Resignedly the girl packed up her instrument. She was about to walk out of the room when she abruptly stopped and said to Jane: “You said you’re a detective. Are you, like, with the police?”
Jane nodded. “Boston PD.”
“That is so cool! I want to be an FBI agent someday.”
“Then you should go for it. The Bureau could use more women.”
“Yeah, tell that to my parents. They say police work is for other people,” she muttered and slouched out of the room.
“I’m afraid that girl is never going to be much of a musician,” said Mrs. Forsyth.
“The last I heard,” said Jane, “playing the violin isn’t a requirement for the FBI.”
That sarcastic remark did not win Jane any points with this woman. Mrs. Forsyth eyed her coolly. “You said you had questions, Detective?”
“About one of your students from nineteen years ago. She was in the school orchestra. Played the viola.”
“You’re here about Charlotte Dion, aren’t you?” Seeing Jane’s nod, the woman sighed. “Of course it would be about Charlotte. The one student no one ever lets us forget. Even all these years later, Mr. Dion still blames us, doesn’t he? For losing his daughter.”
“It would be hard for any parent to accept. You can understand that.”
“Boston PD thoroughly investigated her disappearance, and they never considered our school negligent. We had more than enough chaperones on that excursion, a ratio of one to six. And these weren’t toddlers on the outing, these were teenagers. We shouldn’t have to babysit them.” She added under her breath, “But with Charlotte, maybe we should have.”
“Why?”
Mrs. Forsyth paused. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Was Charlotte difficult?”
“I don’t like to speak ill of the dead.”
“I think the dead would want justice served.”
After a moment the woman nodded. “I’ll just say this about her: She was not one of our academic stars. Oh, she was bright enough. That showed up in her entrance exam scores. And the first year she was here, she did fine. But after her parents divorced, everything went downhill for her and she barely passed most of her classes. Of course we felt sorry for her, but half our students come from divorced families. They’re able to adjust and move on. Charlotte never did. She just remained a morose girl. It’s as if, just by her poor-me attitude, she attracted bad luck.”
For a woman who didn’t like to speak ill of the dead, Mrs. Forsyth certainly had no trouble letting loose.
“She can hardly be blamed for losing her mother,” Jane pointed out.
“No, of course not. That was awful, that shooting in Chinatown. But have you ever noticed the way misfortune seems to target certain people? They’ll lose their spouse, their job, and get cancer all in the same year. That was Charlotte, always gloomy, always attracting bad luck. Which may be why she didn’t seem to have a lot of friends.”
This was certainly not the impression of Charlotte that Jane had picked up from talking with Patrick. It surprised her to hear about this side of the girl.
“In the school yearbook, she seemed to have a healthy list of activities,” Jane said. “Music, for instance.”
Mrs. Forsyth nodded. “She was a decent violist, but her heart never seemed to be in it. Only in her junior year did she finally manage to pass the auditions for the Boston summer orchestra workshop. But it helped that she played the viola. They’re always in demand.”
“How many of your students attend that workshop?”
“At least a few every year. It’s the best in New England, taught by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Very selective.” Mrs. Forsyth paused. “I know who you’re going to ask about next. That Chinese girl who disappeared, right?”
Jane nodded. “You read my mind. Her name was Laura Fang.”
“I understand she was a talented girl. That’s what I heard after she vanished. A number of my students attended the workshop with her.”
“But not Charlotte?”
“No. Charlotte didn’t pass the audition until the year after Laura disappeared, so they wouldn’t have met each other. Another question you were about to ask, I’m sure.”
“You remember all these details, even after nineteen years?”
“Because I just went over it again with that detective.”
“Which detective?”
“I can’t remember his name. It was a few weeks ago. I’d have to check my appointment book.”
“I’d appreciate it if you looked up his name right now, ma’am.”
A look of irritation flickered in the woman’s eyes, as if this was more effort than she cared to make. But she crossed to her desk and rummaged through a drawer until she came up with a daily planner. Flipping back through the pages, she gave a nod. “Here. He called me April second to schedule an appointment. I thought he looked a bit old to be a detective, but I guess experience counts for something.”
A bit old. And asking about missing girls. “Was his name Detective Ingersoll?” Jane asked.
Mrs. Forsyth glanced up. “So you do know him.”
“Haven’t you heard the news? Detective Ingersoll is dead. He was shot to death last week.”
The appointment book tumbled from Mrs. Forsyth’s hands and slapped onto her desk. “My God. No, I didn’t know.”
“Why was he here, Mrs. Forsyth? Why was he asking about Charlotte?”
“I assumed it was her father pushing for it, still hoping for answers. I mentioned it to Mark Mallory at the alumni dinner a few weeks ago, but he didn’t know anything about it.”
