The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  “How’s Maya?” I ask, forgoing pleasantries as I hand her the drink.

  “Taller than me, the rascal,” Silvia replies, taking the straw between fingers tipped with pink acrylic nails and sipping from it.

  “Junior high?”

  “Freshman in high school,” she says, as if such things should not be allowed, her daughter advancing beyond elementary school.

  “Jesus,” I say, because I remember playing with Maya on the linoleum floor of the police station, when I was eighteen and she was only three.

  “So what can I do for you, honey?” Silvia asks.

  I grin, because I know how transparent I am. And Silvia doesn’t suffer fools; she knows ours is a collegiality born of necessity.

  “I’m looking into a case that might be connected to Maggie,” I reply. “Sarah Ketchum. I’ve got her case number.”

  Silvia sits back in her seat. “This for the podcast?”

  I make a quick determination that lying is not the way to go here. Odds are, Silvia will hear about it if anything she gives me makes it into season two. And this isn’t a bridge I want to burn.

  “Potentially,” I say, and watch Silvia’s eyebrow twitch. People in her position are only successful when they’re good at keeping information away from those who might make it public.

  “You know, there are official ways to get that sort of thing.”

  “I’m trying, believe me,” I say. “But the central office is dragging its feet on my FOIA request. They’re saying it could take four to six weeks to get a copy of her records.” It’s not quite the truth, though that’s what the CPD website does say. If I were honest, I’d admit that I haven’t put in a FOIA request yet. I don’t much want to tip off the brass that this case might be getting a bit of publicity sometime soon. My name is bound to raise some red flags in the central office these days.

  “And you’re hoping that I can grease the wheels?”

  “I’m hoping you might have access to a copier,” I reply. “You know . . . make an extra copy of the redacted file, toss it out. You can’t be held responsible for things people steal out of your garbage.” It’s not the first time we’ve pulled this particular trick. Except back then, I was the sister of a missing teenager, an unsolved case allowed to go cold. A feral, desperate little thing. Silvia was more than willing to color outside the lines for me then. She must have understood the brutality of growing up how I did, always looking. Back when nothing was ever enough. Now, however, she’s a bit more reticent.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Silvia says. “Giving records to you, that’s like leaking to a reporter now.”

  “You’re right.” I know I’m asking too much. If I hope to ever get Silvia’s help again, it’s time to start backpedaling. “Maybe just point me in the right direction, then? Do you know who I could talk to about the case?”

  “The only one here today is Detective Olsen.”

  “Of course,” I mutter. I remember Detective Olsen, how he looked at me the day of the DNA test. Like he could see all the furious girls inside me. The guilty, neglected child. The wicked teenager, her every pose and motion vengeful. The woman who knew better than to hope. “He’s here now?” I ask, reticent.

  Silvia motions behind her. “In the bullpen,” she says, a flicker of amusement crossing her face. Like she’s considering making popcorn to watch what’s about to go down. “Back right.”

  I pause for a moment.

  “What’s his deal?” I ask. “Is he a Boy Scout or a tough guy or what?” Even from our brief meeting the year before, I could tell he wasn’t like Detective Richards, who used to call me on Maggie’s birthday and always sent handwritten Christmas cards to my parents. But still, there was something decent in Olsen, behind the scrim of professionalism. Something that was not merely pity.

  “A marine,” she replies. “Little of both.”

  “Great,” I reply as I pass her desk, heading back into the bullpen. Pairs of desks are checkered throughout the room, with offices on its perimeter. Down a narrow hallway on the south side of the building, I know, are the interview rooms. The first is where I sat the night Maggie went missing, looking through the mug shots of violent offenders in the area. Hundreds of them.

  Becky, the woman at the front desk back then, made me cup after Styrofoam cup of Swiss Miss cocoa as I tried to remember what the man in the car looked like, his face blurring with all the blank, dead-eyed faces of the men in the mug shots. And then, when I couldn’t find him after four hours, my dad took me home and I threw up all that cocoa into the toilet in the upstairs bathroom, while my parents shouted at each other in the kitchen. Because my parents always turned to anger when things were out of control. And things never really ever got back under control after that.

  I spot Olsen sitting at a desk toward the back of the room. I’ve grown accustomed, over the years, to dealing with the old guard of Chicago’s finest when it comes to my sister’s case. The weathered, oft-mustachioed men at least twice my age, or the capable, compassionate women who are always good for a little bit of feminine solidarity. So Detective Olsen—hawkish and fair, more handsome than he has any right to be—caught me off guard last year. Still catches me off guard now, if I’m honest.

  “Detective Olsen?” I ask as I approach.

  “Yeah?” He glances up, but his face betrays no recognition. My hair is different, after all. And our interaction was brief, just long enough to collect some cells from the inside of my cheek. I was the one brimming with anticipation that day, already edged with despair. I was the one who remembered everything, who felt every moment as if I’d been stripped of my skin. His unbuttoned collar remained with me for days.

  I decide the fact that he has forgotten me is an opportunity.

