It took him five. Windermere was still waiting for the coffee machine when the tech poked his head into the break room. “It’s done.”
She followed him back to her office, where Stevens was already browsing through a cache of files on Higgins’s laptop.
“I did all I could,” Nenad told them. “The longer a file stays deleted, the better the odds the computer will write over the data. Anything too old is already gone, but I salvaged everything recent.”
Windermere thanked him. Promised the next time she called, she would have a mainframe for him to break into. Then she sat down beside Stevens and clicked open the oldest of the pictures. Scrolled through a couple blurry shots of Mark Higgins until she found what she was looking for.
It was a group shot, four kids around a campfire in gray daylight. They were teenagers, or just barely past, twenty-two or twenty-three at the oldest. A girl and three boys, piercings and tattoos, punk rock hairstyles. They had the worn-out, grimy look of the panhandlers and squeegee kids who patrolled parts of downtown Minneapolis, but they were smiling at the camera, all of them, and one of the boys was holding up a handle of Old Crow. As far as Windermere could tell, the girl in the picture wasn’t the murdered woman. She clicked through.
The next picture was pretty enough that Windermere wondered why Mark Higgins hadn’t kept it. It was taken inside an empty boxcar, two kids sitting in the open doorway, a row of trees visible in the daylight beyond. The kids had their backs turned; impossible to identify them.
There were more pictures in a similar vein. Groups of people in ragged clothing clustered around campfires and makeshift shelters, their hair often unkempt, their faces usually dirty. A girl hugging her knees to her chest on an empty container train, the tracks blurred but visible through the steel latticework on which she sat. Then Stevens clicked to the next, and they both sat forward and stared at the screen.
This was the dead woman. Like the others in the pictures, she was young, twenty or so. She was striking, high cheekbones and vivid eyes, a wide, laughing smile. Her black hair was mostly hidden beneath a woolen watch cap; she was walking away from the camera, her head and shoulders half-turned to look back at the photographer. She was pointing to the background, like whoever’d taken the picture had caught her midexplanation, midjoke. She looked young and happy and full of life, completely unaware of the fate that awaited her.
“That’s her, right?” Stevens said. “That’s our victim.”
Windermere nodded. “Yeah.” She couldn’t look away from the screen.
“Did you notice the background?” Stevens asked.
Windermere hadn’t. She blinked, refocused. The pretty woman was pointing at a train, a massive diesel locomotive maybe sixty feet behind her. She was walking toward the locomotive. Windermere frowned. She didn’t get it.
Then she did.
“They’re train hoppers, these kids,” she said, feeling a little jolt of accomplishment as the piece fell into place. “Our girl was surfing those trains.”
8
According to the file’s metadata, the picture had been uploaded to the cloud in Grafton, West Virginia, in August of last year.
“I didn’t even know train hopping was still a thing,” Derek Mathers told Stevens and Windermere as he studied the picture over their shoulders. “I kind of imagined it went out of fashion after the Great Depression.”
Mathers, another agent in the Bureau’s Criminal Investigative Division, was also Windermere’s boyfriend—though Windermere herself was still warming to the term. Mathers had dropped by the tiny office at the end of his workday, found Stevens and Windermere poring over the same picture, the victim and the train.
“These kids don’t look like the bindle crowd,” Windermere said. “This is something different from just hoboes riding the rails because they can’t find jobs.”
“Whatever it is, we’ve found our victim.” Stevens clicked to the next picture. “So let’s see if we can’t learn a little more about her.”
“Better yet, let’s ID the photographer,” Windermere said. “Is it too much to ask for a picture with his face?”
Mathers straightened. “I’ll leave you to it, I guess,” he said. “I assume this means you won’t be home for dinner?”
“We’ll order something,” Windermere told him. “Don’t wait up.”
They kept scrolling. Followed the photographer—and the victim—as August turned to September, and then to October. They’d headed west as fall approached, through Clarksburg, West Virginia, down to Knoxville, Tennessee, and back up to Louisville.
