The Forgotten Girls

by Owen Laukkanen

Tanya didn’t answer. Run, her mind hollered. Run as fast as you can. But she didn’t move. Couldn’t. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the screen.

  “Tammy?” Mark set down the drinks. “Uh, what’s going on?”

  Tanya didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything, either, not until Mark sat down beside her and reached for the phone. His fingers brushed her wrist, and that jolted her alive, broke the spell.

  Tanya let Mark take the phone from her hand. Then she screamed. She screamed, and she didn’t stop screaming until the police came.

  2

  I’ll warn you now: this will be intense.”

  Special Agent in Charge Drew Harris slid a slim folder across his desk. On the other side, Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere swapped glances.

  It was early January in what was already turning into a frigid new year. Outside, a blizzard raged, blanketing the Twin Cities in another heavy layer of snow. Inside the FBI’s Minnesota regional headquarters, the SAC had his heater cranked high, but Stevens could still feel the chill on his skin from the morning commute. He’d been in the Criminal Investigative Division for all of five minutes before Harris had summoned him and Windermere to his office—a new assignment.

  Stevens and Windermere had been working cases together for going on four years now. Their partnership had begun by chance, Stevens an agent with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Windermere a hotshot with the feds, an interstate kidnapping ring the catalyst. In the years since, the BCA agent and his FBI counterpart had chased bank robbers, contract killers, human traffickers, and one truly sick online predator, and somewhere along the way, Stevens had switched offices from the state police hangout in Saint Paul to the FBI’s new HQ in Brooklyn Center, northwest of Minneapolis. He and Windermere now formed a joint BCA-FBI violent crimes task force and, to this point at least, they hadn’t exactly been hurting for work.

  Stevens could feel Windermere watching him as he reached for the folder. A beautiful, often brilliant thirtysomething from Mississippi, Carla Windermere exuded tough, take-no-prisoners and all kinds of attitude, but Stevens had learned that his partner’s prickly outward persona was mostly a defense mechanism. The real Carla Windermere was infinitely more complex.

  She’d taken the last case hard, a suicide fetishist with a preference for vulnerable teens, and Stevens still wasn’t exactly sure how deep she’d been hurt. Stevens himself was no stranger to tough assignments; the case before last had involved human traffickers importing young women as sex slaves, and Stevens, father to a teenage daughter, had struggled throughout the investigation to keep his emotions in check.

  He and Windermere had faced their share of intense situations already, and Drew Harris knew it. Agent Stevens hesitated before he opened the folder, wondering what new awful crime could have prompted the SAC’s warning.

  There was a picture of a woman, a close-up of her face. She might have been young, but Stevens couldn’t be sure; her face and neck were badly bruised and partially decomposed, and her skin had been mutilated besides, though by what or by whom wasn’t immediately obvious.

  She was dead, though, that was obvious, and whoever she was, she hadn’t died peacefully. She lay on a background of pristine white snow, her black hair spilling out around her, a stark contrast. Stevens’s gut churned as he studied the picture.

  “Ouch. You weren’t lying.” Windermere craned her neck to look over Stevens’s shoulder. “Who is she?”

  “Nobody knows,” Harris replied. “What we do know is that she was murdered. The sheriff’s department in Boundary County, Idaho, recovered her body last week. A railroad maintenance crew found her in a snowdrift by the tracks. Sheriff’s and coroner’s reports are attached.”

  Stevens flipped the pages, scanned the reports. Both were brief: the woman had been sexually assaulted and beaten, brutally. The Boundary County coroner had determined she’d been strangled to death, though exactly when was still a mystery. It was bitterly cold in the Idaho panhandle this time of year, and the low temperatures had arrested the decomposition process, essentially mummifying the woman.

  “Terrible,” Windermere said, reading. “Horrible. Awful. But, I’m sorry.” She looked across the table at the SAC. “Am I missing something, boss? This all happened in Idaho. Where do we come in?”

