Molly Brown Read Free Page B

“Well that’s pretty obvious ... she’s off to see the wizard.”
    “Huh?”
    “Haven’t you been paying attention? Didn’t you notice?” She gestured to the books. “Some cop you are ...”
    “I told you already, I’m not a cop. What should I have noticed?”
    “They’re all the same shitty story.” She tapped her head again. “Don’t you get it? Molly lives in a world of her own. Molly lives in the wonderful world of Oz. She’s off to see the Wizard.”
     

Chapter Two
     
    Connell was doing this as a favor - a little quality control for his buddy Gerry Gesting - checking out a couple of cops who thought it was fine to take their pay check and simply go through the motions. Gesting figured that they might be getting an additional pay check from someplace else, but wasn’t sure and didn’t want to rock the boat until he was.
    Gerry didn’t like bad cops - he had dealt with a few in his time and knew that Connell had a similar distaste for them - but the department was currently stretched trying to track down a serial killer with a taste for sharp knives and dead cops. No one, including Gerry, wanted guys sitting on suspension for taking bribes when they were needed on the street. Gerry was a patient man, though, and with Connell’s help he would gather what he needed to know, and when the boys in blue had gotten their man, he’d step in and separate the gold on the force from the lead. It was what he did and he did it well.
    Connell was about done with his own investigation on Detective’s Gibbons and Scott. He’d been observing them dis creetly over a number of days: cases not followed up; witnesses who mysteriously withdrew their statements; and perhaps more significant, a substantial amount of missing time, time when they should have been doing their job but were too busy doing something else, someplace else. Connell wasn’t entirely sure what they were up to, or where they were up to it, but he figured that, yeah, they were definitely looking the other way, and if he’d had more time and a little more interest in them, he would have dug a little deeper.
    Trouble was , the deeper he dug into the shit left behind by crooked cops, the more he was inclined to stop digging. It left a bad taste in his mouth that he didn’t like. He’d been about ready to write up his report, hand it back to Gerry and go home, but then he’d followed them, gone into the room, and realized this case was something different. This was about a child and now that he was here, he didn’t feel inclined to pass it on.
    Nobody was going to look for Molly Brown. She wasn’t the sweet, photogenic all-American kid t he press liked. She was a weird little runt who reeked of neglect and freaked people out with her strangeness. Similarly, nobody would give a shit about her mouthy sister. She should be in school, making a future for herself; instead, she was selling herself to pay the rent. He thought about the parents and wondered if anyone had bothered to look into their disappearance or whether it had even been reported. Both girls were in danger. He couldn’t just look the other way, couldn’t live with himself if he did. It bothered him greatly that a child had disappeared. It bothered him almost as much that the two lousy cops in charge of the case had chosen not to follow it up.
    He stood outside the building and looked at the street, at the route Molly would likely have taken had she left under her own steam. He hoped she had; he hated thinking about the alternative.
    A poor neighborhood, the sidewalk was littered with uncollected trash bags and general crap. Molly would have needed to walk on the road. At night, in the dark, that would have held its own dangers. She had a flashlight, but as Lydia had already told him, the batteries were dead. So, if she hadn’t been sideswiped by a car and taken to the ER, then maybe some driver might remember trying to avoid her.
    There was a gas st ation at the end of the block.