"Never," he said and then moved his mouth, cold from the beer, to her stomach and down and she squealed and giggled but did not try to get away.

CHAPTER 16.

I met Billy at his apartment. Diane was there, cooking pasta and warming up a red sauce that I knew Billy had put together in advance. I recognized the smell of his special seasonings escaping from each snapping bubble of thick sauce as it simmered. I kissed Diane on the cheek as I helped myself to a beer. met Billy at his apartment. Diane was there, cooking pasta and warming up a red sauce that I knew Billy had put together in advance. I recognized the smell of his special seasonings escaping from each snapping bubble of thick sauce as it simmered. I kissed Diane on the cheek as I helped myself to a beer.

"Counselor," I said in greeting. "You sure you want to sit behind the bench instead of opening your own boutique restaurant on Atlantic Boulevard?"

"I could do that, Max. But your lawyer would have to quit also and be my chef. And where would that leave you?" she said, stopping to have a taste of wine from the gla.s.s beside her.

"I'll be the dishwasher, of course. Work for meals only."

I joined Billy out on the patio where the breeze was coming in off the ocean. It was in the low seventies, same temperature, I knew, as the water. Billy had rolled back his sliding windows, but I knew that he also had the A.C. working inside, if for nothing else than to keep the humidity level down to protect his paintings. Sometimes he did this in midsummer, unruffled by the expense and waste of energy. I knew the kind of oppressive and foul air he'd grown up with in the row houses of north Philly. This was Billy's way of pushing that past back, of exerting his power, even over the weather itself. A few boat lights blinked out on the horizon. One hundred thirty feet below, the surf made the sound of a drummer's slow brushes on a snare head.

"So how was it, rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers the other night?" I asked.

He smiled, looking out into the night, and shook his head.

"I d-didn't know why I was anxious, Max. Maybe because of b-being linked with Diane. On m-my own, I frankly don't give a d.a.m.n. It's one of the beauties of l-lonely success."

He stopped, took a drink from his wine and cut a look at me. If we had reached out and clinked bottle to gla.s.s it would not have been any more obvious. We punched at each other's psyches like this often. We knew each other well.

"I've b-been in that company before, of course. And d-deep down, they're just capitalists. You m-mention the name of a stock that you know everyone is hearing rumblings about. You sp-speak knowledgeably about real estate movements. You agree, even slightly, with a brokerage firm's st-stand on the Republican governor's tax relief on capital gains. h.e.l.l, when it c-comes to money, every one in that circle is green, Max."

"So I take it that suit you were wearing made enough of a statement that you didn't have to?" I said.

"The women were entranced and only a handful of the men knew what they were looking at, other than a high price tag," Diane said as she stepped onto the patio and slipped her arm through Billy's. "He was the talk of the town."

"Without having to t-talk m-myself."

I could not tell whether the slight glow of the moment was balanced between them, or whether hers was spilling onto my friend, enveloping him in the bubble of her optimism. It was like stepping closer to someone else's campfire. Even if the warmth wasn't of your making it made you feel better and a cold man would find it impossible to resist. Diane had that way about her and I was both happy for Billy and a little jealous.

"If you gentlemen are ready," she said, breaking the moment. "Dinner is served."

We ate at the dining room table again, which had always been Billy's habit. He liked being surrounded by his paintings and sculptures and always served on china and crystal. I had even learned to eat in his home without bringing a beer bottle to the table.

Yet Billy was also not one for dinnertime small talk. And as usual he had sensed my reluctance to ask what I'd come to ask.

"So what's up w-with Sherry and this O'Shea?" he said, never shy of cutting straight to it.

"She's still got a bead on him. He's still hanging around, worried that she's going to grab him up."

"So why doesn't he skip the country?" Diane suddenly said, causing both of us to look at her. "I mean, come on, he knows the system and is paranoid enough about your friend Richards picking him up, I would think he'd take the chance to get out of the country before they find a body someplace and connect him."

If no nonsense was an attractive character trait, no wonder these two were together.

