Back in the files, I found that Susan Finnegan had been “seen” by people all over the country after her disappearance. In the first two years after her disappearance, fifty-six sightings were phoned in. In the next two years, it fell to twenty-four. After that, it was a few each year for five years, and then none for several. The last reported sighting came in 1996, three years ago. A prank call was the opinion of the cop who answered. A teenager had phoned, saying he’d seen a woman who looked like Susan Finnegan. Where? Portland, Oregon, buying fish at a wharf. Tuna fish. He’d cackled and hung up. I was surprised the cop had logged it. But he had. He’d even notified the Boston cops, who notified Finnegan. Nothing came of it, of course. Nothing had come from any of the tips.
But Finny chased all the leads, even the one that came from an old biddy in Arizona clearly desperate for attention. She told him she’d seen Susan hiking. This was in 1981. He’d written HIKING? Circled the word. Drawn question marks all around it. Guess he didn’t take his sister for a hiker. He flew out there and interviewed the woman four times before she confessed that she hadn’t seen the woman clearly, and she’d looked close to forty years old. Susan would have been twenty-five at the time.
Boxes four and five revealed that there had been other sorts of searches. Crimes that Finny thought might include his sister as a victim. A man from Long Island kidnapped two girls in 1974. Maybe he’d taken Susan? No. How long had that taken to determine? Two and a half months. Finny’s handwritten notes contained multiple exclamation points. He’d been excited, thinking he was onto her trail. Another case of missing teen girls in New England had briefly made him hope Susan was a victim, but it was clear she didn’t fit the pattern. Too old. Not blond. And there was the small problem that she hadn’t been walking on a deserted rural road, like all the others. There were pictures of the other missing girls, all of them similar, young and blond and enough alike to be cousins, if not sisters. Though the files were about Susan, tens of missing girls populated them, later dismissed as trails to nowhere.
Also included were the visits he’d made to morgues to identify Jane Does who were never Susan Finnegan. His notes were terse. “Not her” or “too tall” or “woman identified by spouse.” The period after 1984 filled one fourth of a box. Very little had happened since then. I sighed.
Back to the beginning. What did we know? Susan had run away from home. She’d taken clothes, her favorite stuffed animal, and a lucky rabbit’s foot. The rabbit’s foot I’d found in Finny’s box wasn’t Susan’s. It had been found in a car searched for drugs. Finny was sure it belonged to his sister, but the sad fur was dyed a bright purple. Later, he’d noted that Susan’s had sported pink fur. He’d been mistaken. The token had never been returned to its owner.
Her bank account had been wiped out. She’d taken her money, all $160 of it. Hard to start a new life on $160, even back in 1972. She’d told her family she was staying at Lucy’s, but her cover was blown by Monday morning when she didn’t appear at school. Everyone assumed she’d run away for good. But what if she’d planned to be gone for only the weekend? What if she’d reappeared Monday at school? No one would have been the wiser.
Where would she have gone for a weekend? Away with a boyfriend? It was clear her father, James Finnegan, had possessed old-fashioned views on dating. But Susan wouldn’t be the first teenager to figure out how to see someone behind her dad’s back.
She leaves home to spend a weekend with Mr. Right, only he turns out to be Mr. Wrong and he kills her? It was a stretch. I leaned back and stared at my ceiling. It hadn’t changed since yesterday. Go figure.
Outside, I heard kids playing tag. The clock read 8:25 a.m. Damn. Time to shower and dress. A car door slammed. A baby cried. Baby. I stopped in the hallway. What if Susan was pregnant? I looked behind me at the boxes on the floor. Pregnant in 1972. That was pre-Roe v. Wade, right? Her options would be limited. Have the baby, give it up for adoption, or … go somewhere where illegal operations were done. If Susan had been pregnant, who would she have told? No one in the family knew. Who would she have told? The baby’s father? Her best friend?
I thought of Rick, my former Homicide partner in New York, now dead. We’d kept each other’s secrets. He’d never told anyone I was gay, and I’d covered up his drug addiction. Maybe we shouldn’t have kept each other’s secrets. But we had. Now Rick was gone.
