Q Is for Quarry

he must have grabbed whatever came to hand. Guy was making shit up as he went along." I watched as Dolan formed a pincer with his chopsticks and tried picking up a chunk of chicken, which he couldn't get as far as his mouth.
    "Question is, did he target that girl in particular, or was he trolling for a victim and it was just her bad luck?"
    Con said, "I think it was a fishing expedition. He might've tried five or six gals and finally one said yes." He shifted to a scooping technique, using his chopsticks like a little shelf onto which he pushed the bite of chicken. 'He got the hunk as far as his lower lip. Nope. I saw him shake his head. "I don't think we're dealing serial. This feels like a one-off." He tried again, this time lunging, his lips extended like an anteater's as he lifted his chopsticks. He captured a snippet of orange peel before the rest fell back onto his plate.
    I grabbed a fork from the next table and handed it to him. Stacey made a doodle on the napkin, which by now was completely tattered. "Hang on. Let's back up a second. Agewise, it seems to me like she's bound to be closer to the high end – sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and up, instead of the twelve, thirteen end of the spread. Young girl like that, somebody's going to report she's gone, regardless of whether she leaves voluntarily or stomps out in a huff. You're a parent, you might shrug and not think too much about it, but when she doesn't come home, you're going to worry. You call around and find out her friends haven't seen her either and you're going to call the cops. If she's twenty and disappears, it might not raise any flags at all."
    "Right. She could've had a history of taking off. This might have been one more in a long string of disappearances."
    Dolan pushed his plate aside. "As long as we're making wild-ass guesses, here's another one. I don't think she's local. Killer didn't get into any facial mutilation so he must not've been worried someone would know who she was. He didn't know how long she'd be lying there. Suppose she's found the same day and they run a description of her in the paper? She's local, somebody's going to add two plus two and figure it out fast."
    I said, "What if she's from another country altogether? England or Spain. There are probably plenty of places where dental care didn't rank that high in those days. It might also explain why she wasn't reported missing."
    Dolan said, "A missing-persons report might've gone through Interpol and never reached us. It's worth checking. Maybe they have something on file."
    "There's a note in there somewhere-woman claims she saw a hitchhiker who fit the girl's description outside of Colgate. This was a couple of hours before the clerk in the Gull Cove minimart saw that hippie girl on August 1. Could be she was working her way up the coast," Stacey said.
    Dolan reached for his black binder with its incident reports already marked with torn scraps of paper. He turned a few pages and checked the marginal notes he'd written in a surprisingly wee hand. "You're thinking about Cloris Bargo. She says July 29, four-thirty in the afternoon, she saw a young white female, five foot two to five foot three, age sixteen to seventeen, navy blouse, flowered slacks, long blondish hair, leaning against the base of the Fair Isle overpass. Bargo saw a vehicle stop and pick her up, heading north on the 101."
    "That's worth another look. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, we might backtrack and see if we can figure out her point of origin, maybe rough out a timeline." Stacey reached for his map of California and unfolded it, flapping and spreading the unwieldy sheet across the tabletop. "If she came from the south, she'd have traveled the 405 as far as the 101," he said. "The main arteries from Arizona into California are Highways 15 from Las Vegas, Nevada, the 40 from Kingman, Arizona, the 10 from Phoenix, and 8 coming up from Yuma. Starting from anywhere else, she'd have taken a different route."
    Dolan pushed his plate away. "You're never going to pin that one down. She could have come from anywhere. On the other hand, you talk about July 29. That's the same day Frankie Miracle killed his girlfriend and hit the road. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, he could've picked her up."
    We left the subject at that point and moved on to other things.
    After lunch, Con dropped me at the office, where I caught up with the notes on my index cards and then spent a few minutes doing digital research, which is