Read Everyone Pays for Free Online

pictures, finding the few girls who were the same. There weren’t a lot of these. Many more of the pictures didn’t have matches, but in all there was a similarity of taste, something that told me there was more here than two dead guys.
    Of the few girls who matched, the first was a blonde with shoulder-length hair and streaked mascara. I put the two shots side by side and stared at her. She had aged maybe six months between the two pictures, but that could’ve happened in three weeks on the street. Her eyes were tough in the first, hardened in the second. Perhaps at that point she was already beyond help.
    The next girl to match stared back at the camera, trying to look sexy-mean, wanting to project a sense of anger that might hide her fear, maybe even protect her. In the first picture, her fear was still there, then less in the other. Fear was now apathy. She could’ve been eighteen or as young as fifteen. Her shoulders were narrow enough to fit through the neck of a dress.
    I wondered if I had ever been that frail. Not since junior high, if then.
    Farrow’s set was harder to put into a chronology. I spread them out to get a better look. He’d had more girls, been at it longer; he was less selective. Some of the pictures were yellowing around the edges, starting to curl. They weren’t Polaroids, which meant he went to the trouble of having them printed. Or maybe he had a color printer somewhere in that craphole. I almost admired them both for going to the trouble of making tactile products of their efforts—physical pictures, instead of just looking at everything on a screen. It showed some kind of dedication to a connection with the physical world. Or maybe I was kidding myself; the real pictures were probably just better for beating off.
    I tossed the ones I was holding down onto the table, glad I was wearing gloves. My disgust for these scumbags rushed back.
    Studying these could wait. I needed to sit it out for a while and settle my stomach, figure out what I was trying to do.
    Working in homicide had always been my goal, ever since my father told me it was no place for a woman. But that was in high school. Now, here of my own accord, I still carried my hurt and prejudices from vice.
    I stood up and stretched my shoulders and arms.
    My dad had been a homicide investigator himself in lower Manhattan in the eighties, should’ve been forward-thinking enough to imagine a woman doing the job. He would’ve pushed me toward this it if I’d been a son. But a daughter? Not ever.
    Here I was then, essentially in the career I had because of him—a man who never thought a woman officer should be anything more than a meter maid.
    A parking ticket maven.
    That wasn’t me. Never was.
    I stacked the pictures, clapped them down a few times on the table to organize the piles, and put them in their bags. They could go back to their shelf in the evidence cage and wait.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Hendricks came in around ten thirty. He could tell by my face I’d had more than enough coffee and wasn’t working on either the Piper or the Farrow murder.
    He came around to look at my computer.
    “That went off the board last week.”
    “Paperwork,” I said. “Got to be done. You might try it sometime.”
    He sighed and dropped himself into my extra chair. “How long you been in already?”
    I lied, told him fifteen minutes so he might think I’d slept well and stayed in bed like a normal person.
    “I got a few ideas about our killer. Mind I run them by?”
    I saved my work. “Go ahead.”
    “For some reason I thought you’d resist this. I don’t know why. I think it’s the girls. We trace it back through them, we find who’s pulling strings.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “What if one of them came into some money? I know the work on both vics needed muscle. What if it was a hired job? One of these girls starts hiring killers.”
    “It’s possible. Why a girl though? What if a pimp starts hitting his johns?”
    “Why would he