Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“Laura Fang.”

“And others.”

“Others?”

“He had a list. A long list with maybe two dozen names. He asked if I recognized any of them. If any had attended Bolton. I told him no.”

“Do you remember any of the names on that list?”

“No. As I said, I didn’t know any of them. He told me they were all girls who’d gone missing like Laura.” Mrs. Forsyth straightened and looked up at Jane. “Girls who’ve never been found.”

THESE ARE DETECTIVE INGERSOLL’S CELL AND LANDLINE PHONE records for the past thirty days,” said Tam, spreading out the pages on the conference table so Jane and Frost could see them. “It’s a list of every call he made and received over the past month. At first glance, nothing jumps out at you. It’s mostly mundane stuff. Calls to his daughter, his dentist, his cable company, his credit card company. A call to the fishing camp where he stayed in Maine. And multiple calls to the pizza parlor down his street.”

“Geez. He sure ate a lot of pizza,” observed Frost.

“You’ll also notice that he called family members of the Red Phoenix victims. Those particular calls were made on March thirtieth and April first. Right around the anniversary of the massacre.”

“I spoke to both Mrs. Gilmore and Mark Mallory,” said Frost. “They confirmed that Ingersoll called them, to find out if they received the usual anonymous mailing that he did. The one they’ve all been getting every year.”

“But then there are a few calls on the list that don’t make sense to me,” said Tam. “The ones that seem completely random.” He tapped his finger on one of the phone numbers. “This one, for instance. April sixth, Lowell. My Best Friend Dog Groomers.” Tam looked up at his colleagues. “As far as we know, Ingersoll never owned a dog.”

“Maybe he was dating the groomer,” said Jane.

“I called the number,” Tam said. “They’d never heard of him, and he wasn’t on their doggy client list. I thought maybe he’d called a wrong number.” He pointed to another entry. “Then there’s this call, April eighth, to Worcester. It’s the number for the Shady Lady Lingerie store.”

Jane grimaced. “I’m not sure I want to know the details on that one.”

“When I spoke to the store,” said Tam, “no one recognized the name Ingersoll. So I assumed it was just another wrong number.”

“A reasonable assumption.”

“But incorrect. He did mean to call that number.”

“Please tell me he was buying sexy underwear for a girlfriend and not for himself,” said Jane.

“Sexy underwear was not involved. His phone call wasn’t meant for the Shady Lady at all, but for the party who used to have that number.”

Jane frowned. “How did you figure that out?”

“After your visit to the Bolton Academy, I pulled up the state database of missing girls, just as you asked. I put together a list of every girl who’s vanished in Massachusetts over the past twenty-five years.”

“You went that far back?” said Frost.

“Charlotte vanished nineteen years ago. Laura Fang twenty-one years ago. I arbitrarily chose twenty-five as the cutoff, to give myself a good margin, and I’m glad I did.” Tam pulled a page from a bulging folder and slid it across the table to Jane. Midway down the page was a phone number circled in red ink. “This is the number Ingersoll called, the one now assigned to Shady Lady. Twenty-two years ago, that same number was listed under the name Mr. Gregory Boles in Worcester. Twelve years ago, the number was reassigned to another party. And then four years ago, it became the number for Shady Lady Lingerie. Phone numbers turn over all the time, and with more and more people giving up landlines, the turnover’s even more frequent. I think that’s the party Detective Ingersoll was actually trying to reach. Gregory Boles. But Boles moved out of state twelve years ago.”

“Who is Gregory Boles?” asked Frost.

Scanning down the page of phone numbers, Jane suddenly felt a thrill of comprehension. “These are the contact numbers from the missing children’s database.” She looked up.

Tam nodded. “Gregory Boles is the father of a missing girl. I was planning to review all the cases that are currently open in the state. Every female under eighteen who’s vanished during the past twenty five-years.” He pointed to the bulging folder he’d brought in. “But I realized it was a monumental task, sifting through them all, trying to find any links with Charlotte or Laura. And to be honest, I was kind of pissed off about getting assigned the task, because I thought it was just busywork.”

“But you ended up finding something,” Jane said.

“Yes I did. I got the idea of cross-referencing all the phone numbers from Ingersoll’s phone log. Every number he called from either his landline or his cell phone. Judging by the numbers on his call log, he started tracking down certain families in early April. Then he abruptly stopped making any phone calls at all. From either his cell phone or his landline.”

“Because he thought he was being monitored,” said Jane. A suspicion that had proven true; the crime lab had indeed found an electronic bug in Ingersoll’s landline phone.

“Based on the calls he made before he stopped using those phones, these are the missing girls he was homing in on.” Tam slid a single page in front of her.

Jane saw only three names. “What do we know about these girls?”

“They were different ages. Thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They all vanished within a hundred and fifty miles of Boston. Two were white, one was Asian.”

“Like Laura Fang,” said Frost.

“Also like Laura,” said Tam, “these were what you’d call good girls. A or B students. No delinquency, no reason to think they’d be runaways. Maybe that’s why Ingersoll grouped them together on his list. He thought that was the common denominator.”

“How old are these cases?” asked Frost.

“These girls all vanished more than twenty years ago.”

“So he was just looking at old cases? Why not more recent ones?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was just getting started. If he hadn’t been killed, maybe he would have come up with more names. The thing that puzzles me is why he got himself involved in this in the first place. He didn’t work these disappearances when he was with Boston PD, so what drew him to this now? Was retirement so boring?”

“Maybe someone hired him to do PI work. Could have been one of the families.”

“That was my first thought,” said Tam. “I’ve been able to reach all three families, but no one hired Ingersoll. And we know Patrick Dion didn’t, either.”

“So maybe he was doing this for himself,” said Frost. “Some cops just can’t handle retirement.”

“None of these three girls would have been Boston PD cases,” said Jane. “They’re all from different jurisdictions.”

“But Charlotte Dion vanished in Boston. So did Laura Fang. They could have been Ingersoll’s starting points, the reason he got involved.”

Jane looked at the names of the three new girls. “And now he’s dead,” she said softly. “What the hell did he get himself into?”

“Kevin Donohue’s territory,” said Tam.

Jane and Frost looked up at him. Although Tam had been working with them for barely two weeks, he had already acquired a hint of cockiness. In his suit and tie, with his neatly clipped hair and icy stare, he could pass for Secret Service or one of those comic book Men in Black. Not someone you could easily get to know, and certainly not a guy Jane could imagine ever knocking back beers with.