Where the Lost Girls Go

by R. J. Noonan

  “I spent some time going through Lucy Jameson’s diary,” I offered. When I told him my theory that Andy Greenleaf was Lucy’s mystery lover, he nodded.

  “Interesting, but you’re jumping ahead. Our first priority is to identify the deceased. Second, explain cause of death. With drugs in the system, possibly alcohol, too, it’s very likely this is another case of driving under the influence.”

  “True.” I had expected him to be a little more enthusiastic. Deflated, I turned toward my desk, a podgy wood chunk in a room full of scarred workstations. “But I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t the argument with her father that set Lucy off. Maybe the cause was a love affair gone bad. It would explain why she went screaming down the road in the sports car.”

  “Possible.” He nodded. “Next steps?”

  “I’m going to check the ranch manager for priors. Actually, I’m going to run background checks on the Jamesons and all their staff. I’ll review the police reports from the times we were called up to the ranch. Pull Lucy Jameson’s school records. Get DMV history on all the Jamesons; see what kind of driving records they have.”

  “Good,” Omak said. “Do some digging, but be discreet with anything involving the Jamesons.”

  “Got it.” Of course, of course. I logged onto the computer as Omak retreated to his office.

  It may sound simple to run a few checks on a list of names, but it was no quick task. There wasn’t one master search engine to profile a person. Arrest records, driving records, and warrants all have to be searched separately. And searches worked best with the full name and date of birth or social, and the only person I had a date of birth on was Lucy. I could run searches using a home address, but that didn’t always work.

  I decided to start with Andy Greenleaf, my choice for “Most Likely to Be Lucy’s Lover.” I got lucky. Right away, I got a hit—the Stafford Hill Road address brought him up as a registered sex offender.

  Sexual assault of a minor.

  6

  Greenleaf’s file included a photo. High cheekbones, dark eyes, smooth skin. Not what you’d expect. Twenty-eight and, I must reluctantly admit, an attractive man. Of course, the details of the case were in another database that I could only access through the parole division. I sent a quick e-mail to Greenleaf’s probation officer, Chris Brewer. Then I printed out the criminal record and brought it to the lieutenant.

  “Really?” His mouth curled in a snarl as he read over the record. “And this guy works for the Jamesons?”

  “For seven years. They hired him not long after his arrest.”

  “Interesting.”

  I thought it was a lot more than interesting. “With Greenleaf’s history of sexual assault of a minor, it points to him being the older man Lucy was involved with. Having sex with. Her diary is explicit. Maybe she wanted to go public, and he refused, knowing that the violation could send him to jail this time. The coroner found drugs in her system. So maybe he drugged her to slow her down, to make her dopy. Or maybe a date-rape drug? And when she came home for dinner, her father got mad at her for being high, they fought, and she roared out of there.”

  He shrugged. “I’m underwhelmed.” He handed back the report. “It’s a theory based on one report. We definitely need to talk to Greenleaf, but let’s not make assumptions.” He glanced toward the door and nodded at two cops coming in for the day tour before lowering his voice. “Keep looking at the Jamesons. We know about that argument before the crash. And from what I recall of the incident reports, Lucy was at the center of other arguments at the ranch. Keep digging. Find out as much as you can before we head over there. When you start interviewing people, you want to have all the available information in your pocket.”

  “Right.” So maybe I had jumped the gun a bit. As more cops for the day tour streamed in, I settled in to cajole information out of the computer. One database for criminal and arrest records, another for outstanding warrants. The Jamesons and the rest of their staff came up clean. The DMV database showed past addresses, and I noted that Kent Jameson had moved here from Idaho twenty years ago, while Martha was homegrown, having gotten her license at the age of sixteen in Tillamook, a coastal town known for its dairy farms and cheese factory. My searches turned up a DUI for the handyman Carlos Flores from three years ago, but nothing popped on Talitha Rahimi or Juana Lopez. Other than the hit on the registered sex offenders list, nothing else came up on Andy Greenleaf. Martha and Kent were clean as a whistle, but seventeen-year-old Lucy had already had her license suspended ninety days for two moving violations: one for speeding and one for failure to yield at a stop sign. It seemed that Lucy had felt a need for speed. The suspension had ended in June.

