Vanishing Girls: A Totally Heart-Stopping Crime Thriller

by Lisa Regan

  Sometimes he knelt beside her and stroked her hair. For once, gentle. But she didn’t like it. There was something worse about that than the way he had dragged her through the woods or thrown her against the wall. She didn’t like the way his breath quickened as he did it.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Josie’s mind worked through the facts as she drove away from Ginger Blackwell’s house. So Ginger had been drugged. Josie had taken enough statements from girls at the college in Denton who’d been roofied to know that Ginger Blackwell’s abductors had used date rape drugs: Rohypnol, GHB, ketamine. It could have been any one of the most popular ones, or a combination. Any of them would lower inhibitions, sedate, and generally destroy any chance of her remembering what happened. That would certainly account for the flash-cut memories.

  She wondered if the woman on the side of the road was involved. She must have been, otherwise she would have come forward after Ginger’s disappearance. Although it was difficult to imagine a woman nearing eighty being involved in abducting women. Josie had seen news footage of the salon owner who had found Ginger’s abandoned vehicle. She didn’t look sick, and she certainly wasn’t elderly. So who was Chemo Lady, and was she really sick or was the headscarf just a disguise to inspire sympathy in a passerby? If she wasn’t involved, what happened to her and why hadn’t she come forward?

  Then there was the rock formation. The one that looked like a standing man. Josie vaguely remembered something like this from her childhood but couldn’t remember how old she had been or where she had seen it. There was something there, at the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t reach it. Mentally, she ticked through all the rock formations she and Ray had catalogued during their childhood. They used to use them as markers. Meet me at Broken Heart. The one in the woods behind Denton East High School that looked like a heart with one of its humps missing. I’ll be at Turtle at ten. The one a mile behind Ray’s childhood home shaped like a turtle’s shell that they used to sit on and get drunk and fool around on in high school. See you at the Stacks. That one was used by lots of kids in Denton, in the woods near the old textile mill at the bottom of a rock face where several slabs of rocks had fallen from the side of the mountain, making large stacks of flat rocks. She and Ray had made out there too. She smiled to herself. There were many more, she knew; she just couldn’t think of them.

  They would be in her photos from high school though. She could look through them when she got home. From the cup holder next to her seat, her cell phone rang. Glancing down quickly she saw a selfie of her and Luke, their faces pressed together, all smiles. She reached down, pressed answer and then speaker, and said, “Hello, darling.”

  Luke’s voice sounded tinny. “Are you in the car?”

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I, uh, drove to the craft store,” she said.

  “The what?”

  “The craft store. You told me to take up knitting.”

  She could picture him shaking his head, that adorable little smile he got on his face that told her he was only half-serious about whatever it was they were talking about. “I said you should look into getting a hobby. I’m not sure you’ll be satisfied with knitting. Although, hey, maybe you could do it with your grandmother.”

  “She crochets.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  A green sign to her right indicated the first Denton exit ramp was two miles ahead. She put on her turn signal and got into the right lane. “I’m not sure,” she said with a laugh. “Guess I should find out.”

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  “I got that file for you.”

  Her heart nearly stopped. The car drifted a little too far to the right, and she jerked it back into her lane. “You did?”

  “Yeah. I xeroxed it and brought it by this morning, but you weren’t home. I left it on your kitchen table.”

  She slowed the car as she came to the exit ramp. At the end of the ramp she stopped for a red traffic light. “You xeroxed it?”

  He didn’t speak. For a moment, she thought maybe the call had dropped. Then he said, “I didn’t want there to be any emails or faxes or scans or anything of it that could lead back to me. I’m really not supposed to be doing this, Josie.”

  The light changed and she made her turn, heading toward home. “I know, Luke. I am really sorry to have even asked, but it means the world to me that you did this for me.”

  “Wanna hear something weird?”

  “Always.”

  “There were four troopers who worked on Blackwell’s case. You know, before the DA’s office stepped in and took over.”

  “They’re all dead!” Josie exclaimed.

  Luke laughed. “No, Drama Queen. But they were all transferred within two years of Blackwell’s case closing.”

  “Oh. Is that unusual?”

  “Well, they were the only ones transferred. One guy had only just started his tour here. I just thought it was odd. Anyway, it’s probably nothing. I’ve been spending too much time with you and your theories. Look, we never had this conversation, because I never got you the file, okay?”

  “Of course,” Josie said, pulling into her driveway. “Luke, I really appreciate this. I promise to repay you.”

  There was a lilt of flirtation in his voice. “Oh really? What kind of repayment are we talking about?”

  “Your favorite kind.” She hung up.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  At home, she kicked off her shoes in her foyer, reveling in the feeling of her feet being free after so many hours in the car. Her leg still ached and throbbed, and her lower back was stiff from the long drive.

