"Q" is for Quarry (9 page)

“Nor did I,” Stacey said. “Well. I’m glad we got that out of the way. So what’s that tell us, the buckteeth?”

“Well, I’d say most kids with a severe overbite have already seen an orthodontist by the time they’re ten,” Dolan said. “My niece has three kids, so I know they start early—sometimes do the work in two or three stages. If this gal was going to have braces, she should’ve been in ’em by the time she died.”

“Maybe her family didn’t have the money,” I suggested.

“That could be. Anything else?”

“Cavities like that, you’re talking poor diet, too. Candy. Soda pop. Junk food,” Dolan said, with a quick look at me. And then to Stacey, “Not to sound like a snoot, but kids from your basic middle- to upper-class families usually don’t have rotten teeth like that.”

I said, “Think about the toothaches.”

Stacey said, “She did get ’em fixed. Matter of fact, the forensic odontist thinks all the fillings went in about the same time, probably in the year or two before she died.”

I said, “That must have cost a bundle.”

“Think of all the novocaine shots,” Dolan said. “You’d have to sit there for hours with that drill screaming in your head.”

“Knock it off. You’re making my palms sweat. I’m phobic about dentists in case you haven’t heard. Look at this,” I said, showing him my palms.

Stacey frowned. “They ever circulate a chart of her amalgam fillings?”

Dolan said, “Not that I know. I’ve got a copy in here. Might come in handy if we think we got a match. We do have the maxilla and mandible.”

I looked over at him. “Her jaws? After eighteen years?”

“We have all ten fingers, too.”

Stacey made a note on the paper. “Let’s see if we can get the coroner’s office to run another set of prints. Maybe we’ll get a hit through NCIC.”

“I can’t believe she’ll show up, given her age at the time of death,” Dolan said.

“Unless she got arrested for shoplifting or prostitution,” I said, ever the optimist.

“Problem is, if she got arrested as a juvenile, her records would be sealed and probably purged by now,” he said.

I raised a hand. “You were talking about why she was never recognized; suppose she was from out of state, some place back East? I get the impression the news story didn’t get nationwide attention.”

“Story probably didn’t rate a mention beyond the county line,” Dolan said.

“Let’s move on to her clothes. Any ideas there?” Stacey asked.

I said, “I thought it was interesting her pants were homemade. If you add that to the issue of poor dental hygiene, it sounds like low income.”

Stacey said, “Not necessarily. If her mom made her the clothes, it’d suggest a certain level of caring and concern.”

“Well, yeah. There is that. Those flowered pants were distinct. Dark blue daisies with a red dot on a white background. Someone might remember the fabric.”

Dolan said, “I’d like to go back and look at that statement the minimart clerk made about the hippie girl who came in. What’s the woman’s name, Roxanne Faught? We ought to track her down again and see if she has anything to add.”

Stacey said, “I talked to her twice, but you’re welcome to try. Is that store still open?”

“As far as I know. It was closed for a while, so it might have changed hands. You want me to take a drive up there?” Dolan asked.

“Let me do that. I can go this afternoon,” I said.

“Good. Meanwhile, what else? What about sizes?”

We spent several minutes working through those details. This time Dolan flipped back through the pages, looking for the list of clothing booked into property. “Here we go. Shoe size—7½. Panty size—medium. Bra size was 38A.”

I said, “That means she’s got a fairly large torso, but a small cup size. Barrel-chested. Girls like that tend to look top-heavy, even if they’re thin.”

Dolan turned a page. “Says here her ears were pierced. ‘Through the left earlobe is a gold-colored wire of a “horse-shoe” configuration. Through the right earlobe a gold-colored wire with a bent clip in its lower end.’ People might remember that, too.”

Stacey added that to the list and then said, “Is that it?”

I raised my hand. “She wore nail polish. Silver.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Not that I remember.”

Dolan got to his feet. “In that case, if you’ll excuse me. I gotta have me a smoke.”

At lunchtime, I volunteered to make a trip to the nearest market and pick up the makings for sandwiches, but they’d apparently gotten wind of my peanut-butter-and-pickle fetish and voted to go out for Chinese. We took Con’s car and made the crosstown trip to the Great Wall, with its pagoda facade and a gilded statue of the Buddha sitting over the front door. In the parking lot, I waited while Stacey and Con tucked their guns in the trunk of Con’s car. The three of us went in.

The interior walls were painted the requisite Chinese red with red Naugahyde banquettes and round white paper lanterns strung like moons around the perimeter. Stacey didn’t have much appetite, but Con seemed more than willing to make up for it. I was starving as usual. We ordered pot stickers and spring rolls, which we dunked in that pale Chinese mustard that cleans out your sinuses. We moved on to Moo Shu Pork, Kung Pao Chicken, and Beef with Orange Peel along with a dome of white rice. Con and I drank beer. Stacey had iced tea.

While we ate, the guys speculated about the killer, a matter in which I deferred to them: I have no formal training in homicide investigation, though I’ve encountered a few bodies in the course of my career. Given the nature of the murder, they theorized that the perpetrator was most likely male, in part because women tend to be repelled by close-contact blood-and-gore killings. In addition, the multiple stab wounds suggested a brutality more commonly associated with men.

“Hey, these days, women can be brutes,” Con said.

