18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  She’d tried to pump the girls for information about their dad’s comings and goings, but neither seemed to know anything. Or maybe they were oblivious to the possibility that he could be out with someone else besides their mother.

  She knew he kept her picture on his nightstand; the girls made it a point to tell her so. She knew he still wore his wedding ring, or at least he was wearing it every time she had seen him since the separation.

  “What’s good?”

  “Everything’s good, but the lobster is outstanding.”

  “Say no more.” Sherry put her hands together. “I haven’t had lobster in months. Are we having cocktails or are you on duty?”

  “Cocktails,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Lots of them.” She was in a slightly better mood this evening. The doctors at the psychiatric clinic agreed that Smyles was both physically and emotionally incapable of the crimes. “He couldn’t deceive you if he tried,” the doctor said. “He couldn’t contain a secret.”

  Sherry sat quietly, calmly, as the candlelight flickered over her glasses. O’Shaughnessy saw how people were drawn to Sherry—first her looks, then the fact that she was blind, then the fact that she didn’t look like she was blind. Her expressions were free and animated, her hands and head followed conversation easily. She was in great shape; you could see it in her muscle tone, in the way she carried herself. Sherry had told her about the various things she did to keep herself busy: workouts in her home gym, martial arts with a sensei twice weekly, sunning herself in her winter solarium and during summers on the lawn behind her house. O’Shaughnessy thought it sounded like a lonely life.

  The waiter took their drink orders and left them alone to decide. They both ordered Cobb salads, boiled lobster for Sherry and crab-stuffed flounder for O’Shaughnessy.

  “You two seem to have a close relationship. You and John, I mean.”

  “He’s the nicest guy you’d ever meet,” Sherry said. “He cares, Kelly. He really does care. It’s not just a job to him.”

  “You’ve known each other a long time?”

  Sherry nodded. “Almost fifteen years now. We met on my very first police case, although I didn’t know what was happening to me at the time. I guess it was the way he treated me. He was sensitive when anyone else might have laughed at me.”

  O’Shaughnessy heard it in her voice, a weak moment perhaps, but she seemed to have let her guard down. Sherry’s tone suggested that there was definitely more between them than a friendship. She wanted to ask but didn’t want to hear there was a wife waiting at home for him somewhere.

  “He’s serious about this victim of his, Susan Paxton,” she said instead.

  “He feels responsible to the victims,” Sherry answered. “He’s always talking about the ones he didn’t close, like he’d never done enough for them. I know it drives him crazy. He keeps telling me that I am God’s gift to victims.” She laughed. “So you’re married?”

  O’Shaughnessy nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Long time?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Children?”

  O’Shaughnessy swallowed; she was going to have to take the question. “Two, both girls.”

  Sherry’s head was down, facing the corner of the table; her expression was wistful. “You’re lucky, you know,” she said. “Really lucky.”

  “I know.” O’Shaughnessy put her fork down. Sherry looked so alone, so vulnerable for just that moment; then it seemed to pass.

  “John said there were women missing. Here, this summer, from the boardwalk.”

  The waiter arrived with their drinks: O’Shaughnessy had a margarita and Sherry had an India Pale Ale.

  “These are on Chief Loudon.” The waiter pointed to the bar. “He said to tell you both to enjoy. He didn’t wish to intrude, but if you have a moment, Lieutenant, he’d like a word with you at the bar.”

  O’Shaughnessy craned her head toward the bar, raised her glass, and smiled as the chief waved back. “My boss,” she said. “I should dash over there before our food arrives. Do you need to go to the ladies’ room? I can take you with me.”

  “I’m good, Kelly, but thanks.”

  “I tried to reach you on the radio,” Loudon growled. “McGuire told me you were here.” His expression was dark. “I thought today might be a good day after you gave me the news on Smyles’s psychiatric tests, but instead I get a call from Jason Carlino.”

  O’Shaughnessy groaned.

  “Who told me he got a call from a highly intoxicated Sergeant Dillon who told him you were meeting with fortunetellers about his daughter’s case. Of course Carlino wanted me to know what idiots he thought we all were.”

