I changed my plans the minute I walked out of the terminal of the Philadelphia International Airport. I'd have to stop somewhere to buy a coat and at least another pair of socks. I was freezing my ass.
The sky was solid gray and sat low over the city like a dirty tin bowl and I had to search to find the wiper knob on the rental car to clear the cold drizzle off the windshield. I got on Penrose Avenue and coming over the George Platt Bridge I could both see and smell the smoke and steam coming up out of the refineries below. I tuned the radio to KYW and listened to that familiar sound of a newswire machine chinking in the background and the patter of a deep-voiced announcer accompanying working folks through their day. I had spent my entire life in an intimate dance with this place. I should not have been surprised by the way I remembered the steps, both the easy ones and the moves that were ankle breakers, but I was.
I turned up Broad Street and saw both the day Tug McGraw led a World Series parade and the night I killed a maniac in an abandoned subway tunnel just below. Farther north I passed South Philly High and in my head found the smell of fresh-cut grass on the football field and three blocks later the odor of chemotherapy drugs dripping into my mother's veins at St. Agnes Medical Center.
A horn blasted behind me and a taxi driver was tossing his hand up at the now green light. I ignored my instinct to flip him off and when I heard an advertisement for a coat sale at Krass Brothers I turned east and moved on into the old neighborhood. The years in Florida had thinned my blood if not my memories. February in Fort Lauderdale is eighty degrees and sun. I needed to get warm and I had work to do.
Before I'd left Florida I told Billy about my confrontation with Bat Man and his unfortunate sidekick and the warning about union organizing and the cruise ship workers. He didn't seem concerned. I told him I didn't have their names yet and he said he'd get them off the public records on the police run sheets and incident reports and then check them out.
When I'd told him I was going to Philadelphia the thought had silenced him in a way I'd never seen before. Billy is never stunned, by calamity or foolishness or the myriad whims of humans. He stared into my eyes as if he were looking for some truth in them and then quickly gathered himself.
"I w-will stay in closer contact with Mr. Colon," he said. "You will do, my friend, what you need to do."
He then helped me find a series of electronic clippings from the Philadelphia Daily News and the Inquirer databases on the disappearance of Faith Hamlin and the subsequent investigation of five police officers. Colin's name and suspicion were prominent, especially after the others confessed and supposedly came clean. I thought I recognized two of the other names but couldn't be sure.
Billy also found the present name and address of O'Shea's ex- wife, through the divorce records he got from an attorney contact in Philly. With a name and date of birth, we found her address in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, across the river from the city. Then I called my uncle Keith. He was still a sergeant in the Eighteenth District and he was understandably shocked to hear from me.
"Jesus Christ, Maxey. Is that you? Where the hell are you, boy? You in trouble? Christ, we thought you fell off the fuckin' edge of the world. You coming to town? You're coming over to the house then, right? No. No. Better you come over to McLaughlin's first. You know your aunt. We'll have a couple before that whole scene. You know she still goes to visit that church your mother turned to in those last years and she says feels her sister there. Damn, Maxey, it's good to hear your voice, boy."
I hadn't managed ten words. When he finally took a breath I told him I was coming in on business. I was working for a lawyer in Florida and did he know anyone in internal affairs that might help me out?
"IAD and lawyers, Maxey?" I could see him shaking his old Scottish head. "The devil and his henchmen. But for you, son, we can find someone maybe we can trust."
I had planned to go straight to my uncle's but on South Street I stopped at Krass Brothers. When I stepped out into a puddle of slush in my Docksides, I made a mental note to hit the Army/Navy on Tasker for some boots. In the store the terse, clipped speech-"Whattaya, forty-two long?"-caught me off guard at first. South Florida isn't exactly Southern, but I hadn't realized how much of my own whipcrack city-speak I'd lost. When I told the guy, "Something warm but I'm not going skiing," he tried to get me into a knee- length cashmere. When I told him I wasn't working for the stock exchange he pushed a three-quarter leather on me.
"Hey, I'm takin' my pops to the Flyers' game here!" I said, trying to regain a bit of Philly speak.
