Q Is for Quarry

ask Joe if he could locate Jane Doe's effects for us. It'd be good to take a look. Might spark an idea. I'll make a call and clear it with the sheriff. Don't think he'd object, but you never know about these things." He made a note to himself and turned back to me. "What else?"
    "After I left her, I drove on up to Lompoc, stopping off at Gull Cove, which is closed, by the way." I laid out my conversation with Roxanne Faught, what she'd said, and where the story she'd told me varied from what we knew. I gave them copies of the news clippings to demonstrate my point. "I think she lifted the details from these, which means we can't rely on her. I believe she encountered someone, but it wasn't necessarily our Jane Doe."
    "Too bad. It sounds like a dead end," Dolan said.
    Stacey said, "Dead ends are a given. That's how these things go.
    We're bound to run into a few along the way. All that tells us is to back up and look somewhere else. Lucky we found out about it now before we wasted any more time on it."
    "Knocks our hitchhiking theory all to hell," Dolan said.
    "Maybe so, maybe not. She could have gone to Lompoc by train or bus and hitched a ride from there."
    I said to Dolan, "What about the vehicles seen in the area? Any way to check those out?"
    "Johanson said something about a hippie van. We could track down that guy – what's his name..."
    "Vogel."
    "Right, him. Why don't we see what he remembers."
    "It's a long shot," I said.
    "So's everything else we've come up with so far."
    Stacey let that remark pass, still fixating on his original point about where the girl had come from. "Another possibility is she bummed a ride to Lompoc with a friend, someone she stayed with 'til she hit the road again."
    Dolan made a sour face. "Would you quit obsessing? We went over that before. If she'd had friends in the area, they'd have wondered what happened as soon as she disappeared."
    "Not if she'd told 'em she was on her way north. Suppose she stays in Lompoc a couple nights and then leaves for San Francisco. She goes out the door, has a run-in with the Devil, and ends up dead."
    "They'd still put two and two together as soon as the story broke." Stacey stirred irritably. "We're not going to find answers to every question we ask."
    "So far we haven't found answers to anything," I remarked.
    Stacey waved that aside. "Maybe our mistake is assuming she's from somewhere else. Suppose she's local? Someone kills her and then makes up a story explaining where she's gone. That's why she wasn't reported missing. It's part of the cover-up."
    Dolan was shaking his head.
    "What's wrong with that?" Dolan sat back in the booth. "No one exists in a vacuum. She must've had family and friends. She worked, went to school. She did some damn thing. Somebody must have wondered. Essentially, this girl dropped off the face of the earth and you're telling me no one noticed? There's something off about that."
    I said, "But, Dolan, think of all the kids who disappeared in those days. There must be dozens unaccounted for. Families probably still fantasize they'll show up one day."
    Stacey said, "Why don't we forget that angle and come at it from the other direction?"
    "Which is what?" I asked.
    "What we talked about before, assume Frankie killed her and see if we can find a way to make it stick."
    "Based on what? Make that leap and we could end up spinning our wheels," I said.
    "We're doing that anyway. The exercise is only pointless if it turns out we're wrong. What do you say, Con?"
    "I'm with you on that one. We'd be no worse off. I've always thought Frankie had a hand in it."
    Stacey turned to me. I said, "You're the boss."
    "My thought exactly. Let me show you what I got."
    He opened a manila folder and removed two connected sheets of computer paper with perforated edges. I peered at the pale print. There, in abbreviated form, was Frankie Miracle's criminal history, starting with his first arrest in Venice, California, in January of 1964. Stacey picked up the paper and began to rattle off the long string of his offenses. "I love this guy. Look at this. 1964. Kid's twenty-one years old, arrested for drunkenness and resisting arrest. Fined twenty-five bucks and put on a year's probation. Well, okay. No problem. His first contact with the law..."
    "That we know of," Dolan said.
    Stacey smiled. "That's right. But boys will be boys. They're not going to execute the lad for public drunkenness. In May that same year, he was arrested for burglary and