“God,” Windermere said. “We were in Louisville in October, Stevens.”
They had been, on their previous case, chasing the online suicide fetishist and his latest—and last—victim.
From Louisville, the photographer followed the victim west to Saint Louis, and then beyond, to Kansas City, mid-October now, the riders starting to bundle up a little more. Then, abruptly, the victim vanished from the pictures. The photographer was still taking shots—Fayetteville, Arkansas, then Shreveport, Louisiana, then Dallas, then Abilene, Texas—but the victim was gone.
“So, what?” Windermere said. “Did our photographer take her up to Idaho in secret? Did he meet her up there? Something’s not computing here, partner.”
They continued to search, on familiar terrain now. The desert, the Southwest. Santa Fe, Flagstaff. More train hoppers, ragged and weary, but seemingly happy. More stunning vistas. But no sign of the pretty young woman.
“By this point, we have to assume Higgins would have recognized her, right?” Stevens said. “He told us he’d never seen the victim before in his life. And these pictures are . . .” He checked the metadata. “Less than a month old now.”
“We know the photographer saw the victim again, though,” Windermere said. “What Higgins remembers is immaterial. And just because the victim isn’t in any pictures doesn’t automatically mean she’s not there.”
“The photographer could have erased any evidence of the victim from his phone,” Stevens said. “You said the pictures only upload when the phone’s connected to Wi-Fi, right?”
“Exactly,” Windermere said. “But keep looking. Maybe our friend Higgins missed something.”
—
Stevens was almost at the end of the cache when Windermere grabbed his arm. “Stop.”
“What?” Stevens drew his hand back from the keyboard. “Do you see her?”
Windermere shook her head. Reached across to the trackpad. We’re not getting that lucky, she thought, clicking back, but this might be a lead.
She scrolled back two pictures. Found the shot she was looking for, a close-up of two faces. A young man with a Mohawk, midtwenties, and a pretty girl with purple hair, a little younger. The girl held a marijuana cigarette. She was laughing.
Stevens scratched his head. “I don’t follow. Who are these people?”
Windermere was feeling the adrenaline, but she kept her poker face. “No idea, partner.”
“Then why’d you stop at this picture?”
Windermere gave it a beat, didn’t say anything, waited for Stevens to get it. Finally, she laughed. “You’re such an old man,” she told him. “That picture right there is a selfie. You remember what a selfie is, Stevens?”
“I think I have the gist of it, sure.”
“A selfie is when you take a picture of yourself, partner,” Windermere said. “That’s what these kids are doing. And that means there’s a good shot one of these pretty punk rockers is our mystery Ansel Adams.”
She stood. “We need to get that picture over to the sheriff in Idaho and out to every FBI resident agency west of the Rocky Mountains. State patrols and every local police detachment on a railroad line. The train cops, too, obviously. Roust the hobo encampments and look for these kids; pay particular attention to the rail yards.”
> Stevens reached for his phone, brought up a map of the Southwest on his computer. Windermere did the same, fingers tapping a beat on her desk.
“We have to move quick, partner,” she said. “These kids are mobile. If we don’t nail down our photographer fast, we’re going to lose him forever.”
9
It took another long, anxious day. A couple sleepless nights. Around eleven the second morning, though, the phone rang with good news.
“Looking for Wintermore,” the man on the other end of the line said. “Agent Carlos Wintermore?”
“You got Carla Windermere,” Windermere told him. “That’s as close as you’re going to get. Who are you?”
“My apologies, ma’am. My name’s Homer Doyle; I’m a detective with the police department down here in Barstow. We got word you were looking for runaways?”
“You saw our picture,” Windermere said, scrambling for a pen. “You found the kids?”
