The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

  The waitress came over, a middle-aged woman with bottle-blond hair. She’d been hovering for a while, kept pretending to check on Mila, asking if she wanted anything else to eat, drink, whatever. The subtext was clear: she wanted Mila to leave, take her purple hair and her packsack and her ripped, dirty clothing somewhere far away from her diner.

  Warren was in the parking lot. He and his buddies had made friends with some guy with a beat-up old Aerostar van, and they were driving down to Big Bear tonight, already talking about hotboxing the thing and skinny-dipping in the lake. Mila could see them all through the window, making eyes at her, waving Hurry up. Every now and then, Warren reached over and leaned on the horn.

  But Mila didn’t care about all that. All she cared about was Ronda’s email. She took a couple deep breaths, tried to compose herself. Picked up the phone and made herself read.

  I have some bad news, kiddo. A friend of a friend found your girl on the High Line. She’d been gone awhile, he says. It wasn’t pretty.

  Mila closed her eyes. Picked up her phone. I don’t believe it, she typed. How does he know it was her?

  She waited. The waitress fixed her with the stink eye. Mila ignored her. Hit refresh on her phone, refreshrefreshrefresh. Then Ronda wrote back. I recognized her. He showed me a picture.

  Show me, Mila replied.

  A pause. You don’t want to see. Like I said, it’s not pretty.

  Mila wrote back immediately. Show me.

  The door to the diner opened. Warren walked in. He smiled at the waitress, who glowered back at him. Walked to Mila’s table and stood across from her.

  “We’re all waiting,” he told her. “Come on. We want to get there before it’s too cold to swim.”

  “I just need a minute,” Mila told him.

  “They’re all, like, impatient. They’re talking about leaving without you.”

  Mila looked at him. Looked back at her phone, torn. Knew she’d lose her connection with Ronda as soon as she left the diner. Knew she’d lose her ready supply if Warren left without her.

  But she knew she couldn’t bail on Ash again.

  “Do what you have to do, I guess,” she said finally. “This is serious.”

  Warren put his hands in his pockets. Glanced out at the van, then back at Mila. “I’ll tell them you’ll be out in five, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Mila told him. “Okay.”

  “Okay,” Warren said. And he shuffled out of the diner and crossed the lot to the van. Mila unlocked her phone again and opened Ronda’s picture.

  15

  The phone rang in Windermere’s hotel room, a Hampton Inn not far from the railroad yard in Barstow. It was six in the morning, and Windermere was wide awake, thanks both to jet lag and the fact that she couldn’t get this case from her mind.

  With Crystal Meth Warren’s help, Stevens and Windermere had tracked down an ID on their purple-haired person of interest: one Mila Denise Scott, nominally of Massena, New York, way up by the Canadian border. She’d run away from her foster family a year and a half back, when she was seventeen; her foster mom’s sister, a woman named Deborah Hood, had filed the missing person’s report.

  “Not that anybody bothered looking too hard,” Hood told Windermere when she’d tracked the woman down. “She’d packed a suitcase, after all, left a dang note. Why expend the resources on somebody who didn’t want to be there, right?”

  “But you didn’t see it that way.”

  “She was seventeen, for God’s sake.” Hood’s voice shook a little, and she trailed off.

  “We’ll try our best to find her,” Windermere told her. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “I guess I just felt guilty,” Hood said, her voice softer now. “I know I could have done more for that girl; she was so unhappy. They told me she was gone, and all I could think about was how I never did anything to make her believe it was worth sticking around.”

  —

  The phone was still ringing. Windermere picked it up. “This is Windermere.”

  “Agent Windermere? It’s Homer Doyle.” The Barstow detective. He coughed, self-conscious. “I just heard from the Northwestern bulls. Apparently, they got a hit on your girl.”

  Windermere sat up. “Yeah? Did they grab her?”

  Doyle hesitated. “Well, see, that’s the thing. One of their guys found her on a mixed freight in Salem, Oregon, kind of just south of Portland. I guess she was hiding in a boxcar.”