  Harris nodded, like he’d been expecting the question. Gestured to the folder. “That picture of the victim is a printout of a digital photograph the police department in Willmar, Minnesota, lifted from a personal cell phone. Turn the page.”

  Stevens did. Found another set of photographs: a youngish man with tired, bloodshot eyes and a deadpan expression.

  “Mark Higgins,” Harris said. “A tractor salesman, a Willmar native. The picture was on his smartphone. A young woman stumbled on it. Apparently, they met at a local bar and Higgins brought her home. She decided to do a little snooping before they got down to business.”

  “For real?” Windermere said. “Dude never heard of a lock screen?”

  “Most people still don’t lock their doors out in Willmar,” Stevens told her.

  “Yeah, but most people don’t have pictures of murdered women in their homes.”

  “The woman, Tanya Sears, freaked out and called the local PD, who booked Higgins,” Harris said. “Higgins denies taking the picture, or ever having seen the deceased before.”

  “So how’d the pic get on his phone?” Windermere asked.

  “That’s the thing,” Harris said. “Higgins hasn’t volunteered much to the Willmar PD, and they don’t have the resources for a prolonged investigation, anyway. They kicked this up to the BCA, who passed it on to us when they discovered the Idaho connection.” He looked at Stevens over his glasses. “Your old boss thought it smelled funny. I’m inclined to agree.”

  “This Higgins dude’s probably the killer,” Windermere said. “Look at him. He’s a creep.”

  “I guess you’re going to find out.” Harris stood. “Willmar PD is expecting you. I told the chief if anyone could unravel this thing, it’s you two.”

  3

  Mark Higgins didn’t look much better in person. There were bags under his eyes, and his hair was a mess. He looked like the clothes in a suitcase at the end of a three-week vacation: wrinkled, disheveled, starting to smell.

  Higgins sat at a table in a sparse interview room in the Willmar Law Enforcement Center, a handsome low-lying complex not far from the town’s namesake lake. It had taken Stevens and Windermere nearly three hours to drive the hundred miles, the snow outside falling heavy and fast, obscuring visibility and blanketing the highway.

  The Willmar PD’s chief was a man named Nordheimer. He shook Stevens’s and Windermere’s hands, offered them coffee, and showed them to the interview room, where Mark Higgins had company already: his lawyer, a young man in his father’s second-best suit who stood up when the agents entered the room.

  “I want to reiterate that my client hasn’t been formally charged with a crime,” he announced. “Mr. Higgins is here of his own accord, as a show of good faith toward the Willmar Police Department, and can exercise his right to leave at any time.”

  “Good to know,” Windermere said, sitting down across from Higgins, “but he’s dealing with the FBI now. And good faith or no, he happens to be a man with a picture of a murder victim on his phone. If he chooses to walk, that tells me and my partner that he cares more about saving his own skin than he does about catching the killer. And is that really the impression he wants to give to the feds?”

  The lawyer colored. “I—I’ll need to confer with my client.”

  Windermere waved him off. “Relax,” she said, gesturing to his empty chair. “Sit down. In case you didn’t know, it’s a blizzard outside. Your client isn’t missing out on any big tractor sales.”

  The lawyer wavered. Higgins didn’t say anything.

  “Come on,” Windermere told them. �
�The sooner we get this done, the sooner you can exercise your right to quit bothering me.”

  But Mark Higgins didn’t have much to say for himself.

  “It’s not my picture,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “I didn’t take the picture, and I don’t know the girl. I sure as heck didn’t kill her.”

  Windermere fished a copy of the picture from her briefcase. Dropped it on the table in front of Higgins. “Have another look,” she said. “It was dark the other night. You were a few Surlys short of a twelve-pack. Maybe you see it again, it jogs your memory.”

  But Higgins didn’t react. He glanced down at the picture, at the dead, battered woman, shook his head, and pushed the picture away. “Not mine.”

