Read The Seduction - Art Bourgeau for Free Online Page B

the other. On the back of the hand holding
the cigarette she noticed a small flower tattoo.
    "What's going on?" Laura said, out of
breath and standing tiptoe to get a look over the crowd.
    "Beats me. I just heard the sirens and come
over. Probably found a body in there. Nothing else'd bring this many
cops. The Mafia, somebody probably got smart with them and got killed
for their trouble . . ."
    "Who you kidding?" said a young woman in a
tank top. "It ain't the Mafia, the Mafia don't work like that.
They just shoot 'em and leave 'em on the street like the rest of the
garbage that don't get picked up in this neighborhood. It's those
missing kids. Their bodies are in there. Every last one of them. Mark
my words . . ."
    Laura pushed on into the crowd until she got to a
uniformed cop. Behind him she could see unmarked Plymouth sedans and
a blue-and-white van labeled "Crime Lab" scattered near a
cul-de-sac with a freight ramp. Fishing in her purse she found her
press credentials and flashed them at a young officer. He had a grim
look on his face.
    "Officer, what's happening?" she asked,
hoping that the woman was wrong, that it wasn't a building full of
bodies. He glanced at her credentials and stonewalled. "I don't
know, ma'am. You'll have to ask the lieutenant about that——"
    "Where is he?"
    "Inside, ma'am."
    All right, he was at least ten years younger than she
was but she wished he would stop calling her "ma'am." It
also was sort of corny, like an old TV show. Well, she wasn't here as
a critic.
    "Can I see him?"
    "Soon as he comes out I'll tell him you're here
. . ."
    She turned away from the next "ma'am" and
moved down the line. As she did she noted the tight, grim faces. From
her experience it took a lot to affect a cop. Something really
terrible must have gone down in that old depot.
    She saw detectives come out of the building, all with
handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths. As she stood there she
felt a rough hand on her arm and turned to face a woman in her
forties with short hair and hard eyes.
    "You're that reporter, the one that lives over
on Emily Street, right?"
    There was an angry look on the woman's face, too, but
unlike the police hers was not a controlled anger—it was the look
of someone who was ready to blow and looking for a place to do it.
For a moment Laura was intimidated by her ominous presence, but she
pushed it to the back of her mind.
    "That's right . . ."
    "I thought so. Me and my husband, we saw you at
Walt's having crabs. You were by yourself. The waitress told us who
you were. You're going to write about this, aren't you? Somebody's
got to do something about it."
    "I don't know. What's going on?"
    "They found a body in there, we think it's Terri
DiFranco. You know, the latest missing girl. It's a sin. They ought
to shoot the sonofabitch that did it."
    Laura knew, all right. She had a collection of
handbills from the neighborhood, all with pictures of missing teenage
girls and reward offers. This Terri DiFranco was the latest. For
months she had tried to interest her paper in doing a story on them
but had gotten nowhere. Without bodies they were just runaways, she'd
been told. They weren't news. No one was interested. Including the
police.
    Another paper, though, had done a piece on the
missing girls as a fill-in on a slow newsday. That was last week,
Saturday—the day she and Carl and the others had been talking about
it at Lagniappe.
    "How do you know what they found?"
    Another woman, of similar stocky build and haircut
but wearing glasses, chimed in, "Because Lennie Carnelli and his
pal Mike knew her. They were laying outa school, playing hooky, and
gonna spend the day in there. When they broke in they found her——"
    A tall blonde in her late twenties interrupted. "I
don't know if you know, but there's nine cops that live in the one
and two hundred block of Mifflin. When they found her they ran up
Mifflin looking for my Jim, both of them sick as dogs. But Jim's on
days so I sent them