“That’s correct, ma’am,” Doyle said. “One of them, anyway. The, uh, male one. One of our patrol guys nailed him on a possession charge, booked him with nearly an ounce of methamphetamine and the assorted paraphernalia. The kid isn’t going anywhere.”
“Perfect.” Windermere snapped her fingers at Stevens until he looked up. “We’re on the next flight.”
—
They caught an afternoon flight to Las Vegas on a Delta 737, three and a half hours gate to gate.
“The part that worries me,” Windermere said, fiddling with the in-flight magazine, “is if Doyle only found the boy in the picture, where does that put the girl?”
From the aisle seat, Stevens shrugged. “These kids are itinerant. Maybe she went her own way. Or maybe she saw the police coming and bolted.”
“There haven’t been any new pictures uploaded to Higgins’s cloud, though,” Windermere said. “Not since the victim. I just don’t think it bodes well.”
They transferred in Las Vegas to a shuttle flight to Barstow-Daggett Airport, an eight-passenger Beechcraft King Air. The little plane shuddered and bounced as it took off, a strong desert crosswind, repeated the process on its final approach. The movement did nothing to calm Windermere’s nerves.
Detective Doyle was waiting for them outside the airport in a Dodge Charger sedan with Barstow Police markings. He was a friendly-looking guy, the far side of middle-aged, and he visibly winced when Windermere introduced herself.
“Awfully sorry about the Wintermore thing,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Ears must be going already.”
Windermere smiled, forgave the guy instantly. “Probably just a bad connection.”
“You’re a kind person to say so.” Doyle shifted into gear and drove away from the airport. “I guess you want to meet your runaway, huh?”
—
The runaway’s name was Warren. Doyle had been able to piece that together from what few belongings the kid had on his person. But Doyle hadn’t found a smartphone. And Warren wasn’t exactly the talkative type.
“Just sits there and scowls at us,” Doyle told Stevens and Windermere, nodding at the steel door to the interview room, a little reinforced window at eye level. “Sometimes he spits and sometimes he swears. Nothing original, mind. It’s all ‘filthy pigs,’ and ‘dirty fascists,’ that old tune.”
“We’ve heard it all before,” Windermere said, reaching for the door. “Let’s see if he can’t show us some new material.”
She opened the door and walked into the room. Crossed to the little table where Warren sat looking up at her, baleful. She dropped the picture of the victim—the Grafton picture, when she was still alive and vibrant—on the table in front of him. “Recognize this girl?”
Warren didn’t bother to look at the picture. “I don’t have to tell you shit,” he told Windermere. Then, under his breath, “Fucking pig.”
Windermere took back the photograph. “Warren, honey,” she said, “my colleagues out there are charging you with possession with intent to sell. That’s a three-year sentence, minimum—more if they can prove you sold your meth to a minor or trafficked it across state lines. You keep mouthing off like that and I assure you, people around here are going to start looking extra hard for ways to make your life miserable. You understand?”
Warren didn’t say anything. Looked down at his hands.
“That’s what I thought,” Windermere said. “So, tell me.” She dropped the victim’s second picture, the postmortem shot, on the table. “Do you recognize this girl or not?”
This time, she got a reaction. Warren closed his eyes. Leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Ah, shit,” he said. “I fucking told her this would happen.”
10
Warren wasn’t clear on the victim’s name—“Amy or Ashley, something like that. We weren’t exactly close”—but he knew where she’d come from, and he knew why she’d wound up in Idaho.
“Riding to Seattle,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “I think somebody died? Said she had to get up there, like, really quick, bailed on us in Kansas City and that’s the last time we saw her.”
“‘We,’” Windermere said. “Who is ‘we’?”
“Me and my friends, you know? We were supposed to go to LA for the winter. Hang out, see some movie stars or whatever.” Warren shifted in his seat. “Listen, if you’re looking for reasons why that girl’s dead, you’re totally doing this wrong. I haven’t seen her since, like, mid-October, and she was plenty alive back then.”