  She groaned louder, but the chief wasn’t done.

  “I got Dillon out of bed and asked him where he got the harebrained idea he could call private citizens to talk about cases. He told me that he and Carlino are friends and that he overheard Mac talking to you about a suspect in the Carlino abduction, thought maybe Carlino would be interested to know we had a break. Dillon told him there’s a Philadelphia homicide detective in town showing a suspect’s sketch and a psychic named Sherry Moore you’re consulting.” His eyes flickered to the table and back. “Dillon may not be the smartest guy on the planet, but he knows how to use the Internet, Kelly, and guess what he found?”

  O’Shaughnessy slumped against the bar. “I’m so sorry, Chief. I should have told you before I did it.”

  “Is there anything else I need to know, Lieutenant?” Loudon looked at the blind woman at O’Shaughnessy’s table and this time he stared.

  “You know the Lisa Penn case we talked about, the one from 1974 with the ballistics matchup to Philadelphia? The detective who has the case is a friend of hers.” She nodded toward Sherry. “His victim was born here. That’s it. I swear it. We help out other departments all the time.”

  “It doesn’t explain Sherry Moore.” He scowled.

  O’Shaughnessy put her hand on the bar and looked at the floor, thinking she wouldn’t dare mention Andrew Markey in the morgue. “All right. It’s her sketch. His suspect. She inspired it.”

  “Ah, well.” The chief smiled, sitting back and taking a deep breath. “That makes it all so much easier. It’s a sketch from the dead that you’re showing everyone. I can explain that easily enough when the city manager calls back. He’ll understand.” Loudon thumped the bar with his fist and leaned into her face. “Didn’t you think it would come out, Kelly? Didn’t you know they would use it against you? Jason Carlino’s been burning up the phone all afternoon. I know you think what you’re doing is right, and I know you must see all this as being very innocent, but this is just the kind of ammunition Carlino’s been looking for. This is what will hang you when it hits the streets.”

  “Streets?”

  “Oh. Didn’t I mention that I was only Carlino’s second call of the day? The first was to the Patriot.”

  “Oh, shit.” She groaned. “Jack, I’ll fix things with Carlino. I’ll go over there and see him myself tonight. He should be glad someone is trying to do something about his daughter.”

  “He thinks you already did, Kelly, and that you blew it when you let Smyles out of jail. That’s what he’s been howling about ever since you started this investigation. That’s why he wants you removed. Stay away from him, Kelly, and if you’re real smart, you’ll put some distance between yourself and your Philadelphia friends, too. Now that may sound a little draconian to you, but this is getting to be about your job. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  O’Shaughnessy nodded.

  Loudon put a five-dollar bill by his half-empty beer and stood. “City manager wanted me to suspend you. Dillon filed a formal allegation with the police union that you staged the burglary scene at your house. He says you wanted to divert attention from your failed search and seizures over at the sanitation yard. He’s asking them to support Carlino’s petition for an attorney general’s audit because in his words, the district attorney in Wildwood is unlikely to p
ut the evidence from the Jeremy Smyles house fire before a grand jury.”

  O’Shaughnessy shook her head. “I’m not following.”

  Loudon coughed. “He said, Kelly, that you’re having an affair with Clarke Hamilton.”

  “Oh, my God.” She moaned. She could no longer spare Tim and the girls. Now they’d drag her relationship with Clarke into the papers. Dillon would know it was a no-win situation for her. How could she actually prove that an intruder had put her uniform on the bed? How could she defend against the fact that she’d been seeing Clarke Hamilton? People in town had already seen them together. She’d received flowers from him in front of an office full of detectives.

  And it wasn’t about whether what she did was right or wrong. It was the suggestion that she was incompetent. The attorney general could not ignore Carlino’s demands for an audit much longer.

  She knew that if it was ever discovered that she’d kept Andrew Markey on ice for Sherry Moore’s sake, she would be back in sergeant’s stripes, riding the streets with Dillon on midnight shifts before the end of the summer.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “About me.”

