The Silent Girl

Ingersoll’s phone log. Every number he called from either his landline or his cell phone. Judging by the numbers on his call log, he started tracking down certain families in early April. Then he abruptly stopped making any phone calls at all. From either his cell phone or his landline.”
    “Because he thought he was being monitored,” said Jane. A suspicion that had proven true; the crime lab had indeed found an electronic bug in Ingersoll’s landline phone.
    “Based on the calls he made before he stopped using those phones, these are the missing girls he was homing in on.” Tam slid a single page in front of her.
    Jane saw only three names. “What do we know about these girls?”
    “They were different ages. Thirteen, fifteen, and sixteen. They all vanished within a hundred and fifty miles of Boston. Two were white, one was Asian.”
    “Like Laura Fang,” said Frost.
    “Also like Laura,” said Tam, “these were what you’d call goodgirls. A or B students. No delinquency, no reason to think they’d be runaways. Maybe that’s why Ingersoll grouped them together on his list. He thought that was the common denominator.”
    “How old are these cases?” asked Frost.
    “These girls all vanished more than twenty years ago.”
    “So he was just looking at old cases? Why not more recent ones?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe he was just getting started. If he hadn’t been killed, maybe he would have come up with more names. The thing that puzzles me is why he got himself involved in this in the first place. He didn’t work these disappearances when he was with Boston PD, so what drew him to this now? Was retirement so boring?”
    “Maybe someone hired him to do PI work. Could have been one of the families.”
    “That was my first thought,” said Tam. “I’ve been able to reach all three families, but no one hired Ingersoll. And we know Patrick Dion didn’t, either.”
    “So maybe he was doing this for himself,” said Frost. “Some cops just can’t handle retirement.”
    “None of these three girls would have been Boston PD cases,” said Jane. “They’re all from different jurisdictions.”
    “But Charlotte Dion vanished in Boston. So did Laura Fang. They could have been Ingersoll’s starting points, the reason he got involved.”
    Jane looked at the names of the three new girls. “And now he’s dead,” she said softly. “What the hell did he get himself into?”
    “Kevin Donohue’s territory,” said Tam.
    Jane and Frost looked up at him. Although Tam had been working with them for barely two weeks, he had already acquired a hint of cockiness. In his suit and tie, with his neatly clipped hair and icy stare, he could pass for Secret Service or one of those comic book Men in Black. Not someone you could easily get to know, and certainly not a guy Jane could imagine ever knocking back beers with.
    “Word on the street,” said Tam, “is that Donohue’s been running girls for years. Prostitution’s just one of his sidelines.”
    Jane nodded. “Yeah. Another meaning of
Donohue Wholesale Meats.
”
    “What if this is how he obtains those girls?”
    “By kidnapping A students?” Jane shook her head. “Somehow, it seems like a risky method of picking up underaged prostitutes. There are easier ways.”
    “But it would tie everything together. Joey Gilmore, missing girls, and the Red Phoenix. Maybe Ingersoll discovered the link to Donohue, and that’s when he got spooked. Why he stopped using his phones. Because if Donohue got wind of it, Ingersoll knew he’d be a dead man.”
    “Ingersoll
is
a dead man,” said Jane. “What we don’t know is
why
he started asking questions. After all these years in retirement, why did he suddenly get interested in missing girls?”
    Tam said, “Maybe what we really need to ask is: Who was he working for?”
    N OW THERE WERE SIX .
    Jane sat at her desk, reviewing what she knew about the three new names on the list. The first to vanish was Deborah Schiffer, age thirteen, of Lowell, Massachusetts. Daughter of a doctor and a schoolteacher, she’d been five foot two, one hundred pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Twenty-five years ago, she vanished somewhere between her middle school and her piano teacher’s house. A straight-A student, she was described as shy and bookish, with no known boyfriends. Had that been the age of the Internet, they would probably know a great deal more about her, but Facebook and MySpace and online chat groups had