“So you say.” Windermere sat down opposite him. Could sense Stevens standing off her shoulder. “But I still think you can help us, honey. See, somebody took those pictures of your friend Amy or Ashley on a smartphone. And they used the same smartphone . . .” She fished out the last picture, the selfie of Warren and the purple-haired girl. Showed it to him. “To take this picture. So you can see why we would make the connection, right?”
“Yeah, okay.” Warren’s eyes shifted between Windermere and the pictures. “It’s weird, I guess. But I don’t have any idea how those pictures wound up together. That’s not even my phone.”
“You took the picture, didn’t you?” Stevens asked.
“Yeah, but only because my arms were longer. You ever tried to let the girl take the selfie?” He shook his head. “It’s impossible. She wanted the picture, so I took it. It’s her phone.”
“Her. Who is her?”
“And where is she now?” Windermere added.
Warren shook his head again. “She has nothing to do with this. Sorry, but you’re completely wrong. We warned that girl not to go up there. We told her what would happen, but she caught on anyway, like she thought she was invincible. And now she’s dead, I guess, but if you’re surprised about it, you’re crazy.”
Windermere and Stevens exchanged looks. “Crazy,” Stevens said. “Why’s that?”
Warren gave him a withering glare. “Because that’s what happens up on the High Line, okay? Single girls, especially. You don’t ever surf trains on the High Line. There’s something evil up there. People just die, or they disappear and never show up where they’re headed, and that’s just how it is.”
Stevens nudged Windermere. “The sheriff I talked to in Idaho, he said he’d heard rumors.” He turned back to Warren. “So, what, you’re saying it was a serial killer who did this?”
“I don’t know what it was,” Warren said. “They call him a ghost rider, like he rides back and forth and never gets caught, just looking for women to murder. Everybody knows about it; you just don’t go up there. That’s why I told Mila she’s fucked in the head.”
“Mila . . .”
“This girl.” Warren pointed to the selfie. “She got a message on that phone a few days ago, probably the same message you guys, like, intercepted. Said her friend was found somewhere up north, and all of a sudden Mila just freaked the fuck out.” He laughed a
little bit, hollowly. “We were supposed to tramp around California for a while, see the sights. But all of a sudden the only thing she could talk about was hopping the next hotshot northbound.”
Stevens and Windermere looked at each other. “So we know she went north,” Stevens said. “That narrows the search.”
“Yeah,” Windermere replied. “Now we just have to search every yard, station, and hobo camp from here to the Canadian border.”
“Oh, I can save you the trouble,” Warren told them. “That girl was in a hurry, but she was damn clear about where she was going.”
He let it hang there. Stevens and Windermere waited. Warren sat forward, studied Mila’s picture.
“She had to see what happened, I guess,” he said finally. “Had to see where he did it, where that rider killed her friend.” He met Windermere’s eyes. “She had her heart set on getting up to the High Line, and nothing I could say was going to change her mind.”
—
The High Line.”
Inside the little prefab yard office, the railroad foreman pulled up a map on his computer and turned the screen around so Stevens and Windermere could see.
“It’s the northern main of the Northwestern Railroad,” he told them. “Chicago to Seattle via the top of the map—North Dakota, Montana, Idaho. Northernmost stretch of long-haul tracks in the country.”
Stevens surveyed the Northwestern route on the screen. He’d seen Northwestern trains pulling through the Twin Cities, headed down to Milwaukee and Chicago or west across the plains to the Rocky Mountains, the coast. The line passed through Minot, North Dakota, and Havre, Montana, stuck to within a hundred miles of the Canadian border, wound through the Rockies at Glacier National Park, cut down to Spokane, and then shot through the Cascades to the Pacific. In the process, it passed right through Moyie Springs, Idaho—the town where the railroad crew had discovered the dead woman.
“What the hell is she thinking?” Windermere said. “She’s going to find this guy—this ghost rider—herself?”
The Forgotten Girls Page 4