A Killing Night mf-4

by Jonathon King

  We turned east for a few blocks and then made a right onto Middle River Drive.

  "Thanks," I said.

  The address on the note was a small, two-story apartment building. Eight units in all. Painted a powdery light green. There were three cars parked in spaces at the front, older models, a four-door Caprice, a small SUV, a Volkswagen beetle, the original, with rust spots on the rounded corners and door seams. We sat quietly and watched for a minute. Richards wrote down the license plate numbers in her notebook.

  "Not the Ritz," I said.

  "Unit C has to be on the first floor, huh?"

  "That'd figure."

  Richards pulled the 9mm, checked the load, slid it back in the holster.

  "Let's go find the truth," she said and we got out together.

  The tiny pool in front of the complex wasn't much larger than a hot tub. The shrubbery was dry and needed clipping. Unit C was in the middle and we stepped under an overhang and flanked the door. Inside I could hear the sound of a television, the tinny words of a game show host, the canned applause. When Richards knocked someone turned down the volume. There was a peephole in the door and Richards stood in front of it but I could see by the cant of her hip that her weight was all on her right leg, ready to push off to one side if she didn't like what appeared. We heard the snick of a lock and the door opened only as far as the safety chain would let it.

  "Yes?"

  The nose, full mouth and expectant eyes of a woman filled the crack.

  "Can I help you?"

  "Hi," Richards said. "Uh, Colin O'Shea sent us over. He said that you might have something for us."

  The woman's eyes were dark brown, wary, but not afraid. She looked straight into Richards's face and then down to the badge, maybe the gun.

  "Do you work with Colin?" she said, shifting her sight to take me in, but did not meet my eyes.

  "Yes, in a way, we do work with him," Richards said. "May we come in?"

  "Uh, yes," the woman said. "Yes."

  She closed the door and while she slipped the chain Richards and I exchanged raised eyebrows.

  Richards stepped in and to the right, I moved automatically to her left, like an entry team. Inside, the sun struggled to lighten the place. I marked the pass-through serving opening to the kitchen first, then the short hallway. Nothing. When I scanned back to Richards she was looking past the woman to the windows and the long couch pushed flush against the wall. Her hand moved off the butt of her gun and I almost expected to hear someone yell, "Clear!"

  Then I focused on the woman. It was after four now and she was dressed in some kind of uniform. Waitress, I guessed. She was barefoot and there was a stain on her apron. Her hair was pinned up but strands were leaking down onto her shoulders.

  "My name is Sherry Richards. I'm a detective with the Broward sheriff's office," Richards said. "And this is Max Freeman."

  The woman nodded, looking at Richards and still avoiding my eyes.

  "Hi," she said again. "Um, Colin said you were going to come here, just to talk, he said."

  She stepped back and at first I thought she was just getting distance between us but then I realized she was shielding something. Behind her was a playpen. A child was standing up with her hands knuckled around the top bar.

  "Well, what a beautiful girl," Richards said, a lilt in her voice that was far too convincing to be faked. The woman turned as Richards took a step forward and a smile was coming into her face.

  "Oh, this is Jessica," she said, moving to the playpen. "She just woke up from a nap because Mommy's home." Richards sat down on the end of the couch and reached out to touch the girl's hand. The woman bent and gathered the child up in her arms and held her on her hip, letting her look out at us. She had flame red hair and wide blue eyes and when the contrast with the woman's coloring struck me, I stared closer at her face and knew who we'd been sent to meet.

  "You're Faith Hamlin," I said, and the astonishment in my voice caused her to finally look into my face and she nodded.

  "You're the one from Philadelphia, right?" she said. "Colin told me. You were a cop."

  I nodded my head. Richards looked from me to the woman and her mouth had opened slightly but nothing came out.

  Over the next hour Faith Hamlin told us her story, how Colin O'Shea had come to tell her that she needed to leave Philadelphia because the officers she knew from the store were in deep trouble and everything that she had done with them was going to come out in the newspapers. At first she told him she wanted to stay. She wanted to help them. She didn't care what the news said.

