The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  “Hey,” she croaked as they neared.

  Annie’s eyes were wide as saucers and fixed on the metal box of bones. She was silent, and it seemed unnatural. Taylor hung back, cautious as always.

  “Hope you don’t mind some company,” Brenna said. “Your dad was being a flying pain in the butt, threatening to walk here if I didn’t bring him. ‘No’ wasn’t an option.”

  Melissa knew she was crying but didn’t care.

  “Men,” she said.

  Carole Dorsey managed a smile. All things considered, she was doing well even as her once-perfect life disintegrated into vile gossip and public speculation. There would be no manslaughter charge against her husband for shooting Sergio Ramos, or at least that was the buzz Brenna was hearing from the legal sharks along Grant Street. Some of her uncle’s compadres in the local media had even tried to spin it all into a selfless act of heroism. Still, rumors were swirling about a conspiracy charge, maybe even something for having an unregistered gun. And then there was the pending extradition request from Argentina. Melissa assumed the shock of Michael Dorsey’s revelations would leave her aunt a wreck for years, but Carole was proving herself more resilient than she thought. Having unexpectedly discovered the identity of Melissa’s biological father, her aunt set to work researching the Dorsey family medical history. Finding no evidence that the gene mutation ever led to cystic fibrosis on his side, Carole even became her niece’s biggest cheerleader once Melissa decided to keep the baby. And she was the one who ultimately suggested the name she’d since chosen for her unborn daughter—Julia.

  As for her own feelings about Dorsey, the man who DNA tests had since confirmed was her biological father? Much like her aunt, Melissa felt little but contempt.

  “Wait,” Annie said. “The kid’s in that crappy little shoebox thing?”

  Melissa caught her laugh just in time, but not her smile. “Doesn’t matter, Annie. We’re here for him. That’s what matters.”

  Her dad steadied himself on his cane and smiled, too. His motor skills were coming back. God willing, the rest would, too. “We miss the service, baby?”

  “No service, Dad. Just me. Wanted to make sure someone was here. That he wasn’t alone at the end.”

  “You don’t mind that we came?” he said. “We just wanted to be here for him, too.”

  “And for you,” Brenna added.

  As if on a silent signal, they all turned to the box in the wet grass and gathered around it in the afternoon gloom. No one spoke for at least a minute.

  “This is creepy,” Annie said. “Somebody should say something.”

  “Somebody should.” Melissa brushed a tear from the outside fold of her eye.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, ’Lis?”

  “That James Taylor song—a couple years ago you sang the words till we were all sick of it. Remember?”

  His struggle began. She felt guilty for asking her father to retrieve an obscure lyric from his ragged memory, and intensely sad. Staring straight ahead, forehead furrowed, he closed his eyes. While her father searched, she prayed: Please let it be there, tucked in some unaffected fold of his brain. Please don’t put him through this. But when he opened his eyes, he said, “Baby, I—James who?”

  “I remember it,” Brenna said. “‘Enough To Be On Your Way,’ the song he wrote about his brother’s funeral.”

  That one. Melissa could hear the plaintive tune in her head. The voice wasn’t James Taylor’s, but her father’s off-key rendition. “The first line, Bren. How’d it go?”

  “I can’t sing,” Brenna said.

  “Never stopped Dad,” Melissa said.

  Brenna quietly recited the line that had come to Melissa first as a feeling, now as a specific memory. She added her voice as best she could to the voice of the third woman she now could call mother:

  So the sun shines on his funeral just the same as on a birth …

  After that they were quiet a long time, listening to the wet hiss of the cars on Stanton.

  Finally, Carole said, “Amen.”

  And that was that. They turned as a group and made their way toward the cars. Halfway down the slope, her father stopped, steadied himself again on his cane, and fished an envelope from the inside pocket of his black raincoat. “For you, ’Lis,” he said as he placed it in her hand.

