Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

I played the message again when I got upstairs and then once more after getting undressed, but it didn’t say any more to me either time. There was nothing I could do about it but wait.

I didn’t want to – I wanted to get up, get on the computer, and chase down a dozen leads. I wanted to bang on some doors until someone told me why Miranda Sugarman was lying in the morgue. But it was almost three in the morning now, I was exhausted, and Miranda wasn’t going anywhere. I forced myself to lie down, close my eyes, and try to get some sleep.

In the morning, I made some toast and a cup of coffee and started working the phone. The only thing that slowed me down was having to wait till noon to reach offices on the West Coast.

Neither of the Mastadunos I’d found was Jocelyn – one was Jessica, the other Jerome – and neither of them knew a Jocelyn. I left a message with the Rianon alumni office, asking for their help. I logged on to the Internet again and copied down the names of the girls who’d been in all the other rooms on the eleventh floor of Heward Hall, and while I was at it the ones on the tenth and the twelfth. Some were named Smith and Jones or the equivalent, but others had more obscure names and I started hunting them down through public directories. I found a Lainie Burroughs in Midland, Wisconsin, and it was the right Lainie Burroughs, but she hadn’t known either Miranda or Jocelyn. I found Maya Eskin. I found Jody Sinkiewicz. Jody remembered Jocelyn and both of them remembered Miranda, but neither had any idea what had become of them.

“They were really close,” Jody said, “I remember that, I’d always see them in the hall together. I mean, I didn’t see them all that often, but if I saw one of them, I saw them both. And then for a long time I didn’t see either of them and I asked someone, and she said they’d dropped out.”

“Who told you that?”

“God, who was it. Was it Katherine? Probably Katherine, she knew them better than I did.”

“What’s Katherine’s last name?”

“It’s Lewis now, but then it was Chin.”

“Do you know where I can reach her?”

“Yeah, hold on.” From the other end of the phone came the sound of a clasp being opened, pages being turned. “Katherine Lewis, she’s in Chicago now, working at the Children’s Hospital? I can give you her work number.”

“Thank you.”

I got numbers, I got names. I checked names off my list and I added new names to it. Call by call, a picture started to grow, a picture of Miranda that was half familiar and half alien. She hadn’t had many friendships, but the few she’d had had been exceptionally tight. She’d been an A student in high school but did poorly in her freshman year at Rianon, and her grades didn’t get better after that. She hadn’t dated anyone. Or maybe she had – there were conflicting stories. She started rooming with Jocelyn in the second semester of her sophomore year, and a year later they both left the school. There was a rumor that they’d dropped out to go on the road, drive across the country or maybe up to Canada, but nobody knew for sure.

Eventually, a man from the alumni office called me back. They’d already talked to the police and weren’t comfortable sharing information with anyone else. Could they at least confirm that Miranda and Jocelyn had dropped out before the start of their senior year? No, he was afraid that was personal information. Did they have an address for Jocelyn? That would be personal information, too. Could they at least pass a message to her if they did have an address? Grudgingly, he agreed, so I wrote a brief note and faxed it to him. I didn’t have high hopes.

But that’s the nature of the detective business. Nothing you do has especially good odds of working, but if you do enough things, make enough calls and knock on enough doors, eventually something will work. Or that’s the idea, anyway.

By two, my shoulder hurt from gripping the phone and I’d run out of people to call, so I switched to the computer. Search engines like Google are only a starting point, though they’re a good one; when you’re in the business, you become familiar with all the other resources out there, ones that allow you to track down municipal filings, business filings, deeds, insurance data, court records, and the like. I tracked through all of them, keeping one eye on the clock. Four hours seems like a long time, but the Internet eats hours like a kid eats popcorn.

Miranda hadn’t left much of a trail – she hadn’t been sued, hadn’t been arrested, hadn’t been fingerprinted. She hadn’t started a business, hadn’t taken out loans, or at least none that I could find a record of. Jocelyn was similarly blank. They were just two kids who stepped out of their dorm room one morning and into the ether.

But Wayne Lenz and the Sin Factory were another story. No shortage of paper on the club, of course: you can’t run a nightclub, strippers or no strippers, without filing plenty of forms. But searching on Lenz turned up a nice pile of material, too.

I looked at his pinched features staring out at me from the screen. Born in Ohio in 1959, where he was remanded to the custody of an aunt after his parents made local headlines by driving off a bridge. Apparently moved to New York as a teenager, since he started having run-ins with the NYPD as early as 1978. Two charges in one year: aggravated assault, though he was only given probation, and then, late in the year, mail fraud. The details of the fraud charge were opaque, as criminal court records so often are, but it looked like he’d tried his hand at running a con and had done a lousy job of it. He’d gotten a five-year sentence and served two. Kept his head down in the eighties, only to surface again in a drug bust in ’93. Back in prison, out in four.

And then he’d bought the Sin Factory? No, the club’s SICA filings made it clear that Lenz was just an employee. The business was owned by a limited liability company set up in Delaware, GoodLife LLC, whose only listed address was a P.O. box. And the man behind GoodLife? He didn’t seem to like to sign his name to things, but in this day and age it takes a lot of work to stay anonymous. All it takes is one slip to blow it, and Leo and I had seen people a lot slicker than this guy. After hunting for about an hour I found a loose thread to pull on: the administrative contact listed in the registration records for the domain name of the Sin Factory’s onepage web site. A man named Mitchell Khachadurian with a New Jersey phone number.

I waited while the phone rang seven, eight times, then heard an out-of-breath voice pick up on the ninth ring. “Yeah? Hello?”

“Mr. Khachadurian?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“This is officer Michael Stern of Midtown South in Manhattan,” I said. “We’re following up on a disturbance at the Sin Factory-”

“You people have got to stop calling me. I’m not involved with my brother’s business, I don’t know anything about it, and I don’t want to know.”

“Your name is listed as a contact for your brother’s web site.”

“I begged him to take that off,” he said. “I made that site three years ago. Listen, I haven’t even talked to Murco in a year.”

“Mr. Khachadurian, do you know how we could reach Murco?”

He snorted. “You guys probably know better than I do. You certainly see him more.”

“What’s the last number you had for him?”

He had to think for a second, but then he rattled off a 917 number. A cell phone, presumably. I wrote it down.

“If you talk to him,” Mitchell said, “don’t mention you got his number from me, okay?”

“You’ve got my word of honor,” I said, “as a policeman.”

I made it through the door at six on the dot, but Rachel wasn’t there yet. The same old man was behind the bar, and he recognized me from the previous night. “Another cheeseburger? Chef’s got some practice with it now.”