Lucy MacManus, Susan’s best friend, had married and moved to Portland, Maine. She was now Lucy Rogers. Finnegan had stayed in touch. His last notes regarding her were from 1993. Six years ago. Her telephone number was on a paper inside one of the boxes. If she was still at the same number, if she hadn’t moved in the past six years. If, if, if.
I found the paper in box number three and dialed it. It rang five times before a breathless woman said, “Hello?” I introduced myself. Asked if I was speaking to Lucy Rogers.
“Yes. Police chief, you said? Has something happened to Lyle?”
Was Lyle her husband? Or her son? “No. No. I’m calling about an old missing persons investigation. Susan Finnegan.”
“Susan.” Relief colored the name. She’d feared for her loved ones. They were still safe.
“I understand you were her best friend.”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“Susan said she planned to stay over at your house the night she went missing.”
“She didn’t.” The words came fast and sounded as if she’d said them a thousand times. She probably had.
“I assume your parents would’ve told the Finnegans if she’d stayed the night.”
“My parents?”
“Yes, well, as we’ve established, they weren’t best friends with Susan. You were. So if someone was going to cover for Susan, to say she had spent the night if questioned, that would be you.”
“But she didn’t.”
“But you see my point.”
“I suppose.”
“Here’s the thing that bothers me. She had a plan in place. She said she was staying with you. She planned to reappear later and have no one the wiser.”
“But she didn’t stay with me!” She was upset, but there was also anger there and … fear?
“Something didn’t go right.” I didn’t know what. I didn’t know a damn thing, but I couldn’t tell her that. I waited, but she offered nothing, so I played my trump card. “When, specifically, did she tell you she was pregnant?”
She inhaled sharply and asked, “How? Who told you?”
She had, just now. It was an old trick. Present information as fact and see if it lands. I’d thought my odds were twenty-eighty at best.
“When?” I asked.
“She told me three weeks before she left. She made me promise not to tell anyone, ever. I wanted to, later. But I was afraid I’d get her in trouble. What if she’d had complications and needed time to heal from the … procedure. When it was clear she wasn’t coming home, I got scared.” She moaned, low. “Oh, God, they’ll hate me when they find out. I almost sent them an anonymous letter, two years after she disappeared, telling them about the pregnancy. But I didn’t know who the father was, and I was about to go to college and I worried, what if they traced the letter and I got locked up, as some sort of accessory?”
“Unlikely.”
“I know that now. Back then, I was a scared girl about to leave home for the first time. And I couldn’t wait to go. The neighborhood never felt right after she left. I hated passing her house, seeing her brothers, her sister, her parents. They’d fuss over me, and I’d feel like the world’s biggest traitor.”
“How pregnant was she, when she left home?”
“About two and a half months, or so she thought.”
“Where was she headed?”
“A doctor in Boston, out of some place in the Combat Zone. That’s all I know. She didn’t tell me the doctor’s name. I gave her money, to help. The operation cost $500.”
“Lot of money.”
“Yeah. She took out all her savings. Took s
ome cash from her folks. Got the rest from the baby’s father.”
“Who?” I asked.
“She wouldn’t tell. I asked and asked, but she’d only say she’d made a mistake and it was over.”
“What else did she say?”
“She wanted me to pretend she was sleeping at my house. Said she’d be back Monday, in school. But she wasn’t.”
I imagined Lucy, at school, staring at the empty desk where her best friend should be sitting in class. Wondering where she was. “Anything else?” I asked.
“No. I wondered if perhaps the baby’s father had gotten upset with her, but I had no idea who he was. She didn’t want to talk about him. Said she wanted nothing to do with him ever again.”
“And you’ve no idea who he was?”
“Until she told me she was pregnant, I assumed she was a virgin, like me. Susan was a good girl. Aside from running away, she hadn’t ever gotten in trouble. But then, after that, her parents watched her like jail wardens. She wasn’t allowed out to basketball games or parties. She had to come straight home after school.”
“And you’re sure she planned to have an abortion?” I asked.