  "But when I told Colin that I knew I was going to have a baby, he said I had to leave and that he had to leave and that and everything would be better if we left together."

  She'd left with nothing, on Colin's word, and they came here and he set her up in this apartment.

  "He paid for everything and then he went back and said he'd come back when the police department was done with him. And he didn't lie. We talked on the cell phone every day until he did come back."

  She was holding the girl on her lap until she fought her way loose and started a regular three-year-olds search around the room for favorite toys to show company.

  "Is Colin the father?" Richards said, looking up after being presented with a stuffed Barney.

  Faith shook her head no and lowered her face for a second and then looked up at her daughter and smiled.

  "No. She looks just like her daddy, but we don't use his name here," she said, going serious.

  "So Colin doesn't live here?" I said, and again she shook her head.

  "Colin got me my job at the restaurant. He said it was under the table so no one could find me. I work the early morning shift, just for tips. I don't work at night anymore," she said and I winced at the words. She knew what I knew. Nothing good happens at night.

  "Colin comes over to check on us and he plays sometimes with Jessica, but I'm a single mom," she said, sounding proud of the designation.

  "Don't you know that people in Philadelphia are worried about you?" Richards said. "That your family doesn't even know you're alive?"

  "No, they aren't," she said with a finality that locked down any further conversation. "Colin was the only one who ever really cared and it's better this way."

  I thought she was just echoing O'Shea's words but then we watched as she snagged her daughter and folded her arms around her and put her face in the child's hair and whispered something in her ear that made both of them laugh.

  "You're sure?" Richards said, and Faith nodded, her cheek moving up and down against the little girl's ear while she looked straight into our faces.

  CHAPTER 30

  Richards couldn't start the car. We sat outside the apartment in silence and looked straight ahead, putting mental dominoes in a row.

  "OK, Max," she finally said. "Was that the truth?"

  "That was her. I saw her portrait in Philly, on the wall of the store where she worked. It's only been three years. That's her."

  "Damn," Richards said, and all I could do was agree.

  She finally turned the ignition. The start of the motor was something, an action at least, while we both tried to line up where to step next. We started back in the direction of the Galleria, to my truck.

  "You know I'm going to have to report this," Richards said and her voice held as much question as statement. "I mean, she's officially missing, and we found her."

  I knew what that report meant, both to Faith Hamlin's life and to Colin O'Shea's, and so did she.

  "Yeah, I know," I said, pulling out my cell phone. "But do you think we could wait until we get Colin's side of all this before you do that?"

  I flipped open the phone but paused. Richards chewed the side of her lip and then nodded. I punched in the numbers to O'Shea's cell.

  "You're not going to pull an 'I told you so' on me are you, Max?" Richards said while I listened to the ring in my other ear.

  "No," I said. "And you wouldn't have done it t
o me, either. There are more important moves to make here."

  I was now hearing a recorded voice telling me that the customer I was trying reach was unavailable at this time. I left a message for O'Shea to call me as soon as possible.

  "Morrison?" she said and I nodded while we sat at the light.

  From memory I replayed my conversation with Marci the bartender, her admission that she had been seeing Morrison for a few months, that the romance had gone wrong and that the officer had raped her. The word itself caused Richards to recoil.

  "She told you this?"

  "Yeah. I thought I was going to talk her into opening up on some kind of drug connection the two of them had," I said. "I told her about the missing bartenders and that we were looking at Morrison as a possible supplier who might have been responsible for their disappearance."

  "We, Max?"

  "Yeah," I said, ignoring the question. "Then she just spilled it. She said she didn't fight him and it might have saved her life."

  "And let me guess, she's not willing to press charges and testify," Richards said.

  I didn't have to answer. I watched her hands flex on the steering wheel. She was controlling her anger, keeping it at bay while she ran the scenario. She might even have been seeing the image of a dead deputy lying facedown in her front yard, the gun still in her hand.

