Lost Light

indicated she purchased 12.4 gallons of midgrade unleaded gasoline at 8:53 p.m. Her car’s tank held a maximum of 16 gallons.
    The purchase was significant because it placed Gessler in the Sepulveda Pass -her normal route home from Westwood to Sherman Oaks-at a time that coordinated with her leaving the bureau offices in Westwood. The night-shift cashier at the Chevron also identified Gessler from a photo lineup as a regular customer who had bought gas on the night of March 19. Gessler was an attractive woman. He knew and remembered her. He had told her she didn’t need to drink Diet Coke and she seemed pleased by the compliment.
    This confirmed sighting was important for several reasons. First, if Gessler was going from Westwood to LAX, where her car was later found, it was unlikely that she would have traveled north into the Sepulveda Pass to buy gas. The airport was southwest of the bureau office. The service station was directly to the north.
    The next significance was that Gessler’s Chevron card was used a second time the same night at a Chevron service station off Highway 114 in the north county. The card was used at point of purchase to buy 29.1 gallons of gasoline, more than Gessler’s and most other cars could hold. Highway 114 was the main route to the desert areas of the northeast county. It was also a major trucking route.
    Last but not least in terms of significance was the fact that none of Gessler’s credit cards were ever found or used again.
    There was no summary or conclusion in the reports I scanned. This would be something the investigator-Lindell-would draw for himself and keep to himself. You don’t write a report concluding that your fellow agent is dead. You don’t say the obvious and you always speak about the missing agent in the present tense.
    But it was clear to me from what I had read what the conclusion had to be. Sometime after Gessler pumped gas into her car in the Sepulveda Pass she was stopped and abducted and it didn’t look like she was coming back. She had probably been rear-ended. She then pulled to the side of the road to check damage and possibly to exchange insurance information with the other driver.
    What happened next was unknown. But she was likely abducted by force and her car was dumped at the LAX lot-a move that probably guaranteed it would not be located for several days, thereby allowing the trail to go cold and the memories of potential witnesses to fade.
    The second gas purchase was the curiosity. Was it a mistake, a clue pointing to the direction of the agent’s abductors? Or was it misdirection, an intentional move by the abductors to point the investigation the wrong way? And the amount of gasoline purchased raised a whole other question. What kind of vehicle were they looking for? A tow truck? A pickup? A moving van?
    Bureau agents descended on the station but there were no exterior video cameras and no credible witnesses to the use of the credit card because it had been a pay-at-the-pump purchase. It was the last blip on the radar screen, but nothing more than that.
    Nevertheless, an agent was still missing. There was no choice. The file contained the short summaries of three days of aerial searches over the desert of the northeast county. It was a needle-in-the-haystack operation but it had to be done. It proved fruitless.
    Agents also spent several days on the likely routes that Gessler would have taken through the Sepulveda Pass on her way home. The Pass cut through the Santa Monica Mountains. While the south slope offered few choices besides the 405 Freeway and Sepulveda Boulevard, the northern slope offered a network of shortcuts pioneered over fifty years of rush hours. Agents traveled all of these roads looking for witnesses to an accident involving a blue Ford Taurus, an accident scene that might have seemed routine but was actually the abduction of a federal agent.
    They got nothing.
    The Sepulveda Pass had been the location of similar crimes in the past. The son of popular entertainer Bill Cosby had been robbed and murdered on the dark side of the road one night just a few years before. And over the last decade a handful of women had been abducted and raped, one of them stabbed to death, after pulling off the road when their vehicles were rear-ended or became disabled. These incidents were not thought to be the work of one person. But rather that the Pass, with its hillsides, dark, winding roads and anonymity, was a place that drew