“Positive. She couldn’t care for a baby, and she thought her father would kill her if he found out. She said once it was over she could get her life back … but then she never came home.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I hoped she’d changed her mind, decided to take off and have the baby, raise it somewhere where no one knew her.”
“You think she’s raising a child under an assumed name and never thought to call her family, let them know she was alive?”
Silence. And then a quiet sob. “No. I know she’s dead. I think she had the operation, and it didn’t go well, and she died.” She hiccupped softly. “I have a daughter, Jeanette, in high school. She’s sixteen, the same age Susan was when she left, and, if anything ever happened to her … I always felt awful, not telling the Finnegans what I knew. Back then, I was just a girl covering for her best friend. Now I’m a mother, and … please tell them I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She hung up the phone. I imagined having to tell Finny this news. That his missing sister had been pregnant. Maybe it would have been better if Lucy had sent that anonymous letter.
DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN
THURSDAY, MAY 20, 1999
0915 HOURS
The police station felt funny. There was a crackle to the air, like before a big thunderstorm. At my desk, I found Lewis had taken a passive-aggressive swipe, setting a long mailing tube between our desks. It kept my stuff from spilling onto his pristine desk. Another guy would’ve tossed my stuff in the garbage. Not Lew. Give it a few days and he’d trace, “Clean Me” in the dust atop my cabinet.
He appeared, a giant Dunkin’ Donuts foam cup in hand. He caught me looking at it and said, “Our youngest was throwing up all night. She caught some bug at school. I’m half-asleep.” If he thought that was bad, well, in another six months he’d have a brand-new baby and he could kiss sleeping through the night good-bye.
“Chugalug, buddy. We got faxes from the OCME,” I told him. “Autopsy report.”
“Yeah?” He drank deeply and removed his jacket, hanging it on his chair back. He sat and extended his hand over my pile of crap. I slapped the faxes into his open palm. “Where’s the first sheet?” he asked.
“Damn machine probably ate it.” We’d had trouble with the fax. Cover pages rarely came through, and sometimes we got a fax ten hours after it was sent.
He made a few “hmmm”s while he reviewed the sheets. Every new page made him swallow another gulp of coffee. “Young woman. Early to midtwenties. Five feet four or so. Caucasian.” My sister, Susan, had stood five feet four. But it wasn’t her. The DNA hadn’t matched. “Blunt-force trauma to the skull,” he read. “Looks like the arm was cut from her torso before she was buried, but after she died. Evidence of knife wounds via her clothing and her rib bones.”
“So he kills her, and then he stabs her.”
“Looks like it.”
“Somebody was angry.” Most people stop attacking once their victim is dead.
“Yep.” He rubbed his eye. “Surprised they didn’t chew us out about holding onto that humerus bone.” He didn’t look at me, though he knew I was behind it.
“Maybe they have bigger fish to fry.”
“Still waiting on the soil tests,” he said. “Might tell us what season she was buried.”
I closed my eyes and imagined the woods where we’d found her. The woods, in spring, or, scratch that, summer, when the ground could be dug easily. The trees abloom so you could hardly see two feet ahead of you. Birds singing. A young woman in the woods. Dead or alive? Dead. He killed her elsewhere and used the woods as a dumping ground. That was intuition talking. Sometimes the gut knows things.
A thump sound brought my eyes open. “Napping?” Lew asked.
“Thinking.”
“Funny, they look the same,” he said.
I tapped my brow. “I am using my leetle gray cells,” I said in my best Hercule Poirot voice. He looked at me like I’d sprouted wings. Not a Masterpiece Mystery! fan.
“They got us dentals,” he said. “You want to go to East Windsor?”
Not really, but I was second fiddle, so he could order me about. The fact he couched it as a question was decent of him. I stood. “Looks like I have a date with a dentist.”
“Maybe ask about finally getting that crown fixed.” He knew about my crappy dental work. Most of the station did. My bad teeth were a favorite subject of complaint.
I drove to East Windsor where a state forensic odontologist worked out of a rebuilt Victorian with pink trim. Dr. Finch had red hair tucked behind her ears. Her handshake was firm and dry. “Come into my office.”
