Vanishing Girls

by Lisa Regan

  Next, she brought up Google and entered June Spencer’s name into the search bar to see if Trinity Payne had come up with anything new on the case, or if the story had been picked up by the national news outlets. There was a smattering of headlines proclaiming: “Denton Girl Missing for One Year Found Alive” and “Teen Runaway Kept as Sex Slave for a Year.” Josie checked the sources. They were all local, mostly WYEP and the few local newspapers in the area. A few listings below the stories about June, an older headline caught Josie’s eye: “Missing PA Housewife Found Alive in Denton.” Josie clicked on the story from USA Today and quickly scanned it. Then she opened a new browser window and entered the housewife’s name into the search bar. It turned up hundreds of news reports, the headlines all screaming the same thing:

  MISSING PENNSYLVANIA WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH

  * * *

  MISSING PA MOTHER FOUND ALIVE

  * * *

  MISSING ALCOTT COUNTY WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER 3 WEEKS

  One by one, Josie clicked through and read each piece. Six years ago, Ginger Blackwell, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three from Bowersville, the next town over, west of Denton, disappeared on her way home from the grocery store. Her vehicle and all of her personal belongings—purse, phone, keys—were found on the side of a rural road between the grocery store and her home. Her groceries were still in the back of her car and her driver’s side front tire was flat. She had vanished without a trace.

  The Bowersville police, the state police and the FBI searched day and night. A command center was established near the grocery store where she was last seen. Even a tip line was set up. All the major networks picked up the story. Blackwell’s husband was an early suspect even though he had an alibi. Once he passed a polygraph the police focused their investigation elsewhere, but with absolutely no leads the investigation ground to a halt. Josie vaguely remembered the case. Back then she hadn’t yet joined the police force; she was fresh out of college, living with her grandmother and still partying more than anything else. She was sure she was aware of it since it had happened so close by, but it hadn’t stayed vividly in her mind.

  After three weeks, Ginger was found on the shoulder of Interstate 80 between the two Denton exits, bound and naked. She claimed that a woman had stopped to help her with her flat tire, and the next thing she knew she was being held prisoner, but she could not describe where she had been held or the person, or persons, who had held her. “It was just complete darkness,” she was quoted as saying. “Like being kept in a cupboard. The darkness was absolute. Like a black box.”

  Josie sucked in a sharp breath as invisible fingers crawled up her spine. Like a cupboard. Like a closet. She didn’t have to imagine; she knew Blackwell’s terror. Was it too much of a coincidence? Blackwell had vanished without a trace along a lonely rural stretch of road, just like Spencer and Coleman. All three women had disappeared within a six-year period. That was a lot in a short amount of time for an area as small as Denton. Had the same person who had taken Isabelle Coleman, and possibly June Spencer, also taken Ginger Blackwell? Josie pulled up the Megan’s Law site in a new window and checked Donald Drummond’s page again. He had been in prison when Ginger Blackwell was abducted.

  She flipped back to the tab with the Blackwell story on it and read on. Blackwell remembered next to nothing. She had no idea whether the woman who stopped to help her had been involved in her abduction or not. A Bowersville woman, the owner of a local hair salon, came forward later to say that she had stopped when she saw Blackwell’s vehicle broken down on the side of the road but that Blackwell was nowhere to be found. Ginger couldn’t remember if the salon owner was the same woman she spoke with. She didn’t remember being dumped on the interstate. Her injuries were minor. The news reports didn’t address whether or not she had been sexually assaulted.

  Because she was found on the interstate, the state police had jurisdiction, but because she was found in Denton, Chief Harris fought to keep her case. Ultimately, the Alcott County district attorney appointed a special investigator to conduct an independent investigation. It was an unusual move, but Josie understood the amount of pressure all of law enforcement and the DA’s office would have been under to solve the case given the amount of national press coverage.