  “Okay.” Windermere was standing now, twisting the phone cord, waiting for the big reveal. “So do they have her or not?”

  “Well, no. No, they do not.”

  Windermere didn’t say anything. Rolled her eyes to the ceiling and thought about hanging up.

  “I guess the bull got her off the train,” Doyle was saying. “He knew it was her from the purple hair, but when he mentioned that you guys were looking for her, she bolted.”

  “He mentioned us? Like, the FBI?”

  A pause. “Uh, correct.”

  “Damn it, Doyle.” Windermere threw a pillow. It hit a lamp in the corner, which threatened to topple over. The lamp rocked back and forth but stayed upright. “No wonder she bolted.”

  “Yeah,” Doyle said. “I know. They said the bull is really sorry.”

  “I bet he is.”

  “At least you know she’s in Salem,” Doyle said, his voice brightening. “So that’s a plus, right?”

  “I guess it is.” Windermere imagined pitching Drew Harris on more plane tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars. “I guess we’ll head up there, check it out.”

  She hung up the phone. Then she pulled on a pair of sweats, checked her hair, and knocked on the door to the adjoining room. Stevens opened it fast. He was holding his laptop and a handful of printed pages.

  “Was just about to go get you,” he said. “I think I found something.”

  “You can tell me about it on the flight,” Windermere said. “Pack your bags, partner. Our girl just ducked a railroad bull in northern Oregon.”

  Stevens held up his laptop, the pages. “I’m thinking we can do better than Oregon, Carla,” he said. “Hear me out.”

  —

  I was thinking about what Warren said about the High Line,” Stevens told Windermere as he set his laptop on the duvet and sat down beside it. “How every rider knows there’s something evil up there, somebody preying on women. That sheriff I talked to in Idaho, he said something similar, like he’d always heard rumors but never had the resources to really check it out.”

  He handed her the printouts. “Couldn’t sleep last night,” he told her. “And the business center downstairs is 24-7, so—”

  “So you destroyed half a rain forest instead.” Windermere flipped through the pages, found a collection of news reports, blog posts, opinion pieces. Stevens had been productive.

  “It’s not just the riders who are talking about this,” Stevens said. “And it’s not just riders going missing, either. I must have found a hundred cases, if these reports are true. That’s not just coincidence, Carla.”

  Windermere thought about Mila Scott, somewhere up in Oregon, slipping away from them. She sifted through the printouts again absently. “So what are you saying, partner? You don’t think if there was a serial killer operating up there somebody would have noticed already?”

  “Sure,” Stevens said. “Except these cases are spread across three states and two mountain ranges, god knows how many counties. And Truman said himself that the winters are killer up there. It would be easy to write off a few missing women and a handful of dead transients if you weren’t looking for some kind of pattern.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Windermere said. “I don’t really know. But we have a concrete lead on the one person who can shine a light on this case for us, and she’s slipping away from us, somewhere in Oregon. We can’t afford to go off c
hasing hunches right now.”

  She made to stand. Stevens touched her hand lightly, and Windermere was so surprised by the gesture, she sat down again.

  “Normally, I’d be with you,” Stevens said. He reached for his laptop, turned the screen so she could see. “But it happened again, Carla.”

  On his screen was an email from Sheriff Chuck Truman. The subject line: LINCOLN COUNTY. The body of the message: a few lines and a picture. A woman’s body—or what was left of it—in a bed of snow, her face and body mutilated, her clothes torn to scraps around her.

  “Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department found the body last night,” Stevens told her. “About a hundred and fifty miles east of Boundary County, Idaho, and . . .” He paused. “Less than a mile from the Northwestern main line.”

  Windermere studied the screen, the picture Truman had sent. She couldn’t look at it very long without feeling something wake up inside her, some kind of anger she could barely contain. Suddenly, finding Mila Scott didn’t seem like job one anymore.

  “A ghost rider,” she said, standing. This time, Stevens didn’t stop her. “Montana in January. Damn it, partner, I really hope you’re wrong.”