He found me a tan, goose down waist-length with cloth elastic cuffs. I thanked him very much.
"Yo, I thought you was just offen' your yacht or somethin'," he said, looking without shame at my shoes.
I got a pair of lace-up work boots on Tasker and then drove through the neighborhood.
The streets seemed too narrow, the stoplights too frequent. People on the sidewalks had their heads down in the sleet, not that I would recognize anyone. On Tenth I got caught behind some joker double-parked but I just sat there five doors down from the house I grew up in the next block past Snyder. I waited, looking at the old stoops and the front window of the house where a kid I knew named Fran Leary used to live. It was still ringed in Christmas lights. A young guy wearing the same leather coat I'd just turned down came out of a doorway and waved at me before he got in to the double- parked car and pulled away.
I moved up until I could see the cut-stone steps and the wrought iron rail that led up to the house I grew up in. The second-floor window that looked out on the street was to my room, where I had spent nights reading books and fantasizing about Annette the cheerleader and listening to the Allman Brothers Band on a tinny old record player. It was also the place where I cowered and tried to ignore the sound of my father's heavy, drunken steps and the sharp snap of a backhand and the muffled protests of my mother. I was one hundred feet away but did not want to see my front door and feel the ugly memories that I'd closed behind it. I had seen both of my parents die in that house. My father, a broken and shamed former cop, fell to a slow and deserved poisoning. My mother, who came home from the hospital to die, convinced that God had filled the hole left by her treachery with cancer.
I turned east instead and then up Fifth and past South Street to the Gaskill House, a bed and breakfast where I'd reserved a room. The place was a redone coach house built in 1828 just a block from Headhouse Square. The manager of the Gaskill had befriended me when I was walking a beat there by showing up with hot coffee at eleven o'clock each night at the corner of Third. His name was Guy and now, years later, he met me at the door with a handshake and what may have been the same huge ceramic-and-steel coffee cup.
He was envious of my winter tan and Florida address. I was, as always, envious of his collections of antiques and the stone and wood eat-in kitchen down on the basement level of the house.
"Your friend Mr. Manchester called and faxed three pages for you, Max," Guy said. "I put them in an envelope on your bed upstairs. We got a cancellation so I've given you the blue room at the top.
"Remember, breakfast eight to ten," he said as I climbed the stairs.
The room was done in Colonial-era furniture, poster bed, writing table, a small fireplace on the west wall. The thick comforter and window treatments were blue and muted yellows and dark burgundy, colors you rarely saw in Florida. I pulled out some paperwork and sat at the desk and called Colin O'Shea's ex-wife. I'd put off contacting her until I got here, not wanting to give her an easy excuse to dismiss me. She was now listed as Janice Mott. It was past five when I called and introduced myself as a private investigator from Florida, which at least keeps people on the line if only for the sake of curiosity.
"I was a Philadelphia officer with your ex-husband, Colin. We actually grew up close to each other in South Philly," I said, a dose of familiarity.
"If Colin has debts, Mr. Freeman, I have no idea where he is. I haven't seen him in years," she said.
I could hear kids in the background. I thought I was going to lose her.
"No, ma'am. I know where he is. I just saw him two days ago," I said quickly, taking a chance, a gamble, that she would care.
She lowered her voice.
"He's not dead, is he?"
"No, Mrs. Mott. He's all right. He kind of got jammed up down in Florida and I'm, uh, trying to find out more about his, uh, domestic background."
Once again, I knew I'd used the wrong wording.
"He never hit me, Mr. Freeman," she said, the words now almost a whisper.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Mott, he…"
"Colin never physically abused me when we were married," she said.
The statement held both a sense of strength and apology.
"I know they called it domestic abuse, but it wasn't physical." She hesitated. "It was a way out."
A way out, I thought. She'd already left him by the time O'Shea got caught up in the disappearance of Faith Hamlin.
"I, uh, really don't know anything about the details of your past relationship, Mrs. Mott," I said. "But honestly, that is the area I'm trying to explore," I said.
"To help him or hurt him, Mr. Freeman?"
She was smart and blunt. And she would see right through any bullshit answer I might toss her.
