Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“And then?”

“He took my raincoat off, and pushed me, and I started walking,” she said. “And then I heard him driving off.”

“Did you know where you were?”

“I thought the park,” she said. “We hadn’t come that far. But where in the park, I didn’t have any idea.”

“Did anyone come by before Officer Dohner got there?”

“No,” she said. “I saw lights, headlights, and started walking toward where they were going past.”

“I’ll certainly be talking to you again, Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said. “But this is enough to get us started. Thank you for being so frank with me.”

“I hope he runs away when you catch him, so you can shoot the sonofabitch!” she said.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Hemmings said.

I shouldn’t have said that.

“What happens to me now?” Mary Elizabeth Flannery said.

“Well, I guess that’s up to the doctor,” Hemmings said. “He’ll probably want you to spend the night here.”

“I don’t want to spend the night here,” she said, angrily. “I want to go home.”

“Well, that’s probably your decision….”

“How am I going to get home? I don’t have any clothing, my purse…”

“If you’d like me to, Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said, “I’ll be going to your apartment. I could bring you some clothing, and if you can work it out with the doctor, I’d be happy to drive you home. But if you want my advice, I’d stay here, or at least spend the night with your family, or a friend—”

“‘Hello, Daddy, guess what happened to me?’”

“I’m sure your father would understand,” Hemmings said.

She snorted.

“What my father would say would be, ‘I told you if you insisted on getting an apartment by yourself, something like this would happen.’”

“Well, what about a friend?”

“I don’t want to have to answer any more questions from anybody,” she said.

“Well, I’ll go get you some clothing,” Hemmings said. “And bring it here. You think about it.”

THREE

As Mickey O’Hara had walked across the fine carpets laid over the marble floor of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, and then onto South Broad Street, 6.3 miles to the north, where Old York Road cuts into Broad Street at an angle, about a mile south of the city line, the line of traffic headed toward downtown Philadelphia from the north suddenly slowed, taking the driver of a 1971 Buick Super sedan by surprise.

He braked sharply and the nose of the Buick dipped, and there was a squeal from the brakes. The driver of the Mercury in front of him looked back first with alarm, and then with annoyance.

I’m probably a little gassed, the driver of the Buick thought. I’ll have to watch myself.

His name was David James Pekach, and he was thirty-two years old. He was five feet nine inches tall, and weighed 143 pounds. He was smooth shaven, but he wore his hair long, parted in the middle, and gathered together in the back in a pigtail held in place by a rubber band. He was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The shirt was mussed and sweat stained. The jacket of his seersucker suit was on the seat beside him.

The Buick Super was not quite three years old, but the odometer had already turned over at 100,000 miles. The shocks were shot, and so were the brakes. The foam rubber cushion under David James Pekach’s rear end had long ago lost its resilience, and the front-end suspension was shot, and the right-rear passenger door had to be kicked to get it open. But the air conditioner still worked, and Pekach had been running it full blast against the ninety-eight percent humidity and ninety-three degree temperature of the late June night.

David James Pekach was on his way home from upper Bucks County. His cousin Stanley had been married at eleven o’clock that morning at Saint Stanislaus’s Roman Catholic Church in Bethlehem, and there had been a reception following at the bride’s home near Riegelsville, on the Delaware River, at the absolute upper end of Bucks County.