42097609460

she’d gone after that. Kevin put a gun to the man’s head, but even
though he cried, he couldn’t tell Kevin anything more.
Kevin had to go back to work on Monday, furious that she’d
eluded him. But the following weekend, he was back in
Philadelphia. And the weekend after that. He expanded his
search, but the problem was that there were too many places and
he was only one person and not everyone trusted an out-of-town
cop.
But he was patient and diligent and he kept coming back and took
more vacation days. Another weekend passed. He widened his
search, knowing she would need cash. He stopped in bars and
restaurants and diners. He would check every one in the city if he
had to. Finally, a week after Valentine’s Day, he met a waitress
named Tracy who told him that Erin was working at a diner,
except she was calling herself Erica. She was scheduled to work
the following day. The waitress trusted him because he was a
detective, and she’d even flirted with him, handing him her phone
number before he left.
He rented a car and waited up the block from the diner the
following morning, before the sun was up. Employees entered
through a door in the alley. He sipped from his Styrofoam cup in
the front seat, watching for her. Eventually, he saw the owner and
Tracy and another woman head down the alley. But Erin never
showed, and she didn’t show up the following day, either, and no
one knew where she lived. She never came back to pick up her
paycheck.
He found where she lived a few hours later. It was walking
distance from the diner, a piece-of-crap hotel. The man, who
accepted only cash, knew nothing except that Erin had left the day
before and come back and left again in a hurry. Kevin searched
her room but there was nothing inside, and when he finally raced
to the bus station there were only women in the ticket booths and