"Honestly, I don't know, Mrs. Mott," I said, and waited.
"Colin does have that effect, doesn't he?" she said.
"Confusion," she answered her own question. "It's his stock-in-trade."
She agreed to meet with me, in a public place. Her son had an ice hockey game at three the next day. Meet her there, with identification, and we could talk. No promises. I pulled around to the back of McLaughlin's at eight. It was already dark and I had missed the transition from daylight. There was no fade of color, no blue to disappear, no rose-tinged cloud of sunset. The gray had simply turned a deeper gray and then been overtaken by the dusty glow of city light. The sleet had turned to light snow and up in the high streetlights it drifted down and swirled in whatever wind current caught it off the buildings. It turned to slush on contact with the concrete and car tires slashed through it on the street. I was hatless and shivered and then heard the music in McLaughlin's buzz against the window and went inside.
The place was full and conversation was battling with an Irish melody on the speakers, neither winning. For someone used to the natural humidity of the subtropics, the hot, dry air was enough to make you want to drink just to dehydrate. It was a cop bar, dominated by clean-shaven faces, working men's clothing, the pre-game show to the 76ers game, an appropriate locker room level of loud voices and the guffaws of a joke badly told. The few women present were older wives and the young ones' impressionable girlfriends.
I spotted my uncle at a table in the back. He was flanked by a couple of cronies his own age. As I worked my way back I saw his eyes pick me up halfway and make a decision before the smile started. He was out of his chair, rattling the pitcher and glasses on the table with his girth before I reached him.
"Christ in heaven, Maxey boy," he said, embracing me with his stovepipe arms and wrapping me in the smell of cigar smoke and Old Spice aftershave.
"You are as skinny as a fuckin' sapling, boy," he said, standing back at arm's length. "And dark as a goddamn field hand." A few heads turned, but not for more than a look. My uncle was an old- timer. Gray-haired and thirty years with the department, his language and his political incorrectness was grandfathered in. He introduced me to his friends, both with over twenty years themselves, and we sat. There was a pitcher of beer on the table with a frozen bag of ice floating in it. An open flask of what I knew was Uncle Keith's special blend of Scotch stood as its companion. He poured shots all around and raised his own for a toast.
"To the wayward son, what took the money and run," he announced with a wink.
"Aye," said the others, and we drank.
For the next three hours we drank and they told old stories. Carefully and with loyalty to my uncle no mention was made of my father, the legendary one whose death would always remain a secret of the brotherhood of the blue. We drank and I described only the beauties of Florida, and their eyes went glassy with reverence of a dream of golf and sun. We drank and my uncle exhorted me to show the bullet wound scar in my neck and they toasted Mother Mary for bad aim and mercy. We drank and they bitched about pensions and union stewards and the job in general and when I found an opening and asked Keith about an IAD contact they stopped drinking.
"We got a guy there, I called and gave him a heads-up, Maxey," my uncle said. "His name is Fried. He got attached over there a few years back after blowing out his hip in a pileup with a fire truck responding. He was with the detective squad up in East Kensington. He'll give you what he can."
I nodded my head and watched the others doing the same, avoiding my eyes. I could feel the vacuum at the table.
"IAD and lawyers, Max," he said, echoing his words on the phone from Florida. "Can I ask what it is you're into, son?"
We leaned our heads in together and the others tried unsuccessfully to pay no attention.
"I'm actually checking in on a former cop, a guy from my rookie class, Colin O'Shea, from the neighborhood," I said. "Any recollection?"
Since I was a pissant kid I'd known my uncle's brilliance for names and descriptions. He was the human equivalent to getting Googled. When he hesitated I knew it wasn't because he was stumped. He was considering his answer as he looked around the table and caught the glances of his crew.
"That would be the O'Shea of the Faith Hamlin situation?" he said, now watching my eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "I did some research."
Now he and the rest were looking down into their drinks, uncle Keith shaking his big head.
"Not a good time for the department or the district, Maxey," he said.
"Tell me."
He brought his eyes up and started in, his voice low but his mouth stiffening with the distaste of the telling.