  Ginger’s case was quickly labeled a hoax. Josie scrolled through at least twenty articles outlining why police believed that her abduction had been faked. In each one Ginger’s husband was quoted, perhaps to cast doubt on the hoax theory. He said, “My wife did not stage her own kidnapping. This was no hoax. She went through hell. Tell me, if she did all this herself, then how did she tie herself up and dump herself on the side of the highway?”

  How indeed.

  Studying the photos of Ginger, it was hard to believe the woman had been thirty-two. She looked like a teenager. She was thin with long, lustrous auburn hair and eyes the blue of tropical waters. Her pale skin glowed in every picture. In some, she held squirming toddlers in her lap; in others, she stood in front of a monument or landmark. All taken before her abduction. All showing her radiant and impossibly happy. Josie wondered if she had gotten that smile back in the years after her recovery.

  A hand brushing through the back of her hair made her jump. “Jesus,” Luke said. “What are you doing? Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Her heart thudded against her sternum as she looked around the kitchen and noticed the muted gray daylight flooding in through the windows. She had been awake the entire night. “I—I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  He yawned. “You must be exhausted.”

  But she wasn’t. She felt more keenly awake than ever before. Luke sat beside her at the table, still bare-chested, wearing only the low-slung sweatpants that he kept in the top left-hand drawer of her dresser. “What are you doing?” he asked, squinting at her computer screen, which displayed her search for Ginger Blackwell. “You really need to give Google a break,” he added, jokingly.

  Josie clicked on one of the news stories, and a photo of Ginger Blackwell with her wide, infectious smile filled the screen. Below that, a video of the ninety-second news piece began to play. “Do you remember this case?” she asked. “She was kidnapped and then dumped on I-80 three weeks later. Ginger Blackwell?”

  Luke pushed a hand through his hair and studied Blackwell’s photo. In the video, Trinity Payne appeared next to a large-screen television showing a slideshow of photos of Blackwell and began reciting the scant facts of the woman’s disappearance. The sight of Trinity sent a jolt through Josie. Trinity had been a correspondent for one of the major networks at the time of Blackwell’s abduction. Perhaps she had gotten the story because of her ties to the area.

  “I remember the case,” Luke said. “But only because it was on the news. I was stationed near Greensburg back then. I thought the whole thing was a hoax.”

  Sighing, Josie snapped her laptop shut. “That seems to be the consensus,” she replied, but she wasn’t so sure. She wished she could see the Blackwell file and decide for herself. It wasn’t that far out of the realm of possibility; hoaxes had been known to happen before, but usually the culprit was then charged, or at least fined, for the unnecessary use of police resources. It cost money to put on a search as large as the one mounted for Ginger Blackwell. Money a county like Alcott just didn’t have. Josie knew for a fact that Denton had probably blown its annual budget within three days of Isabelle Coleman’s disappearance. If Blackwell had staged her abduction, why hadn’t she been punished for it? Something was missing; something was in the Blackwell file that hadn’t made it onto the news. She knew it.

  Josie watched Luke as he stood and made his way to her counter, scooped coffee grounds into the coffeemaker, poured water into it and turned it on. She wondered if she could trust him. Really trust him. She had learned at the tender age of eleven that not all men were trustworthy, possibly before that when, at six, her father had chosen a bullet over her.

  The only man she had ever really tr
usted was Ray, but he was a boy when she met him. And look how that turned out. He had grown into a man and destroyed the most sacred period of their life together—their marriage—proving to her, once and for all, definitively, that men could not be trusted.

  Yet she wore Luke’s engagement ring on her finger. She had said yes. Without hesitation. Which implied some trust on her part, didn’t it? Could she talk to him about the Princess barbell? About her theory that Blackwell, Coleman and June Spencer were all connected? Would he dismiss her as easily as the chief had? Would he think she was crazy?

  She thought of the incident that had landed her in the unholy mess she was in now, suspended and at loose ends. After it happened, Ray had called her exactly that. Crazy. Then he had said, “You can’t do shit like that. You can’t just hit people.” Of course she couldn’t. She knew that. But nearly every officer on the Denton PD shared Ray’s opinion: she had gone crazy. She may have lost control but she knew she wasn’t crazy.

