Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2) by Allison Brennan Read Free Book Online

have no hard evidence that the couple were anywhere near that area. Their car may have been seen, but we only have a partial number and mention of the colorful Ohio plate. The witness is eighty if he’s a day, and the call came in a year ago. Now he doesn’t remember any of it. Frankly, it’s like they just vanished. Poof! Into thin air.” She sipped her quad-shot latte. “I can see why Max is so obsessed with the case.”
    Sally O’Hara didn’t know the half of it. The disappearance of Jim and Sandy Palazzolo hit all of Max’s buttons: they were an older couple, they vanished without a trace, and they had a family who wanted answers.
    “Detective, Max wouldn’t have asked me to come out here if she thought she was going to have her own theory regurgitated back at her.”
    “I don’t know how she knew,” O’Hara mumbled.
    David didn’t say anything. He just stared at Sally until the cop talked.
    “We found something, okay? Shit, one of my cops must have flapped his chops.” She shook her head. “No proof of anything, and it probably isn’t connected to the Palazzolos at all , but it’s weird. You know Max was almost arrested two weeks ago for trespassing.”
    Of course David knew. Ben had to do some fast talking to keep Max from getting more than a slap on the wrist.
    “Fortunately, my team had already gone through the rail station and removed potential evidence, so she came down to the precinct and raised hell like she does, and O’Malley kicked her out and swore none of us would tell her.”
    “He’s suppressing evidence?”
    “No, it’s all in the files, he just doesn’t want Max to have them. She vilified him three years ago when those girls went missing from the airport. Just skewered him. And while he made a mistake, he didn’t deserve to have his reputation tarnished like that.”
    David didn’t know what case she was referring to, but nodded just the same. He’d have to ask Max about it later.
    He steered Sally back toward the case at hand. “What did you find?”
    “I swear, if she ever tells anyone I told you this, I’ll never speak to her again.”
    “Understood.”
    “I go through cold cases at home, reading through trying to look at things from a different perspective. I started thinking about that witness who called, and realized no one had been back to the area since. Not for a comprehensive search. So a couple of weeks ago I got a pair of uniforms who owed me a favor to help. It took us three days, but we covered every abandoned building in a four-block radius.
    “In one of the abandoned train stations, a block from where the witness had possibly seen the Palazzolos’ car, we found an empty container marked sodium hydroxide. Lye.”
    “I’m familiar with the chemical.”
    “It was just sitting there, in the middle of the tracks, sort of hidden from sight because of the angle of the structure and debris that had piled up around it. It had been there a long time. It seemed so odd that I ran the serial numbers and it came back as having been sold to a business in Brooklyn—along with two other twenty-five pound containers. We followed up, but there was no such business and the address belonged to an old lady who didn’t speak English and had no idea what we were talking about.”
    “Someone used her as a mail drop.”
    Sally nodded. “We brought in a translator and pushed, talked to neighbors, but we didn’t even know what to ask. And there’s not like a doorman on the building who could tell us about a shipment that arrived nearly a year ago.”
    “Nearly a year?”
    She hesitated, then nodded. “The sodium hydroxide was ordered the day after the Palazzolos disappeared. It was delivered the day before the call came in about their car in Queens.”
    “And you haven’t found the other two containers.”
    She shook her head. “There is absolutely nothing to connect the empty container to the Palazzolos. Nothing. I can come up with a dozen plausible scenarios. And