  She slid a finger along the unsealed flap and tugged out the red and blue jacket of an airline ticket. She opened it—a voucher for a round trip to Buenos Aires. There was more: a folded piece of her father’s letterhead with a name and address penned in her father’s now-shaky handwriting. Melissa had never seen the name before: Sonia Limon.

  “Your abuela, baby,” he said. “Your grandmother. A widow. She’s been looking for you for all these years.”

  Melissa put her arms around his neck. When she was sure he was balanced, she whispered her love into his unbandaged ear and guided his free hand to her belly. His granddaughter was moving now, a steady, insistent kick, and she wanted him to feel it, too.

  Chapter 60

  Christensen watched the Navigator creep down a distant hill, its approach as deliberate as a stalking cat. Melissa and Carole noticed it, too. After six weeks as a public spectacle and family exile, Michael Dorsey was finally crawling back.

  “Shit,” Melissa said. “He must have followed you guys from the house.”

  Carole tugged open the Legend’s door. “Let’s go.”

  Annie stood on her tiptoes to see what they were watching. When the approaching Navigator caught her eye, she said, “Every party has a pooper.”

  Carole climbed into the Legend’s backseat. Melissa stiffly followed. Brenna ordered the two younger kids to join them.

  “Come on, Jim, let’s just go,” Carole called.

  Christensen was standing between the open front door and the passenger seat. The easy thing would have been to climb in, but to do so would prolong the agony of doing what he knew needed to be done. He’d had six weeks to think about this moment.

  “Don’t leave without me,” he said. “Be right back.”

  He closed the door on Melissa’s protests and walked slowly to a point on the center line of the cemetery road, about twenty yards behind Brenna’s car. He steadied himself on his cane and waited until the Navigator eased to a stop, Dorsey killed the engine, and stepped out.

  He’d lost weight, a little anyway, and there was a general fatigue about the way he moved that was striking in someone so normally bombastic. Nothing hinted more eloquently at Dorsey’s state of mind than the sad condition of his hair. For years his comb-over had seemed sculpted from granite, an impenetrable shield for his fallow scalp. Now it was half-hearted and limp, with wide gaps between the gathered strands. The two of them faced each another in the misting rain.

  Dorsey nodded toward the open grave. “Don’t be angry, Jim. He was my son. He carried my name. I wanted to help bury him.”

  Christensen watched his brother-in-law in awkward silence. He had no doubt Dorsey was sincere. “Carole, Melissa—they want nothing to do with you. A lot of things aren’t clear to me right now, but that much I know. You need to respect that.”

  “I’m trying to give them time. Really, I understand. So you all just go on. I just wanted a few minutes—after everything. I just wanted a little closure with my boy.”

  “Michael—”

  Dorsey brushed away a raindrop or a tear. “Jim—oh God, I’m so lost.”

  “Let me talk then, because there’s something I need to say. A couple things.” Christensen cleared his throat. “First, I know you had a choice to make that day in my office. You spared my life, Melissa’s life. You got us the help we needed when it mattered. I want to thank you for that.”

  Dorsey looked away, confirming what Christensen had suspected as he watched through a red veil of blood. In the end, Dorsey shot and killed the man whose escape from justice he had engineered. In the moment before that, though, Dorsey’s gun hand had wavered as he considered the alternativ
e. Christensen would never trust him again.

  “Knowing what happened that day is what makes this so hard, Michael, this other thing I’m about to say.”

  Dorsey flinched, as if Christensen had feigned a punch.

  “Jim, I—”

  “You need to go.”

  Dorsey stared. The mist became a drizzle. “I need to go?” he echoed. “Where?”

  “Away. Somewhere else. I don’t care where, as long as it’s somewhere where we won’t see you, where there’s no chance of Carole spotting you at a traffic light, or Melissa bumping into you at the store.”

  Dorsey squared his broad shoulders and clenched his fists at his sides. “Like hell, Jim. Where would I go?”

  “Some people in Argentina want you to answer some questions. Why not go there? Maybe the truth will set you free.”

