trying to find any links with Charlotte or Laura. And to be honest, I was kind of pissed off about getting assigned the task, because I thought it was just busywork.”
“But you ended up finding something,” Jane said.
“Yes I did. I got the idea of cross-referencing all the phone numbers from Ingersoll’s phone log. Every number he called from either his landline or his cell phone. Judging by the numbers on his call log, he started tracking down certain families in early April. Then he abruptly stopped making any phone calls at all. From either his cell phone or his landline.”
“Because he thought he was being monitored,” said Jane. A suspicion that had proven true; the crime lab had indeed found an electronic bug in Ingersoll’s landline phone.
“Based on the calls he made before he stopped using those phones, these are the missing girls he was homing in on.” Tam slid a single page in front of her.
Jane saw only three names. “What do we know about these girls?”
“They were different ages. Thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They all vanished within a hundred and fifty miles of Boston. Two were white, one was Asian.”
“Like Laura Fang,” said Frost.
“Also like Laura,” said Tam, “these were what you’d call good girls. A or B students. No delinquency, no reason to think they’d be runaways. Maybe that’s why Ingersoll grouped them together on his list. He thought that was the common denominator.”
“How old are these cases?” asked Frost.
“These girls all vanished more than twenty years ago.”
“So he was just looking at old cases? Why not more recent ones?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was just getting started. If he hadn’t been killed, maybe he would have come up with more names. The thing that puzzles me is why he got himself involved in this in the first place. He didn’t work these disappearances when he was with Boston PD, so what drew him to this now? Was retirement so boring?”
“Maybe someone hired him to do PI work. Could have been one of the families.”
“That was my first thought,” said Tam. “I’ve been able to reach all three families, but no one hired Ingersoll. And we know Patrick Dion didn’t, either.”
“So maybe he was doing this for himself,” said Frost. “Some cops just can’t handle retirement.”
“None of these three girls would have been Boston PD cases,” said Jane. “They’re all from different jurisdictions.”
“But Charlotte Dion vanished in Boston. So did Laura Fang. They could have been Ingersoll’s starting points, the reason he got involved.”
Jane looked at the names of the three new girls. “And now he’s dead,” she said softly. “What the hell did he get himself into?”
“Kevin Donohue’s territory,” said Tam.
Jane and Frost looked up at him. Although Tam had been working with them for barely two weeks, he had already acquired a hint of cockiness. In his suit and tie, with his neatly clipped hair and icy stare, he could pass for Secret Service or one of those comic book Men in Black. Not someone you could easily get to know, and certainly not a guy Jane could imagine ever knocking back beers with.
“Word on the street,” said Tam, “is that Donohue’s been running girls for years. Prostitution’s just one of his sidelines.”
Jane nodded. “Yeah. Another meaning of
“What if this is how he obtains those girls?”
“By kidnapping A students?” Jane shook her head. “Somehow, it seems like a risky method of picking up underaged prostitutes. There are easier ways.”
“But it would tie everything together. Joey Gilmore, missing girls, and the Red Phoenix. Maybe Ingersoll discovered the link to Donohue, and that’s when he got spooked. Why he stopped using his phones. Because if Donohue got wind of it, Ingersoll knew he’d be a dead man.”
“Ingersoll
Tam said, “Maybe what we really need to ask is: Who was he working for?”
NOW THERE WERE SIX.
Jane sat at her desk, reviewing what she knew about the three new names on the list. The first to vanish was Deborah Schiffer, age thirteen, of Lowell, Massachusetts. Daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher, she’d been five foot two, one hundred pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Twenty-five years ago, she vanished somewhere between her middle school and her piano teacher’s house. A straight-A student, she was described as shy and bookish, with no known boyfriends. Had that been the age of the Internet, they would probably know a great deal more about her, but Facebook and MySpace and online chat groups had yet to be invented.
A year and a half later, the next girl on the list disappeared. Patricia Boles, fifteen, was last seen at a shopping mall, where she’d been dropped off by her mother. Three hours later, Patricia did not show up at the appointed meeting place. She was five foot three, 105 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. Like Deborah Schiffer, she was an above-average student who had never been in trouble. Her disappearance no doubt contributed to the subsequent breakup of her parents’ marriage. Her mother died seven years later; her father, whom Jane was finally able to reach at his current residence in Florida, scarcely wanted to talk about his long-lost daughter. “I’m remarried and I have three kids now. It hurts too much to even hear Patty’s name,” he told Jane over the phone. Yes, he’d received calls from the police over the years about the case. Yes, he’d spoken to Detective Ingersoll recently. But nothing had ever come of those calls.
After Patty Boles’s disappearance, more than a year passed before the next girl went missing. Sherry Tanaka was sixteen, petite, and a high school junior in Attleboro. She vanished from her own home one afternoon, leaving the front door ajar, her homework still spread across the dining room table. Her mother, who was now living in Connecticut, had recently received a letter from Detective Ingersoll asking to speak with her about Sherry. It was dated April 4, and had been forwarded through a series of old addresses. She had tried calling his phone number just yesterday, but it rang unanswered.
Because Ingersoll was now dead.
Mrs. Tanaka did not know any of the girls on the list, nor had she heard of Charlotte Dion. But the name Laura Fang was familiar, because she was an Asian girl like Sherry, and that detail had stuck in Mrs. Tanaka’s mind. It had made her wonder if there was a link. Years ago, she had called the Attleboro police about it, but had heard nothing back since.
Having three Massachusetts girls go missing over a period of six years was not in itself surprising. Each year across the country, thousands of children between the ages of twelve and seventeen went missing, many no doubt abducted by non-family members. Dozens of girls in Massachusetts had vanished during that same time period, girls in the same age group, who had not made it onto Ingersoll’s list. Why had he focused on these particular victims? Was it because they were of similar ages and statures? Because they were all taken from locations within an easy drive of Highway 495, which encircled the Boston metropolitan area?
And then there was seventeen-year-old Charlotte Dion. Unlike the other girls, she’d been older and a disinterested C-minus student. How did she fit into the pattern?
Maybe there was no pattern. Maybe Ingersoll had been searching for links that did not exist.
Jane set aside the notes on the three girls and turned her attention to the folder on Charlotte, which had been compiled by Detective Buckholz. It was a great deal thicker than Laura Fang’s file, and she had to assume it was because of the Dion name. Wealth did count, even in matters of justice. Especially, perhaps, in matters of justice. A child’s disappearance would forever haunt any parent, would make him wonder as the decades passed if that young woman he glimpsed on the street might be a long-lost daughter, grown up. Or was she just another random stranger like all the others, whose smile or curve of a lip seemed, for an instant, heartbreakingly familiar?
Jane opened the envelope containing what were probably the last images ever recorded of Charlotte, which they’d obtained from the