  “Well, I’ve got a uniformed officer in the park across the street from your house twenty-four hours a day. What do you think I think?” He shook a finger at her. “What should concern you, Kelly, is not what I think. I won’t be able to say no to him if there’s a next time. I won’t be able to save you.”

  Loudon took the finger out of her face. “I don’t know what you’re planning to do with Miss Moore, Kelly, and quite frankly, I don’t want to. I just want you to know that everyone in town is waiting to see what you’re going to do next. Have a good dinner.”

  O’Shaughnessy returned to her table as the entrees arrived. She picked up her fork and made noises on the plate, drank her drink a little fast, and failed to answer something Sherry had asked.

  “Something wrong?”

  O’Shaughnessy looked up at the blind woman. “I’m okay.”

  “The hell you are.”

  O’Shaughnessy sighed, looked around at the other tables, and smiled weakly. “You don’t miss much.”

  “Am I a problem? That happens more than you know.”

  “It’s part of it,” O’Shaughnessy admitted. “But it’s really only an excuse, too. The problem was here long before you arrived.”

  “Can I do anything?” Sherry asked.

  She shook her head. “One of my victims’ fathers learned that you and Detective Payne are in town. He’s been riding my ass since the day his daughter disappeared. Now the newspapers are going to pick on you and he’ll play it to his advantage.”

  “John and I should leave.”

  “Absolutely not. You only came to help, Sherry. If my daughter was missing, I would want people to explore every possible means of finding her. This man’s problem is with me. He’s a powermonger. He wants the state to take over the case and he’ll use the fact that I invited you here to do it.” She put her fork down. “I had an incident at my house last night. A break-in.”

  O’Shaughnessy told her the story about finding her uniform on the bed, leaving out that she had been in the district attorney’s home at the time it happened.

  “They’re trying to say it was staged. That I staged it to divert attention away from the abductions.”

  “Kelly, that’s a very serious allegation. If they’re not looking for whoever did it, you could be in danger.”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “The chief put an officer outside my door, but I’m sure it’s someone I know, a cop who thinks he can score political points before this is all over.” She raised a finger to signal for the check and settled back in her chair. After a few seconds she leaned forward again. “Before we go to the morgue, would you like to go under the boardwalk with me, to feel what it’s like, to see where my victims were abducted?”

  “Of course I would,” Sherry said. “Of course. I just want you to be sure.”

  “It’s…dark,” O’Shaughnessy started to warn, then put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Yeah, it is, isn’t it.” Sherry giggled back.

  O’Shaughnessy stood and looked to the bar where Chief Loudon had been sitting. “And as long as we’re at it,” she said, “we’ll stop by the condo and get a bottle of wine on the way. Okay?”

  “Good deal.”

  9:15 P.M.

  The rain had stopped; the sea was eerily calm. O’Shaughnessy parked in the lot where they’d found Carlino’s Explorer. She opened the glove box and removed a flashlight. “I’m leaving my shoes in the car,” she said.

  Sherry nodded and kicked off her own.

  “You’ll want to watch your head. It gets low in places.”

  “Got it.”

  There were only a handful of cars in the lot; most of the tourists had left in advance of the storm. O’Shaughnessy guided Sherry to the drainpipe where it disappeared under the walk.

  “Okay, grab my belt and remember your head.”

  Sherry took a loop of O’Shaughnessy’s belt and reached out to find the edge of the walk.

  Sherry could smell urine as they stepped under the timber, then a whiff of something decomposing, a seagull or a rat. The sand was cold, mushy under their bare feet. They stepped into a puddle, then heavy sand that was dry and caked around their ankles.

  O’Shaughnessy took Sherry’s hand and laid it on the side of the drainpipe. “We’ll follow the pipe about twenty feet.”

  “Got it.”

  Footsteps clomped overhead. A dull, hollow quality about the enclosure seemed to intensify the farther under they went from the parking lot. The smells changed to those of the barnacles, seaweed, century-old pilings.