  Dorsey waved away his words. “That extradition request, Jim? It’s dead. The feds intend to turn it down. I’ve got people on the inside who already told me that.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, then.” Christensen wiped a drop of rain from his eyelash, mulling his options. Time to play the ace. “Let me ask you this, Michael: If those insiders knew what I know, do you think they’d be so confident? So eager to protect you?”

  “Meaning?”

  “How do you think the feds will feel knowing how hard you worked to save this Ramos? Or that you knew the junta was going to kidnap the mother of your children, and that you cut a deal—your lover for your kids, plus a one-way trip to safe exile for the man who could make it happen.”

  Dorsey looked like a stunned steer in the slaughterhouse chute.

  “I heard everything,” Christensen added.

  “Wait, Jim—you believed that bullshit?”

  “To tell the truth, Michael, I don’t know. I may never know. But I know what I heard that day in our office. What I saw, too. And if I decide to talk to the feds, I’ll make every effort to be convincing.” Christensen took a few seconds to let the implications settle. “Something like that could change their minds about granting Argentina’s extradition request.”

  “Oh, Christ—Jim, you make Ramos sound almost credible. But the man was a stone-cold liar. Who’d believe anything he said?”

  “He was talking to you when he said it, when he thought no one else could hear. Why would he lie? More to the point, why would I? The Justice Department’s going to understand that.”

  The rain was coming harder now, a steady drizzle. Dorsey stepped close enough that the belt buckle fronting his girth touched the knuckles of Christensen’s hand atop his cane. A hank of dyed hair hung over Dorsey’s ear and was staining the collar of his white linen shirt. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “No?” Christensen shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then turned away.

  “You’re serious?”

  Christensen stopped and put his hand on the Legend’s door, but didn’t open it. The five faces of his family stared out at him. Brenna cranked the engine, so he raised his voice to make sure he was heard. “If anything changes, Michael, I’ll find you. But right now, you need to go away.”

  Dorsey stood in the middle of the road, incredulous. “You are serious.”

  “If I see you again, I make a call.”

  With that, Christensen opened the car door, braced himself with his cane, and eased into the passenger seat. It felt good to be inside where it was dry and warm. He closed the door.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, and no one looked back as they pulled away.

  THE END

  Acknowledgements

  The story told in these pages is entirely fiction, but to a lifelong journalist like me, the best fiction is woven from scraps of reality. That’s certainly the case with The Disappeared Girl. Some of the fictionalized events described in this story actually happened, more or less, and I benefitted from the work of journalists around the world who chronicled those events. I owe them a great debt for doing the hard work of reporting, and for giving me the material with which to create this novel.

  A military airplane really did once crash into the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It happened on Jan. 31, 1956—the year I was born, and seven years before I ever lived in that great city. The mysteries surrounding the crash of that B-25 persist to this day, and gave me a wonderful opportunity to impose on that tragedy a story that I chose to set decades later. In doing so, I mean no disrespect to those who actually died when that aircraft went down. The late Robert H. Johns, a former Navy crew chief and pilot, thoroughly researched that case and shared his work with me in the early 1980s when, as a young reporter, I was writing a series of stories for The Pittsburgh Press. The knowledge he imparted then about aircraft navigation and procedure helped me write some chapters of this book several decades later. I manipulated some of his carefully gathered facts to better serve the fiction, and I like to think he would have forgiven me that, because the man knew how to tell a good story. Johns’s friend and colleague, Robert A. Goerman, later helped turn Johns’s research into a book, edited by Robert E. Cole, called The Incident That Could Have Killed Pittsburgh.

  Also, the night terrors of Argentina between 1976 and 1983 really were a part of that country’s tragic “Dirty War.” People really did disappear, an estimated 30,000 of them. Some of the political prisoners were pregnant women, and about 500 babies born to those women really were stolen and funneled into a shadowy and now-notorious adoption pipeline. The women who survived that ordeal later formed a collective conscience called The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Beginning in 1977, and at great risk, those brave women began gathering in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to focus world attention on that tragedy, and to learn the fate of their lost children and grandchildren. Their courage should humble us all.

