Where the Lost Girls Go

by R. J. Noonan

  “Wow. That’s harsh.”

  “It wasn’t a huge deal,” Sonia insisted. She poked at the fading mound of whipped cream at the top of her drink. “I had other friends, and I was meeting new people every day. It was just . . . abrupt.”

  “And that was when she started homeschooling?”

  Sonia nodded. “She disappeared from Sunrise High. I figured she went back to one of those boarding schools, but someone said she was getting her diploma online.”

  “Isn’t that ironic?” Randy said. “One of the few kids in town whose parents could pay her way to any college in the world, and she’s probably settling for a GED.”

  “If she even got that far,” I added, recalling the workbooks I had come across, many of which were only partially completed. Of course, Lucy would probably never need to work a day in her life, but that didn’t mean she could sit around eating Twix bars. Everyone needed a purpose.

  “So that’s all I really know about Lucy.” Sonia’s mouth opened wide, and she blinked rapidly. “Oh, my God. You don’t think Lucy is dead, do you? I mean, since she disappeared?”

  “I don’t think so. Kent and Martha don’t seem too worried. Apparently she’s disappeared from the compound before. More than once.”

  “Well, she dumped her friends more than once, too. I heard that girl Katie was out of the picture in six months, and the new girl was Darla or Darcy or something. Disposable friends. That’s how Lucy was.” She checked her cell phone and rose. “I have to go. So are you dropping me off, Randy, or should I use your car?” she asked, obviously hoping for the latter.

  “I’ll take you.”

  Cups in hand, the three of us left the table and headed out. Juggling her cup and phone, Sonia was texting as she pushed through the door.

  “Thanks for bringing Sonia,” I told Randy as the door gently dropped closed behind her. “Maybe the two of us can have coffee some other time and talk about what’s bothering you.”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “Then why have you been scowling at the floor since we came in here? Do you hate the tiles that much?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Something dark squeezed my chest at the realization that the easy banter I’d enjoyed with Randy at the scene of the car wreck was a thing of the past.

  “Okay.” I lifted my chin, acting as if I didn’t care. “Then never mind.” I started to yank open the door but he stopped me.

  “The thing is, it’s not you. I don’t want to piss anyone off here. I might be seeing someone else.” His brows shot up. “I mean, are we talking about coffee or more?”

  “Today was just coffee,” I said, reminding myself to keep breathing. There were many fish in the sea, plenty of guys in my place of work. But only one Randy Shapiro, my guy next door. “If you’re sort of, maybe seeing someone else, let’s leave it there.”

  He smiled, turning my heart to butter. “See? You’re good at handling this stuff.”

  As I headed out into a gust of wind, I was glad that the light of my life was about as observant as the leaves swirling around in the parking lot. He waved good-bye, looking straight through me. I was invisible to him. Too bad that didn’t make me care for him any less.

  19

  When I arrived at the precinct, a few of the cops did a double take as I walked into the squad room. I discreetly checked my fly and looked back at the heel of my boots for a streamer of toilet paper. I was clear. I suspected they liked my street clothes, which was salt in the wound after coffee with Randy, who hadn’t seemed to notice what I was wearing.

  I was logging onto my computer as Z came sweeping in. “Hey, hey, now. Look what I got.”

  He held up a black cell phone, and it took me a minute to piece things together.

  “Andy Greenleaf’s cell phone?”

  He grinned. “His lawyer called this morning, gave us the go-ahead and the pass code. I spent the last two hours going through his text messages for the past two weeks, and there’s nothing from Kyra Miller.”

  “She could have used another name.”

  “No, believe me, there is nothing interesting here. Mostly messages to the girlfriend saying, ‘What time you coming over?’ and ‘I’m so lonely without you.’ Junior high shit.”

  How I would have loved to text a boy messages like that in junior high. “Have you looked at the photos? May I see it?”

  “No time for that. Omak and Deming are waiting for us in the conference room.”

  “All right.” I grabbed my paper file with notes and followed him down the hall. “Can I just see his phone for a second?”