  "The rape took place out in the Glades, Sherry," I said, trying to pull her back. "Some spot out off the Alley."

  She reconnected her eyes to mine.

  "But she couldn't lead you to it, right?" she said and I must have had some look of stupidity on my face again.

  "So somehow you get it in your head to tail the guy? How long did you think you'd have to pull that off?"

  "It wasn't that blind," I said, defending myself. "I talked with Marci and got her to pass on a lie to Morrison that we had physical evidence on one of the missing bartenders."

  "So what you're telling me is that you used her to set him up?"

  "It was just an attempt, Sherry. It might have stirred up something to cause him to make a mistake, give up a lead. O'Shea was covering her," I said. "It didn't work out and if Morrison did have someplace to go, he'll stay the hell away from it now."

  We both went quiet as we pulled into the parking garage and up next to my truck.

  "Maybe not," Richards said and I looked at her. "I put a tracker on his patrol car the day after I told you about his file."

  Now I was staring.

  "You know, those GPS trackers that the delivery managers and armored car guys use on their vehicles so they can monitor their fleets or individual drivers? It clocks their stops and mileage and maps out every damn place they go during the day."

  "Yeah, yeah," I said. "I know what they are. How the hell did you manage that?"

  "Internal affairs," she said. "Morrison was already on their screen. I just gave them a nudge. They called in his car for a bogus maintenance check and stuck the tracker in there the other day."

  "So you believed me," I said.

  "I was opening myself up to possibilities," she said, not looking away. "I checked it this morning and last night after Morrison caught you up in his little DUI trap he went home to his residence until about midnight and then took this long drive out on Alligator Alley.

  "He got about fifteen miles out past the toll booth and then turned north on some kind of trail, I'm guessing, because the map doesn't even show a road. He stopped there for thirty minutes. Then it appears he turned around and came back."

  "Christ," I said. "That's where he takes them."

  I could feel the blood in my veins, the adrenaline chasing it. Sherry saw it too, the scenario, the possibilities.

  "And you've got the coordinates of this place where he stopped?" I said, opening up my door.

  "I've got a mapped printout. It's in my briefcase."

  "You know where he is now?"

  "I can find out," she said.

  I tried O'Shea again, got the recording. While I called Kim's, Richards handed me the printout of Morrison's trip to the Glades.

  "I have a friend in dispatch," she said and then made a call of her own.

  When I finished I looked in at her and she raised a finger to me, said thank you to someone and clicked off.

  "Marci didn't show for her two o'clock shift," I said. "It's the first time she's missed since she was hired and Laurie can't get her on her cell."

  "Morrison checked in at roll call and will be on patrol for the next eight hours," she said.

  "All right, I'm taking this with me," I said, waving the printout. I expected her to stop me, to tell me to wait for a crime scene team, to at least demand that she come with me.

  "You make that run, Max," she said instead, a sense of urgency in her voice. "I'm going to find this girl."

  CHAPTER 31

  I was ten miles west of the tollbooth, doing eighty in the rain and watching both the darkening roadway slide out under my headlights and the truck's odometer to mark the turnoff. Richards would be checking Marci's apartment and the hospital E.R.s and doing it without having anything broadcast out on the police radio band. She'd keep checking with a friend at dispatch to confirm that Morrison was still working in his Victoria Park zone. I was out after physical evidence only.

  My wipers were running a delayed beat, a one-step brush and then silent. Sunset had long been shrouded by the cloud cover. The rain was light but had turned the freeway into a ribbon of asphalt that shined wet in my lights and then dulled and disappeared out where the beams could not catch up to my speed. The hiss of tires slinging water up into the wheel wells sounded just above the deep rumble of my engine. When I'd stopped to hand the toll-taker a dollar I'd noticed the cameras and knew that there would be yet another piece of evidence against Morrison if he tried to deny his trips out here.