  The noise of ringing phones and conversations blurred into a dull background as I worked. At one point I noticed the day squad assembling in the meeting room, a space set up like a classroom with one glass wall. Roll call, which I didn’t have to attend since I was here on special assignment. The sergeant informed the cops of the deadly crash that had taken place last night involving Kent Jameson’s vehicle. The officers were warned to treat this and every critical incident with sensitivity. “Any information you encounter while performing your duty must remain confidential.” From where I was sitting, I could hear Sgt. Joel’s voice, sour and full of reproach, implying that they were already in deep trouble. I was glad Sherry Joel wasn’t my shift supervisor.

  “Next item,” Sgt. Joel continued, “another mailbox fire on the east side of the lake. This time a security camera caught a suspicious youth leaning into the box before the fire . . .”

  Tuning her out, I searched for the police reports of the incidents at the Jameson residence. Nothing came up.

  I switched to the dispatcher’s log of 9-1-1 calls. Five hits, all within the past four years, all listed as domestic disputes. Why weren’t these incident reports coming up in my other searches? Omak knew of an incident with the ex-wife, Candy, as well as problems between Lucy and Martha. Checking the dispatcher records, I saw that Brown and Garcia had been sent to every job in the past two years. Interesting.

  I closed the report on my monitor and went to search the paper archives, which we keep in the precinct only for twelve months or so. A paper copy of the last two reports should have been there, but there was nothing in the archives on the Jamesons’ ranch. Such a paper chase. I returned to my desk and sent an e-mail to our records division, requesting all incident reports involving the Jameson residence in the past five years.

  To close the gap in my celebrity education, I googled Kent Jameson and his ex-wife, Candy. The author had a website with a smoky background and photos of his book covers. His bio mentioned only his wife and daughter, no names. I clicked on other links and quickly scanned interviews and book reviews. Only once did I find Kent referring to his ex-wife’s tragic death and the heartbreak it had brought his daughter, Lucy.

  The news articles about Candy Jameson were brief, her most notable achievement being her past marriage to the famous author. A sad way to memorialize someone. Her death was deemed a suicide, a drug overdose according to the Los Angeles County medical examiner. I found contact info for the LA County Sheriff’s Department and e-mailed a request for police and death records.

  As my fingers flew over the keyboard, a female voice addressing roll call held a different tenor: soft, beseeching, yet dignified. A fiftyish couple stood at the front of the room next to Sgt. Joel. I moved to the doorway and watched from the back of the room.

  “My name is Louise Dupree, and this is my husband, Thomas. As your sergeant mentioned, we’re from Baker City. That’s eastern Oregon. We’re here for our daughter Emma, who’s been missing for more than a year now. Emma plays guitar, and she’s a wonderful illustrator. And she likes to bake chocolate chip cookies.” She held up a flyer with a photo of a teenage girl with wispy blonde hair fluffed in the breeze. Something about her, maybe her innocence or the sleepy look around her eyes, reminded me of a newly hatched chick. “Emma was last seen in Old Town, Port
land. Like many runaway teens over the past few years, she came to this area and then disappeared. There hasn’t been a single letter posted. She stopped texting and her phone calls ceased. We haven’t even been approached to accept a collect . . . a collect call.” Louise Dupree choked on the last words, and her husband put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “We’re here to ask for your help.” Thomas Dupree spoke in a low, grainy voice. “We’re going to every police and sheriff’s department in the Portland area because, frankly, we don’t know what else to do. We are aware that the Northwest is a corridor for sex trafficking, but the FBI tells us that our daughter’s case does not fit the same patterns for a variety of reasons. This led us to compile a database of girls who went missing in Portland. Like our daughter, these girls never appeared in sex ads on Craigslist or Backpage. They simply disappeared.” Dupree explained that their database on the Lost Girls included photos, pedigree information, and dental records. “Please,” he concluded, “help us find our daughter. Help us bring our Lost Girls home.” He pointed toward the hallway, toward the photos of the missing posted on the wall. “Their faces are on the bulletin board out there and in every precinct. We want our girls back.”