“Did you ask Mr. Dion?”
She flushed. “The Bolton Academy avoids any contact whatsoever with Mr. Dion. To avoid dredging up … bad feelings.”
“Tell me exactly what Detective Ingersoll said to you.”
The woman sank into the chair behind her desk. Suddenly she looked smaller and less formidable, stunned by this intrusion of the brutal outside world into her sheltered universe of books and orchestral scores. “I’m sorry, give me a moment to think about it …” She swallowed. “He didn’t actually ask very much about Charlotte. It was more about the other girl.”
“Laura Fang.”
“And others.”
“Others?”
“He had a list. A long list with maybe two dozen names. He asked if I recognized any of them. If any had attended Bolton. I told him no.”
“Do you remember any of the names on that list?”
“No. As I said, I didn’t know any of them. He told me they were all girls who’d gone missing like Laura.” Mrs. Forsyth straightened and looked up at Jane. “Girls who’ve never been found.”
THESE ARE DETECTIVE INGERSOLL’S CELL AND LANDLINE PHONE records for the past thirty days,” said Tam, spreading out the pages on the conference table so Jane and Frost could see them. “It’s a list of every call he made and received over the past month. At first glance, nothing jumps out at you. It’s mostly mundane stuff. Calls to his daughter, his dentist, his cable company, his credit card company. A call to the fishing camp where he stayed in Maine. And multiple calls to the pizza parlor down his street.”
“Geez. He sure ate a lot of pizza,” observed Frost.
“You’ll also notice that he called family members of the Red Phoenix victims. Those particular calls were made on March thirtieth and April first. Right around the anniversary of the massacre.”
“I spoke to both Mrs. Gilmore and Mark Mallory,” said Frost. “They confirmed that Ingersoll called them, to find out if they received the usual anonymous mailing that he did. The one they’ve all been getting every year.”
“But then there are a few calls on the list that don’t make sense to me,” said Tam. “The ones that seem completely random.” He tapped his finger on one of the phone numbers. “This one, for instance. April sixth, Lowell. My Best Friend Dog Groomers.” Tam looked up at his colleagues. “As far as we know, Ingersol
l never owned a dog.”
“Maybe he was dating the groomer,” said Jane.
“I called the number,” Tam said. “They’d never heard of him, and he wasn’t on their doggy client list. I thought maybe he’d called a wrong number.” He pointed to another entry. “Then there’s this call, April eighth, to Worcester. It’s the number for the Shady Lady Lingerie store.”
Jane grimaced. “I’m not sure I want to know the details on that one.”
“When I spoke to the store,” said Tam, “no one recognized the name Ingersoll. So I assumed it was just another wrong number.”
“A reasonable assumption.”
“But incorrect. He did mean to call that number.”
“Please tell me he was buying sexy underwear for a girlfriend and not for himself,” said Jane.
“Sexy underwear was not involved. His phone call wasn’t meant for the Shady Lady at all, but for the party who used to have that number.”
Jane frowned. “How did you figure that out?”
“After your visit to the Bolton Academy, I pulled up the state database of missing girls, just as you asked. I put together a list of every girl who’s vanished in Massachusetts over the past twenty-five years.”
“You went that far back?” said Frost.
“Charlotte vanished nineteen years ago. Laura Fang twenty-one years ago. I arbitrarily chose twenty-five as the cutoff, to give myself a good margin, and I’m glad I did.” Tam pulled a page from a bulging folder and slid it across the table to Jane. Midway down the page was a phone number circled in red ink. “This is the number Ingersoll called, the one now assigned to Shady Lady. Twenty-two years ago, that same number was listed under the name Mr. Gregory Boles in Worcester. Twelve years ago, the number was reassigned to another party. And then four years ago, it became the number for Shady Lady Lingerie. Phone numbers turn over all the time, and with more and more people giving up landlines, the turnover’s even more frequent. I think that’s the party Detective Ingersoll was actually trying to reach. Gregory Boles. But Boles moved out of state twelve years ago.”
“Who is Gregory Boles?” asked Frost.
Scanning down the page of phone numbers, Jane suddenly felt a thrill of comprehension. “These are the contact numbers from the missing children’s database.” She looked up.
Tam nodded. “Gregory Boles is the father of a missing girl. I was planning to review all the cases that are currently open in the state. Every female under eighteen who’s vanished during the past twenty five-years.” He pointed to the bulging folder he’d brought in. “But I realized it was a monumental task, sifting through them all, 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 Donohue Wholesale Meats.”
“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 is a dead man,” said Jane. “What we don’t know is why he started asking questions. After all these years in retirement, why did he suddenly get interested in missing girls?”
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 re
married 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?