Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge Read Free Book Online

derisively at the sight of a Jeep Wagoneer pulling up to the crime scene, and the four detectives try not to laugh as their sergeant, Mike Callahan, walks toward the van in cowboy boots and a brand-new leather bomber jacket.
    â€œWhat are you two doing here?” he asks O’Hara and Krekorian, although the question would be better asked of him. “Busman’s holiday?”
    â€œO’Hara caught this as a missing person on Friday,” says Krekorian defensively. “We’ve been working it as a potential homicide since Sunday.”
    â€œI guess you saw how the papers are running with it, so you know it’s big.”
    Callahan, who made sergeant by scoring well on a test rather than distinguishing himself on the streets and augments his income by selling cop memorabilia out of his basement over the Internet, is the kind of house mouse no working detective has much use for, and O’Hara keeps her eyes moving in the hope it will make her disdain harder to read. She needn’t have worried, because her sergeant’s attention has already shifted to the black official-looking SUV that just drove up, and when Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Van de Meer steps out, the sergeant is gone without a word, ditching his detectives like four losers at a cocktail party.
    â€œSo long, Sarge,” says Loomis under his breath. “It’s been real.”
    Just before 4:00 a.m. TV vans from five networks pull up to the scene together. They’ve obviously received the same call from downtown, because five minutes later, the police commissioner arrives to do a thirty-second remote. O’Hara knows for certain the case is top priority when a third banged-up Impala arrives and Detective Patrick Lowry extricates himself from the passenger seat. Six foot five and nearly four hundred pounds, Lowry resides ambiguously in that gray area between fat and big, playing it either way as the situation dictates, and his eyesight has deteriorated so badly in the last ten years, he can’t drive. And while both his epic size and his myopia have stoked the legend, as well as the fact that he was drafted out of Hofstra by the Philadelphia Eagles, there’s no denying his résumé. Lowry made it to Homicide by twenty-eight and made grade at thirty, and every major homicide in Manhattan in the last twenty years has crossed his desk. Without saying a word to anyone, Lowry, with the help of his partner-chauffeur Frank Grimes, somehow gets himself under the yellow tape and disappears into the bathroom.

11
    Across the river, a milky dawn puddles up over Brooklyn and Queens as Dineen and his ghouls load Pena into a van, and a grubby phalanx of Impalas follows it out of the park. Twenty minutes later, at the office of the medical examiner, O’Hara and Krekorian jockey for sight lines with Lowry and Grimes and two other homicide detectives. In front of them on a steel gurney, Pena, still bound and encased in plastic, lies on her side, exactly as she has since Thanksgiving morning. When O’Hara arrived, she saw for the first time that the back of the victim is also covered with gouges.
    Conducting the survey of Pena’s multiple wounds is a tall skinny thirty-two-year-old ME, Sam Lebowitz. As he circles the gurney, trailed by a forensic photographer, he jots notes on a long yellow pad, then reads them aloud to the detectives. “Lacerations and trauma on the back and top of the skull,” he says, points at them with his pen, then backs up out of the photographer’s viewfinder. “The skull does not appear to be fractured.” Not to disturb a nearby colleague, who is performing an unattended autopsy of a middle-aged black man, Lebowitz makes his observations in a quiet conversational voice.
    â€œThere is extensive evidence of torture…The victim has been repeatedly and systematically gouged, cut and burned, front and back, from ankles to shoulders…blunt trauma around vagina,