  O’Shaughnessy raised the light to the boards overhead. “The kids spray graffiti here. There are lots of cigarette butts and beer cans lying around. We found a blood trail the whole way down the pipe, handprints and hair that matched the victim’s. Right up here, just another few steps.” She rapped on the side of the pipe with her knuckles. “Her wristwatch was on the other side, buried in the sand. Her ring was wedged in the boards above where her head would have been. The blood marks on top of the pipe tell us that he grabbed her from this side and pulled her back over.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “This one was seventeen, long hair, very pretty; her friends called her the conservative one, simple jewelry, no tattoos, no body piercings. From what we could tell, she was attacked in the parking lot where we came in. That’s where her car was found. Tire punched. The blood trail ended here, just on the other side of the pipe.”

  O’Shaughnessy turned the flashlight’s beam upward, bathing them both in a halo of light that circled the dark sand around them.

  “You said there was graffiti.”

  “Uh-huh.” O’Shaughnessy took Sherry’s arm and tugged her back in the direction they had come. “We can sit here, the sand’s dry.”

  Sherry let herself down cross-legged and O’Shaughnessy sat opposite her, their knees touching. They had already pulled the cork on the wine bottle in the car, so it came off easily. O’Shaughnessy raised the light and Sherry raised the wine, taking a drink from the bottle and handing it back.

  “‘Beatles, Kurt Cocaine, EP loves FS, Green Day Dookie, Bay Side Blows, Allison loves Christy, Stop the War, Wishbone, Beejun’s suck, SSM 96, Syko Sue, Peace.’” She shifted, took another drink and continued reading. “‘LCMR High—’94 Champs, Surfers DRule, Fuck Gerald, Pat loves Rocky, BH is a cunt, Curly and Moe,’ and on and on. I never imagined that people hung out under here.” O’Shaughnessy lowered the light and turned toward her companion. “I lived here all my life and—Sherry, Sherry, are you all right?”

  Even in the poor light she could see a troubled look on the blind woman’s face. “Sherry?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” Sherry whispered. “Psycho Sue, only the word psycho was spelled wrong. I saw it through Susan Paxton’s eyes in Philadelphia.”r />
  O’Shaughnessy turned the light on Sherry’s face, recalling a conversation with Gus Meyers. They called her crazy Sue…

  “Spell it out like you saw it.”

  “S-Y-K-O,” Sherry whispered.

  O’Shaughnessy looked at her, wiped her forehead with a gritty hand. “You mean she was here? Sitting right here where we are?”

  “It’s the same spelling, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the same,” she whispered. “It’s exactly the same.”

  10:00 P.M.

  O’Shaughnessy was grateful to find the morgue dark and the parking lot empty. She parked her unmarked car in a space reserved for the medical examiner behind an ivy-covered brick wall. She led Sherry to a basement entrance, where she took out a set of keys and tried several before the door opened. A half-dozen steps ascended to a spotless linoleum floor; their shoes tapped loudly down the corridor until they reached a set of cool double doors. She took a breath and tried more keys, and the doors swung open.

  Anyone who had ever seen Sherry at work would hardly forget the moment. Andrew Markey’s head was draped with a sheet; O’Shaughnessy had seen the autopsy reports and knew his face had all but been cleaved in half when it struck the edge of the bottom step. There was no reason to see it now and so it remained draped as Sherry took his hand and tilted her head to one side.

  …an old woman was sitting on a rocker, she was holding out her arms for a hug…a pig hung butchered from scaffolding behind a barn, there was blood dripping from its ears…a young woman, a beautiful woman riding a bicycle, same woman on the beach, same woman naked in a bed…a stage with small children dressed for a Christmas play…man mopping a floor, she could see his face, turning up to her, grinning…a name on the back of a boat, something luck…a young woman, it was Susan! A prison…the man with the mop again, crooking a finger at him, beckoning him down the hall.

  Oh, my God! It was the older man in Susan Paxton’s memory, the man with the floppy hat and raincoat who had been picking up sweaters.