"Money?" Billy offered.

"h.e.l.l, an ex-cop from the States could find work in South America without much trouble," I said.

"Family?"

"I didn't get that sense from his ex-wife. They never had kids."

"Has to be somebody he cares about?"

"Richards says he lives alone and the way he's playing the bar scene, I don't think so."

Diane was watching us with a bemused look on her face until Billy noticed it.

"What?" he said.

"Maybe this man is innocent," she said.

Billy slipped his hand over and touched his fingertips on the back of his fiancee's wrist.

"An interesting position, coming from a future judge," he said and smiled at her. "And I b-believe Max was finally getting to that part."

He looked, expectantly, at me. Billy was good at watching my internal arguments. Sometimes he was even better at recognizing when I'd come to a decision than I was.

"I think O'Shea needs a lawyer," I said, throwing it straight out there.

Billy cut his eyes to Diane, she to him.

Then I told them both of Richards's plan to arrest O'Shea on the a.s.sault charge, about the tactic she used to get inside his apartment with the hope of finding something to connect him with the missing girls.

"Was she successful?" Diane asked.

"I don't know. O'Shea called me and said they'd confiscated his boots. Richards was figuring on bloodstain to connect him with the a.s.sault, but he didn't say what else they might have taken."

"It would be easy enough to get a copy of the warrant, see what they took out of the place," Diane said, the lawyer in her, working it even as an unconscious reaction.

"If he g-gets arrested, you just sh-show up at magistrate's court as an eyewitness and squelch the p-prosecutor's p-probable cause by entering an affidavit that you two were the ones who were attacked."

"Through who, Billy?" I said. "The public defender who's just going through the morning cattle call? You know how that works in front of a judge who's probably on rotation for three weeks because everyone hates that duty."

Billy and Diane again looked at each other. They knew I was right.

"The guy needs a lawyer," I repeated.

I knew what I was asking of my friend, who had not spoken in open court since his days in college when his law degree required him to display his stutter in front of fellow students. I knew he loathed the idea of revealing his flaw and giving others a reason to think they had some advantage over him.

"Can I get anyone coffee?" Diane said, standing to clear the table and then going to the kitchen without an answer which she knew she already had.

"I'd just hate to see the guy standing up there with no one to throw another possibility across the judge's bench," I said.

"The magistrate judge isn't likely to listen any more to Billy than she would the public defender, Max," Diane said from the kitchen. "Unless they try something outrageous like asking for no bond."

This time I knew she was right. But I also knew that if they were holding O'Shea on a.s.sault charges it would just bolster any argument the prosecutor made to a grand jury on filing an abduction and homicide rap on the guy later. I could hear it clearly in my head: "I know the evidence is circ.u.mstantial, ladies and gentlemen, but our suspect was also recently arrested for a violent act which shows his penchant for aggression."

Billy was quiet. Even as a behind-the-scenes litigator, he knew the workings and the working flaws in the system. He also knew that a lawyer can get a leg caught in the machinery and get pulled in, just as a suspect can. I was asking him to risk that chance that he might be pulled into an arena that he had avoided his entire career.

"O'Shea says he has nothing to do with these disappearances, Billy. And he asked me to help him."

"D-Do you trust him?"

I hesitated, something a good attorney would never do, whether they were convinced or not. People familiar with the working of courtrooms know that truth and justice are only in the eye of the beholder. The best lawyers know that their job is only to convince that beholder of their version.

I knew I could never accept that role and I knew Billy well enough to know how he disdained it.

"My gut tells me he's not involved," I said. "But I could be giving him more benefit than he deserves. The guy did save me from a hole in the back ten years ago."

Diane brought over the coffee, put mine in front of me and then sat next to Billy.

"Do you want to t-tell me that part?"

Even if he did phrase it as such, I knew it wasn't really a question. While I told the story, I went through the entire pot of strong Colombian blend. Diane got up twice to refill her winegla.s.s. I reconstructed the drug bust on South Street and how O'Shea must have been listening in on the tack channel that night and horning in on the action. But there was also no doubt that he'd kept the drug runner from using the handgun I neglected to frisk him for. I could have been dead in the street, another cop funeral in the family.

