The Seduction - Art Bourgeau by Art Bourgeau Page A

drizzle outside nor the lecture inside had dampened their
real enthusiasm—it was a day off from school. Watching them, so
full of youthful piss and vinegar, she couldn't help think about one
of the missing—a young girl whose body had been moldering in an old
depot in South Philly.
    Her thoughts must have shown in her face, because the
first thing Sloan said when he arrived was, "What's wrong?"
    "Nothing. I was just thinking about the girl . .
. Terri DiFranco, wasn't it?"
    "Come on, let's walk," he said, taking her
arm. Then as an afterthought, "You don't mind, do you? I mean
with the drizzle and all."
    "I don't mind. You're the one with the flu."
    Outside he stopped long enough to turn up the collar
of his single-breasted London Fog, but Laura noted he was still
hatless, rather unusual for a man with so little hair.
    Sloan didn't seem in a hurry to talk about the
murder. Instead, as they strolled among the rows of park benches
still at least half-filled with people, he said, "It takes more
than a little rain to drive them out of this park. You know, if you
come here anytime, day or night, unless there's two feet of snow,
you'll nearly always find people here. I've never been able to figure
out what makes this park different from the others in Center City."
When Laura didn't reply he chattered on, "Once, too damn many
years ago, I met a girl at closing time at Doc Watson's and convinced
her to go to one of the Greek places around the corner for breakfast.
Afterward we came down here, you know, to be alone, and at four in
the morning there wasn't a single empty bench in the whole park."
    Laura kept staring out toward Independence Hall, the
tower hazy in the mist and drizzle.
    "Anyway . . . getting to what you're waiting to
hear, we've pretty well wrapped up the first stage of the work on the
girl."
    He hesitated for a moment, then said, "The
parents just left before I called you. The ID's positive. It's Terri
DiFranco."
    "My God, the shape her body's in. How could you
put them through that?"
    "We didn't. We first took the clothes around and
her mother recognized them. Then we got the name of the family
dentist from her, borrowed the kid's records and ID'd from them. But
when we went back to the parents—she'd called the husband and he'd
come home from work by then—they insisted on seeing the body. I
tried to talk them out of it. It was no-go. They insisted."
    ” How did they take it?" Stupid question, she
realized, as soon as it was out of her mouth.
    "Bad. So if you can do your story without seeing
them, at least for a couple of days . . ."
    "What were they like?"
    "What were they like—parents, what else?"
A touch of anger was in his voice, and she realized with some force
that she wasn't alone in the way that day had affected her, that even
someone in Sloan's business needed to compartmentalize, to get at
arm's length from something like this or he couldn't function,
either.
    He began again. "She—Terri—was the oldest,
with a younger brother. Her parents are South Philly born and bred.
They live on Second and Morris. The father's a longshoreman, the
mother works as a checkout clerk a couple of days a week at the
Pathmark on Oregon Avenue. They're in their thirties, I'd say,
Catholics who no doubt go to mass every Sunday at Sacred Heart. The
mother is pretty: very Italian-looking but still trim with dark hair
cut short. The father's got dark hair, too, except it's like mine,
about all gone."
    He paused, then: "You don't have any kids, do
you?"
    "No, I'm not married." What had made him
ask that?
    "Me neither . . . I guess to really understand
this, what they're going through, you have to be a parent."
    They walked for a few minutes in silence. The drizzle
now turned to light rain, but the park benches, as Sloan had said,
remained at least half full. The only ones going for shelter seemed
to be the tourists.
    Finally Laura broke the silence. "What did you
tell them happened to her?"
    "The truth, that the autopsy