18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

  An abandoned car and a missing girl wouldn’t have remained a priority in any town in the United States for long.

  O’Shaughnessy’s fingers stroked the frayed red bindings of the file. She shifted a stale piece of Nicorette from one side of her mouth to the other and scanned the water-stained pages.

  Then she found the list.

  It was handwritten in blue ink on lined tablet paper. She read:

  Venable, Marissa, W/F/dob: 6/6/58—Beckley, West Virginia, missing 7/7/74.

  Ashley, Bianca, W/F/dob: 3/6/54—Wildwood, missing 9/27/74.

  Melissa Last Name Unk, W/F/dob: unk/20’s, missing 2/18/76 along with a young child, all statistics unk.

  Below them at the bottom of the page and circled in red was an entry Penn, Lisa, W/F/dob: 4/13/56, missing 9/21/74 and a line drawn up the side of the page with an arrow placing it between the names Venable and Ashley.

  She flipped to Venable, who had been living in a community house on Versailles Street with eleven other people. Venable was reported missing by a man with whom she shared a bed. The man claimed he last saw her at a beach party where they had been smoking marijuana. When he woke up the next morning, she still hadn’t returned. A few days later, when she hadn’t come by to pick up her belongings, he walked to the police station and made a report.

  Venable’s parents stated that they hadn’t seen or heard from their daughter in the four months prior to her disappearance. There were two photographs stapled to the inside of the jacket, one taken with her mother several years before and one with a cousin in Arizona in 1971. Standing in front of a cactus, both girls wore granny glasses and long beaded vests.

  Bianca Ashley-Wells, the second missing woman, was born and raised in the North Beach section of Wildwood and was married to the owner of a local real estate company at the time of her disappearance. Case notes described the evening of the disappearance as the couple’s sixth wedding anniversary. The family’s Volvo station wagon was found with the hood up along the Garden State Parkway near the golf and country club. Detectives later determined that a radiator hose had come loose, draining the car’s coolant and causing it to overheat. She was only two miles from the club, where she was to meet her husband for dinner, when it happened.

  Ashley, along with her purse and a gift-wrapped Rolex for her husband, was never found. The jeweler who sold her the watch said that she had stopped by the store just before closing and seemed to be in high spirits. A dozen other pages concerned her husband, who detectives ultimately determined was not involved.

  Two years later in February, a woman living in Cottage Town disappeared with her daughter. She was a dark-haired beauty shown in a photo kneeling behind a sand sculpture of the Last Supper. “Melissa” was the only word written on the back of the photo. She had a child, according to housemates, a happy little girl nearing preschool age. They said Melissa was secretive about her past and never used a last name or talked about the child’s father. Her friends had the impression she was from the northeast, but they couldn’t agree on why they thought that.

  O’Shaughnessy picked up the phone and dialed the department’s laboratory. “Gus, it’s Kelly. Can you come up for a minute? I need to show you something.”

  “You ever heard of a cop named Andrew Markey?”

  Gus looked at her oddly and nodded. “Uh-huh. He was a captain around the time I came on. Got caught up in the rackets in Atlantic City in the seventies; the FBI locked him up and he did some time in upstate New York.”

  “He had a daughter?”

  The lab chief nodded. “I remember one.”

  “He’s dead. Fell down a set of steps in Elmwood first of May. His daughter was gunned down execution-style a couple days later in Philadelphia. Someone came into the store where she worked and put three bullets in her. The police said no sex, no robbery. One of the men her father testified against has climbed the ranks to underboss of the Gambino family.”

  He frowned. “Hell of a long time to wait for revenge.”

  O’Shaughnessy shrugged. “On that everyone agrees. So here’s the kicker: Philadelphia homicide got a match on their murder weapon to one of our cases.”

  Gus leaned forward; forensics was his specialty.

  He watched her eyes for a moment, then looked at the thick red file on her desk. “Which one?” he asked hesitantly, thinking there had been no mob shootings in Wildwood in his memory.

