The Silent Girl

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.”

T HESE 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. Aprilsixth, Lowell. My Best Friend Dog Groomers.” Tam looked up at his colleagues. “As far as we know, Ingersoll 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 andmore 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