Shadows Still Remain Read Free Page B

walked up to a guardrail and stared with their mouths hanging open at the Grand Canyon. Looking at McLain, she doesn’t know whether to hug him or kick him in the ass.
    â€œIs staying this long OK with Francesca? She didn’t give you a deadline?”
    â€œNot yet. I help out. I buy groceries. I clean up.”
    â€œWhere’d you sleep?”
    â€œOn the floor in my sleeping bag.”
    He’s as loyal as Bruno, thinks O’Hara. But who knows? Maybe he got kicked one too many times.
    â€œWhen was the last time you saw Francesca?”
    â€œAbout eight-thirty Wednesday night. She was meeting friends for dinner. Then they were going to have drinks at some new trendy place. Don’t know which one.”
    â€œYou know the names of her friends?”
    â€œNo. Never met them. I’m pretty sure she’s ashamed of me. One is the daughter of a famous artist.”
    â€œSo what did you do after she left?”
    â€œShopped for our dinner.”
    â€œWhere’d you buy the stuff?”
    â€œA twenty-four-hour supermarket on Avenue A around Fourth Street.”
    â€œWhat time you get there?”
    â€œAbout one a.m., maybe a little later. I think I got the last turkey in NYC. Then I got up at seven the next morning and started cooking.”
    â€œWho taught you to cook, your mom?”
    â€œYou kidding me? My grandmother.”
    You walked right into that one, thinks O’Hara, and for a second feels as bad as she did about Axl’s suburban Thanksgiving.
    â€œKeep the receipt for the groceries?”
    â€œWhy would I do that?”

5
    Saturday, O’Hara and Krekorian focus their crime-solving talents on a pocketbook, net contents seventeen dollars, snatched the night before at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Delancey. When they get there, the manager has the whole caper cued up on video, and it plays like something out of Oliver Twist . The victim, African American, approximately thirty-five, sits at a table enjoying her coffee and the latest Patterson, when the five-foot, two-hundred-pound Astrid Canozares waddles through the door, a stroller in front and two hyperactive kids in tow. While the kids distract the mark, Canozares tosses the woman’s pocketbook into the stroller, then mother, kids and infant, suddenly no longer hungry, exit the premises. O’Hara and Krekorian know the stroller is empty and the kids on loan because they’ve arrested Canozares three times in the last six months.
    â€œThe hardest-working obese kleptomaniac on the LES,” says Krekorian.
    â€œHands down,” says O’Hara.
    Even though they know where Canozares lives, and the family that supplies the prop and extras, it takes all evening to track her down and another four hours to run her through thesystem. O’Hara and Krekorian share the collar, and because it’s her turn, O’Hara gets the overtime, which is the only real point of the exercise, turning seventeen stolen dollars into an extra $176 on O’Hara’s next pay stub. It’s a long slow night, and O’Hara spends much of it thinking about David McLain and Francesca Pena, more worried about the lost boy than the missing girl.
    Â 
    Sunday, her shift starts at four, and in the dismal early dusk, the short thick precinct house, with its slits for windows, looks medieval. O’Hara tells herself she won’t take the girl’s disappearance seriously until the end of the day, but when she calls McLain and finds he still hasn’t heard from Pena, she takes out her coffee-stained list of hospitals and ERs and starts making calls: Beth Israel and St. Vincent’s in the Village, NYU, Cabrini and Lenox Hill, St. Luke’s Roosevelt near Columbia, Mount Sinai in East Harlem and Columbia Presbyterian in Washington Heights. Pena hasn’t turned up at any of them or in Hoboken or Jersey City, and near the end of their shift, she and Krekorian drive up to NYU to have a talk with Campus