"Had to be four years ago, after you left, word goes out on a missing persons' report out of the district. A woman, middle twenties, ya know, kind that elopes to Atlantic City or something. At first nobody pays much mind."
He stopped to sip his special blend. The other guys are straight- faced, like a poker game, but when they follow my uncle's lead, you know they're all listening and agreeing.
"But this girl, people know. She was a kid from the neighborhood who was kind of an outcast. Connellys down on Tasker had taken her in from a relation when she was young 'cause they couldn't handle her. She was, you know, not really retarded, but slow. Kids her age avoided her. But she did know how to, you know, ingratiate herself on people, trying to get them to, uh, accept her I guess."
"An' not bad-lookin', neither," said one of the crew, a veteran who'd been introduced as Sergeant Doug Haas.
"Not that I was going to add that detail," Uncle Keith said, narrowing his eyes at Haas.
"What?" his friend said. "I'm lying?"
Keith turned away.
"The family understood this, her physical attributes, and tried to keep her in someplace low profile," he continued. "They got her a counter job, working the register at this little corner store on Fifth Street near Sinai Med Center. She did the overnight, selling coffee and smokes to ambulance drivers and such who worked late."
"And cops on the beat," I said.
"Yeah," Keith said, and the heads went down and shook together.
"So somebody gets the word when she goes missing and tongues are waggin' because these cops on the Charlie shift are always in the place and they aren't offering up much in the way of information, like on the last time they seen her and such, being that she just disappeared off the face of the earth in the middle of her shift and nobody sees anything."
He took another sip, getting to it more slowly than Uncle Keith was used to getting to it.
"The rumor ain't rumor for long. Word gets around that these four cops were passing her around, each getting a piece of it back in the storage room while each partner was watching the front."
"They said she liked to pay them back for protecting her," Sergeant Haas broke in again.
This time my uncle just shook his head in agreement.
"And Colin O'Shea was a part of this?" I said.
"He was one of them," Keith said. "And once IAD got onto the case, he was the only one who didn't come out and finally own up to what they'd done."
"They cracked them?"
"Like fuckin' walnuts, Maxey. All of them were suspended and eventually fired for what they did to the girl even though she wasn't underage and she wasn't around to dispute that it was consensual. But to a man, they all said they didn't know where she'd gone or what happened to her."
"All except O'Shea," I said.
"He never admitted any part of it and was never seen in the city again."
"Christ, IAD must have done some knuckle pounding," I said. "Was this guy Fried the lead on the case?"
The table again went dead still. No one would look up from their whiskey. No sipping, no head shaking.
"And what else, Uncle Keith?" I finally said.
"Well, Maxey. You got somebody else over in that office that you have some recollection of from the past," he said, looking up through those damn bushy eyebrows that had scared me as a kid. I waited him out. "Meagan Montgomery is her name now."
"Meagan?" I said. "As in my ex-wife, Meagan?"
He nodded and said: "Yes. She would be the lieutenant for the unit now, after she caught the Faith Hamlin case and sent five cops down the slide."
I let the vision of my wife of two years sit in my head, as it had too many times on the plane trip back here. The one memory I thought I could escape was dead in the middle of my investigation.
"Well," I finally said. "I'll bet she can cut some balls off over there, eh?"
The old men in the crew sighed their relief, and then a bit boisterously I lifted a toast to women lieutenants and we drank, yet again.
At the end of the night I promised Keith I would stop by the house to see my aunt and shook hands all around. My head was swimming with the booze and music and smoke and faces. Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had dropped. The air felt like a slap. When I tried to breathe deeply through my nose to sober myself I caught that old familiar feeling of the air crystallizing in my nose and my eyes started watering. February in the Northeast, I thought and pushed my hands into the pockets of my new coat. I took a cab back to the Gaskill. Last thing I needed was a DUI. I'd get the rental in the morning on my way to the police roundhouse and my appointment with the IAD contact. As I sat in the back of the cab I tried not to think of Meagan Montgomery and the possibilities. I woke at nine in the big four-poster bed of the blue room and panicked in fear. I had no idea where I was. The thick comforter around me, dark maple wardrobe, a fireplace on the opposite wall. Gaskill. Philadelphia, Scotch whiskey. In seconds it tumbled into focus but I was still unsettled that it had taken longer to right myself than it should have. When I stood I felt uncomfortably old.
