Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge Read Free Book Online Page B

waiting area outside, a shattered couple occupy one corner. Although they are nothing like what she pictured, O’Hara knows they must be Pena’s parents. Both are in their late thirties. The mother is tall and blond and looks eastern European, the stepfather compact and swarthy. His thick workingman’s hands lie palm-up at his sides. Only O’Hara stops. She introduces herself as the detective who spoke to them on the phone a couple of nights before.
    â€œI have a son about the same age,” she says, “but I can’t imagine what you’re feeling. I promise you, we’re going to find the person who did this.”
    Neither parent says a word.

12
    From the ME’s office, Lowry and Grimes proceed directly to the Seven, where Lowry commandeers the table in Callahan’s office and calls in O’Hara and Krekorian.
    â€œI hear you two have been on this for a couple days,” he says. “What do you got for me?”
    â€œI’ll let O’Hara tell you,” says Krekorian. “She caught it as a missing person Friday night.”
    â€œI don’t give a fuck who caught it. I just need what you got. If anything.”
    Lovely to meet you too, thinks O’Hara as she flips open her notebook. O’Hara had been under the impression that for seventy-two hours the case belonged to her and Krekorian, but clearly that’s not how it works when the media get this involved and a homicide gets jumped to the front of the line.
    â€œThe victim was last seen at three-thirty Thanksgiving morning,” says O’Hara, reading from her notes, “walking alone out of a bar on Rivington between Bowery and Chrystie. A place called Freemans.”
    â€œThey got bars on that godforsaken block now?” asks Lowry.
    â€œThree,” says O’Hara,” unless they opened another this morning. Not to mention a store that sells something called ‘sutlery.’”
    â€œMilitary provisions,” says Lowry. “Sutlery are military provisions. Who has her leaving that bar?”
    â€œThe bartender, Billy Conway,” says O’Hara, pissed off at herself for bringing up sutlery and doubly pissed off that Lowry knew what it was. “Conway poured Pena and her girls trendy cocktails for four hours. At two-thirty, her friends pack it in, and Pena, who apparently was interested in a guy, stays. The hookup, as far as we know, doesn’t happen, but she stays for another hour and essentially closes the place alone.”
    â€œSo at three-thirty, our victim staggers alone onto the darkest block in lower Manhattan? Brilliant.”
    â€œExcept for the staggering part. Conway says she wasn’t visibly drunk.”
    â€œHe would say that, wouldn’t he?”
    â€œSo does a busboy we spoke to. Conway says that after her friends left, she switched from the fancy cocktails to a Jack and Coke and nursed it for an hour.”
    â€œIs that how you sober up, Red, with Jack and Coke?”
    â€œI’ve done dumber things,” says O’Hara, and feels a tap on her right foot from Krekorian, who is getting increasingly worried about the competitive edge to O’Hara’s responses. The nudge takes O’Hara back six months to a night she and Krekorian spent at a beautiful old bar on East Eighteenth Street. The place is called Old Town, but because of the stained glass in thewindows, the high ceilings and the cool wooden booths that feel like pews, they’ve renamed it the Church of the Holy Spirits. In the spring they often repaired there after night shifts, particularly lousy ones. On one of those nights, the foul residue from the shift led to round after round, and after three or four Jamesons too many, Krekorian directly violated their unwritten rule not to tell each other anything about themselves they didn’t want to hear. “The problem with you, Dar,” he said, “is you got a chip on your shoulder the size of an