  “Lisa Penn,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t recall it.”

  “Nineteen seventy-four.” She smiled. “I was three years old.”

  “Good God,” he whispered. “Is that the jacket?”

  “Uh-huh. It’s not very helpful, though. They never found the victim.”

  He looked confused. “Go back to this Philly shooting.”

  “Andrew Markey’s daughter moved to Philadelphia twenty-five years ago. The detective says she’s clean, heavy into the church, good family, solid friends, no flaws that he can find. He said she never came back to Wildwood and didn’t stay in touch with anyone here. Not even her father, who was in Elmwood for a decade.”

  Gus whistled. “What about the husband?”

  She shook her head. “Born and raised in Philadelphia, good family, good education, clean as the victim. Philadelphia is hoping we can tell them something about Markey that they haven’t already heard.”

  “May I look at it?”

  She lifted the jacket and handed it to him with a smile. “I was hoping you would ask.”

  He put it in his lap and traced the binding with his fingers.

  “What about the mother?” O’Shaughnessy asked. “Philadelphia never mentioned one.”

  He nodded. “Pretty woman, took a long walk off a short pier the week after the indictments were handed down. Never seen again. The daughter turned into a regular wild child after that. I remember hearing the guys talking about her around the station; they called her Crazy Sue or something like that. She got busted for drugs at least once I knew of, and she was running with some real lowlifes. Then she just vanished, or at least I never heard of her again.”

  O’Shaughnessy thought that Detective Payne would find that last bit of information interesting; still, like Susan’s father’s connection with the mob, it was a long, long time ago. “Give me a call when you’re finished reading it.”

  “It’ll be tomorrow. I’ve got to work up Clarke’s savings and loan checks or he’ll have a cow. The FBI is already driving him crazy.”

  THURSDAY, JUNE 2

  O’Shaughnessy spent the morning developing information on Sandy Lyons. His house was located in Rio off Route 9. It was a two-bedroom modular with one visible neighbor. A motorcycle and a ten-year-old Subaru filled the driveway; a hard-barking Doberman paced the gated backyard. According to the regular mailman, Lyons lived alone.

  She’d ordered Lyons’s old case summaries, which would provide details of his sex crimes; she was particularly curious about whether he had used duct tape on any of his victims and if he had transported them to any other location than the crime scene.

  Just after lunch a bouquet of white roses arrived at her door, which prompted some hooting from the detectives. O’Shaughnessy took that to mean the men were starting to accept her, but it might also have meant they liked the delivery girl.

  The card was from Clarke. Not Tim.

  She called the DA to thank him, forgetting that he was arguing motions on the savings and loan case, and left a message. Afterward she called the girls, who were getting to her mother-in-law’s from day care. Oddly, it was Tim who answered the phone.

  “How are you, Kel?”

  “I’m fine, Tim. You?”

  She wondered why he was not at work and was curious about his damned commitment, but she held her tongue. They were both adults. She had been the one to suggest a separation in the first place, and after all, what was separation anyhow if not a chance to reevaluate? Besides, she had gone out with Clarke.

  They talked about Re
agan’s birthday party for a few minutes and then he put the kids on.

  “I got to bring a ferret home,” Marcy said, excited.

  “A ferret,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  “His name is Alf and we all get to take him home for a week if it’s okay with our parents. Daddy said it’s okay. Daddy said you wouldn’t mind. Is it okay with you, Mommy?”

  “Of course it’s okay,” she said. “How is your sister?”

  “She’s fine, but Alf doesn’t like her as much as he likes me.”

  “Put your sister on.”

  “Reagan won a ticket to a matinee for a spelling bee.”

  “Put your sister on,” she repeated. “I’m sure Reagan wants to tell me about it, too.”

  O’Shaughnessy missed hearing about their school adventures over the dinner table. She missed being a part of a family again. Had Tim really had a date?

