Shadows Still Remain (6 page)

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.

“I hear you two have been on this for a couple days,” he says. “What do you got for me?”

“I'll let O'Hara tell you,” says Krekorian. “She caught it as a missing person Friday night.”

“I 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.

“The 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.”

“They got bars on that godforsaken block now?” asks Lowry.

“Three,” says O'Hara,” unless they opened another this morning. Not to mention a store that sells something called ‘sutlery.'”

“Military provisions,” says Lowry. “Sutlery are military provisions. Who has her leaving that bar?”

“The 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.”

“So at three-thirty, our victim staggers alone onto the darkest block in lower Manhattan? Brilliant.”

“Except for the staggering part. Conway says she wasn't visibly drunk.”

“He would say that, wouldn't he?”

“So 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.”

“Is that how you sober up, Red, with Jack and Coke?”

“I'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 the
windows, 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 Armenian girl's ass.” Krekorian wasn't telling her anything she didn't know. The attitude to which he referred had been there as long as her memory of herself, taking root when she was three or four at the latest, and had only gotten bigger over time. Nevertheless she was stunned, because to some degree everything else about her personality had been shaped in an effort to conceal it.

“Me too,” says Lowry, “but I weigh three hundred and sixty, on a good day, and not even my mother thinks I'm cute.”

That would explain it,
thinks O'Hara, and Lowry flashes such a hard look, she wonders if she said it out loud.

“Anything else?” asks Lowry, still staring hard.

“After her friends leave, a guy or maybe
the guy
comes over and tries to chat her up, and according to Conway, she gently shoots him down. Again according to Conway, there's no drama, and the guy leaves an hour before she does, unfortunately after paying in cash.”

“How about the ex-boyfriend who reported Pena missing?”

“David McLain,” says O'Hara, “I don't think so.”

“Oh really,” says Lowry. O'Hara is not sure if she hears more sarcasm or condescension. Condescension, probably.

“Torturing someone for hours, then walking into the station and filing a report seems like a stretch for a nineteen-year-old slacker from Westfield, Mass., who'd been in the city three weeks. Me and Krekorian talked to him again last night before Pena was found. The kid's a mess, but he's not going anywhere. If he killed her, I don't think he'd stick around.”

“That's all you got for me in two days?”

O'Hara makes a show of slowly thumbing through her notes one more time, and although they contain several more items worth mentioning, including Conway's observation about the unlikelihood of a beauty like Pena closing a bar alone, and K.'s related question about why she would stay even after blowing off the guy, O'Hara elects not to share them, telling herself a certified legend like Lowry would have picked up on such obvious irregularities himself.

“That's it,” says O'Hara, closing her notebook.

“Then I need two things,” says Lowry. “Her so-called friends in the precinct and the phone records for her last forty-eight hours.”

An hour later, while O'Hara is still waiting on return calls from Chestnut and company, Krekorian brings over a printout from T-Mobile, and O'Hara can tell by the way he drops it on her desk, he thinks there's something in it.

“Between Wednesday night and yesterday afternoon, Pena got eleven calls—two from her mother, four from her father, and five from McLain.”

“It's her stepfather,” says O'Hara.

“Stepfather,” says Krekorian, “whatever. The last incoming call she picked up was at eight-thirty p.m. Wednesday night from Chestnut,” he says. “That checks with what you got from McLain about Pena meeting her friends at eight-thirty. In total, she got seven calls her last two days—two from McLain, two from Chestnut, one each from Case, Singh and her parents. Over the same period, there are five outgoing calls—one each to Chestnut, Singh, and Case and two to McLain.”

“In other words,” says O'Hara, “no calls to or from anyone we don't already know about.”

“Yeah, but only making five calls in two days? For a nineteen-year-old girl? That's got to be a record.”

“You read the stories, K. Practice, studying, volunteer work. Pena had a lot on her plate.”

A little after four, Chestnut, Singh and Case arrive together, each chaperoned by a middle-aged male attorney. O'Hara clears the lunch table of debris, pulls up a couple extra chairs and is in the midst of thanking the debutantes for coming, when Lowry steps up to the table with his own chair and cuts her off.

“Was Pena having trouble with anyone?” he asks. “A student, a teacher?”

“No” says Chestnut, “everyone adored Francesca.”

“Anyone in love with her, obsessed with her?”

“We all were a little,” says Case.

As the girls respond to Lowry's question, O'Hara finds herself checking out the jewelry sparkling through their grief: the single-strand pearl choker above Case's cashmere sweater,
the gold Cartier on Singh set off by her fresh burgundy manicure, and the gold chain around Chestnut's neck, which, like her ring, is so big it's probably meant to look fake.
If this is what these girls wear at nineteen, what the fuck do they step up to at thirty?

“She dating anyone?”

“She was too busy,” says Singh.

“So she just hooked up with strangers at bars?” says Lowry.

“What's that supposed to mean?” asks Chestnut.

“Well, that's why she stayed, isn't it? She often hook up with guys at bars?”

“This is bullshit,” says Chestnut, looking at her attorney for support.

“No,” says Lowry. “What's bullshit is your friends leaving you drunk and alone at a bar at two-thirty in the morning.”

“None of us wanted to leave her there,” says Case. “But we're her friends, not her parents. Besides, she wasn't drunk.”

“How many drinks did you each have?”

