Free Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge Page B

books McLain on a phony little marijuana charge and sends him to Rikers, figuring the place and its inmates can pick up where he’s left off. O’Hara knows it’s bullshit, but there’s nothing she can do. She tries not to think about a soft teenage kid fending for himself in the city’s biggest jail.
    Nearly as hungry as she is exhausted, O’Hara drives to a diner on Second Avenue. From her crome-and-vinyl stook she watches the Hispanic cook calmly preside over five sputtering orders of eggs, one of which is her mushroom, pepper and onion omelet. The space behind the counter in which the cook has to maneuver is twenty-four inches wide and some fifteen feet long— imagine a cop spending his twenty years walking a beat that size —but O’Hara can tell he’s happy in his work and gives his customers something more than just good food. She gratefully devours her perfect breakfast, then walks back to her car and sits in the sun behind the wheel. For the next forty minutes she slips in and out of sleep.
    At some point during the night, O’Hara’s seventy-two-hour tour with homicide came to an unmarked end. What she should do is go home to Bruno, drink a bottle of red and enjoy the most underrated perquisite of her sex, which is the ability to sleep uninterrupted for sixteen hours. Instead she drives west a couple of blocks and parks on Mercer just north of the Angelika Film Center.
    When Pena left her apartment for the last time Wednesday night, she told McLain she was going to meet her friends for dinner. O’Hara already knows that’s not true. The downtown debutantes didn’t meet up with Pena until 10:30. Pena told her girlfriends that she had spent the previous couple of hours at the NYU gym, running laps on the rooftop track, and O’Hara can see a corner of the track from where she’s parked.
    O’Hara doesn’t think that’s likely either. If Pena was working out, she wouldn’t have to lie about it to McLain, unless of course, being in her tiny apartment with her lovesick ex-boyfriend was driving Pena so crazy, she couldn’t breathe. In that case, she might have said anything to get out, figuring she could decide what she was really going to do once she hit the street. O’Hara knows what that’s like.
    As O’Hara approaches the entrance, a student holds his ID up to a scanner and pushes through a turnstile, so it should be straightforward to determine whether or not Pena was at the gym. O’Hara shows her badge, and a guard walks her to a small office, where a student employee pulls a chair up to his desk. “People on the track team are here at all hours,” he says. “What time do you want to check for?”
    â€œAbout eight-forty-five p.m., last Wednesday,” says O’Hara. “November twenty-third.”
    â€œThen I can tell you right now she wasn’t here. That was the night before Thanksgiving. We closed the gym at five.”
    â€œDid Pena have an assigned locker?” asks O’Hara.
    He glances at his screen. “One seventeen.”
    â€œHas anyone been here to look at it yet?”
    â€œNot that I know.”
    The student pages a burly Polish custodian, who finds O’Hara a pair of rubber gloves and a plastic bag. Rather than going with her, which would require closing the girls’ locker room, he gives O’Hara the master key. Number 117 is at the end of a row of full-size lockers allocated to varsity athletes. Several pairs of sneakers are piled at the bottom, and shorts, shirts, and running bras hang from the hooks. On an upper shelf beside some toiletries is a stack of expensive-looking envelopes, and when she pulls them down she sees that they’ve all been sent by one person. O’Hara carefully opens the top one. “I feel like I just got off a train at the wrong station and the joke’s on me,” she reads. “I think you made a hasty decision and