  As promised, on her kitchen table was a large manila envelope containing the Ginger Blackwell file. Next to it lay a bundle of pink wildflowers, each one with four rounded petals and tiny yellow flutes at its center. Limestone bittercress. Her grandmother had taught her the actual names of most of the wildflowers that grew in rural Pennsylvania. These started blooming in March and were her favorite. Josie smiled as she picked them up.

  She found a vase for the flowers, poured herself a glass of red wine, and sat down at the table. The Ginger Blackwell file was remarkably thin for a case that had garnered so much attention. She sifted through pages’ worth of tips that had been faxed from Denton PD to the state police, ranging from vague (a brown-haired lady lurking outside of an elementary school in New York) to the bizarre (a woman claimed to have seen Ginger in a dream before). None were particularly useful, and all of them—at least, the ones that sounded sane enough to check out—had been investigated and dismissed. There were notes about where Ginger had been found and by whom. An Ohio driver passing through Pennsylvania on Route 80 had seen her struggling to stand up on the side of the road and stopped. He called 911 and the state police found her. The notes said she was “bound at the arms with tape.”

  Josie shuffled the contents of the folder until she found two photographs. One was of the area where she’d been found and the other was of Ginger sitting on a hospital bed. The photo sent a cold shock through Josie. Sure, it had been six years since Ginger Blackwell returned from her ordeal, but the girl in the photo looked like a terrorized shell of the woman Josie had met that morning. Her auburn hair was matted and shot through with dried leaves and small twigs, her skin was pale almost to the point of looking blue. Dull eyes peeked from above hollowed-out cheeks, her expression as vacant as June Spencer’s had been.

  She was naked from the waist down. Her upper body, from just below her hips to her neck, was wrapped so tightly with tape that the outline of her hands were only just visible as two small bumps.

  “No way she did this to herself,” Josie mumbled.

  Josie paged through the rest of what was there, looking for fingerprint reports—surely they had tried lifting prints from the duct tape—but there was nothing. Ginger’s statement was there, but there were no reports from investigators vi
siting all local oncology units to talk to female patients. Had they not investigated at all? Perhaps those reports hadn’t made it into the file, or had been removed once the investigation concluded?

  “Seriously?” Josie said to herself as she reached the end of the stack of pages. There were no medical records. She paged through the entire thing again. No log of the rape kit. No log of injuries. No crime lab results from the rape kit. No photos of Ginger’s injuries. No photos of the duct tape, or of Ginger after it was removed. The cold fingertips of fear scuttled over her. This went beyond shoddy police work. You didn’t omit the results of a rape kit in a sexual assault abduction case.

  And then she finally realized what had bothered her from the moment she’d read about the investigation. Why would the police come out and say that Ginger’s case was a hoax? Why not just quietly let it go cold without any leads if they wanted the problem to disappear? And what problem was that? What could the medical records or DNA results from the rape kit have revealed to warrant omitting them from the file?

  The sound of her front door opening made her jump. Luke’s laughter filled the room. He stood in the doorway. “It’s me,” he said.

  She put a hand over her pounding heart. “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The last sip of red wine had sloshed over the contents of the Blackwell file. She rushed to the counter and got some paper towels to blot it. Luke watched her with a mildly amused look on his face. “You sure were engrossed in that file. Did you forget I was coming over?”

  She got the last drops of moisture off the pages, although not the red stain, and stuffed the pages back into the envelope. “No,” she snapped. “I didn’t.”

  He stepped closer and hooked an arm around her waist, pulling her in. He smelled of soap and aftershave. “Did you like the flowers?”

  She softened as his lips tickled her neck. “You know I did.”

  * * *

  An hour later they were eating dinner in her bed. Luke had ordered fancy takeout from the restaurant that Solange, Dirk Spencer’s ex-girlfriend, worked at and brought it with him, complete with plastic forks to go with the white foam takeout containers. She watched him devour more lobster ravioli than she could eat in a week.

  “Do you know anyone in the forensic division?” Josie asked, catching him between mouthfuls.

  “Where?” he asked. “You mean in the state crime lab?”

  “Yeah, didn’t you used to be stationed out by Greensburg?”

  He nodded, putting his empty container on the nightstand and lying across the foot of the bed, one hand propping his head up while the other stroked her uninjured calf.

  “Near there, yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “So, do you know anyone in the lab?”

  His fingers stopped moving. She looked up over her takeout container long enough to see a shadow cross his face. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I might know someone there.”

  She wiggled her foot and inched her toes toward his chest, tickling his rib cage with her big toe. “Might?”

  His hand moved further up to her inner thigh. “Well, I’d have to find out if they’re still working there. Not to mention—again—that I shouldn’t be pulling files, or strings, for you.”

  She put her takeout container to one side and stretched her body closer to his roving fingers. “I wouldn’t ask unless it was really important.”

  His mouth followed his fingers with breathy kisses along the insides of her legs. “Is this about that Blackwell file?”

  An involuntary moan escaped her lips. “Yeah. I need the uh, report, uh the… results of the…”

  As his mouth reached her center, she lost her ability to speak. He lifted his head for a moment, a wicked grin on his face. “If I promise to ask about it, do you promise not to talk about the case for the rest of the night?”