“Four, five,” says Singh. “But we were there for four hours. We met Francesca at ten-thirty and didn't leave till two-thirty.”

“She say what she did before she met you?” asks O'Hara, earning a scowl from Lowry for interrupting.

“Trained on the track at Loeb gym,” says Chestnut. “She ran fifty miles a week.”

“What do you know about her old boyfriend?” asks Lowry.

“She never mentioned him,” says Singh.

“David McLain, her old boyfriend from high school, had
been staying at her apartment for weeks. She never said a word about him?”

“No,” says Chestnut, and looks across the table at her girlfriends.

“Maybe she was embarrassed about him,” offers Case. “An old boyfriend from her old life. People are funny about stuff like that. I wish she had told us, though. It makes me feel terrible that she didn't think she could tell us.”

“One last thing, ladies,” says Lowry. “I need your fake IDs, all of them, right now, on the table.”

When the meeting concludes, O'Hara and Krekorian walk the girls and their attorneys to the street, where three Lincoln Town cars are idling. After the limos pull away, they linger on the steps outside.

“McLain told you that Pena met her friends at eight-thirty, not ten-thirty,” says Krekorian.

“I know.”

“I think we got to tell Lowry.”

“You think he's sharing ideas with us?”

“There's no
I
in
team
, Dar.”

“Really? I never could spell for shit.”

By the end of that night, Lowry has O'Hara and Krekorian out canvassing the block where Pena was last seen alive. Rivington, between Bowery and Chrystie, has a nightclub, a beer garden, an SRO turned discount hotel, two restaurant supply stores and eleven small tenements. Several have windows that look out directly onto the alley leading to Freemans, and all have either tenants, customers or employees who might have encountered Pena as she left the bar, or at least seen or heard something.

They start with the German joint, Loreley. At 10:30 the rough-hewn bar contains half a dozen men in multicolored football jerseys who sip from tall steins and watch a rebroadcast from the Bundesleague. It turns out that six of the nine employees who closed Loreley last Wednesday are working on this Tuesday night, and over the next two hours, the manager brings the bouncer, a waitress, a line chef and three busboys to his basement office, one at a time.

What time did they leave work? Which way did they turn when they stepped out the door? Did they notice a woman with short black hair coming out of that alley? Did they notice or hear anything unusual early that morning? A woman's cry? A
scuffle? A car double-parked at the corner? Bouncers—steroid freaks and ex-cons, half of them working with phony IDs—are suspects by definition, but this one is a rabid soccer fan from Liverpool with a legitimate green card. When they run him through the new 9/11 computer at the precinct, he comes out clean, and like everyone they talk to that night, he has nothing to offer.

At 1:00 a.m., having gone without sleep for almost two days, they call it a night.

Six hours later, they're back on the same tight short block, knocking on apartment doors, Krekorian taking the buildings on the south side, O'Hara the north. It's tedious, unfocused gruntwork, like selling encyclopedias door to door or handing out leaflets for the Jehovah's Witnesses, and O'Hara is excruciatingly aware of her seventy-two precious hours of homicide time ticking away inside these poorly lit tenement hallways.

If the clock started running at seven yesterday morning when Pena's death was officially ruled a homicide, twenty-four hours are already gone, and it occurs to O'Hara more than once that Lowry is taking pleasure in the fact that she and K. are pissing away their time so far from the front lines. That's why she particularly appreciates the call she gets from Medical Examiner Sam Lebowitz later that night as she's descending a steep stairwell.

“I just spoke to Detective Lowry,” says Lebowitz, “but I wanted to speak to you directly too. I'm sorry to say all the tests have come back negative. The only DNA we got belongs to the victim.”

“You ever come across anything like that before?” asks O'Hara. “I mean after such a long messy attack?”

“More than you might think,” says Lebowitz. “But it's always disappointing.”

The tenements and the nightclub eat up all of Wednesday, which means that when they return yet again on Thursday morning, their homicide tour is down to its last twenty-four hours. They burn the first three of those talking to the employees of two restaurant supply stores and a fourth talking to the Indian manager of a small hotel, Off Soho Suites, whose tiny office still smells of breakfast curry. When they step outside, a tall man lumbers over in work boots. “I'm Charles Hall,” he says, “project foreman for the Atelier across the street,” and points at the building under construction O'Hara noticed several nights before. “There's something you need to see.”

Struggling to keep pace with his long strides, they follow Hall to Chrystie, and then north under the scaffolding into the working entrance of the project. Just past the sentry box, Hall hands each of them a hardhat, grabs a flashlight and leads them through a maze of building supplies until they're standing in the southeast corner of the ground floor, facing the plywood sheets that separate the construction site from the sidewalk.

“Twenty minutes ago, a laborer came in here to get a ladder, and saw this spot here where the plywood had been pried apart by a claw hammer. His first thought was someone had broken in overnight or over the long weekend, maybe a junkie or some kids from the neighborhood. When I got here, I noticed these
red spots on the floor and then this.” Turning on his heels, Hall aims his flashlight at the cement floor, where a large broom appears to have been pulled through the dust. Stepping through open, wire-filled walls, they follow the trail as it weaves through stacks of steel vents and plastic tubing and large wire spools and ends at a stack of Sheetrock about two feet high. On the top sheet, the shape of a small person is outlined in dried blood.