Free The Girl in Times Square by Paullina Simons

detective at Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire, he stayed in a room above the garage in his brother Sean’s house. But then being a patrol cop on Long Island had become enough for Spencer and besides he wasn’t too crazy about Sean’s wife (she was too tidy for his liking), so he transferred to NYPD. His brother’s wife’s freakish neatness drove him to New York City, that messy kettle-pot of vice.
    New York was quite different from changing tires for women on the Long Island Expressway and administering the DUI test fifteen times on a Saturday night. Spencer was first assigned as a detective third grade to the Special Investigations Division of the Detective Bureau. He was one of four local squad detectives working on the Joint Robbery Apprehension Team. He was moved across—at his own request—to Missing Persons after the MP senior detective was at the wrong place at the wrong time and was fatally shot by a perp fleeing the scene of a robbery at an all-night deli on Avenue C and 4th. Spencer thought he might be ready for missing persons again. He was made senior to the dead man’s partner, Chris Harkman, who’d been in Missing Persons for twelve years, remaining at third grade, because as Harkman said, “It’s such a low-pressure job.” He had had three heart surgeries, gout, arthritis, and was set to man the missing persons desk just two more years, long enough to retire at forty-eight with nearly full pay and full benefits.
    But Spencer wasn’t ready to retire. He didn’t mind coastingand, like Harkman, would have coasted also, but it just so happened that he, by accident or fate, or by virtue of his own nitpicky character and peculiar memory, found a boy who had been missing since 1984, living years later in a crack den off Twelfth Avenue and 43rd Street. The kid was picked up by the narcs, but when Spencer saw his name on the books—which he checked daily and religiously—he recognized it. Mario Gonzalez. Spencer obsessively checked the photos and the names of every person detained by the NYPD exactly because of a case like Mario Gonzalez. Turned out the boy—who had been twelve when he had disappeared—did not want to be found by his inconsolable parents, but that wasn’t the point, for in his department Spencer was a hero. He was promoted to lieutenant first grade—and put in charge of the entire MP division—while Harkman, by virtue of being partnered with him, got a second grade promotion and a raise. That the boy killed himself a few weeks after being found didn’t dampen anyone’s joy at a, finding an MP that long gone, and b, finding an MP alive.
    After that, results were expected of Spencer in a department that was notoriously low on results. It wasn’t like other departments in special investigations where the detectives were constantly getting patted on their backs for jobs well done, collars made, perps caught—in credit card and con games, larceny and extortion, airline fraud, arson and art theft—and especially homicide. If only Spencer cared a whit about the other divisions he might have been a captain already.
    But Spencer’s heart, for reasons unfathomable to him, remained with finding people that had been long missing. No, not even that. Looking for people that had been long missing.
    Since Gonzalez, he had found six or seven more hopeless cases and become somewhat of a mythological maverick at the department—a favorite of his chief, Colin Whittaker, and a homeboy of the homicide division next door with whom he was loosely associated. “Give it to O’Malley,” the saying around the station went. “He’ll find anything.” He became tight with a couple ofguys in homicide, one particularly, Gabe McGill, whom Spencer liked so much he wished he could be partnered with him, except Spencer didn’t want homicide, and Gabe didn’t want MP.
    The apartment was dark. He hadn’t turned any lights on, and that was just the way he liked it in the first few minutes after he got