  “You understand the confusion, right? Your girlfriend did find this pic on your phone.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Higgins said, “but yeah. This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

  “What?” Stevens leaned forward on the table. “Pictures of murdered women showing up on your phone?”

  “Not murdered women, but pictures, yes. It started, like, five or six months ago. I would turn on my phone and there would be a bunch of new pictures in my photo folder, strange pictures, pictures I hadn’t taken.”

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “Landscapes, mostly. A few desert pictures. Very few people. There was some really beautiful stuff, actually.”

  “But you didn’t tell anyone?” Windermere said. “You didn’t think that was weird?”

  “Of course I thought it was weird.” Higgins glared at Windermere like she was the killer. “I thought it was just a glitch in the software, and anyway, some of the pictures were kind of neat. Did you look? Whoever did take them was actually pretty good.”

  Windermere looked back at Nordheimer. “You have the phone handy?” she asked. “I want to see for myself.”

  Nordheimer produced Higgins’s phone in an evidence bag, unsealed it, and handed it to Windermere. She shot Higgins a look as the phone powered up. “If this thing does some crazy self-destruct bullshit, I will have you arrested,” she told him. “And I don’t give a damn what your legal representation has to say about it.”

  “It’s not going to self-destruct,” Higgins replied. “But you’re going to be scrolling past a lot of tractors.”

  Higgins wasn’t lying; there were a lot of pictures of him selling tractors. Combines, dozers, riding lawn mowers. All kinds of agricultural equipment. There were pictures of a woman, too, farther back on the camera roll, a pretty brunette. She was standing with Higgins by a lake in one. In another, she was wearing combat fatigues. Windermere showed the picture to Higgins, who couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “She’s, uh, a good friend,” he said. “Jessie. She’s been overseas for, like, six months now.”

  “Right,” Windermere said. “Does Tanya know?”

  Higgins didn’t answer. Didn’t have to, as far as Windermere was concerned. Whatever. Not Windermere’s business.

  She kept swiping, and she saw what Higgins was talking about. Interspersed with the home life pictures were a handful of arty landscape shots, somewhere hot and barren, no people for miles. Desert landscapes, the American Southwest. Texas ranch land, Louisiana swamps.

  “I’ve never been south of Kansas or west of North Dakota,” Higgins told the room. “Haven’t had a vacation since Christmas, either. You can ask my boss about that.”

  There were road signs in a few of the pictures, highway billboards, the back end of an auto-parts yard. Santa Fe. Flagstaff. Abilene, Texas. There were no people in the pictures. No sign of the photographer, or of anyone else, for that matter. Just landscapes and scenery and lifeless, abandoned buildings.

  Windermere reached the end of the photo roll. “This is it?”

  “I mean, yeah,” Higgins replied. “There were more, but I deleted most of them. I only kept the ones I really liked.”

  “The ones you deleted,” Stevens said, “do you remember anything about them?”

  “Not really. They were just kind of mediocre.”

  “Were there people in any of the others?” Windermere asked.

  “Some of them,” Higgins told her, “but I deleted all of those. They weren’t my people, you know? I didn’t know them from Adam.”

  4

  He’s a tractor salesman,” Stevens told his wife over dinner that night. “Swears he never saw the woman before in his life, has no idea how these pictures keep popping up on his phone.”

  Stevens and Windermere had grilled Higgins for a couple more hours. Pushed him for information about the lost pictures until, finally, the lawyer stepped in. This time, they conceded the point.

  “My client is going home, too,” the lawyer had told Stevens and Windermere as they packed up to leave. “There’s no reason to keep him here. He’s committed no crime. I insist—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Windermere had waved him off. “Go home if you want, Mr. Higgins. Maybe call your good friend Jessie—or Tanya, if you prefer. But don’t go anywhere, understand? Stay close.”

  Higgins laughed humorlessly. “Where would I go?”

  “That’s the spirit. Go home, fire up Netflix, wait for us to call you. Oh.” Windermere reached back, took Higgins’s phone off the table. “And we’re going to be keeping this.”

