Finding Amy by Joseph K. Loughlin, Kate Clark Flora Read Free Book Online

Rubright as a suspect. Sergeant Bruce Coffin likes Rubright. Danny is shifting.
    At this point, it's three to one, but Danny pushes on. “Remember, Rubright was mad the night before as well.”
    â€œLook,” Tommy exclaims, “Rubright is gonna leave. He leaves, gets a lawyer, and then it's back and forth to Florida. We gotta hit it hard now and push this other guy aside. He can wait.” Tommy's just doing his job here—prioritizing and being practical.
    Brady emerges from the polygraph again, shaking his head wearily, and consults with Coffin. “He's testing deceptive and inconclusive again. Admits he's still lying to me. Plus there's this thing with another girl named Amy. He told me he has harassment papers against him and this other girl fits your girl's description.”
    I'm feeling excited because I think we've got our perp. It's a strange, conflicted story, and everything points to him. But Danny is still holding out. He's pushing this other guy, Russ Gorman. Gorman's on probation, which means a criminal history.
    â€œLook,” Danny says, “this Gorman was the last one seen with the girl. We can't eliminate him yet.”
    â€œDan, he dropped her off, okay? Then nutbag here picks her up and he's in a jealous rage ’cuz she left him. Plus they had that fight the day before she went missing.”
    Tom jumps in. “He's leaving tomorrow and we've got nothing on this guy. We have a lot of work to do to check this out.”
    No one goes home. We're working against the clock on Rubright with a million other things to check. This is what investigation is all about. It's hard, frustrating, and tedious, but we're starting to think maybe we've got a dead girl, and that's what matters.
    Danny Young, who was the primary, continued to disagree. He wanted to focus the attention on Gorman. Young, who felt he had a pretty good rapport with Rubright, took over interviewing him, an interview observed by Sergeant Bruce Coffin. (Frequently, significant interviews will be conducted by one detective with a second one observing.)
    Sergeant Coffin is a tall man, wide shouldered and lanky with a graying Abe Lincoln beard. He always wears a suit. Coffin has a ready smile and is quick with a joke to ease tension or lighten people's spirits. His impatience, his eagerness to resolve matters quickly, contrasts oddly with the fact that he is a wonderful and patient explainer of police procedure. When he's not fighting crime, Sergeant Coffin is a gifted artist whose paintings are shown in galleries.
    Although both the inconclusive polygraph and Rubright's peculiar manner continued to concern the detectives, Rubright was cooperative and forthcoming. He described being unable to find Amy, leaving the Pavilion nightclub, and using his compass to travel south until he reached the turnpike. Young found Rubright's story and demeanor convincing, and was impressed by his continued willingness to speak with them and his openness about his story. 3
    Young's feeling was that Rubright, a former college rugby player who was currently unemployed owing to the effects of a severe concussion sustained in a car accident, was just a down-to-earth, dumb jock who had developed a big thing for Amy St. Laurent, a feeling that she didn't reciprocate. However, at the end of the interview, concerns were raised again when Young and Coffin asked Rubright for hair samples and DNA and he refused. Why balk at this after having been so cooperative, unless the cooperation was just a ploy?
    At the same time that they were collecting information about Eric Rubright, the detectives were also focusing on Russ Gorman, the man who, according to the timeline they were developing, appeared to be the last one known to have seen Amy St. Laurent alive. Gorman was twenty-one years old, a five-foot-ninish, 160-pound pretty boy with artificially streaked blond hair fashionably spiked with gel. He had multiple tattoos and a pierced ear. He was a