  16

  Ican’t let you do it,” Ronda said. “Kiddo, it’s insane.”

  Mila was talking on a pay phone outside of the diner. Ronda had insisted Mila call her, collect, right after she’d sent the picture.

  The picture.

  Mila couldn’t think about the picture without wanting to cry again. Cry or throw up; she’d done plenty of both. It was Ash, all right, in that photo Ronda sent. It was Ash—and it wasn’t. It was her face, anyway, her skin and her eyes and her mouth and her hair. It was all the superficial things that made Ash look like Ash, beaten and shattered and broken and torn. Ruined.

  The real Ash was gone. She’d been gone long before the picture was taken.

  Warren was gone, too, gone forever, his stash along with him, and Mila could already feel the empty gnawing inside her, the need, growing, pushing her to want to chase the van down and pay whatever price Warren wanted, do whatever he asked for a bump.

  “Kiddo,” Ronda said. “You still there?”

  Mila exhaled. “I’m here.”

  “Did you hear what I said? I can’t let you do this. It’s a suicide mission.”

  “Maybe.” Mila looked out onto the highway, the train tracks in the distance. “But nobody else is going to do anything. They’ll forget about Ash like all the rest.”

  “Fine,” Ronda said, “but Ash is gone, sweetie. You aren’t helping anything by getting yourself killed.”

  “I have to go up there, Ronda.”

  Ronda started to protest. Mila cut her off. “We can talk about it in person,” she said. “I’m coming your way. If the trains work out okay, I’ll be there in a couple of days.”

  She hung up the phone. Surveyed the parking lot again, the lights of a truck-stop town after dark. Then she reached for her phone. She was still close enough to the diner to be connected to the Wi-Fi, and she opened Ronda’s email again. Pulled up that picture, even though it hurt to look at it.

  I’m sorry, Ash.

  Mila saved the picture to her phone. Then she walked across the parking lot and out toward the train tracks, scanning the horizon for her ride.

  —

  Now, in Salem, Oregon, Mila snuck one more look at Ash’s picture as she crouched in the bushes, ten feet from the tracks. Not the horrible Ash-but-not-Ash picture that Ronda had sent, but the other Ash picture, the happy one, the picture Mila had snapped as they were running to catch that hotshot in Virginia, somewhere in the Alleghenies.

  Ash had turned back, seen the phone, and rolled her eyes, laughing. “Come on, girl,” she’d said. “Are you a rider or a tourist? We’re missing our train.”

  Click.

  The truth was, Mila didn’t feel like a rider, even after a year hopping trains. She knew she would have washed out within weeks, turned tail and gone home again—or worse, gotten herself killed—if she hadn’t met Ash. If Ash hadn’t found her.

  Ash was a rider.

  Mila was a tourist.

  Ash had protected Mila, covered her ass. Tried to get her clean again, keep her off the drugs. Girls have to stick together out here, you know? But Mila hadn’t done the same, and now Ash was gone, and there wasn’t much to do but make it right, or as right as these things could be made.

  Mila pocketed her phone. She was north of Salem now, had spent the day skulking through town, avoiding the bulls and the local police, looking for a hotshot to get her the heck out of there.

  She’d snuck into a sporting goods store on the outskirts of town and swiped a black watch cap from a rack by the door. Pulled it low on her head and cursed Warren and his punk rock peer pressure. Boring brunette Mila wouldn’t attract nearly the same attention, but she’d had to be a try-hard, as usual.

  Never mind. She could fix her hair color in Seattle, at Ronda’s. But first, she had to get out of Salem.

  Mila listened for the heavy throb of the big diesel locomotives, peering through the darkness for the first glimmer of headlights. Time passed. Fifteen minutes, maybe. A half hour. The night air was bitterly cold, and Mila knew she’d be even colder if she surfed a hotshot.

  Suck it up, girl. It’s only going to get worse.