She put the x-rays I gave her on the light box. She smiled as she peered at them. One of her teeth was slightly crooked. “I’ve got good news.” She tapped a molar that was bright in the x-ray. “Tooth number two. She had a gold crown.”
“Gold. Really?”
“Gold is good dental material. Very durable, but expensive, and somewhat rare. If the body pre-dates, what did you say, 1985?”
“1983.”
“Even better. I doubt you’ll find many people back then with a gold crown. Also, you can see she had all of her wisdom teeth.” She tapped the very last teeth. “Likely she was older than 16 and younger than 25. In fact, probably younger. Maybe 21 or 22 at the outset. See this gap in front?” She pointed to the front teeth. I nodded. Susan had also had a gap between her front teeth, more sizable. It had made her self-conscious. Ma had told her that Lauren Hutton had a sizable tooth gap, and it hadn’t held her back from modeling or acting. Susan had shaken her head, aggrieved at our mother’s lack of understanding.
“If she’d had the wisdom teeth long, they’d have pushed the front teeth together and shrunk that gap. That it’s still intact tells me she didn’t have them long, a year maybe.”
I focused on the two front teeth, rounded at the bottoms. “You think she came from money?” Gold was expensive.
“She’d have been middle or upper-middle class, or had a dentist in the family.”
“Thanks for your help.”
“Happy to do it. Beats lecturing kids on brushing and flossing. Last kid I had in here? I overheard his mom say that as a reward for being so good they’re going to the candy store. This, after I spent half an hour scraping plaque from his teeth.”
Lewis was delighted by what I’d found. “That ought to help us winnow these down.” He pointed to a teetering pile of folders on his desk. “Missing persons. New England–area white females aged 15 to 25 reported missing from 1975 to 1983. One hundred eleven results so far.” He picked up the pile and dropped them onto my desk, flattening some old chip bags and scattering dust particles.
“What are you up to?” Shouldn’t he be working the stack?
He rubbed his forehead. “While you were
out, they caught the clamshell vandal, so I have fresh paperwork to attend to, thank you very much.”
“What? When?”
“Just after you left, Dix and Johnson radioed in that a young woman was chucking clamshells out of her car on Piper Street. They followed her home to Holland Ave. They knocked on the front door, and her mother answered.”
“Wait,” I said. “Her mother? How old is she?”
“Fifteen.”
“I told you!” I crowed, whooping for emphasis. “Teen girls!”
He clutched his head and groaned. “Stop gloating.”
“Ex-girlfriend of the quarterback?” I asked. Maybe I was two for two.
“Best friend of the ex-girlfriend of the quarterback. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish this damn report. You work on whittling the missing persons, yeah?”
I whistled as I worked my way through the photos and sketches of missing women. Some had freckles and braces, others had braids or ponytails. They were smiling, none of them aware their futures would lead them here, to a pile of missing persons reports two feet tall. I stopped whistling. Susan had surely never seen herself in their ranks. I shook my head.
“You okay?” Lew didn’t look up from his report. Guess my movement hadn’t been subtle.
“Aces.” I separated from the pile several girls who were too tall or too short to be ours. Into the “no” pile they went: Veronica, Mary, Jessica, Sara, Ann, Louise, Kelly, Nicole, Caroline, Polly, Gertrude, May, Heidi, Candice, Helen, Lisa, Teresa, Victoria, Melissa, Betty, Sophie, Amanda. All those girls, somebody’s daughter, all of them missing. Last seen outside a bus stop, after a basketball game, never seen again after leaving for an aunt’s house. They’d been gone decades. Maybe some had aged, acquired wrinkles and gray hairs, and fattened up where they were all angles and elbows before. But some had not. Some of these girls had vanished, and not to a better life. They might be buried in a woods grave or damp basement, or dumped in a lake. These girls, with their wide smiles, they never saw it coming.
I cleared my throat and went to the coffee machine. I hardly needed more, but I wanted a break from those smiling faces. Dix came by as I watched the coffeepot burble. “Hey,” I said. “Heard about your big bust.”
Idyll Hands Page 7