  The three series novels that preceded this one—Time Release, Shadow Image, and Straw Men—originally were published between 1997 and 2001. Each of those books featured memory expert Jim Christensen as the protagonist, and each thrust the psychologist into the unfamiliar world of criminal justice. I was certain it was time to raise the stakes for Christensen, to make his next story a deeply personal one, so I wrote this fourth series book in 2002—the same year Straw Men was an Edgar Award finalist. What you’re reading has been revised and updated for contemporary publication. It’s now set in 2005, and faithful readers of the Memory Series books will realize that these characters have aged in peculiar ways since they last appeared in 2001. I hope they’ll forgive that artistic sleight of hand. I’m grateful to Diversion Books and editor Randall Klein for recognizing this book’s value, for his valuable suggestions, and for giving the whole series new life in digital form. Sarah Masterson Hally, Diversion’s production manager, also was enormously helpful in preparing the manuscript for publication.

  None of that would have happened without the hard work of Susan Ginsburg of Writers House, my literary agent since 1994. She encouraged me to write this novel more than a decade before we found a publisher, and I’m grateful for her continuing faith and patience.

  I also owe four people my thanks for helping me understand the world of adoption and adopted children: First, my niece, Missy Bell Evans of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, for helping me understand what it’s like to have been adopted as an infant; second, my longtime friend and occasional coauthor Patrick J. Kiger, who shared his thoughts and experiences as the father of an adopted child. Their insights helped inform the characters of both Jim and Melissa Christensen. Finally, my friends Steve Hawk and Pamm Higgins shared with me the special struggles of children who are adopted long after infancy.

  As always, my wife Judy has suffered with little complaint while I focused much of my attention on writing during the years when we were raising our family. I’m hoping our now-grown kids will someday understand why their dad spent so much of their youth working, preoccupied, or bleary-eyed and tired. I’m hoping someday to understand that myself, but I’m hoping my
professional ambitions did them no permanent damage. I couldn’t be prouder of the remarkable adults they’ve become.

  Finally, a book propelled by deceit and dark family secrets should come with a nod of absolution to the family that offered me nothing but love and support while raising me as its youngest member. So to my parents, William L. and Helen Vance Smith, who were lucky enough to celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary in September 2013; my brothers, Bill Jr. and David; and my sister Lisa Wren, to whom this book is dedicated: Thank you all for showing me the way.

  Martin J. Smith

  Palos Verdes Estates, California

  More from Martin J. Smith

  MARTIN J. SMITH is a veteran journalist, author, and magazine editor who has won more than 50 newspaper and magazine awards. A former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he currently is editor-in-chief of Orange Coast magazine in Orange County, Calif. His first three crime novels were nominated for prestigious crime fiction awards—the Edgar, Barry, and Anthony. He also is the author of three nonfiction books, including The Wild Duck Chase, Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America, and Oops: 20 Life Lessons From the Fiascoes That Shaped America.

  Available now

  If you've enjoyed Time Release, please read on for a preview of Martin J. Smith's latest standalone thriller, Combustion.

  1

  The closing credits were still scrolling up the screen of Starke’s iPad when his cell phone jolted him straight up in bed. What time had he finally fallen asleep? He scanned the darkness for some sign of the time.

  His phone chirruped again, like a cricket trapped somewhere in his one-bedroom cave. Where’d he left it? He moved the tablet to the side, slid his feet off the twin mattress and onto the worn carpet, and stood with a riotous popping of cartilage. He was naked. The compressor of his window air-conditioner had been busted for months. Since the apartment was above the Suds-Your-Duds laundromat on the ground floor, the dryer vents leaked warm, moist air through the ductwork. It was like living in somebody’s armpit, but he just hadn’t had the energy to move, or do anything besides work, since Rosaleen.