Shadows Still Remain Read Free Page A

throat.”
    â€œLike I said, I haven’t seen him.”
    â€œBut if you do, you’d call us, right?”
    â€œNo question.”
    Â 
    When their shift ends, Krekorian parks their black piece of crap Impala in front of the precinct house and heads to his own piece of crap Montero in the lot. O’Hara runs inside to use the bathroom before her forty-minute ride home. Slumped in one of the filthy plastic chairs just inside the door is a brown-haired white kid in a gray hooded sweatshirt about the same age and loose-limbed build as Axl, and when she gets back down the stairs she can’t help looking at him again. Like Axl, he looks like the kind of shy kid who could sit there all night, before getting up and saying anything to the desk sergeant.
    â€œHow long you been here?” asks O’Hara.
    â€œAn hour. I need to report a missing person.”
    â€œWho?” says O’Hara.
    â€œFrancesca Pena. She’s nineteen, a sophomore at NYU, five foot nine, short black hair, about one hundred eighteen pounds.”
    As O’Hara looks down at him in his chair, the kid takes out a well-thumbed snapshot of a very pretty teenage girl with long jet-black hair and bottomless brown eyes. “That’s before she cut it,” he says, touching the picture. “When she smiles, she’s got a beautiful gap between her teeth.”
    â€œShe your girlfriend?” asks O’Hara, looking wistfully over the kid’s shoulder at the door.
    â€œNot anymore. Just friends. That’s why I wasn’t that worried when she didn’t come home Wednesday night. We’re not a couple anymore. That’s cool. But we had planned to spend Thanksgiving together and I knew she was looking forward to it. Now it’s Friday, and she still doesn’t answer her phone.”
    â€œYou roommates?”
    â€œNo, I’m visiting. From Westfield, Mass. Francesca’s from Westfield too.”
    A handsome kid, thinks O’Hara, but with that fatal transparent sincerity that drives girls away in droves . Wednesday night, Pena probably hooked up with someone sarcastic and cutting and didn’t have the heart to tell him she was blowing him off for their Thanksgiving dinner. It’s amazing how many girls disappear at the start of weekends and reappear Sunday night. But O’Hara brings him upstairs to the detective room anyway. Partly, it’s because he’s not Dolores Kearns, and she can’t imagine him two days from now looking through her like a pane of glass. Mostly it’s because she misses Axl.
    Without taking off her coat, she sits him down by her desk, turns on her computer and takes down his information. Name: David McLain. Age: nineteen. Address: 85 Windsor Court, Westfield, Massachusetts. Since he arrived in the city, he’s been staying with Pena at 78 Orchard Street, 5B. He gives her the numbers for his cell and Pena’s.
    â€œHow long you been visiting?” asks O’Hara.
    â€œThree weeks. I’ve been working as a barback a couple nights a week at a place on First and Fifth called Three of Cups.”
    â€œDon’t you want to go to college yourself?” she asks, not sure why she’s talking to the kid like a guidance counselor.
    â€œMaybe. I had a pretty good chance for a soccer scholarship till I let my grades slip.”
    With his forlorn expression and downtrodden posture, McLain looks almost as pathetic as Axl after he got dumped by his first real girlfriend sophomore year. People outgrow each other. Sad as hell, but it happens, and for six months, Axl walked around just like this kid, with his head so far up his ass that eventually O’Hara had no choice but to stage an intervention. On a Friday afternoon, the last day before summer vacation, she picked him up at school and just started driving. Chugging Big Gulps and talking, they drove twenty-six hours before they stopped in their first motel. Five days later, they