  “I was wondering if you could help me find some information,” I say, my voice a half octave higher than usual, turning back to my old strategy. The young damsel, in need of saving. Because if men are going to insist on being macho this far into the twenty-first century, it’s fair game to use it against them.

  He shuts the file he had open in front of him. There’s a toothpick tucked into the corner of his mouth. I wonder if he’s recently quit smoking.

  “What is it that you need?” His voice softer than I expected, its slight rasp another clue.

  “I was hoping to get some information on a case,” I reply, handing him the sheet of paper with Sarah Ketchum’s case number on it. “I’m studying the sociology of violent crime against women on the North Side of Chicago.” He considers the case number.

  I know enough by now to know not to lie to a cop. So instead I’ve learned to be vague and to let them draw their own conclusions. You don’t say you’re a student, but you imply you are when you use the word “studying.” Technically, I am studying two cases of violent crime against women on the North Side of Chicago. Plus, when I was still a sociology major at Northwestern, I wrote a paper on that very topic. If he asks follow-up questions, at least I’ll be ready with semicompetent answers.

  “Is it an active case?” he asks.

  “No, it was closed about seven years ago.”

  “You’re going to have to put in a Freedom of Information Act request with the CPD’s central office.”

  “The woman at the front desk told me that I might be able to talk to a detective about it. On a more unofficial basis.”

  “Silvia let you in here?” he asks, glancing toward the front of the station. “How did you manage that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She usually rivals the city’s best bouncers.”

  “I told her I needed help,” I reply, trying to look innocent. Confused. The sort of girl someone might take pity on.

  “I wish I could,” he says, offering the paper back to me, “but you’re going to have to go through the proper channels.”

  “Okay,” I say, taking the pa
per. He goes back to his computer screen, while I linger for a moment. Hoping the possibility of helping someone in distress will supersede his marine’s dedication to protocol. I remember the evenness of his voice as he explained the process of the DNA test a year ago, as I bit off what little was left of my fingernails. He’s a man who knows how to speak with someone having the worst day of her life. I wait, until his fingers pause and he glances back up at me.

  “Is there something else?” he asks.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and conjure a sheen of tears. Unlike my mother, I’m capable of crying on command. “It’s just that I’m not sure I can wait to get the file through a FOIA request. I’m behind where I should be on this, and I was just hoping you’d be willing to cut me a break.”

  He sits back in his chair, considers me. There it is, I think. The look he gave me when we first met, when he knelt in front of where I sat. An unexpected kindness from someone who did not need to be kind.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Martha,” I reply. I have to actively stop myself from saying “Maggie.” It’s a habit I’ve developed, to answer that way when men ask my name.

  “Martha,” he repeats, and reaches again for the slip of paper, which I hand to him, and then I wait with my arms crossed as he looks it up on his computer.

  “The Ketchum murder,” he says, extracting the toothpick from the corner of his mouth, tossing it into the trash can beneath his desk. This is clearly serious business.

  “Are you familiar with it?” I ask.

  “Pretty familiar,” he replies. “I knew the guy who worked it, before he retired.”

  “Detective Richards?” I ask, because Richards is the only detective in the unit to retire in the past five years.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Newspaper article,” I reply. “He gave a statement; it came up in my research.” It’s not quite a coincidence that the same detective would have investigated Sarah’s case and Maggie’s. After all, Detective Richards transferred from Missing Persons to Homicide a few years after Maggie disappeared, and he had a knack for handling high-profile cases that the top brass seemed to appreciate. It’s not a huge surprise that he’d be assigned to the murder of a teenage girl. But it’s close enough to a coincidence to get my blood up. Still, I can tell I’ve lost some ground here with Olsen, so I shift gears.

  “I understand if you can’t help me with the file. But could you tell me anything about the case? Just for context?” I pull my little Moleskine journal from my pocket and prepare to write.

  “If you want a statement on the case, you really should contact our press office,” he says, almost regretfully. Almost.

  “I’m not a journalist,” I say, and as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I begin to realize all the ways in which they’re not quite true. “I’m just . . . looking to get a sense of the case, to fill in the blanks until I can get the file. Anything you can remember from what Detective Richards said.”

  He lets out a sigh, considering me with pursed lips.

  “The boyfriend killed her,” he says finally. “Strangled her in her apartment, and then half-buried her body in LaBagh Woods. They found his DNA on her and in her apartment. And he didn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder.”

  I know what he’s doing, even as he pauses, watching me scratch notes down in my journal. He’s giving me what an internet search would reveal. What was widely reported on during the investigation and the trial.

  “And the boyfriend was the only suspect the CPD investigated?”

  “He was the primary suspect,” he replies, watching me cannily, in a way that makes me slightly nervous. As if he’s figuring me out, though I’m the one asking the questions.

  “Did they ever find the car he used to dump the body?” I ask, giving it a shot. And immediately I know it’s a step too far, using one of the tactics Colin’s defense attorney used at trial. The question of the car, how he could have moved her body such a distance without one. Because whatever openness there was in Olsen’s expression snaps shut.

  “They didn’t need the car to get the conviction,” he replies, folding his arms over his chest. “What school did you say you go to?” he asks.

