Free Find Me by Carol O'Connell Page A

her chair at the center table, and she was softly crying. The old man, last to leave, offered her words of comfort before he joined the others outside.
    A few minutes later, Mallory was flipping burgers and listening to the day’s news on the radio. The lead story was not a grisly homicide in Chicago, but a sudden change in weather patterns and a forecast of rain.
    Most of the vehicles had cleared the parking lot, and Sally was still seated in the same chair. She took a deep breath as she ran a wet rag around the tabletop, slowly gearing up to the job of assessing the damage to her larder. Tw o of the caravan women returned to the diner and set to work taping posters to all the windows, and they would not leave before the counter and every table, chair and stool had been wiped clean, not before they had shaken Sally’s hand and blessed her for her kindness.
    Finally the door closed behind them.
    Peace. Quiet.
    The waitress sat back in her chair, dumbfounded as she took in the whole expanse of papered windows-her freshly cleaned windows- looking from one gang of lost children to the next. More tears rolled down her face.
    Mallory carried two plates with cheeseburgers to Sally’s t able and sat down to share a meal. “Don’t w o rry about the posters. I’ll help you take them down.”
    The waitress was appropriately shocked, but only for a moment. “Can we
do
that?”
    “Sure.”
    Absolved of all guilt, Sally bit into her cheeseburger with gusto.
    Gerald C. Linden’s s e vered hand was only a few yards from where Mallory ate her lunch and listened to the news station on the radio. Chicago Homicide and the Illinois State Police had done a good job of containment-no press leaks. Apart from police, no one knew what had been attached to the corpse on that city crossroad last night. The caravan parents could have no idea-for their faces had all been so hopeful.

4
    Lieutenant Coffey looked out

his office window as the first tourist of the season was strafed with droppings from a low-flying pigeon, and now it was official: Springtime had come to New York City. On the street below, those happy pedestrians who had not been defecated upon were shrugging their arms out of sweaters and jackets and lifting their faces to the warmth of the sun at high noon. The sky was a brilliant blue, and it was a foul day in Special Crimes Unit. At the age of thirty-six, Jack Coffey was considered young for a command position, yet his mind was on his pension.
    He pictured it circling a toilet bowl.
    All morning long, he had done a frantic tap dance on the telephone, spinning lies and dodging questions, trying to give a good impression of a man in charge, though he had no idea why one of his detectives had traveled to Illinois. But now he was more at ease with the paperwork for Mallory’s e rstwhile houseguest, Savannah Sirus, and the official finding of suicide. If Detective Mallory had committed murder, she would not be reporting abandoned cars and found body parts to the local cops along her escape route.
    The lieutenant’s second window was a sheet of glass spanning the upper half of one wall. It gave him a view of Police Commissioner Beale on the way to the stairs at the other end of the squad room. Men with guns were rising from their desks as the skinny old man passed by them. It was a rare day when the top cop visited the lower echelons, and he had come without his entourage-no witnesses. There had been no appointment, not even a warning telephone call, and there would be no record of the meeting just concluded. Commissioner Beale was planning to put the screws to the FBI-old grudges died hard-and he needed Mallory to do it.
    The commissioner had assumed that Detective Mallory was on vacation in Illinois. If the old man ever thought to check, he would find no paperwork for any sanctioned leave time. She had been clocked in this morning as a cop on active duty. And, apparently, she
was
on the job today. She was just working for the wrong