Thirty minutes later I was downstairs in the kitchen drinking coffee, eating one Guy's fabulous omelets and scanning the first few pages of the Philadelphia Daily News. Guy was devilishly accounting his own story of booking the entire house to a contingent in town for the Republican National Convention a few years earlier and their slow realization after they arrived that his was a gay- owned and -managed establishment.
"Of course when they left the next day I charged them for the full four days and they paid without a peep."
I got a cab to my rental and it took fifteen teeth-chattering minutes to get the heater up to speed. I was at the roundhouse near Franklin Square at eleven for an eleven-fifteen with Detective Fried and I parked in the visitors' lot.
On the third floor there were few uniforms. Shirts and ties. Suit jackets. Secretaries and doors with brass nameplates. Pure administration. I'd worn my collared shirt. Guy had read the extra-close shave and hint of cologne and had lent me an expensive sweater. The cuffs of my pleated chinos came down far enough to disguise the black work boots that still had a manufacturer's shine.
I checked in with the IAD assistant and waited uncomfortably in an anteroom for Fried. There was a large corner office that I knew would belong to the lieutenant. The door was shut. I didn't have to make out the name on the brass plate. I paced, fidgeting, and realized I was surreptitiously looking for a flash of blonde hair.
"Mr. Freeman?"
I turned on the male voice, wishing it quieter, questioning why I hadn't set this up as an outside meeting.
"Rick Fried," the man said, shaking my hand in a strong grip. "Good to meet you. Come on in."
I followed the back of Fried's suit into a small office and since he hadn't closed the door, I did. He slipped his coat off and hung it on the back of his chair before sitting.
"Your uncle speaks very highly of you, Mr. Freeman. And when Sergeant Keith speaks, the smart ones around here listen."
"He's a good man," I said.
"One of the best," Fried answered, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling back his sleeves, just us working guys here. It was probably a technique for IAD interviews. He was younger than my uncle, older by ten years than me, at least that's what I was telling myself.
"He tells me you're a P.I. in Florida now."
I nodded.
"Nice tan."
I nodded again.
"OK. The sarge says you're working something on our former Mr. Colin O'Shea and I gather it's gotta be on the defense side, Mr. Freeman, 'cause I see that someone from the, uh, Broward sheriff's office has already made some inquiries on Mr. O'Shea."
"You handle them?" I said.
"Nope. The lieutenant does all outside agency contacts," he said.
Fried was reading from a lined check-out sheet stapled to the front of a file on his desktop. It was lying on top of a second folder.
"Well, I wouldn't say 'defense,' detective. I'm in a sort of neutral position," I said. "I was asked by a friend to offer an opinion because I knew O'Shea, years ago."
"Yeah, right, you two graduated academy together," Fried said, unconsciously, or maybe not, touching his fingers to the second file. "You two ever work the streets together?"
I knew the IAD game. Even if this guy was a friend of my uncle's, his whole existence in this job was give-and-take. Info for info.
"We ran across each other. He was from the neighborhood," I said. "Know what I mean?"
In South Philly, mention of the neighborhood still had a sense of being synonymous with a tribe of sorts. I was here on my uncle's honor. It snapped Fried back.
"Yeah, well, the file's pretty straight up on O'Shea," he said, handing it across his desk.
"Had some complaints. He was written up for excessive use of force. Then he and a couple others out at the Tenth got stopped on a drunk and disorderly, their sergeant handled it, kept it off the books, warned them to clean it up. But O'Shea stayed on the bottle. Another excessive a year later. Then his wife throws a domestic- abuse charge at him."
"Any of these excessive-force complaints involve women?" I said, looking through O'Shea's stats. High number of arrests. Most in districts I remembered as being high-crime spots.
"Naw. Lowlifes mostly. Drug collars on the street. One was a group thing where the bang squad went in on a house full of gang warrants and the hard boys started crying about being beaten afterwards. But I got the feeling that O'Shea didn't exactly shy away from a little extracurricular activity."
