obvious. The girl had long chestnut hair and big green eyes and a pretty face, but it was the sort of wide-cheeked, fair face with Cupid’s-bow lips that she associated with Irish women she had known. The father had the long face with pointed, narrow nose that made her think of Englishmen. She found herself forming theories about Allison’s mother.
She kept going, looking at each picture, and then noticed a similarity. There were lots of places-a houseboat on a lake in a treeless landscape that had to be Arizona, a white sand beach on the ocean, a redwood grove, a place that looked like a restaurant on a balcony above a lagoon, outside an apartment or condominium-but just the two of them. In some shots Allison was alone, and in others she was with her father, but there were never any friends, either her age or his. And there was never anyone who could be the mother. She said, “Was the mother the one who took the pictures?”
“I think she was out of the picture, literally. There was no mother I ever saw, and no shots of her, either, even in the pictures of the girl as a toddler. I think they were all taken by strangers, people he handed the camera to and asked to press the button.”
Emily found one of Allison in a bathing suit, and understood what Sam had said earlier. The girl had an exceptional figure, like an hourglass, and it made her seem older than sixteen in spite of her smooth, untroubled face. “She was very pretty.” Emily returned the photographs to the envelope and put them back on the table.
Sam said, “He gave us the pictures. He showed us the girl’s birth certificate and a black-and-white photocopy of her driver’s license. After the first meeting, we asked for things. Anything we asked for, he would send by overnight mail. Phil wasn’t easy on him, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a father from up north comes to you and says his sixteenyear-old daughter disappeared two months ago. He’s already had the local cops on the case, and he’s hired detectives up there. They’ve talked to all her friends and relatives, searched her room and her school locker, and every place she went regularly. Now he comes down to L.A. and hires a detective to find out if that’s where she went. It’s got to occur to you that most likely what you’re looking for is a corpse. Phil went up and got fingerprints off some things she touched in a ranch the family owned that nobody had visited since she left.”
“To identify her body?”
“Well, if the cops find a Jane Doe somewhere, they generally fingerprint her if they can. Our theory was that we might be able to end this guy’s uncertainty just by a records check. It didn’t pan out.”
“What did you do after that?”
“We started to search for a live girl, thinking we probably would find a dead one. It was one of those stories you wish you hadn’t heard. He grounded her because of her grades. She slipped out of the house on a school night in the middle of the week, and spent the night with a few friends of both sexes. There was drinking and, he suspected, some drugs. He got stricter. He said she couldn’t go out for the rest of the year, and that she would have to earn his trust if she was even to go out during her senior year.”
“Isn’t that going a bit far?”
“He thought he might have laid it on a little thicker than he needed to. After we talked to him for an hour or two, he mentioned that maybe he called her a few names, used words he might not have used if he had it to do over again.” Sam paused. “Only he didn’t. They kind of coexisted for a week or so. They didn’t talk much. His story fit one of the things I’d noticed a few times in this business. It’s a lot easier to avoid people if you’re rich. They lived in a big house with a lot of out-of-the-way rooms, and servants who would serve the girl a meal by herself so she didn’t have to eat with her father. And just having servants around all the time makes the house too public to hold a big confrontation that will clear the air. Then she was gone.”
“Gone? Just gone? No message?”
“That’s what he said. He was out all day as usual, and he got home late at night and figured she was asleep. When he got up the next morning around ten, he figured she was at school. While he was at lunch, the phone rang, and it was the math teacher asking whether Allison was going to be sick another day and needed the homework assignment. He said it took him a day and night to realize that she wasn’t just skipping school, and then to find out that she had probably been gone since at least the morning of the day before, or even at the end of school the day before that. She didn’t take the car, didn’t even take credit cards, so he wasn’t ready to panic just yet. Then he discovered that she had taken out three thousand dollars from a savings account her grandmother had started for her. She was gone.”
“He called the police?”
“That was the first step. They seemed to have covered all the friends, interviewed servants, teachers, relatives, and so on during the first week. At that point, he was crazy with worry. He’s a rich man, so he offered a reward and hired a big detective agency that works out of San Francisco-you’ve probably heard of them-Federal Surety and Safety International. They had offices in Fresno, Modesto, and Sacramento, and they had people fanning out all over the place showing her picture and asking questions. Nothing. All this took time. At the end of a month, the cops were clearly preparing him for the probability that she was dead. His detectives, of course, were not about to give up, ever. They had a client who could keep paying until the end of time, and you know this business. There’s always another door you can knock on, and when you run out, there’s always another town where you can start the whole process over again. A customer who can pay can have as much time as he wants.”
“What brought him to Phil?”
“I don’t know. He said he’d had his attorneys check around with Southern California attorneys. Phil got mentioned.”
“But why Southern California?”
Sam shrugged. “If he had really been thinking, he should have done it earlier. L.A. is one of the places where runaway kids are most likely to come.”
“Did Phil take the case right away, or did he hold out?”
“He was pretty good about it. He said right off that he didn’t want to keep the distraught father in suspense. He was willing to try to help. Then he said everything you would want an ethical investigator to say-that the cops were good at this, and that after a month, anything we found was probably not going to make him happy. But Mr. Forrest said he knew all that, and a few other things the cops had told him. He just wanted the girl found, and he wasn’t ready to give up. Clear enough. We went to work.”
“What did you do?”
“We got the pictures copied, and then we went out showing them to people and asking around. We went to nightspots and found kids who were willing to look in exchange for the reward. It was a hundred thousand, so we didn’t hear `No’ a lot. Then we moved to street kids, who were always out there, always looking, always hungry. Next we found some upscale kids outside expensive stores, and got them interested, too. That was an idea of Phil’s. If you think about Allison’s background, you know that’s who she would fit in with. And her looks were good enough to get her in anywhere. We talked to authorities, too-anybody who would run into somebody like her. We went to the volunteers who ran shelters and clinics, a few cops I knew in Hollywood, street vendors, hookers, cabdrivers, anybody who would talk to us. I used to find that I got a lot of good observation from the guys who drive around to fill the machines that sell newspapers. One of these guys will be out in the dead hours from three to six. He has to drive to each spot, get out of his truck, open the machine, empty a coin box, take out the old papers and put in the new ones. It takes a minute or two, and he’s always looking closely at anybody nearby so he doesn’t get robbed. He sees a lot.”
“How long did that go on?”
“That phase of things kept Phil and me occupied for about a month. We went out with pictures day and night, on rotation. We tried to hit everybody’s schedule who might have seen her-the night sleepers and the day sleepers. Then we started over again. Finally, after a couple of months, we got a breakthrough.”
“What was it?”
“A pocket. When you’re looking for people who have seen somebody, you get either none or some. If it’s real, you usually get one, then a few more. If you do, then you’ve found the neighborhood where she hangs out. You chart the sightings-where, exactly, she was seen, and when-and you begin to get an idea of where she was at what time of day and what she was doing.”
“So she was alive after all,” Emily said.
“That’s right. Allison’s territory was a long, thin strip of pavement. She was seen in several clubs along Hollywood Boulevard near Highland. And during the day she was in stores and coffee shops along Melrose. She was