  I bit my bottom lip to keep my mouth from puckering. What had happened to these teen runaways, six girls now, who had managed on the streets and highways until they vanished in Portland? Some had even kept in touch with their families until they disappeared. And each girl’s trail ended in Rose City, where a small Missing Persons Division kept searching. Sunrise Lake was too small a department to assign anyone to something so specific, but we’d covered kidnapping and missing persons in the Oregon Police Academy. The good news: most people who were reported missing were found. The bad news: some of them were found dead.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Dupree . . .” Sherry Joel stepped forward. Even the ironclad sergeant seemed to be softening. “I can assure you that these officers will do their best to watch for your girl.” She turned to the squad. “Do you have any questions for the Duprees?”

  As the Q and A began, I returned my attention to my desk and saw that I had an e-mail from forensics: the mechanic’s review of the Karmann Ghia was attached. Back to work.

  The mechanic’s report was choppy, the subject matter a little bit foreign. Axle, frame, and chassis—could be the names of three pop stars. He saw signs that the car had been leaking fluids before the crash:

  Most likely the fire started in the engine bay, where most flammable liquids are concentrated. In the Ghia, the engine is in the rear of the vehicle. There’s some indication of leaks, possibly in the gas line or brakes or both. Although fuel and brake fluid move along the entire length of the car, the fire would not have spread to the front so rapidly without additional accelerants like leaking gasoline, engine oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid. Once the flames reached the storage compartment in the front, it was fueled by a spare can of gas. A twenty-buck gasoline container.

  A gas can. That was bad luck and not wise to be carrying around. And all those leaks. Had the car been poorly maintained? Unlikely. The Jamesons had the money to pay a mechanic. You would expect them to keep the car their daughter liked to drive in good shape.

  At the end of the report came the clincher.

  Brake lines were severed, not a result of the crash. Point of impact is far from damaged cables. The ’69 Ghia did not have dual master cylinder, so the brakes would have lost pressure. Most likely damaged brake lines contributed to crash.

  I read those last lines three times. Someone had cut the brakes, though it sounded too contrived. Wasn’t that a useless device in bad mystery novels?

  The mechanic’s name, Bob Balfour, and number were on the bottom of the report. I called him and waited as the call went to voice mail. “Don’t slow me down,” I groaned. This was the sort of information I needed to have in pocket, as the lieutenant had said, before I confronted the ranch manager.

  I tried the mechanic a second time. Again, unavailable.

  I happened to know a mechanic with an encyclopedic knowledge of classic cars. My nerves trilled for a moment as I swiped through my phone directory to find Randy’s number, which I miraculously still had all these years later. A deep breath, a stilted grin, and I hit call.

  When the phone rang the third time, I remembered that it was still fairly early in the morning, probably the reason Bob Balfour hadn’t answered. I didn’t want to wake Randy, but this was important. He would understand.

  “Hello?” His voice was scratchy, hushed. Yup, I’d woken him up. I imagined his dark hair splayed against a white pillow. The scruffy hairs of a day’s growth on his jaw.

  “Randy, this is Laura.” Silence. How many Lauras did he know? “Laura Mori.”

  “Yeah, Laura. What’s up?”

  “I’m investigating that car crash. The Karmann Ghia from last night? I’ve got the mechanic’s report back, and I’m wondering about a few things. Car things I thought you could explain.”

  “From last night? That’s pretty fast.”

  “The police chief put a rush on everything.”

  “Yeah. So . . . okay.” His voice began to warm. “So what’d they say?”

  I explained about the mechanic finding evidence of fuel leaks that would have made the fire spread faster.