  When the woman gave me change I tossed it into the cup holder and punched the trigger on my trip meter. I was now watching for 21.7, the exact distance Richards's planted GPS tracker had recorded. As I got closer, I slowed to 50 mph, then 20. When the odometer crept to 21.5 I pulled over to the shoulder and crept along, looking out into the darkness on my left for a sign of disturbed gravel or a light-colored wheel track in the vegetation. Almost to the exact mileage mark I spotted a streak of matted grass leading off to the north and I stopped. I put on my slicker and took the long- handled flashlight from its place behind my seat and got out. It was a two-track, unmarked by anything official. But clearly it had once been used for some kind of access to the other side of the canal that ran the length of the freeway. I walked twenty yards out and shot my flashlight beam out to the north. A man-made earthen bridge had been built across the canal over a culvert which allowed the water to flow. Even in the dark my eyes could pick up the difference in black shades that showed a tree line. There was a hammock extending out from the freeway. There were no reflectors or fences or signage, just a path to nowhere.

  I went back to the truck cab and dialed Richards.

  "Your map was on the money," I said when she clicked in. "I'm going to walk it in and see what I can find. Any luck with Marci?"

  There was a scratchy delay over the transmission and then it cleared.

  "…to her apartment but nothing seems out of place. Her clothes are still there and her makeup. The manager said he doesn't remember ever seeing a marked police car out in front of the place. He said the last time he saw her was when she drove away Wednesday morning and he didn't notice her carrying a bag or suitcase."

  While she talked I watched a set of headlights grow out of the east. The sound of low and powerful engine noise reached me before I could make out that it was a tractor-trailer rig. It blew past me, leaving a swirl of rainwater and wind in its wake that I had to turn my face away from. Its passing drowned out the first part of another sentence.

  "…don't want to put the plate number out on the radio in case Morrison could recognize it but we're going to have to do something soon," she was saying.

  "L
ook. The map shows it's only a half mile from here to where he stopped. I'll let you know," I said.

  "Max?"

  "Yeah."

  "Be careful, all right?"

  "Yeah," I said and hit the End button and stuck the phone in my raincoat pocket.

  Before starting in I got back in the truck and parked it lengthwise across the entry to the trail. With the canal on either side, no one would be able to drive in and surprise me. On the other hand, it was a marker that I was here and on foot. I reached into the glove box and took out a handful of plastic ziplock baggies for evidence and stuck them in my back pocket.

  I locked the doors by habit and started out with my rain hood off so I could hear the sounds around me. I had been living on the edge of the Glades for a few years now and trusted my senses. Morrison might know the tricks of the streets but I felt sure he could not match me on this turf. This had become mine.

  I stepped carefully down the slight incline and used the flashlight to trace along the flattened grass and rut of the left track. When I got to the other side of the canal, I stopped when the beam glistened dully on the ground and then bent to look at a recent impression in a patch of clear mud. The tire track was not one of the wide, chunky off-road types that hunters and gladerunners used. It was a street tread. If it didn't rain too much more, it might be lifted with a mold and then matched against an existing tire. I filed the thought away and moved on.

  Once I got used to the footing, it was easy going. I kept sweeping the light beam in a circle, up to judge the reach of the gumbo limbo lining the path and then down in front of me from one track to the other to check for any drop-off. The rain had stopped and I had not gone far before the sounds of passing traffic behind me were absorbed by the thickness of vine and fern and leaf cover. The hiss of the tires was replaced by the sound of wind in the tree branches. Off to the west I thought I could even hear the rush of acres of open sawgrass being pushed and folded by the breeze, the long stiff blades softly clattering. Twice the trail became enclosed in a tunnel of overhang and melding branches. If there had been a chirrup of frog or cicadas before my arrival, they were quiet now. I had learned from my late canoeing that the animals of the swamp were highly sensitive to any unnatural stirrings of water and air. The night dwellers would have sensed me long ago. They also would have marked Morrison's presence each time he came here. Nothing goes unwitnessed in this world.