  “Patience, Mori. We got bigger fish to fry now.”

  “You are such a tease.”

  Inside the conference room, Omak was seated next to a white woman dressed in an ill-fitting suit that made her resemble the Mad Hatter.

  “Hello. I’m Claudia Deming from the county prosecutor’s office. Thank you for coming in on your day off. Have a seat and we’ll lay out the evidence that we have against Andy Greenleaf.” She wasn’t the person I was expecting from the creamy, rich voice on the phone. She was older than I had imagined and not nearly as soft and fuzzy as her voice. She wore navy slacks and a man-tailored striped shirt with billowing sleeves under a baggy vest. With electric blue glasses stuck in her straight silvering hair and piercing blue eyes, Claudia Deming meant business. “Please, bear with me as I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around this one.” She looked down over her glasses as she tapped a pale fingernail on her electronic tablet. “Oh! By the way, Officer Mori, those samples you scraped up from the Jameson driveway? That viscous substance? It was a match to the brake fluid in the Karmann Ghia that was involved in the crash.”

  “So the car’s brake lines were severed at the Jameson place,” I said, feeling a small surge of victory as one puzzle piece fell into place.

  “Where was it parked?” Omak turned to me.

  “Just outside the garage. The groundskeeper, Carlos Flores, saw it there when he left Monday at eighteen hundred.”

  “And the crash was reported at nineteen forty-five. So we can argue that the brakes were cut at the Jameson residence.” Claudia turned to me. “Which reminds me, locating the stain to determine where the car’s brake lines were cut—that was a nice bit of detective work, Officer Mori.”

  “Please, call me Laura.”

  She pointed her blue glasses at me. “Okay, Laura. I’m wondering what sort of shape those brakes were in, considering it was an old car. A classic, yes, but not necessarily in mint condition.”

  “I spoke with the Jamesons’ mechanic, Hal Burke, last night,” I said. “Sorry I didn’t get the notes into the case file yet. He said that the Karmann Ghia was serviced recently and the brakes were in good condition. Kent Jameson loved his cars, babied them all. Hal works on their cars exclusively two times a week, maybe three.”

  “Could the brakes have failed without tampering?” Z asked. “It was an old car.”

  “It’s highly unlikely on a car that is regularly serviced,” I said. “Hal is vehement about the safety of the cars he works on. Both Hal and our mechanic agree that someone tampered with those brakes. Someone who knows cars.”

  “Because you can’t easily disable the brakes in a more recent car, which isn’t common knowledge,” Claudia said. “Am I correct?”

  I nodded. “Cars made after 1976 have a different braking system to prevent the loss of pressure. And if you add in the gas can in the trunk of the car—more fuel for the fire after crashing—the evidence points to premeditation. Someone meant for Kyra to crash.”

  “We could certainly argue the point,” Claudia said. “Have you tracked down the source of the gas can? The fact that there was one in the car suggests foul play.”

  Breathless panic seeped through my chest as I looked at Z. Oh, please, have an answer.

  “We checked around at the local service stations,” Z said.

  He’d done it . . . and he said “we” to share the credit. What
a great partner.

  “No one recalls selling gas to Andy Greenleaf, but we found a kid, J. J. Metz at the Shell on Oak, who remembers that Lucy Jameson came in with two gas cans to fill.”

  “Lucy Jameson?” Claudia squinted. “The daughter? Really?”

  I was almost as surprised as Claudia. Almost. After talking with Sonia this morning, it was clear that Lucy had a tenuous grip on stability. But what had happened to the second gas can?

  “Lucy came in last week. Put it on a credit card, so there’s a record. He advised her against it—told her it was too dangerous—but she acted like she knew what she was doing.”

  “Well, that’s an interesting turn.” Claudia turned to Omak. “Have you met this Lucy, Lieutenant?”

  “None of us have. She’s still missing,” he said.

  “Of course she is.” Claudia smiled. “That little twist reminds me of a Kent Jameson novel, only I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to wrap it all up with the same panache.”

