in Elizabeth) represent an unfettered decision of one and give her inordinate pleasure. The same goes for the photographs, including the pictures in the small foyer of her parents and grandmother and Bruno. Her favorite, hanging just above the couch, is of her and Axl, in the midst of their epic road trip. It was taken at six in the morning in front of a motel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Above them the sky is just lightening, and the fifteen-year-old Axl looks so beautiful and nakedly adolescent it almost feels wrong to look at him. As Axl and Pena and Pena’s panicked parents clamor for different parts of her attention, Krekorian calls.
“Dar,” he says. “You caught something big.”
“Do I need to get tested?”
“Give me a call after you’ve seen the papers. I think we need to go in.”
When O’Hara gets off the phone and fans her Monday papers out across the table, the same photo of Pena she has in her pocket stares back from all three. O’Hara is surprised the press jumped on the case so quickly. Being Puerto Rican and working-class is usually enough to keep anyone from getting much ink. But as O’Hara reads the stories, she realizes that Pena, with her wealthy friends and NYU scholarship, has the prospects of a well-off white or Asian kid. Plus, she’s beautiful and light-skinned, and comes with an irresistible backstory
The Post and News are interested in the potential tragedy as a cautionary tale. A teenage girl stays alone at a bar in the hope of getting laid. Therefore, she has to be punished. The Times concentrates on the poignancy of Pena’s unlikely journey that began long before she got to NYU. Its story on the front page of the Metro section, above the fold, recounts how Pena grew up on public assistance in a notorious Chicago ghetto, lost her drug-addicted father to AIDS when she was eleven and got into enough trouble in her early teens to do two months in juvenile lockup. Desperate to escape the gravity of the inner city, mother and daughter rolled the dice and moved to New England. In Westfield, the mother was remarried, to a local carpenter and small-time contractor, Dominic Coppalano, and took his name, while Francesca kept the Pena of her late father. The terrified man on the phone last night was Pena’s stepfather.
In the depressed former mill town of Westfield, Massachusetts, Pena rewrote her destiny, or at least tried to. She became a competitive runner and a motivated student, won a scholarship to a prep school and two years later a full ride at NYU. According to a quote from the Assistant Provost and Director of Admissions, Pena had made so much progress as a student-athlete, the school was planning to propose her as a candidate for a Rhodes scholarship.
O’Hara has read enough of these stories to know they’re written to a curve. When catastrophe lurks, a pretty girl becomes a breathtaking beauty and a B student a future world leader. But it’s the particulars of Pena’s story that get O’Hara’s attention. O’Hara also lost her father at eleven, and although getting pregnant didn’t get her sent to juvenile detention, the special school for fuckups on East Tenth Street wasn’t much better. And then there’s the oddly parallel cross-country trips, Pena’s mother grabbing her daughter and heading east, not long before O’Hara and Axl headed west. And weren’t both mothers attempting about the same thing: to distract their impressionable kids with a change of scenery?
O’Hara should have known Callahan would call reporters, but it never occurred to her that they would bite so enthusiastically. Now that they’ve decided Pena can sell papers, it’s become the kind of case that can launch a career. But not for long. If Pena’s disappearance is upgraded to a homicide, she and Krekorian will only get to work it for seventy-two hours. Then it will be turned over to Homicide South, and for O’Hara and Krekorian, it’s back to burglaries and domestic disputes, Astrid with her stroller and fake kids and Dolores in her bathrobe.
Krekorian lives twenty miles up the Palisades in the Rockland County town of New City, or as he likes to call it, Jew City. He picks up O’Hara on his way in, and they get to Freemans at 2:30 p.m., several hours before it’s due to open. Although O’Hara finds the place a lot easier to take empty, the daylight isn’t kind to the decor and reveals how little money was spent to achieve its faux-antique effects. The oil-stained mirrors and dusty paintings that at night suggested the lodgings and funky heirlooms of a hard-partying disinherited count look like sidewalk trash during the day, and the animal heads on the walls look like roadkill.
“Two things you can’t avoid, Dar,” says Krekorian, nodding at a glassy-eyed elk.
“Death and taxidermy.”
“I guess someone forgot to tell Wesley Snipes.”
They sit at the bar and sip their coffee, while in the open kitchen a line chef sautées onions and a busboy pulls oversized plates from a dishwasher. Over the next hour, the waitresses and other kitchen staff trickle in, the employees getting prettier and whiter the closer they get to the customers. The maître d’ arrives, sporting a natty tweed blazer a couple of sizes too small, and soon after the weekday bartender, Billy Conway “She was too pretty not to remember,” says Conway, who actually looks like a bartender, with the thick shoulders and forearms of an ex-jock. “She and her friends had a couple spots at the bar. After they left, she moved to a table and stuck it out by herself to the bitter end.”
“When was that?” asks O’Hara.
“About three-thirty Because of Thanksgiving, we closed a little early.”
“She leave alone?”
“Yeah.”
“No one followed her out?”
“There was no one left to follow her. She was the last one here.”
“She talk to anyone beside her friends?” asks Krekorian.
“Right after her friends left, a guy came over and tried to chat her up, but got cut off at the knees.”
“You ever see him here before?”
“First time. About five feet ten, bad skin, long hair, at least fifty One of those ugly Euro guys some girls can’t get enough of.”
“Little old for this place, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but we get a couple trawlers just like him every night. Polanskis we call them.”
“Speaking of age,” says O’Hara, “all four of those girls were under twenty-one.”
“They had IDs; I looked at them myself.”
“You should have looked harder. Polanski, how’d he take getting shot down?”
“Quite well. I don’t think he was going to leave the country. Besides she did it so fast, it was like laser surgery. If I wasn’t right in front of them pulling a draft, I wouldn’t have noticed. He finished his drink, put down a generous tip and left. Paid cash, or I’d look for the receipt. Then she took her Jack and Coke and sat down at that table.”
“You remember every drink you pour four days later?” asks O’Hara.
“The reason I remember is because she and her friends had been ordering one labor intensive cocktail after another, stuff that’s a pain in the ass to make. As soon as they left, she switched to something simple. I was relieved. The other reason I remember is because it confirmed something I already thought, which is that she didn’t