  Then she heard the telltale rumble, low at first, but getting louder. Saw the rails light up with a headlight around the bend. She tensed as the train appeared, the engineer giving it throttle as he pulled out of town, the ground shaking like an earthquake as the locomotive approached.

  It was a long mixed train—a junker, Ash called them—boxcars and grain hoppers and tank cars and flats. Junkers were slower than hotshots, but if you found an empty boxcar you were riding in style, protected from the wind and the elements and prying eyes. Even the grain cars had little cubbies to hide in.

  A cut of hopper cars was approaching. Mila tensed, watching the stepladders on the ends of the cars, looking for her shot. She picked a car and hefted her packsack, ready to throw it aboard.

  The hopper approached, wheels squealing. The train was picking up speed. Mila threw her packsack at the hopper’s little cubby. Then she grabbed the stepladder and held on for her life.

  The train nearly wrenched her arms from their sockets. She squeezed the ladder tight, let the train carry her, pulled herself up, and swung aboard. She curled up in the cubby, watching the city lights fade in the distance as the train thundered north, Ronda somewhere ahead, and then Ash.

  17

  Just getting to the High Line was a hell of a chore.

  Barstow to Los Angeles International Airport was a two-hour drive—an hour and a half with Windermere behind the wheel, the rental Hyundai’s little engine screaming in protest the whole way. From LAX, the agents caught a flight to Spokane, landing at Spokane International just in time to learn their connection to Kalispell, Montana, was canceled.

  “Weather,” the gate agent told them. “Got a heck of a snowstorm running through there right now.”

  “A snowstorm.” Windermere thought of Barstow, the desert, Los Angeles. Thought of Miami, where she’d first joined the Bureau. Warm weather. No snow. No need for winter clothing. “Shoot, Stevens, and I forgot to pack my mittens.”

  Stevens gave her a smile, then glanced over his shoulder at the long line of passengers rebooking to later flights, no word yet when the airport in Kalispell would reopen.

  “So, what now?” Windermere asked him. “I don’t relish the thought of waiting in this airport all day. But I’m betting the highways are closed, too.”

  They were headed for a town called Butcher’s Creek, two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Spokane, near the Canadian border. Stevens checked his phone.

  “Highway might be closed,” he said, “but the railroad isn’t.”

 
—

  Truman said it was a rancher who found the latest victim,” Stevens told Windermere, reading from his notes as they pulled out of Spokane on Amtrak’s North Coast Limited. “Some guy named Benson had a wolf lurking around his property, called the warden to come take a look at it. Warden showed up, figured out pretty quick why that wolf wasn’t leaving.”

  Windermere made a face. “Oh no.”

  “Afraid so,” Stevens said. “The body was in rough shape when they found her; no purse or ID, either. But she’s a female and probably Native. Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department is treating the case as suspicious until they can pin down a cause of death.”

  “Strangulation,” Windermere said. “That’s how Truman’s Jane Doe died, right?”

  “That’s right. Boundary County coroner found her larynx crushed.”

  Windermere shivered. Outside, the train kicked up a gale of snow and ice as it wound through the mountains, obscuring what little could be seen through the windows. It looked cold out there, ice-age cold—and as darkness fell, it looked desolate.

  “Pretty crummy place to be a serial killer, if there really is one out here,” she said, staring out the window. “This doesn’t look like a neighborhood where nature needs the help.”

  —

  It was long past midnight when the North Coast Limited stopped at the little flag station in Butcher’s Creek. Stevens and Windermere were the only two passengers to disembark, and as Stevens climbed down to the platform and the bracing, bitter cold, he shivered and hoped someone from the sheriff’s department had remembered they were coming. This was frostbite weather, die-of-exposure stuff, even to a native Minnesotan, and Stevens, who’d spent the last couple of days sweltering in the desert, was shocked at how quickly the mountain air chilled him.

  “Come on,” he told Windermere, shouldering his overnight bag as the train pulled away behind them. “Let’s see if we can’t find some shelter.”

  Windermere rubbed her hands together. “Right behind you, partner.”