  “We’ll give it our best, Claudia.” A rare joke from Omak.

  “Now for our man in custody.” Claudia tilted her head to one side and squinted at some distant spot. “I agree we have probable cause against Mr. Greenleaf. And he has a criminal record. One charge. Seven years ago. And there are the naked photos. Not a good thing for a former sex offender. But there’s something missing here. I had a brief conversation with Andy Greenleaf before he lawyered up, and I’m not convinced he’s our guy. Andy Greenleaf is no rocket scientist, but he does have enough smarts to know that his movements were being watched by the Jamesons, their staff, his own girlfriend. To engage with Kyra Miller? Unlikely. And you got his cell phone this morning. Did you find anything?”

  Z shrugged. “Nothing so far.”

  “People put idiotic things on their cell phones, but if you haven’t found it yet, you won’t.” Claudia shook her head. “Something doesn’t feel right to me. Andy claims he never saw those photos of Kyra, doesn’t know how they got there. In fact, his prints are not on the photos or the envelope. And as Officer Mori noted, the envelope hadn’t been up in that attic long. It was placed there recently.”

  “So you think someone else planted the photos there,” I said.

  “It’s quite possible. I don’t know who put them there. That’s for you guys to figure out.” She leafed through the file. “What was Andy’s relationship with Kyra?”

  “He talked to me about Kyra,” I offered. “Granted, he may have been putting a spin on things, but he sounded like he was talking about a younger sister.” I told them about Andy’s accounts of how Kyra had related to the alpacas, how she had seemed to genuinely love the animals.

  “See that?” Claudia’s tone was not critical; she seemed utterly intrigued. “We have some contradictory evidence here and very little physical evidence. I’m waiting on a court order to take a blood sample. Then we can check if his DNA matches the semen found in Kyra Miller’s body. A match would prove they had intercourse but not that he murdered her. And, as we all know, the real test procedures aren’t as quickas the process you see on TV. It takes about a month to get a DNA match back. Obviously, we can’t hold Andy that long without more substantial evidence. Let’s talk tomorrow, Lieutenant. In the meantime, I’m intrigued by Lucy Jameson. Quite intrigued.”

  As was I.

  * * *

  At home I pulled off my boots and considered watching a movie. The wind had blown in inky gray clouds and rain that pelted the street so hard drops bounced on the pavement. It was that turning point in October when any vestiges of summer seemed gone forever. The driving rain was miserable enough to make me glad that I could hole up inside for the day.

  But I wouldn’t be able to focus on TV when my mind was conjuring images of Lucy and the Prince, sparking fires and spearing wild animals like half-barbaric winners of Survivor in Stafford Woods. I collapsed on the soft corduroy sofa and pulled my computer onto my lap. My mother must have taken the dogs somewhere, and the luxury of having the house to myself almost made up for the rotten feeling of getting rejected by Randy and then realizing that we had most definitely arrested the wrong person.

  Before I’d left the precinct, I’d suggested to Omak that we release Andy. I’d given him a crash course on what I’d learned about loony Lucy and the Prince, rich kid-turned-survivalist. He stuck with the wait-and-see attitude Claudia had recommended. Which bothered me, because the instinct to correct a mistake shrieked in my head.

  My father liked to spin off Japanese proverbs (or at least he said they were ancient words of wisdom) to his family, customers, and staff at the restaurant. Right now, he would tell me that “Many failures lead to success.” Which might sound positive, but I didn’t want any failures to begin with.

  I needed to get my ego out of this and go with the developing facts of the case, wherever they led. That meant working with Z and letting go of the desire to be a hero. Another Japanese proverb: “If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.” I had to stop expecting to have everything figured out as smoothly folded as an origami crane.

  The next step in the investigation seemed to be in finding Lucy and the Prince. Kyra had lived with the Prince in Stafford Woods and then with Lucy at the estate. These two would have answers and insights if I could just get to them.

