I Would Find a Girl Walking by Diana Montané, Kathy Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

Atlantic Avenue, Daytona Beach’s entertainment area. The lounge at the top of the hotel was a popular gathering place for young people. Mary Carol was to get a ride with a girlfriend when she was ready to leave. If she couldn’t, she would call her mom to pick her up.
    She was at the bar for a while, talking with friends. She was pretty, blond, with a tanned, toned body, the figure of someone whose favorite hangouts are the gym and the swimming pool. Mary Carol had been a championship swimmer at Mainland High School and was attending Daytona Beach Community College at the time she disappeared.
    Mary Carol would be capable of fighting off her attacker, agile as she was. Did she get in a car with someone she knew? Crow wondered.
    Several motel employees thought they had seen her get into the elevator with a man who appeared to be Hispanic. Crow had the witnesses assist detectives in preparing a composite sketch of the man. The Daytona Beach News-Journal had run the sketch, but so far none of the calls that came in directly to the sergeant had yielded much information about just what had happened to Mary Carol after she left the bar.
    Crow’s silent musings were interrupted by a tap on the door of his office.
    “We’re ready when you are,” Gadberry said and motioned to Stano to go in.
    The three walked to a small interrogation room at the rear of the Detective Bureau office. Gadberry pointed to a chair for Stano to sit down, and then walked in behind Crow, closing the door.
    “Gerald, I want you to meet Sergeant Crow,” Gadberry said. Stano extended his hand and shook Crow’s, then moved to a seat behind the small desk. Gadberry and Crow followed suit, sitting in the other two chairs and facing Stano behind the desk.
    “Today’s my birthday,” Stano blurted out suddenly, prompting Gadberry to look up quickly from the police reports he had been thumbing through.
    “What do you mean?” asked Gadberry, knowing Stano’s date of birth on his driver’s license was September 12, 1951. “Today’s the day they got me,” Stano explained.
    “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Gadberry countered.
    “Today’s the day my adoption was final so I kind of think of it as my birthday,” Stano said.
    “Oh, so you’re adopted?” Crow asked.
    Stano responded with a nod of his head, seeming pleased at the notion.
    “What a coincidence,” said the sergeant, “my son is adopted, too.”
    With that, Stano seemed to warm up to the burly police sergeant, whose massive shoulders and biceps were solid proof of his years of working out with weights and horseback riding. As Stano listened to Crow, he sat forward in his chair, elbows resting lightly on the desk, staring intently at the detective.
    “Hey, did you know your mustache is crooked?” Stano asked Crow, pointing to the bristly row of white hair on the detective’s upper lip. Self-consciously, Crow touched his face. “You should get that evened up,” Stano observed.
    “Gerald, Sergeant Crow and I want to talk to you about a girl who disappeared from here and see if you might know anything about her,” Gadberry offered, growing a tad impatient but also being careful to leave out the fact that the girl was dead.
    “Okay, fine.” Stano tried to appear cooperative, almost chummy with the men.
    Paul Crow knew it was time for him to establish a rhythm with the killer. “Did you know either of these girls?” asked Crow, producing pictures of Mary Carol and her sister, whose close resemblance to one another could have easily caused them to be mistaken for twins.
    Crow’s interviewing skills had been refined when he was among a small group of law enforcement officers invited by the FBI to attend their profiling seminar at Quantico. There, he had learned the art from the best, such as John Douglas, the coauthor of Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit , and Robert K. Ressler, who had first coined the term serial killer and had founded ViCAP (Violent