  McGuire took two of his detectives and picked up Billy Weeks in front of Lecky’s Pawnshop and brought him into the office.

  Weeks made a show of being put out by the experience, shirt askew, hair ruffled, scowl on his face. It wasn’t the first time he’d been run in by the cops, but it was the first time he had a pocket full of money and three bags of dope. Not to mention an additional ten bags they’d found in an empty coffee cup sitting on top of the trash can next to him. He wasn’t worried, though. He knew the search wouldn’t hold up without probable cause. If there was no legal reason to pick him up, there was no legal reason to go through his pockets. The cocaine would be inadmissible. Maybe his attorney could even sue them for false arrest.

  The interview room—no larger than Billy’s walk-in closet—had a narrow table with two chairs on either side. The walls were covered with cork tiles to suppress sound. He waited for the interview to begin. He knew the drill. Butter him up good, then turn on the heat. He watched NYPD Blue. He’d wait long enough to find out what they knew and then he’d ask to see a lawyer. That would be his final word on anything.

  But Sergeant McGuire wasn’t ten words into the conversation when Billy started to talk, forgetting all about lawsuits and lawyers. Somehow they’d learned that he was the last person to have seen Tracy Yoland alive before she disappeared.

  He told them everything he knew. If they ever found the girl’s body, his hair and semen would be on her anyhow. They could haul him in front of some Baptist jury and convict his ass of murder with nothing more than DNA. And Billy Weeks didn’t want to be a murder suspect, not even for five more minutes. Billy wanted to be charged with cocaine possession, not murder. Billy wanted to help!

  “Didn’t you see the flyers we handed out on the boardwalk, Billy?”

  “Yes, yes,” he told them. He’d seen the flyers. He knew it was the same girl who was missing, but it wasn’t a crime just to know her, was it? He hadn’t heard that her purse was found. He thought she had just changed her mind about going home and ended up with someone else that night. It wasn’t like that hadn’t happened before.

  Gus was stooping over a plate-size magnifying glass when O’Shaughnessy entered the laboratory.

  “S&L?” she asked.

  He nodded, looking through the glass and switching documents. “Lady had some pretty big cojones if you ask me.”

  “Quarter of a million, I heard.”

  “And growing. She had more checking accounts than she had shoes.”

  “How’s it going with you?” she asked.

  “Good.” He pushed the lens away. “And you?”

  “I mean, how are you really doing, Gus?” She put a hand on his shoulder. It was a rare moment when no one else was around.

  “I’m so-so,” he answered.

  “Haven’t had a chance to say it, but I’m so sorry, Gus.”

  “We had lots of good years, Kelly. You have to look at it like that.”

  She thought of Tim and the girls at that moment. Nothing was certain. Not ever. “Are you sure you want to be here?”

  “I could sit in that pastel hell over there waiting for her to die, but I’d rather be working. Working keeps my mind off her. Besides, she sleeps most of the day.”

  O’Shaughnessy squeezed his shoulder. “McGuire said you called.”

  Gus walked to his desk and picked up the red file. “I remember these women,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of specialists back then. In fact there was only one detective assigned to the entire department, and his job was to monitor the pawnshops’ and liquor stores’ licenses. Beat cops handled their own investigations and the state police assisted with murders. I know there was talk about white slavery rings out of Philly and Washington, D.C.; pimps used to roll through town in their Lincolns and Cadillacs on the way to AC. We were asked to record out-of-state tags and any activity that looked suspicious. We had some big-city detectives come over from D.C. and nose around for a while, but nothing ever came of it.”

  She shook her head. “And everyone just moved on?”

  “That was the times, Kelly. There wasn’t a clearinghouse for missing persons in the seventies. Every department took their own reports, sent descriptions across the country by Teletype, and looked for their own victims. Picture a whole country full of roaming teenagers. No one knew where their kids were. Serial rapists, killers, and pornographers were in their heyday. Victims were sticking out their thumbs and climbing into the backseat of anything that came along.”