  The prospect of hiking into the woods to find them was equally tempting and frightening. I remembered a trek into those woods with my friends that had gone awry. Natalie, Rebecca, and I had decided to hike to the Cliffs, a crazy-steep ridge that cut through the woods. It was fourteen miles round trip, but we were junior high kids without a sense of distance or consequences.

  I brought up a map of Stafford Woods, three thousand acres of mostly wooded area with the scar of a huge gorge running through the center. The Cliffs were attractive to naturalists because there was no access road to the site. I had thought the wilderness aspect cool, until the woods had turned on me and there was no fast escape.

  The walk to the Cliffs took us so long that we had snacked on our sandwiches and depleted our water in the first five miles. Then on the way back, the weather had changed. Darkness fell over us and the sky began to pour, swift and cold. We huddled together under tall fir trees for the worst of it, with our jackets over our heads for cover. But after that we all had to pee, and when we separated for privacy, I lost my friends.

  A thread of that panic in the woods still comes back to me whenever I get sticky pine sap on my hands or scrape against the rough bark of a tree. The smell of damp soil and the sight of raindrops glimmering like diamonds in the fine needles of fir trees can jar me to that time. Something about those woods beckoned me to go deeper, something compelling and thrilling and frightening. Acres where someone could grab you and no one would hear you scream. Nooks and hidey holes that neighbors or campers or creeps could watch from.

  I had sensed the danger there, and I couldn’t get away fast enough. But instead I froze, panicked, choked up, chest swollen in fear as my heart raced.

  I shuddered against the sofa cushions. The irony of my relationship with the woods was that our family name, Mori, meant “forest” in Japanese. So I was torn: drawn to the beauty of nature but frightened by the possibility of losing myself in the mossy, damp darkness.

  Thank God Camp Turning Leaf was east of the Cascades on flatter, high desert terrain. If it had been a camp in the woods, I probably wouldn’t have lasted long as a counselor.

  Zooming in on the map, I imagined combing the woods for Lucy and the Prince. A total fantasy. Even if I had the nerve to try, the search would be futile.

  I left another message for Hans and Christine Vandenbos. I was reading a lengthy article about how young Emory survived the plane crash when the whir of the electronic garage door opener warned me that someone was home. A moment later, I heard the tap-tap of paws on wood as the dogs came in. When they saw me, their tails began to wag as they darted around the bookcase and came straight over. I patted the sofa, and they both jumped up
and snuggled in beside me, looking for affection. Never underestimate the power of a King Charles spaniel to lift your mood.

  My mother took a moment longer, probably unzipping her boots in the garage. When she emerged, she looked elegant in a black trench coat, her gleaming black hair styled in a cloud around her face. Don’t ask me how she kept it dry. My mother seemed to be immune to weather.

  “Oh, it’s you. What are you doing sitting around like a hobo in the middle of the day?”

  “It’s my day off. But I just got home from errands.”

  “Me, too. I dropped off food from the restaurant to the church mission.” My father had worked out a deal in which he could donate leftovers to the church so those not-so-crisp green beans or rice that had been steamed the previous day could feed the poor. But Dad couldn’t spare an employee, so Keiko usually drove into Portland and loaded up her Acura for transport to St. Benedict’s on the outskirts of Sunrise Lake. “What kind of day off is a Wednesday?” she asked. “Everybody’s working on Wednesday.”

  “Mom, I told you.” I had explained this a million times. “Cops have to work weird hours because someone has to be available to help the public twenty-four-seven. And as a newbie, I’m not going to get weekends off. Not for a while.”

  “So maybe I shouldn’t tell you on your day off, but Sister Mary Grace said you should call her.”

  I stifled a groan. “Please tell me you didn’t volunteer me to teach Sunday school.”

  “No, but that’s a good idea. You should be doing something for your church. Sister wants to talk to you about the Lost Girls.”

  “Really.” I perked up. “Does she have a tip?”

  “She’s not sure, but three girls who come in for the food pantry, they’re not from around here, and they don’t seem to be old enough to be on their own. Maybe they’re the Lost Girls you’re looking for?”