"You guys ever do any psych screens on him?" I said.
"Not if it isn't in there," Fried said.
I closed the file and put it back on the desk. As I did I glanced at what I was sure was my own file.
"I don't see anything in there about the Faith Hamlin case," I said, nodding at O'Shea's jacket folder, making the accusation that Fried was holding out on me as bluntly as I could.
The detective laced his fingers and sat back in his chair, like mention of the case had not surprised him.
"That's all part of an ongoing investigation, Mr. Freeman. "It's not public information."
I lowered my voice and leaned forward just as far as Fried had moved back.
"Oh, I thought my uncle's word carried more weight than that. There was once a brotherhood and even you guys were part of that," I said, watching his eyes, their movement, center to right, center to right, giving him away.
He finally leaned in.
"Your uncle doesn't have the power to hire and fire, Freeman," he said, showing his allegiance was with his paycheck. "My boss is where she is because of the Hamlin case. She took those guys down, and I'm not saying they didn't deserve it, but as far as she's concerned, the real perp got away."
"O'Shea," I said, without having to.
Fried nodded and leaned back again.
"Now, you got anything on him from Florida that's gonna help her nail his ass for the killing of Faith Hamlin, I'm more than happy to forward that information along, Mr. Freeman."
I sat back as well, more than happy to increase the personal space between us. Fried didn't know that I had once been married to his boss. Uncle Keith had been more circumspect than that.
I stood up and offered my hand.
"If I should come across anything that I think you can use, Detective, you'll be the first to know," I lied. "I appreciate the time."
"Hey, any friend of the sarge. Maybe I'll catch you out some night, buy me one," he said, just one of the boys again.
I grinned the guy grin while he showed me out. In the hallway I found myself shaking my head and thinking some line about six degrees of separation. My ex-wife and now my ex-lover had swapped notes on O'Shea and his connection with the disappearances of Faith Hamlin here, and about the disappearances of the women in Florida. They both had the guy's ass in their rifle sights. I figured I knew that Sherry Richards's motive was this hell-bent desire for justice for the victims. Meagan's I was equally sure of: a premier scalp on her already extensive collection, a step up her ambitious ladder to who the hell knew where, and yet another man-challenge to conquer. I didn't think either had mentioned my name or my intimate connection to both of them.
"Don't tell me that God has a plan, Mamma," I whispered to a pale empty wall. "Or he is one bizarre poet."
I was waiting for the elevator when I heard her call my name and there was no denying the voice.
"Max?"
I looked back down the hall toward IAD and she was standing in a cerulean-colored suit that I could only imagine her coming up with when the dress code said blue. Even from here I could tell the high cut of her skirt was not regulation. Her head was angled slightly with a questioning look and her honey blonde hair took advantage of the tilt to cascade down over one shoulder. She had called out my name once like that when we were married, late one night while she tried to sleep after a SWAT shooting she'd been in on. Her voice had sounded like she'd needed me, so I'd held her in our bed until she stopped shivering. But the next morning she had no recollection of it and I had been wrong about the needing.
"Max?"
I put my hands in my pockets and took a step toward her. The elevator bell rang and I ignored it. I watched her hand a load of files to a man in a suit next to her and wave him into the office, all without taking her eyes off me. As she approached she looked down once, then raised her eyes and reached up and took a strand of hair that had come loose and in one heartbreaking motion that burned in our past, she tucked it behind her ear. We met halfway.
"Max Freeman, holy shit, look at you!"
Her lips were sealed in a barely contained smile but her eyes were undeniably bright. She tossed her arms around my neck and I think I put one hand on her back. Her perfume was new. Her cheek soft and the same. I felt my weight anchor in my heels and the hug might have lasted a second too long for a divorced couple standing in a police headquarters who hadn't seen each other for more than five years. She stepped back, or I did, and she still held my shoulders.
"Jesus Christ, a beach bum? An oil rigger? A damn boat captain? What the hell have you done with yourself, Max?"