  Dinner had been all but cleared from the table when Stevens arrived home in Saint Paul, but Nancy Stevens had a plate in the oven for him, and she sat beside him at the kitchen table and listened as he explained the case between mouthfuls of meat loaf.

  “And you’re sure he’s telling the truth?” she asked as Stevens turned his attention to a pile of steamed broccoli. “Could he be trying to protect someone? It seems weird that these pictures would just show up like that.”

  “Very weird. We’re going to talk to the cell service provider tomorrow, see if they have any answers. Have to call the sheriff in Idaho, too. We—”

  Stevens broke off as his daughter entered the kitchen. “What’s going on?” she asked as she walked to the fridge.

  Stevens and Nancy shared a look. Andrea was seventeen, a high school senior, as smart and stubborn as her mother, who herself was a legal aid lawyer and perennial champion of the underdog. Andrea was mature for her age, almost an adult, but Stevens still didn’t feel especially comfortable talking shop with her in earshot.

  An awkward silence ensued. Andrea poked her head out from the fridge. “Come on, Dad. How bad could it be?”

  Plenty bad, Stevens thought, but he kept that to himself. “It’s nothing crazy. Just a guy out in farm country had a bunch of weird pictures show up on his smartphone, one of which happens to be evidence of a crime. But nobody knows how the pictures wound up there.”

  “Huh.” Andrea retreated from the fridge with a carton of milk and poured herself a glass. “Did he lose his phone recently? Like, did he have to replace it?”

  Stevens frowned. “I’m not sure. What difference would that make?”

  “Well, it’s the cloud,” Andrea said, as if the answer were obvious. Stevens looked at his wife, but she was mystified, too. Andrea sighed the way only a teenager forced to explain technology to her parents can sigh, and brought her glass of milk to the table. “The cloud,” she repeated. “You know, like, online storage. So you can access your data from anywhere.”

  “Sure,” Stevens said, though he was already kind of lost. “But what does this have to do with phantom pictures?”

  Andrea took a drink. “I was reading about this online, the exact same thing. Some guy in New York had his phone stolen. He replaced it, but then these weird pictures from China started showing up on his new phone. Some guy taking selfies in a bunch of orange trees.”

  She paused, waiting for her parents to make the connection. When they didn’t, she continued. “Because the old phone was still connected to the guy’s cloud
, don’t you see? Even though the old phone was, like, in China, the cloud system meant the New York guy was still getting pictures.”

  She grinned at her parents. “It turned into this huge thing. The guy in New York went over to China and they both became, like, huge celebrities. All because of a stolen phone.”

  “So if this guy’s phone was stolen,” Nancy said, “someone else could be taking pictures on his old phone and automatically uploading them to his new one.”

  Andrea sat back. “Exactly. So does that help?”

  Stevens was already standing. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  —

  Replaced my smartphone?”

  On the other end of the line, Mark Higgins gave it a beat. Then his voice brightened. “Actually, yeah. I was out at some bar in Minneapolis about six, seven months ago and someone swiped the damn thing. It was a real pain in the ass, too; I had to shell out five hundred bucks to replace it.” He laughed a little. “That’s all you wanted to know? Does it get me off the hook, or what?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Stevens told him. “I’m still putting this together.”

  5

  It’s called the cloud,” Stevens told Windermere. “Andrea says it’s some new storage thing. Like, you put your files on your phone, and you can access them on your laptop or wherever.”

  Windermere cocked her head at Stevens, the hint of a smile playing on her lips. “Yeah, Stevens, the cloud. You’re telling me this is the first you’ve ever heard of it?”

  Stevens held up his cell phone, which was just about old enough now to qualify for antique status. “I’m not exactly Mr. Technology over here, remember?”

  They were back in their shared office in the FBI’s Brooklyn Center headquarters. Stevens had called Windermere first thing that morning, told her he’d had an epiphany.

  “Great,” Windermere had replied, groaning. “You couldn’t just text me?”