Read Online Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge - Free Book Online

ends at a stack of Sheetrock about two feet high. On the top sheet, the shape of a small person is outlined in dried blood.

14
    O’Hara has Hall close down the job, then calls Jack Narin in Crime Scene.
    â€œWe got to tell Lowry about this,” says Krekorian.
    â€œNo, we don’t. It’s our case for another seventeen hours and…twenty minutes. I want to let Narin take a look first. Maybe it turns out to be nothing.”
    â€œWhat are the odds of that?”
    â€œHow should I know? I’m not a statistician.”
    â€œDar, you know that chip on your shoulder we talked about?”
    â€œThe one you compared to a prominent part of the female anatomy?”
    â€œWell, guess what? It’s even bigger than I thought. And it’s about to fuck us both.”
    Narin and two assistants arrive in minutes, and starting at the same spot O’Hara and Krekorian did with Hall, they follow the track through the dust. Upon reaching the bloodstained drywall, Narin asks O’Hara where Pena was last seen alive, and when he learns that it was a bar around the corner, his assistants close the street between Freemans and the construction site. Lowry has other detectives out canvassing the blocks just east and west of them, and soon after the yellow tape goes up on Rivington and Chrystie, Grimes’s Impala screeches to a stop in front of the Atelier. Lowry climbs out. “I just spoke to Jack Narin. He tells me you got a crime scene here. Pena’s crime scene.”
    â€œIt’s possible. I didn’t want to call you until I was sure.”
    â€œI assign you this block, and you roll your eyes like it’s Siberia. It turns out, it’s not a shit detail at all, and leads you directly to the goddamn crime scene. And you don’t call me?”
    â€œLike I said, I wanted to be sure we really had something first. I realize now it was a mistake.”
    â€œYou’re a strange bird, O’Hara,” says Lowry, and if he didn’t have far more pressing things on his mind he might speculate more energetically as to why this peon chick detective, who should be doing everything in her power to kiss his ass, is going out of her way to antagonize him. But seeing as he does, he turns his immense back and lumbers back to the car, which Grimes spins around so Lowry can address O’Hara one last time from the passenger seat.
    â€œYou want this crime scene so bad, O’Hara, it’s all yours. Knock yourself out.”
    With Hall’s help, Narin strings extra lights over the spot where the plywood was pried open and Pena dragged through, and works the crime scene backward toward Freemans. It’s slow, tedious work, and when Narin can’t tolerate any more of O’Hara’s hovering, she retreats to what will soon be the Atelier’s chandeliered marble lobby and huddles around a space heater with Hall and a still-annoyed Krekorian.
    â€œNarin starts putting up yellow tape,” says Krekorian, “and you don’t think anyone’s going to notice?”
    â€œYou’re right,” says O’Hara. “I owe you a drink…at least.” To change the subject, she turns to Hall, who is slouching in a much too small plastic chair beside a laminated sign that lists the luxe features of the twenty-eight new units.
    â€œChuck, forgive my ignorance, but what the fuck’s an atelier ?”
    â€œA studio or workshop used by an artist,” he says. “It’s a French word.”
    â€œOK,” says O’Hara, pointing at the sign. “And what does that have to do with three-million-dollar apartments with Corinthian marble vanities and Sub-Zero refrigerators?”
    â€œFuckall.”
    In the midafternoon, Narin spots a tuft of black hair, the same length and color as Pena’s, snagged on a nail in one of the scaffolding’s two-by-fours, and an hour later, as the sun begins its precipitous descent, finds three drops of