  She palmed his head and pushed his face back down. “Yes,” she breathed. “Oh God, yes.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Luke left for work while Josie was still asleep but he had, at least, left some coffee on for her. Leaning against her kitchen counter, sipping it slowly, she noticed that all of the chairs had been pushed beneath the kitchen table. That the stack of mail she’d been riffling through yesterday had been piled neatly on top of the Blackwell file, which had been placed on her closed laptop. Everything in an orderly pyramid right next to the flowers he had brought her, the water topped up.

  She knew she should be happy. Ray had driven her crazy with his perpetual messiness, but this irked her in a different way. This was her house. Her sanctuary. Her mess. Luke didn’t get it. Sometimes he just didn’t get her.

  With a sigh, she retrieved a large plastic bin from her garage and pulled out an old photo album to see if she could find the rock formation Ginger had mentioned. By evening, nearly every surface in her spotless kitchen was covered with photos of her and Ray. The earliest one had been taken when they were almost ten years old. They were on his porch. Ray’s mother had caught them laughing and snapped the picture. That was when Ray’s family lived on the other side of the wooded area behind Josie’s trailer park. Before his dad left. They’d spent countless hours together exploring the forest but mostly hiding from their parents and avoiding their homes.

  The next flurry of pictures were from high school. The two of them were always pressed against one another, Ray’s arm slung across her shoulders and Josie turned toward him, her face looking up toward his. The memory of those years stung now. Never could Josie have imagined that Ray would hurt her like he did.

  Josie found a photo of the two of them the day they’d made settlement on their house. Their faces glowed. They looked like two people deeply and wildly in love. They were meant for one another. She choked back tears as she snapped the album shut. That nagging voice in the back of her head asked for the thousandth time if she had been too harsh on Ray. She went over that awful night again in her memory and then the night she’d caught him with Misty. No, she had done the right thing. She might have forgiven his infidelity eventually, but that night with Dusty he had broken the most sacred kind of trust between them, the kind she could never forgive.

  With a sigh, she took a second look through the pile of photos she had made of the two of them near the various rock formations in and around Denton, which had been taken by friends. She found every other formation in the city, it seemed, except the Standing Man. Had she imagined it? Why did Ginger’s description sound so familiar to her? She tried calling Lisette both to check on her and to find out if she remembered the Standing Man, but the call went right to voicemail. She left a brief, cheery message asking her grandmother to call back.

  Luke called just before nine, interrupting her mental catalog of her life and which part of it matched up with which rock formation. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  She laughed. “Gee, I don’t know. Let me check my calendar. Oh, that’s right, I’m doing nothing. Why? What’s up?”

  “My contact in the lab? She can meet you tomorrow at one. I figure if you leave around nine, you could get to Greensburg in time. If you feel like making the drive. It’s almost four hours.”

  “I can’t talk to her over the phone?” Josie asked.

  “No, she wants to meet face to face. That was non-negotiable.”

  “Oh. Well, okay, I can make the drive. Are you coming with me?”

  “I can’t. Gotta work. I’ll text you the address of the lab. There’s a public park a few blocks away from it. You can’t miss it. She’ll meet you there. I know it’s a long drive, but if you want the Blackwell results, this is the only way to get them. I’m already doing way more than I should over this, Josie.”

  There was no sternness in his voice, just a matter-of-fact reminder that he was bending rules to get her what she was asking for. “I know,” she said quickly. “I’ll go see her. Thank you. I really appreciate this.” From the depths of the mountains of photos and photo albums on her table, she fis
hed a pen. “What’s her name?”

  “Denise Poole. I’ll text you the other information. I have to get back to work. I just picked up an extra shift.”

  He said the name so quickly, she barely heard it. “Denise Poole?” she confirmed, scribbling the name down.

  “Yeah,” he said, sounding uncomfortable. “She was my girlfriend. Look, I really have to go.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend when you worked in Greensburg,” she blurted.

  “So?” he said. “What difference does it make? We broke up years ago. I mean, it’s not like we’re still married.”

  “Ouch,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, without sounding it. “Listen, we’ll talk tomorrow, okay? Gotta go.”

  She stared at the phone after he hung up. That stung. He was right, it wasn’t a big deal that he and Denise Poole had dated before; obviously, Josie knew she wasn’t his first. But it did bother her that he’d never mentioned her before. She’d talked about hers, but she didn’t have much to tell. It was always Ray.

  She called Lisette again as she tried to recall how long he’d been stationed in Greensburg for. The call went to voicemail again. Josie left another voicemail in a voice that sounded much too cheery to be believed. She tried again a little later. When she got Lisette’s voicemail for the third time, she called the nurse’s station.

  “She’s been really depressed,” one of the nurses told Josie. “You know, since Sherri died. She still gets up for meals, but other than that, she’s been in bed.”

  “Oh,” Josie puzzled. “I didn’t realize she was close to Sherri.”