Read Compulsion (Max Revere Novels Book 2) for Free Online Page B

investigation and gave me your name.”
    “Yeah, she found out it was passed over to me and thought she could use our friendship to push her crazy-ass theory. Last time I helped her I got my hand slapped. If O’Malley finds out I’m giving her anything after he banned her from the precinct, I’ll be demoted to manning the drunk tank.”
    David had known Max for nearly two years, but hadn’t heard of O’Hara. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise; Max knew a lot of people.
    “Then maybe it’s better that she sent me.”
    “You’re not exactly Mr. Incognito. I totally knew who you were.”
    “Really?”
    She shot him a narrow glance. “Who else is going to be here asking about the Palazzolos? And I recognized your name when Dunn called me.”
    “Give me the story and I’ll get out of your hair.”
    “There is no story. We’re just following through on some things.”
    “Like?”
    She didn’t say anything for an entire block. Then she turned in to a Starbucks. It was a short line for nine thirty in the morning. David paid and they took their drinks to a small table outside. The table and chairs were chained together. Didn’t make them impossible to steal, only more of a challenge.
    “How much has Max told you?” O’Hara asked.
    “I know about her theory that Bachman killed the Palazzolos.”
    O’Hara glanced around. “Shh! Dammit, there could be cops here. Or reporters.”
    “All the reporters are at the courthouse.”
    “Right. Every damn one of them in all of New York City,” she snapped sarcastically. “Look, I want to find these people as much as Max. More. It’s my damn job. I work missing persons. All of Queens, not just in the one-one-five. There are two of us in each borough, and six in Manhattan. We’re pretty tight so I knew about the Palazzolos from the get-go. But who does Max call? Me . Just because she helped me once, I feel like I’ve sold my soul to the devil and I’ll never get out of debt.”
    Max had that way with people.
    “So,” O’Hara continued, “she’s been nagging me on and off, but truthfully, there was nothing there. We all thought they’d left like they were supposed to and got jumped at a rest stop on their way back to Ohio. But there were a few things that bugged me. None of their cards were used after they filled up with gas near the I-95 interchange. We checked the surveillance cameras in the area and saw their car leave the station, but we can’t see who was driving the car and there’s no surveillance of the car crossing any bridge or entering the tunnel within twenty-four hours of that last charge.”
    “So something happened to them in Manhattan.”
    “We walked, talked, harassed everyone in the area and nada. No one remembers them, no one claimed to see anything. It was a dead end.”
    “If they disappeared in Manhattan, why do you have the case?”
    “That’s what Max asked me, and I avoided the answer like the plague, but she bribes cops with baseball tickets and Scotch. There has got to be something illegal in that,” she said under her breath. She sipped her coffee, silently fuming, but David had her pegged. She wanted Max’s help—because Max’s help meant Max’s resources—but Sally didn’t want to make it seem like she was easy.
    “Somehow,” Sally continued, “Max figured out the case had been sent over to me. We had a witness, about a week after the Palazzolos disappeared, who claimed to have seen the Palazzolos’ car in the area surrounding the old Long Island rails. There’s an abandoned strip in southern Queens. So because the case might have had a Queens connection, Manhattan slid it over to me a few weeks ago so their clearance record would look better. Assholes. ”
    “That’s a largely abandoned area,” David said. “Similar to where Bachman dumped the bodies of his other victims.”
    “There was nothing there a year ago. But when I got the case, I decided to retrace everyone’s footsteps, even though we