Tess Gerritsen - The Silent Girl

“Word on the street,” said Tam, “is that Donohue’s been running girls for years. Prostitution’s just one of his sidelines.”

Jane nodded. “Yeah. Another meaning of Donohue Wholesale Meats. ”

“What if this is how he obtains those girls?”

“By kidnapping A students?” Jane shook her head. “Somehow, it seems like a risky method of picking up underaged prostitutes. There are easier ways.”

“But it would tie everything together. Joey Gilmore, missing girls, and the Red Phoenix. Maybe Ingersoll discovered the link to Donohue, and that’s when he got spooked. Why he stopped using his phones. Because if Donohue got wind of it, Ingersoll knew he’d be a dead man.”

“Ingersoll is a dead man,” said Jane. “What we don’t know is why he started asking questions. After all these years in retirement, why did he suddenly get interested in missing girls?”

Tam said, “Maybe what we really need to ask is: Who was he working for?”

NOW THERE WERE SIX.

Jane sat at her desk, reviewing what she knew about the three new names on the list. The first to vanish was Deborah Schiffer, age thirteen, of Lowell, Massachusetts. Daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher, she’d been five foot two, one hundred pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Twenty-five years ago, she vanished somewhere between her middle school and her piano teacher’s house. A straight-A student, she was described as shy and bookish, with no known boyfriends. Had that been the age of the Internet, they would probably know a great deal more about her, but Facebook and MySpace and online chat groups had yet to be invented.

A year and a half later, the next girl on the list disappeared. Patricia Boles, fifteen, was last seen at a shopping mall, where she’d been dropped off by her mother. Three hours later, Patricia did not show up at the appointed meeting place. She was five foot three, 105 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. Like Deborah Schiffer, she was an above-average student who had never been in trouble. Her disappearance no doubt contributed to the subsequent breakup of her parents’ marriage. Her mother died seven years later; her father, whom Jane was finally able to reach at his current residence in Florida, scarcely wanted to talk about his long-lost daughter. “I’m remarried and I have three kids now. It hurts too much to even hear Patty’s name,” he told Jane over the phone. Yes, he’d received calls from the police over the years about the case. Yes, he’d spoken to Detective Ingersoll recently. But nothing had ever come of those calls.

After Patty Boles’s disappearance, more than a year passed before the next girl went missing. Sherry Tanaka was sixteen, petite, and a high school junior in Attleboro. She vanished from her own home one afternoon, leaving the front door ajar, her homework still spread across the dining room table. Her mother, who was now living in Connecticut, had recently received a letter from Detective Ingersoll asking to speak with her about Sherry. It was dated April 4, and had been forwarded through a series of old addresses. She had tried calling his phone number just yesterday, but it rang unanswered.

Because Ingersoll was now dead.

Mrs. Tanaka did not know any of the girls on the list, nor had she heard of Charlotte Dion. But the name Laura Fang was familiar, because she was an Asian girl like Sherry, and that detail had stuck in Mrs. Tanaka’s mind. It had made her wonder if there was a link. Years ago, she had called the Attleboro police about it, but had heard nothing back since.

Having three Massachusetts girls go missing over a period of six years was not in itself surprising. Each year across the country, thousands of children between the ages of twelve and seventeen went missing, many no doubt abducted by non-family members. Dozens of girls in Massachusetts had vanished during that same time period, girls in the same age group, who had not made it onto Ingersoll’s list. Why had he focused on these particular victims? Was it because they were of similar ages and statures? Because they were all taken from locations within an easy drive of Highway 495, which encircled the Boston metropolitan area?

And then there was seventeen-year-old Charlotte Dion. Unlike the other girls, she’d been older and a disinterested C-minus student. How did she fit into the pattern?

Maybe there was no pattern. Maybe Ingersoll had been searching for links that did not exist.

Jane set aside the notes on the three girls and turned her attention to the folder on Charlotte, which had been compiled by Detective Buckholz. It was a great deal thicker than Laura Fang’s file, and she had to assume it was because of the Dion name. Wealth did count, even in matters of justice. Especially, perhaps, in matters of justice. A child’s disappearance would forever haunt any parent, would make him wonder as the decades passed if that young woman he glimpsed on the street might be a long-lost daughter, grown up. Or was she just another random stranger like all the others, whose smile or curve of a lip seemed, for an instant, heartbreakingly familiar?

Jane opened the envelope containing what were probably the last images ever recorded of Charlotte, which they’d obtained from the Boston Globe photo files. There were a dozen photos taken at the double burial service of Arthur and Dina Mallory. The horrific nature of their deaths, and the extensive publicity surrounding the Red Phoenix massacre, had drawn nearly two hundred people to the cemetery that day, according to the Globe article, and the photographer had taken several long shots of the somberly dressed gathering standing beside two open graves.

But the most arresting images were the close-ups of the family. Charlotte stood dead center, the dramatic focus of the composition, and no wonder: With her pale features, her long blond hair, she was the fragile embodiment of grief. Her hand was lifted to her mouth, as though to stifle a sob, and her face was contorted in a look of physical pain. Standing on her right was her father, Patrick, looking at her with concern. But her body was turned away from him, as though she did not want him to see her distress.

At the periphery of the photo stood Mark Mallory, his dark hair longer and more unruly. At twenty, he already had a man’s well-muscled build and broad shoulders. He towered over the gaunt and middle-aged woman seated in a wheelchair beside him, his hand resting on her shoulder. Jane assumed the woman was Mark’s mother, Barbara, Arthur’s ex-wife. Barbara sat staring at the coffins, unaware that the click of a camera shutter would forever capture her expression, not of grief but an unsettling gaze of cold detachment. As if the man in that coffin meant nothing to her. Or perhaps less than nothing; after all, Arthur had left her for Dina, and although Mark claimed there were no bitter feelings between his parents, that view of Barbara’s face told a different story. Here was the discarded wife, standing at the graves of her ex-husband and the woman who had stolen him. Did she feel some trace of satisfaction at that moment? A twinge of triumph that she had survived them both?

Jane flipped to the next photo. It was taken from the same vantage point, but Charlotte’s face was blurred as she turned even further from her father, her whole body bent forward in motion. In the next photo, Patrick was frowning at her as she continued to move, her hand still pressed to her mouth, her face grimacing. By the next shot, she was halfway off the frame, only her back still in view, her skirt a black blur. One more click of the shutter, and Charlotte was no longer visible at all; neither was Mark. Patrick Dion and Barbara Mallory remained in place, both their faces registering puzzlement that their children had slipped away from the gathering.