  Quite honestly, she had expected more support from her colleagues. Like none of them had ever lost his temper in the heat of the moment, been driven to do something regrettable, something stupid or maybe, yes, a little crazy. Sometimes it happened. What they dealt with day after day was the worst humanity had to offer. If it didn’t get to you now and then, you weren’t human. Only Noah had given any indication that he understood. He had quietly said to her, as she left the station house in disgrace, gunless and badgeless, “She had it coming.”

  Josie took the steaming cup of coffee Luke offered her, fixed just the way she liked it—two sugars and lots of half-and-half. “Luke,” she said, as he sat down next to her. “Remember the incident with that woman, you know, the one I got suspended for?”

  He laughed. “Hard to forget it.”

  “Do you think I did the right thing? Hitting her like that? Or do you think I was… I don’t know… crazy?”

  His face turned serious. “No,” he said, not a hint of laughter in his tone. “I don’t think you were crazy at all. I would have shot her.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They went out to breakfast, and in a hushed tone she told him what June had shown her after Sherri Gosnell’s murder, following up with her theory that the Princess tongue barbell in June’s mouth actually belonged to Isabelle Coleman. He didn’t tell her she was crazy. He didn’t question her competence. He didn’t tell her she had too much time on her hands, or that she should give it a rest. Instead, he raised an eyebrow, chewed his toast thoughtfully, swallowed and asked, “Did you check June Spencer’s Facebook page to see if there are any photos of her with this tongue piercing?”

  Her fork paused, floating over her plate. “I did. There wasn’t anything useful. Wait—you think I’m right?”

  Luke shrugged. “Don’t know. I can see what the chief is saying. It’s not a definitive piece of evidence that points to Coleman, but given everything you’ve told me, I can also see where you’re coming from.”

  “You think there is something bigger at work here? Like Drummond was involved with someone else? Maybe more than one person?”

  He finished off his toast. “I don’t know. Anything’s possible.”

  “You think it’s some kind of trafficking ring?”

  His brow furrowed as he took a sip of coffee, then he said, “Traffickers spend a lot of time grooming their girls. They don’t usually take by force. I’m not saying they never kidnap women, I’m just saying the usual MO is for them to find a girl with low self-esteem—family issues, desperate for attention, that sort of thing—and then they pull the bait and switch. It’s usually one guy making the girl feel like she’s the most special person in the whole world, that he loves her like crazy, giving her all kinds of gifts, lavishing her with attention and then when she is so gaga for him that she’ll do anything, he introduces the sex-for-money thing. It’s all about manipulation. It’s a game, and these guys are good at it. We do a lot of busts at truck stops. I see a lot of these girls. Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of them. So a trafficking ring that abducts teenage girls and then either gives them or sells them to known sex offenders to keep? It’s possible, but I’m really not sold on that.”

  “But you think it’s possible that the same person or people who took Ginger Blackwell also took Coleman, and possibly June Spencer?”

  Another shrug. “Could be. Worth checking out. You should tell your chief to request a copy of the Blackwell file and check for any connections to the Coleman case—assuming that the Blackwell case really wasn’t a hoax. If there is anything useful, I’m sure he’ll find it. Who has the file?”

  “The state police would have a file. They were the first responders, and they had the case until the chief raised holy hell and got an investigator from the DA’s office involved. The state police lab processed the evidence.”

  “You got all that from Google?”

  “Trinity Payne did a pretty detailed story on the whole thing.”

  Luke said nothing and they ate in silence for a few moments. Then Josie asked him the question she’d been working up to the entire time, “Can you get me a copy of the Ginger Blackwell file?”

  He stared at her. “Josie.”

  “I know. I’m asking a lot. Especially because I’m not on the job right now.”

  The truth was that even if she was on the job, asking for a copy of the file was putting Luke in an awkward position. It was a closed case and she was with another law enforcement agency. “Please,” she added.

  He put his fork down and put both his hands on the table on either side of his plate. “Why?”