  “Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not often that you see a fire sweep through the entire car like that. Generally it stays near the engine.”

  “That’s what Balfour said.”

  “Bobby Balfour? He’s your mechanic?”

  “Do you know him?”

  “I worked for him one summer. He’s good people. You can trust his report. So what else were you wondering about?”

  “The brakes. This sounds crazy, but he says someone cut the brake lines and the brakes probably lost power.”

  “Really? Ha.” Randy seemed impressed. “That’s not something you hear every day.”

  “It sounds pretty lame to me. I’ve read that cutting the brakes is a myth. That you don’t just lose power like people think.”

  “That’s true of most cars we drive today. In 1976 there was a new standard requiring that the master brake cylinder be divided into two sections, each with its own pressurized hydraulic circuit. So in cars made after ’76, if you cut a line, no big deal. You would lose the brakes on two wheels, but the brakes on the other two would have power. So you hit the brakes, and yeah, it might feel a little mushy, but your car will slow down and stop.”

  “And, of course, the Karmann Ghia is a ’69,” I said.

  “Exactly. It doesn’t have the dual master cylinder, so if someone cut the brake line, you could get into some trouble. Especially going downhill. Which was what the Ghia was doing when it crashed into the tree.”

  “Right. And we didn’t find skid marks at the scene. So if I had an old classic car, someone could cut the brakes and I would careen off the road, just like that. Wow, that’s scary.”

  “Actually, you would have some warning. First, there would be a substantial puddle under the car if it was sitting for a while. Brake fluid. Looks kind of oily.”

  “She left the Jameson ranch at night,” I said.

  “You might miss the puddle in the dark.”

  I wondered where the Karmann Ghia had been parked at the Jameson place. I made a mental note to check for a puddle in that big garage.

  “And the brakes wouldn’t lose all the pressure right away,” Randy went on. “But once you got going down the driveway, you’d realize the brakes weren’t working. You’d have to be an idiot not to.”

  “But she kept going,” I said. “There were plenty of places to slow and pull over on the access road to the Jameson estate. Or even along the main road. There were places she could have rolled to a stop before it was too late. Before she was flying downhill.”

  Swerving across the yellow line and smacking into a tree.

  But circumstances had been stacked against Lucy. Dr. Viloria had found evidence of drugs. Maybe alcohol, too.
And Lucy had been arguing with her father within an hour of the crash. Fueled by alcohol and anger, she might not have even realized that the brakes weren’t working. “She was probably upset,” I said, thinking aloud. “Fuming. Her anger amplified by intoxication.”

  I could see it now: Lucy, wild-eyed and sobbing, so focused on flying out of there that she barely touched the brakes in the first mile or so. And if she’d noticed the problem with the car, she would have been too inexperienced to steer her way to safety once she was headed down that hill. “Plus she was young,” I said, “not much experience behind the wheel.”

  “How old was she?” Randy asked.

  “Seventeen. An inexperienced driver who’d already had her license suspended. And at that age, you take risks. You think you can handle anything.” I glanced down at a photo of Lucy, her lips curved in a cynical expression that belied the innocence of her doe-like eyes. “You believe you’re going to live forever.”

  7

  I hung up with Randy after nervously making plans to get coffee soon. Shaking off the residual awkwardness, I returned my focus to the case.

  Who had reason to kill Lucy Jameson?

  The question was foremost in my mind as I checked databases and searched for background information on the family members.

  I tried to get in to talk with Omak, but he was tied up on the phone. “It’ll probably be a while,” advised Zion Frazier, who noticed I was trying to get in. “He’s on with Crappin’.” Through the glass wall, I could see him pacing methodically as he spoke. I went back to my desk and called the Jamesons.

  “Any news?” Martha asked breathlessly.

  “Nothing to report, but I wanted to let you know we’ll be coming by this morning.” I explained that we were gathering information and needed to interview Martha and Kent as well as all the other people who worked in the compound.