Nowhere to Hide by Joan Hall Hovey Page B

name was called.
     

 
     
    Fourteen
     
     
    "Angela, honey, don’t you think that sweater’s just a tad too small for you?" Lieutenant Mike Oldfield said, sitting at the Formica kitchen table, drinking his second cup of coffee of the morning. He watched his sleepy-eyed daughter scurrying about the room, taking a quick gulp of milk in lieu of breakfast, gathering up her books and stuffing them into her book bag.
    Though she was only eleven, she was already starting to develop breasts, little buds that pushed at the yellow fabric of her sweater, hinting at the lovely young woman, that, as far as Mike was concerned, she was too-fast becoming. It scared the hell out of him.
    The vision exploded when she wiped the milk mustache from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
    "Oh, Daddy, I like this sweater, it’s warm." Giving a swish of her caramel-colored, slightly scraggly hair, she awkwardly shoved her arms into the orange sleeves of her neon green jacket. "I gotta go," she said. She planted a kiss on his cheek, simultaneously plucking a half-slice of toast from the plate. "I’ll miss my bus." She gave him a dimpled grin. "You need a shave, Daddy. Your face feels scratchy."
    He heard the door slam. It was all Mike could do not to go after her and make her go back upstairs and change into something baggy and unattractive.
    Outside, the voices of children rang out like happy geese. A moment later he heard the rumble of the school bus arriving, the hiss of airbrakes, and moments after that, silence .
    Why couldn’t she just remain his little girl, always? He understood her as a child. He could deal with that. He could protect her. Sometimes he felt so damned inadequate. A girl needed a mother. But Karen had abandoned them when Angela was only two; she barely remembered her mother, though she kept the picture Mike had given her on her nightstand, and tried to understand.
    He wondered if Karen had ever become the actress she’d wanted to be. He’d never seen her in anything.
    He was thinking about this, putting the video he’d made at the cemetery in its plastic case, when the phone rang.
    He took the call in the living room. It was long distance, from a Detective Shannon at N.Y.P.D. He was sorry to call him at home, he said, but he was having a little problem that maybe Mike could help him out with.
    Mike picked up the blue mixing bowl from the sofa and set it on the floor. A few uncooked kernels of corn rolled around on the bottom of the bowl. He settled himself on the sofa. "Whatever I can do, Sergeant," he said.
    Before getting to the crux of the call, the detective tossed Mike a few crumbs, related to him the grotesque fact that Gail Morgan’s killer had painted her face up to look like a clown’s as a parting gesture. It was the one piece of evidence they were keeping under wraps, the detective said. The one detail that might help them nail the bastard. The sister was in New York, he said, had dug herself in at the victim’s apartment, was going around asking questions.
    So there was a problem, Mike thought.
    "I’m expecting her any minute now," Shannon said. "I can set my watch. The woman is obsessed."
    "The landlady found the victim, didn’t she?"
    "We’ve sworn her to secrecy."
    "And you think it’ll take."
    "Who knows? Let’s hope so." Not that he wasn’t sympathetic , of course he was, but there was nothing more they could tell her. What the hell did she think she could do that they weren’t already doing? Never mind that they were already up to their eyeballs in unsolved killings. "She doesn’t even know her way around the city, for Christ’s sake," the detective barked. "She’ll only end up getting herself hurt. Or worse, ending up another statistic, like her sister."
    Clearly, Shannon wanted Mike to get her off his back. Because Mike had been the one to have to tell her that her sister wasn’t coming home this Christmas, she had somehow become his responsibility. He felt a stirring of