  “Because I don’t believe that her case was a hoax, but I won’t know for sure unless I know what the police held back from the press. And what if there really are connections between her case and Isabelle Coleman’s? What if Coleman is being held in the same place Blackwell was taken? I could find her.”

  He looked away from her for a moment, at a point over her shoulder. A small vertical crease appeared above the bridge of his nose. He looked uncomfortable, like the time she’d had to tell him that she was still, technically, married to Ray. She could tell he was considering his words carefully. Whatever he was about to say, he didn’t want to offend her or patronize her. Finally, he forged ahead. “Josie, Denton PD is perfectly capable of following up on these leads. Googling missing girls in this area and trying to connect their cases is one thing; accessing a police file illegally for no other reason than…” He drifted off, unwilling or unable to finish the sentence. “I know it’s hard for you, being suspended, especially with everything that’s going on right now, and I know you want to be a hero and find Coleman on your own, redeem yourself or whatever, but maybe you would… I don’t know, get more sleep at night if you found something else to, you know, take up your time.”

  “What, like knitting?”

  His cheeks colored. “No, yes… no. I mean…”

  She stabbed her fork in the air in his direction. “This isn’t a hobby, Luke. I’m not doing this because I’m bored—”

  He leaned his elbows on the table, folding his hands together over the top of his plate. “Then why? Why are you doing it?”

  From the look in his eyes, she knew it was a genuine question. The flat white of her napkin was suddenly wildly distracting. Staring down at it, she ran her fingertips over the stippled edge of it. Because it’s who I am.

  “I’m just saying that most people would be perfectly happy with a few weeks off from work. Most people have other things to do. Me? If I had time off from work, I’d be fishing from sunup to sundown. Sure, I’d miss the work, but I’d be happy for the break.”

  She looked back up at him. “If I get a hobby, will you at least think about getting me the file?”

  He shook his head, letting out a heavy sigh, but as he returned to eating she could see a half smile on his face, and she knew he would do what he could.

  After they finished eating, Luke went to work and Josie went home. She had planned to get a few
hours’ sleep—what else did she have to do? But she lay in her bed wide awake, sunlight slipping around the sides of her mini-blinds. She wasn’t sure why the Ginger Blackwell case bothered her so much, or even why she had asked Luke for the file. Why did it matter? What connection could it possibly have to June or Isabelle Coleman’s case?

  Then it came to her. Ginger Blackwell’s disappearance had gained national attention. Within the first week, her face was the centerpiece of every news program in the country. Josie had even found stories about her abduction on the evening celebrity magazine shows: Access Hollywood, TMZ and the like. It was like the entire world had been wallpapered with Ginger Blackwell. Two weeks later she was dumped on the side of the highway.

  “Why?” Josie muttered to herself. Had the news coverage had something to do with her abductor letting her go? Had Blackwell’s abductor made a mistake? The woman could easily have been mistaken for a college-aged kid. Had her abductor, or abductors, taken her because they assumed she was young? Had they intended to keep her or even kill her, but felt compelled to release her under the relentless pressure of the media attention?

  In spite of the sheer volume of news coverage about Ginger’s disappearance, there were few details about what the woman had experienced and seen during the three weeks she was missing.

  Josie had to talk to Ginger Blackwell.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Josie scoured the internet for Blackwell’s address for an hour before her eyes started to burn and her head grew heavy and clouded by sleep deprivation. There was an address for a rural route outside of Bowersville, but Josie knew the Blackwells no longer lived there because the entire area had been developed into a miniature golf course. She searched using Blackwell’s husband’s name but nothing came up. Where the hell had they gone? Even if they had moved, it would have been impossible to keep their new address off the internet in this day and age, surely? She tried using a private address search database that the department subscribed to using Ray’s login. This database she could log into without him knowing she was using his credentials, and he used the same password for everything: JoRay0803, their names followed by the date they’d gotten back together after college. But the database turned up nothing beyond the Blackwells’ old Bowersville address.