  “Northwestern,” I reply, shutting my notebook. Great, now I’m actively lying to a police detective.

  “What program?”

  “Sociology,” I say.

  “And you’re focusing on violence against women on the North Side of Chicago?” he asks. “Seems to me there’s a lot of violence on the South and West Sides that is in desperate need of some study. Especially from someone at Northwestern.”

  I know this argument. It’s a good one; it’s one I grappled with in the first season of the podcast. It’s one that I know still weighs heavily on Andrea as well. The ways in which Maggie’s case got media attention because she was young and white and from a wealthy area. She went to a good school. She had parents with the resources to force a protracted, thorough search for her. I watched as a seventeen-year-old Black girl from Woodlawn went missing the following summer and only got a day or two of media coverage, versus the weeks the local papers and TV stations afforded to Maggie. And the wash of guilt surges up inside me, because there is so much I have not been able to do, with my vision tunneled to a pinprick, with my sister squarely in the middle. There is so much else I should be doing. The weight of them could drag a fleet of ships to the ocean floor. I hear my own voice echoed back at me, as it was played over the loudspeaker at the awards ceremony. My own acknowledgment of all the other women I’m failing by looking only for my sister. But of course, anger follows closely on the heels of despair.

  “It would be nice if all your colleagues shared your concern,” I reply. Because even the handling of Maggie’s case came with a healthy dose of institutional misogyny from the Chicago Police Department. Questions about whether Maggie was sexually active, for instance. Whether she had more than one boyfriend. Whether she drank alcohol, did drugs. Whether she could have been pregnant. Whether she was rebellious, engaged in risky behavior. Whether she knew better than to put herself in danger, as one cop had put it. As if she were responsible for preventing her own kidnapping. I can only imagine the sort of assumptions the CPD must make about girls from the South or West Side. But I can tell that Detective Olsen doesn’t appreciate the comment, so I decide an exit strategy is my best bet. “Anyway, thanks so much for your time, Detective Olsen,” I say. “I think I have everything I need.”

  “You don’t need the case file anymore?” he asks, stopping me as I turn to go.

  “I thought I had to go through the proper channels for that.”

  “Well, I could bend the rules a little bit,” he says, and his friendliness is as flat as the papers before him. “If you feel like telling me what you really want with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, unless you’ve got a Northwestern ID in your purse, I’m going to assume you’re not a student there.”

  I swallow, trying to keep my composure. I’m not good at this, being put at a disadvantage. Having to show my hand to a stranger.

  “I’m trying to see if Sarah Ketchum’s case might be in some way related to another case in the same area.”

  “What other case?” he asks. His tone suggests that his patience is wearing thin.

  “Maggie Reese,” I reply.

  “Shit,” he says, revelation easing some of the rigidity from his posture. “You’re her sister.”

  “I was wondering if you’d recognize me.” I think of the last time he saw me. Long-haired and twitchy, sick with grief. A conflict-free diamond on my left hand. I don’t blame him. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself anymore.

  “And you have a radio show?”

  “It’s a podcast,” I reply.

  “I thought you said you weren’t a journalist,” he sa
ys, his mouth tight, teeth suddenly sharp.

  “I’m not,” I reply. “I’m a victims’ advocate. I just . . . contribute to a podcast.”

  “And why exactly do you think they’re related?”

  “The cases? I don’t know if they are,” I say quickly. “But they were similar ages. Similar physical types. Sarah’s father lived close to where Maggie and I grew up—”

  “Her murder was over a decade later,” Olsen cuts in. “Do you know how many disappearances and killings there were in Chicago between these two cases?”

  “They were physically similar. They both disappeared at the same time of day.” I tick my points off on my fingers as I speak. “They were both transported by car. Colin didn’t have a car. He didn’t have access to one. So who took Sarah from Rogers Park to LaBagh Woods?”

  “Colin didn’t have a car,” he repeats. “What, you’re on a first-name basis with Colin McCarty now?”

  “I know his sister,” I reply.

  He lets out a breath and presses both of his hands together, as if he’s praying, his fingertips resting against his mouth for a moment. “Look, I can’t imagine how difficult it was for you to lose your sister that way,” he begins, and my anger flares again. Anger at every cop who ever gave my family their opinion about our situation. The runaway theory. The pregnancy theory. The idea that Maggie disappeared of her own volition, or because she’d dared to have sex, dared to go into the city without my parents. As if the whole Chicago Police Department could close up shop and go home if young girls would just learn to behave and follow the rules.

  Well, I have news for all of them. I’ve broken every rule in the book, and somehow I’m still here.

  “Don’t patronize me,” I snap at him. “Did anyone here ever consider anyone else for Sarah’s murder? Did you even think that it might have been someone else?”

  “No,” he says, and his eyes are on mine. Stripped of artifice. Unnerving in their directness. “Listen to me on this, okay?” His voice unwavering, so sure that it’s easy to be swept up in his certainty. “He did it. Colin McCarty killed that girl. We never had to look for anyone else. Because sometimes, in cases like that, you just know it cold.”