Jonathon King - A Killing Night

She'd left with nothing, on Colin's word, and they came here and he set her up in this apartment.

"He paid for everything and then he went back and said he'd come back when the police department was done with him. And he didn't lie. We talked on the cell phone every day until he did come back."

She was holding the girl on her lap until she fought her way loose and started a regular three-year-olds search around the room for favorite toys to show company.

"Is Colin the father?" Richards said, looking up after being presented with a stuffed Barney.

Faith shook her head no and lowered her face for a second and then looked up at her daughter and smiled.

"No. She looks just like her daddy, but we don't use his name here," she said, going serious.

"So Colin doesn't live here?" I said, and again she shook her head.

"Colin got me my job at the restaurant. He said it was under the table so no one could find me. I work the early morning shift, just for tips. I don't work at night anymore," she said and I winced at the words. She knew what I knew. Nothing good happens at night.

"Colin comes over to check on us and he plays sometimes with Jessica, but I'm a single mom," she said, sounding proud of the designation.

"Don't you know that people in Philadelphia are worried about you?" Richards said. "That your family doesn't even know you're alive?"

"No, they aren't," she said with a finality that locked down any further conversation. "Colin was the only one who ever really cared and it's better this way."

I thought she was just echoing O'Shea's words but then we watched as she snagged her daughter and folded her arms around her and put her face in the child's hair and whispered something in her ear that made both of them laugh.

"You're sure?" Richards said, and Faith nodded, her cheek moving up and down against the little girl's ear while she looked straight into our faces.

Richards couldn't start the car. We sat outside the apartment in silence and looked straight ahead, putting mental dominoes in a row.

"OK, Max," she finally said. "Was that the truth?"

"That was her. I saw her portrait in Philly, on the wall of the store where she worked. It's only been three years. That's her."

"Damn," Richards said, and all I could do was agree.

She finally turned the ignition. The start of the motor was something, an action at least, while we both tried to line up where to step next. We started back in the direction of the Galleria, to my truck.

"You know I'm going to have to report this," Richards said and her voice held as much question as statement. "I mean, she's officially missing, and we found her."

I knew what that report meant, both to Faith Hamlin's life and to Colin O'Shea's, and so did she.

"Yeah, I know," I said, pulling out my cell phone. "But do you think we could wait until we get Colin's side of all this before you do that?"

I flipped open the phone but paused. Richards chewed the side of her lip and then nodded. I punched in the numbers to O'Shea's cell.

"You're not going to pull an 'I told you so' on me are you, Max?" Richards said while I listened to the ring in my other ear.

"No," I said. "And you wouldn't have done it to me, either. There are more important moves to make here."

I was now hearing a recorded voice telling me that the customer I was trying reach was unavailable at this time. I left a message for O'Shea to call me as soon as possible.

"Morrison?" she said and I nodded while we sat at the light.

From memory I replayed my conversation with Marci the bartender, her admission that she had been seeing Morrison for a few months, that the romance had gone wrong and that the officer had raped her. The word itself caused Richards to recoil.

"She told you this?"

"Yeah. I thought I was going to talk her into opening up on some kind of drug connection the two of them had," I said. "I told her about the missing bartenders and that we were looking at Morrison as a possible supplier who might have been responsible for their disappearance."

"We, Max?"

"Yeah," I said, ignoring the question. "Then she just spilled it. She said she didn't fight him and it might have saved her life."

"And let me guess, she's not willing to press charges and testify," Richards said.

I didn't have to answer. I watched her hands flex on the steering wheel. She was controlling her anger, keeping it at bay while she ran the scenario. She might even have been seeing the image of a dead deputy lying facedown in her front yard, the gun still in her hand.

"The rape took place out in the Glades, Sherry," I said, trying to pull her back. "Some spot out off the Alley."

She reconnected her eyes to mine.

"But she couldn't lead you to it, right?" she said and I must have had some look of stupidity on my face again.

"So somehow you get it in your head to tail the guy? How long did you think you'd have to pull that off?"

"It wasn't that blind," I said, defending myself. "I talked with Marci and got her to pass on a lie to Morrison that we had physical evidence on one of the missing bartenders."

"So what you're telling me is that you used her to set him up?"

"It was just an attempt, Sherry. It might have stirred up something to cause him to make a mistake, give up a lead. O'Shea was covering her," I said. "It didn't work out and if Morrison did have someplace to go, he'll stay the hell away from it now."

We both went quiet as we pulled into the parking garage and up next to my truck.

"Maybe not," Richards said and I looked at her. "I put a tracker on his patrol car the day after I told you about his file."

Now I was staring.

"You know, those GPS trackers that the delivery managers and armored car guys use on their vehicles so they can monitor their fleets or individual drivers? It clocks their stops and mileage and maps out every damn place they go during the day."

"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I know what they are. How the hell did you manage that?"

"Internal affairs," she said. "Morrison was already on their screen. I just gave them a nudge. They called in his car for a bogus maintenance check and stuck the tracker in there the other day."

"So you believed me," I said.

"I was opening myself up to possibilities," she said, not looking away. "I checked it this morning and last night after Morrison caught you up in his little DUI trap he went home to his residence until about midnight and then took this long drive out on Alligator Alley.

"He got about fifteen miles out past the toll booth and then turned north on some kind of trail, I'm guessing, because the map doesn't even show a road. He stopped there for thirty minutes. Then it appears he turned around and came back."

"Christ," I said. "That's where he takes them."

I could feel the blood in my veins, the adrenaline chasing it. Sherry saw it too, the scenario, the possibilities.

"And you've got the coordinates of this place where he stopped?" I said, opening up my door.

"I've got a mapped printout. It's in my briefcase."

"You know where he is now?"

"I can find out," she said.

I tried O'Shea again, got the recording. While I called Kim's, Richards handed me the printout of Morrison's trip to the Glades.

"I have a friend in dispatch," she said and then made a call of her own.

When I finished I looked in at her and she raised a finger to me, said thank you to someone and clicked off.

"Marci didn't show for her two o'clock shift," I said. "It's the first time she's missed since she was hired and Laurie can't get her on her cell."

"Morrison checked in at roll call and will be on patrol for the next eight hours," she said.

"All right, I'm taking this with me," I said, waving the printout. I expected her to stop me, to tell me to wait for a crime scene team, to at least demand that she come with me.