The Silent Girl

her backpack, left in the alley. Nineteen years ago, we didn’t have nearly as many surveillance cameras around to catch anything. Whoever snatched her did it quick and clean. Had to be a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “It was a school field trip. She went to this fancy boarding school, the Bolton Academy, out past Framingham. Thirty kids came into the city on a private bus to walk the Freedom Trail. Their stop at Faneuil Hall was a last-minute decision. Teacher told me the kids got hungry, so that’s where they went for lunch. I’m thinking the perp spottedCharlotte and just moved in.” He shook his head. “Talk about a high-profile snatch. Patrick Dion’s a venture capitalist and he was in London when it happened. Flew home on his own private jet. Considering who he was, and his net worth, I expected there’d be a ransom demand. But it never came. Charlotte just dropped off the face of the earth. No clues, no body. Nothing.”
    “Her mother was killed in the Red Phoenix restaurant just a month before that.”
    “Yeah, I know. Rotten luck in that family.” He sipped his scotch. “Money can’t stop the Grim Reaper.”
    “You think that’s all it was? Rotten luck?”
    “Lou Ingersoll and I talked and talked about it. We couldn’t see a way to tie the two events together, and we looked at it every which way. Custody fight over Charlotte? Nasty divorce? Money?”
    “Nothing?”
    Buckholz shook his head. “I’ve gone through a divorce myself, and I still hate the bitch. But Patrick Dion, he and his ex-wife stayed friends. He even got along with her new husband.”
    “Even though Arthur ran off with Patrick’s wife?”
    He laughed. “Yeah, can you figure? They started off two happy families. Patrick, Dina, and Charlotte. Arthur, Barbara, and their son, Mark. Both kids attended that snooty Bolton Academy, which is how the families met. They started having dinners together. Then Arthur hooks up with Patrick’s wife, and everyone gets divorced. Arthur marries Dina, Patrick gets custody of twelve-year-old Charlotte, and they all go on being friends. It’s unnatural, I tell ya.” He set down his glass. “The normal thing would’ve been to hate each other.”
    “Are you sure they didn’t?”
    “I guess it’s possible they hid it. It’s possible that five years after their divorce, Patrick Dion stalked his ex-wife and her husband to that restaurant and shot them in a fit of rage. But Mark Mallory swore to me that everyone was friendly. And he lost his own father in that shooting.”
    “What about Mark’s mother? Was she hunky-dory about losing her husband to another woman?”
    “I never got a chance to talk with Barbara Mallory. She had a stroke a year before the shooting. The day Charlotte vanished, Barbara was in a rehab hospital. She died a month later. Yet another bad-luck family.” He waved at the bartender. “Hey, I need another one here.”
    “Um, did you drive, Hank?” asked Jane, frowning at his empty glass.
    “It’s okay. I promise, this’ll be my last.”
    The bartender set another scotch on the counter and Buckholz just stared at it, as though its mere presence was enough to satisfy him for the moment. “So that’s the story in a nutshell,” he said. “Charlotte Dion was seventeen, blond, and gorgeous. When she wasn’t attending that boarding school, she lived with her rich daddy. She had everything going for her, and then—poof. She’s snatched off a street. We just haven’t found her remains yet.” He picked up the scotch, his hand now steady. “Hell of a thing, life.”
    “And death.”
    He laughed and took a sip. “So true.”
    “You have any thoughts about the other girl who vanished? Laura Fang?”
    “That was Sedlak’s case, rest his soul. But I did review it, because of the Red Phoenix connection. Didn’t find anything to make me think the abductions were related. I think Charlotte was a spontaneous spot and snatch. Laura, she was a different case. It happened right after school got out and she was walking home. One of her schoolmates saw Laura voluntarily climb into someone’s car, like she knew the driver. But no one got a license plate and the girl was never seen again. So that’s another body that’s never been found.” He stared at the bottles lined up on the other side of the counter. “Makes you wonder just how many skeletons are piled up in the woods, in the landfills. Millions of people missing in this