Back on Murder by Mark J. Bertrand Read Free Book Online

only been gone a day and a half. Last week’s big headline, the vanishing financial advisor Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who’d gone out on his own after the Enron debacle, had consumed the local outlets without getting even a hint of national traction. The man absconded to Cancun and points southward, supposedly with a suitcase full of his clients’ money. Macneil, one of those guys who sits on everybody’s board, has a finger in everybody’s pie, put a dent in some prominent bank accounts, but outside the Loop, nobody cared.
    Now a missing Houston teen is big news? Kids run away all the time in this town. Finding the car might put a sinister spin on things, but as far as I can tell from the commentary, no one saw her being abducted or anything.
    Then they flash a headshot of Hannah Mayhew on the screen. Everything becomes clear.
    She’s a beauty, haloed in golden hair with a dimpled smile that’s gotten plenty of use. Her eyes are that crystalline ice-blue that catches light like a prism. The picture looks professional, the background tastefully blurred, like it came straight out of a modeling portfolio. Which is no surprise. She has the kind of face that gets photographed a lot.
    You can’t call yourself a jaded cop if you’re not cynical about the different treatment an attractive white suburban blonde gets when she runs into trouble. Her story makes the front page, beams out into millions of living rooms, and strangers everywhere look upon her as their own. They worry, they agonize – and above all they love, projecting all their frustrated hopes onto this inscrutably attractive teen.
    By losing track of their daughter, her parents have donated her to the public at large, and now she’s everybody’s missing kid.
    I shake my head at it all. In my house off West Bellfort, sharing her deathbed with Octavio Morales, there’d been another girl. No one’s interested in her. Not even the lab. When I called to request a rush on the blood work, hoping to get an id on my absent victim, I got the usual answer. We’ll get to it when we get to it. No cutting to the front of the line.
    But Hannah Mayhew won’t have to wait. They’ll bump her right to the front. Because girls like her aren’t supposed to disappear.
    I can’t watch anymore. I turn the television off and go upstairs to change, not even bothering to keep the noise down. By now, her pills downed with a glass of water, Charlotte’s long past hearing.
    There are closer bars and probably cooler ones, but the place I end up is the Paragon, where the waitresses wear layered tanks with plaid miniskirts and the crowd would rather drink than dance. Even on a Saturday night, even as Labor Day weekend kicks off, I can find a table in the back corner, far enough away from the speakers that the ice doesn’t shake in my glass.
    I cast a glance over the room, confirming Tommy’s absence. Pearl Bar is his haunt these days, but I’ve caught him at the Paragon once or twice and had to leave. Nobody knows me here and I’d like to keep it that way.
    A waitress named Marta flounces up, showing an inconceivable amount of tanned thigh. Acts like she’s never seen me before, not realizing she actually has. She jots down my whiskey sour, which I have no intention of drinking, then shuffles bar-ward through the crowd, shaking schoolgirl pigtails that look anything but innocent. I watch her move even though I shouldn’t.
    She’s a cute enough little thing, but she couldn’t get famous just by vanishing.
    “Excuse me. Are you using these?”
    I turn to the table next to me, where a couple of women in low-cut tops are busy arranging extra chairs. One of them looms over me, a pink-skinned blonde with glitter on her eyelids, of indeterminate age, motioning to the unused seats around my table.
    “Take them.”
    They all descend, dragging the chairs off just in time for another wave of girlfriends, who arrive with many air kisses and group hugs.
    When