  “What stopped this one, Gus? Things like this don’t just stop on their own.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe he moved on to another part of the country or maybe he got himself arrested. Maybe he died. Or maybe there really was some organized white slavery ring and someone put the squeeze on them. Could have been a million different reasons.”

  She considered that for a moment. “Okay, how about the Penn girl? Why shoot someone if you’re going to kidnap her anyhow? He already had a gun on her, so she was most likely going to cooperate.”

  “The only thing I can come up with is that she wasn’t taking him seriously and he wanted to get her attention fast.”

  “Then it stopped?”

  He nodded. “Last one in ’76.” He tapped the front of the file. “I checked with Youth Division this morning. There hasn’t been a special-circumstances case since 1991 and that was when a maid abducted a child from the Pan Am Hotel and took him to South Carolina.” He handed her the jacket. “Not until Anne Carlino last May.”

  “What do you think of this case up in Philadelphia? This ballistics match?”

  “I’d say it’s the strangest thing I’ve heard in thirty-five years.”

  O’Shaughnessy waited for the detective to pick up the phone, popped a Nicorette in her mouth, and settled back in her chair.

  “Payne here.”

  “It’s O’Shaughnessy, Detective Payne. We lost the juvenile records to our fire, but I can tell you your saint wasn’t exactly a saint when she lived in Wildwood. Crazy Sue was the term I heard used. Our lab chief remembers her, said she kept some real bad company.”

  “You don’t say.” Payne cradled the phone against his ear, pulled a pad toward him. “What about your shooting in 1974? The Penn girl.”

  “‘Missing from college in Indiana, Pennsylvania,’” O’Shaughnessy read from her notes, “‘car was found by the boardwalk. A bullet was fired through the seat. There was blood in the seat fibers, same type as the missing girl.’ End of story. Girl was never seen or heard from again.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m afraid so.” She took the gum from her mouth, made a sour face, flicked it in the trash. “There were other missing women around that time. Four in all over a two-year span. All open cases.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’ll fax you the summaries if you want.” As her eyes traveled to the crime scene photo of the drainpipe, a thought struck her like a lightbulb flash and that thought led her to a very strange place.

  “Detective,” she said softly.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Lisa Penn
’s car, the one with your bullet match from 1974, it was found in public parking by the boardwalk.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I had an abduction May first, same way. Victim’s car was found in the same parking lot, bloody scene, victim never turned up.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  “Any suspects, Lieu?”

  “Two.”

  “Could either have come here and killed Susan Paxton?”

  “I don’t know. One of them can’t drive; the other doesn’t know he’s a suspect yet.”

  For a moment they were both silent.

  “Lieu,” the detective said hesitantly, “do you still have Andrew Markey on ice?”

  “Uh-huh. I called over there after our conversation yesterday.”

  “Look, Lieutenant, I know this is going to sound a little off, but I was wondering, have you ever heard of a woman named Sherry Moore?”

  O’Shaughnessy repeated the name. “Sherry Moore? I don’t think so.”

  “She’s been written up a lot for helping the police solve cases. She reads memories. Memories of—”

  “Dead people. Yes, yes, I remember,” O’Shaughnessy interrupted. She’d read about the woman while on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard last fall. The bittersweet memory of Tim’s surprise anniversary vacation startled her as much as the question.

  “Lieutenant, Sherry Moore is a personal friend. I asked her to assist me on the Paxton case.”

  O’Shaughnessy was quiet a moment. “To read your victim’s thoughts?”

  “Kind of,” he said.

  “Well, I must say you surprise me every time you call, Detective Payne. So what is it she saw?”

  “A man. I have a sketch, Lieu. Sherry described him to our police artist. Young man, long hair, beard; he doesn’t show up in any of our books. Neither the husband or friends or coworkers have ever seen him before.”