I told them of my interviews with O'Shea's ex-wife and my trip to the IAD office. When I mentioned Meagan's name, Billy looked up into my eyes. He would let me gloss over it, but I was using truth to base my a.s.sumption of O'Shea's innocence on. When Diane heard that I had been married to an aggressive, type-A personality who was always bent on being the alpha-male of her block, she kept her eyes on the rim of her gla.s.s. But I could see the twitch at the corners of her mouth.

I stopped talking and she finally looked up.

"What?"

"It only lasted two years," I said defensively.

"I'm surprised."

"At what?"

"That it went that long."

She waited a beat.

"Any children?"

"No. Thank G.o.d," I said. "She would have eaten her young."

Diane coughed into her gla.s.s. Billy patted her back.

"Sorry," she finally said.

I smiled and shook my head. Billy brought us back on line.

"OK. If I was his lawyer. If," he said. "I would obviously argue f-for no crime to begin with. No body. No evidence. But say it m- moves to indictment anyway. Then as an attorney I try to sh-show that someone else could be responsible. Who? What kind of man abducts grown, s-smart single women whose only similarity is their chosen work?"

"Someone who's a psycho, but a different one," said Diane, rejoining us. She had switched her drink to ice water in a crystal tumbler.

"If I put myself behind that bar, I see the same group of guys every night waving their d.i.c.ks around trying to show who can snag the attention of the good-looking bartender. So to be successful, this one's got to have a different schtick."

"Your honor!" Billy said in mock horror. "Waving their..."

"And at the risk of sounding shallow," I interrupted, "he's good- looking himself. She's probably got a target-rich environment, if you know what I mean. She knows she's onstage and can pick from the audience."

"Someone in their age r-range, I would suspect. M-Maybe a little older."

"But not Daddy," Diane said. "You said your friend Richards profiled these girls as being far from home, not necessarily close to family, independent-minded. I see that as a girl running away from Daddy, not to one."

"Someone who appears stable. Has a job. Isn't in there sc.r.a.ping change together or begging off a tab. These girls have seen enough of that."

"Someone s-safe. Or p-perceived to be safe," said Billy. "They see a lot of quick hit hustle going on b-between pickup and bar stool relationships every night."

"All right," said Diane. "We've got a good-looking guy with an aura of something out of the ordinary who appears stable, self- sufficient, not boring, smart and makes you feel safe."

The table went quiet for too long. I was staring into my coffee cup and when I raised my eyes they were both looking at me.

"Where were you on the night of January third?" Diane said with that mischievous look in her eyes.

"It fits you, M-Max. And your friend, O'Shea," Billy said.

"Who doesn't trust a cop, off-duty, in a bar?" Diane said. "Especially a blue-collar girl from a blue-collar neighborhood."

"I'm not a cop anymore, and neither is O'Shea," I said, going on the defensive.

"The problem with all this dime-store psychoa.n.a.lysis is that none of us knows what the women were looking for to let themselves fall into this trap. And that's if they fell at all and aren't tending bar in Cancun or Freeport or Houston for Christ's sake," I said. "And what's the killer's motive in all this if they were abducted?"

This time I got up myself and poured the final cup from the coffeemaker.

"They're lonely, Max," Diane said, answering the first question. "You don't use logic to explain what one person sees in another to save them from loneliness."

She slipped her hand under Billy's.

"Just like m-most abusers, rapists, it's not about s.e.x," Billy said. "The guy is trying to control something and can't, not even himself."

"Colin O'Shea doesn't want control that bad," I said. "h.e.l.l. He never wanted it when he did have it."

"I agree," said Billy.

"Yeah?"

"Yes. If he gets arrested, Max. Tell him t-to call m-me."

"I appreciate it, Billy," I said, and looked at Diane, who was now squeezing Billy's hand.