"Hi, Meagan. How have you been?" was all I could manage and my face felt stupid and flushed. She cocked her head. She was one of those women whose eyes told you she was smarter and wittier than you, but she was willing to let you try to catch up.
"It's the Florida sun," I said. "Plays hell with a guy's complexion."
I wanted to tell her that she hadn't changed a bit. But she did it for me.
"Did you come all this way just to see me?" she said with that teasing smile of hers.
The elevator pinged again and a group got off.
"Uh, yeah, Meg, in a way," I said, lying again. Home must have brought back that special talent in me. I guided her to a bench in the hall and sat.
"I'm actually working for an attorney in West Palm Beach on a case."
"You're a P.I., Max. How perfect for you and that independent streak of yours. Do I know the firm?"
"Uh, I doubt it. He's a one-man show. Kind of independent himself."
"It's just that my husband, Troy Montgomery of Montgomery and Wallace, does a lot of work with real estate attorneys in Florida," she said. She crossed her legs with the grainy shoosh of fine nylon and rested her left hand on her knee. The ring on her finger flashed, even in the poor fluorescent light.
"I, uh, congratulations," I said. "I didn't know you were married."
"Yes you did, Max," she said, fluttering the fingers of her left hand on which a rock the size of Gibraltar clung. "You've always been an observant cop."
"Anyway," I said, avoiding that trap. "I came up to talk with some folks about a former officer, Colin O'Shea. He was a few years younger than me. I think you might have met him."
She looked past me, spinning, I knew, the scenarios through her head. Meagan had been a sharpshooter on the SWAT team when we were married. She was tough, accurate and knew through training, and not just a little of her naturally conniving character, how to see a path in her head before taking it.
"Is this the O'Shea some agency in Florida is looking at as an abduction suspect?"
"Yeah."
Never underestimate a smart woman with skills.
"A detective down there called me. I gave her what we had in the file. You do know I'm heading IAD these days?"
I nodded.
"And I wouldn't be giving you credit, Max, if I didn't suppose that you also know about the Faith Hamlin case."
"Yeah, I do."
Without physically moving, space of some kind opened up between us on the bench. A step back, without one actually taking place.
"This detective, she was very persistent. Wanted to know more than what we had. Very aggressive."
I nodded again.
"You know her?"
"I've done a couple of overlapping cases."
"Overlapping?" she said, raising that eyebrow of hers. I'd determined years ago it was a skeptical twitch she must have been working on since childhood. I pretended to ignore it. "So, do you know more, Max? About O'Shea?"
Here came the info for info drill, I thought.
"I guess I know that he was your prime suspect in the Hamlin disappearance and that because he couldn't be charged he moved to Florida," I said.
Meagan did not flinch.
"And you also know that your overlapping detective friend is considering him as her main suspect in the disappearance of other victims."
I fell back on my refusal to answer rhetoric.
"How Republican of your local constable to farm out investigative work to a private contractor, Max," she said. "Or are you somehow working for Mr. O'Shea as a defensive player?"
Down the hall the suit Meagan had been with stuck his head out the door of her office and looked at us, briefly, no high sign, no clearing of the throat, before retreating,
"She asked me to talk with O'Shea, see what he might say to someone from the neighborhood. It was a favor," I said.
Meagan's eyes brightened, the sudden look of enthusiasm catching me, like it had the first time I'd met her.
"Then we've got to have dinner, Max," she said brightly as she stood. "You can tell me about this conversation with our Mr. O'Shea and what that perceptive mind of yours came up with."
"And you can bring along the investigative case file for me?" I said, playing the info game.
"All in my head, Max," she said, smiling and touching her hair with an index finger. "Yours for the asking."
"Tomorrow, eight o'clock at Moriarity's then?" I said, instinctively tossing out a place we'd gone to many times when we were together.
"Ah, a little slumming, Max," she said, and I'll be damned if her eyes didn't twinkle. "Perfect choice. See you tomorrow at eight."
When I stood, she leaned into my rising face and caught me with a kiss on the cheek and then turned on a heel and left me standing there wondering if I was an idiot or just a common fool. I gathered enough sense to turn my back to her before she reached her office door where I knew she would turn to see if I'd been watching her legs.