain looks almost as pathetic as Axl after he got dumped by his first real girlfriend sophomore year. People outgrow each other. Sad as hell, but it happens, and for six months, Axl walked around just like this kid, with his head so far up his ass that eventually O’Hara had no choice but to stage an intervention. On a Friday afternoon, the last day before summer vacation, she picked him up at school and just started driving. Chugging Big Gulps and talking, they drove twenty-six hours before they stopped in their first motel. Five days later, they walked up to a guardrail and stared with their mouths hanging open at the Grand Canyon. Looking at McLain, she doesn’t know whether to hug him or kick him in the ass.

“Is staying this long OK with Francesca? She didn’t give you a deadline?”

“Not yet. I help out. I buy groceries. I clean up.”

“Where’d you sleep?”

“On the floor in my sleeping bag.”

He’s as loyal as Bruno, thinks O’Hara. But who knows? Maybe he got kicked one too many times.

“When was the last time you saw Francesca?”

“About eight-thirty Wednesday night. She was meeting friends for dinner. Then they were going to have drinks at some new trendy place. Don’t know which one.”

“You know the names of her friends?”

“No. Never met them. I’m pretty sure she’s ashamed of me. One is the daughter of a famous artist.”

“So what did you do after she left?”

“Shopped for our dinner.”

“Where’d you buy the stuff?”

“A twenty-four-hour supermarket on Avenue A around Fourth Street.”

“What time you get there?”

“About one a.m., maybe a little later. I think I got the last turkey in NYC. Then I got up at seven the next morning and started cooking.”

“Who taught you to cook, your mom?”

“You kidding me? My grandmother.”

You walked right into that one, thinks O’Hara, and for a second feels as bad as she did about Axl’s suburban Thanksgiving.

“Keep the receipt for the groceries?”

“Why would I do that?”

5 (#u0aa81585-1a05-5713-8672-487b82f70195)

Saturday, O’Hara and Krekorian focus their crime-solving talents on a pocketbook, net contents seventeen dollars, snatched the night before at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Delancey. When they get there, the manager has the whole caper cued up on video, and it plays like something out of Oliver Twist. The victim, African American, approximately thirty-five, sits at a table enjoying her coffee and the latest Patterson, when the five-foot, two-hundred-pound Astrid Canozares waddles through the door, a stroller in front and two hyperactive kids in tow. While the kids distract the mark, Canozares tosses the woman’s pocketbook into the stroller, then mother, kids and infant, suddenly no longer hungry, exit the premises. O’Hara and Krekorian know the stroller is empty and the kids on loan because they’ve arrested Canozares three times in the last six months.

“The hardest-working obese kleptomaniac on the Lower East Side,” says Krekorian.

“Hands down,” says O’Hara.

Even though they know where Canozares lives, and the family that supplies the prop and extras, it takes all evening to track her down and another four hours to run her through the system. O’Hara and Krekorian share the collar, and because it’s her turn, O’Hara gets the overtime, which is the only real point of the exercise, turning seventeen stolen dollars into an extra $176 on O’Hara’s next pay stub. It’s a long slow night, and O’Hara spends much of it thinking about David McLain and Francesca Pena, more worried about the lost boy than the missing girl.

Sunday, her shift starts at four, and in the dismal early dusk, the short thick precinct house, with its slits for windows, looks medieval. O’Hara tells herself she won’t take the girl’s disappearance seriously until the end of the day, but when she calls McLain and finds he still hasn’t heard from Pena, she takes out her coffee-stained list of hospitals and ERs and starts making calls: Beth Israel and St. Vincent’s in the Village, NYU, Cabrini and Lenox Hill, St. Luke’s Roosevelt near Columbia, Mount Sinai in East Harlem and Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights. Pena hasn’t turned up at any of them or in Hoboken or Jersey City, and near the end of their shift, she and Krekorian drive up to NYU to have a talk with Campus Security.