Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge

playing it too close to the vest, and what her life really needs is another infusion of rock. At the far end of the bar next to the door is a postersize blowup of that famous photo of a thirty-two-year-old Keith Richards wearing a T-shirt that reads, WHO THE FUCK IS MICK JAGGER ? No disrespect to the Stones and Sir Mick, but O’Hara’s got a question a bit closer to home. Who the fuck is Darlene O’Hara?

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    Breaking in a new box of Advil is rarely attempted under happy circumstances. With the kind of hangover O’Hara wakes up with late Sunday morning, it’s a gruesome exercise. By the time O’Hara rips apart the box, pries off the cap, deflowers the aluminum foil and plucks out the last shred of cotton plug, she’s grateful her service revolver is in the bedroom. “Still feel like crap, Sarge,” she says into Callahan’s voice mail after she’s washed down a handful. “Must be the goddamned flu.” The first part is certainly true, the second unlikely, and O’Hara hopes the gratuitously colorful goddamned doesn’t give her away. She couldn’t have just said “the flu.” It had to be “the goddamned flu.” Fortunately Callahan isn’t much of a detective. That’s why he’s a sergeant.
    Gelcaps and coffee clear out enough space in O’Hara’s head for her to rough out a working plan. If the killer knew Pena well enough to be connected to her by a tattoo, finding him is just a matter of learning more about Pena. You can cut out a tattoo but not every trace of personal history. As long as O’Hara keeps slogging forward, she’s going to stumble on him eventually. She clears her kitchen table and plows through six days of unreadpapers, clipping every story about the murder and jotting down the name of every person with something to say about it.
    Two stories quote a Dr. Deirdre Tomlinson, NYU’s assistant provost of admissions. O’Hara calls her office, expecting on a Sunday afternoon to get another machine, but is startled by a booming theatrical “Tomlinson here!” Although Tomlinson was about to head home, she agrees to wait for O’Hara in her office. Based on the dramatic phone presence, O’Hara pictured a matriarch of some heft and vintage, but the woman who leads O’Hara into the parlor floor of a redbrick townhouse on Washington Square North is rail-thin and in her late thirties, her long skinny legs emerging from a chic tweed skirt and disappearing into knee-high equestrian boots. The unkind descriptor that pops into O’Hara’s mind is “Condi with a ’fro.”
    â€œFrancesca’s death is a tragedy for her family and a catastrophe for this university,” says Tomlinson, directing O’Hara to the high-backed chair facing her desk. “It’s also a great personal loss. If there’s anything I, or the university, can…do.”
    Despite her relative youth, Tomlinson’s office is enormous. It’s adorned with a dazzling array of African-centric art, and when Tomlinson sees O’Hara’s eyes roving from piece to piece, the former literature professor plays the patronizing docent. “That photograph of a beautiful Kenyan woman was taken twenty years ago by a wonderful photographer named Irving Penn, and the small figures on the shelf are Ethiopian and fashioned, believe it or not, from cow dung. The collage of course is a Romare Bearden, one of our great late artists. It belongs to the university, obviously, but I get to look at it every day.”
    Cow dung is about right , thinks O’Hara, and does her best to keep her eyes from rolling out of their sockets. “It sounds like you knew the victim quite well,” she says.
    â€œI recruited her to NYU. The dean at Miss Porter’s alerted me to Francesca when she was only a junior, and I visited her there as well as at her home in Westfield.”
    â€œDo you spend that kind of