“Yeah, but I can’t see a woman hefting that body into the car trunk and hauling it out again. A hundred twenty-five pounds is a lot of dead weight.”

“As it were,” Dolan said. “You think this was planned?”

“If it was, you’d think he’d’ve worked out a plan for disposing of the body. This guy was in a hurry, at least enough of one that he didn’t stop to dig a grave.” He was making notes on a napkin and the pen made occasional rips in the paper while the ink tended to spread.

Con opened his packet of chopsticks and pried the two wooden sections apart, rubbing one on the other to smooth away any tiny wooden hairs. He doused both his chicken and his beef with enough soy sauce to form a shallow brown lake in which his rice grains swam like minnows. “I’m surprised he didn’t pick a dump site more remote.”

“That stretch of road looks isolated if you don’t know any better. No houses in sight. He probably didn’t have a clue about the quarry traffic running up and back.”

“I’m with you on that. Forensics says the wire he used to bind her wrists was torn off something else so he must have grabbed whatever came to hand. Guy was making shit up as he went along.” I watched as Dolan formed a pincer with his chopsticks and tried picking up a chunk of chicken, which he couldn’t get as far as his mouth.

“Question is, did he target that girl in particular, or was he trolling for a victim and it was just her bad luck?”

Con said, “I think it was a fishing expedition. He might’ve tried five or six gals and finally one said yes.” He shifted to a scooping technique, using his chopsticks like a little shelf onto which he pushed the bite of chicken. He got the hunk as far as his lower lip. Nope. I saw him shake his head. “I don’t think we’re dealing serial. This feels like a one-off.” He tried again, this time lunging, his lips extended like an anteater’s as he lifted his chopsticks. He captured a snippet of orange peel before the rest fell back onto his plate.

I grabbed a fork from the next table and handed it to him.

Stacey made a doodle on the napkin, which by now was completely tattered. “Hang on. Let’s back up a second. Age-wise, it seems to me like she’s bound to be closer to the high end—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and up, instead of the twelve, thirteen end of the spread. Young girl like that, somebody’s going to report she’s gone, regardless of whether she leaves voluntarily or stomps out in a huff. You’re a parent, you might shrug and not think too much about it, but when she doesn’t come home, you’re going to worry. You call around and find out her friends haven’t seen her either and you’re going to call the cops. If she’s twenty and disappears, it might not raise any flags at all.”

“Right. She could’ve had a history of taking off. This might have been one more in a long string of disappearances.”

Dolan pushed his plate aside. “As long as we’re making wild-ass guesses, here’s another one. I don’t think she’s local. Killer didn’t get into any facial mutilation so he must not’ve been worried someone would know who she was. He didn’t know how long she’d be lying there. Suppose she’s found the same day and they run a description of her in the paper? She’s local, somebody’s going to add two plus two and figure it out fast.”

I said, “What if she’s from another country altogether? England or Spain. There are probably plenty of places where dental care didn’t rank that high in those days. It might also explain why she wasn’t reported missing.”

Dolan said, “A missing-persons report might’ve gone through Interpol and never reached us. It’s worth checking. Maybe they have something on file.”

“There’s a note in there somewhere—woman claims she saw a hitchhiker who fit the girl’s description outside of Colgate. This was a couple of hours before the clerk in the Gull Cove minimart saw that hippie girl on August 1. Could be she was working her way up the coast,” Stacey said.

Dolan reached for his black binder with its incident reports already marked with torn scraps of paper. He turned a few pages and checked the marginal notes he’d written in a surprisingly wee hand. “You’re thinking about Cloris Bargo. She says July 29, four-thirty in the afternoon, she saw a young white female, five foot two to five foot three, age sixteen to seventeen, navy blouse, flowered slacks, long blondish hair, leaning against the base of the Fair Isle overpass. Bargo saw a vehicle stop and pick her up, heading north on the 101.”

“That’s worth another look. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, we might backtrack and see if we can figure out her point of origin, maybe rough out a timeline.” Stacey reached for his map of California and unfolded it, flapping and spreading the unwieldy sheet across the tabletop. “If she came from the south, she’d have traveled the 405 as far as the 101,” he said. “The main arteries from Arizona into California are Highways 15 from Las Vegas, Nevada, the 40 from Kingman, Arizona, the 10 from Phoenix, and 8 coming up from Yuma. Starting from anywhere else, she’d have taken a different route.”

Dolan pushed his plate away. “You’re never going to pin that one down. She could have come from anywhere. On the other hand, you talk about July 29. That’s the same day Frankie Miracle killed his girlfriend and hit the road. If Jane Doe was thumbing rides, he could’ve picked her up.”

We left the subject at that point and moved on to other things.

After lunch, Con dropped me at the office, where I caught up with the notes on my index cards and then spent a few minutes doing digital research, which is to say, walking my fingers through the telephone book. My job was to verify reports about the young hippie girl, hitching rides in the period between July 29 and August 1. Con was going to hit the phones and track down the whereabouts of Frankie Miracle’s former cellmates, while Stacey searched out his legal skirmishes in previous years. We agreed to meet that night at CC’s to share what we’d learned.

I had a prior address for Roxanne Faught, but nothing for Cloris Bargo. As it turned out, luck was on my side and startingwith the obvious paid off for once. A check of the white pages revealed one Bargo, not Cloris, but a sister who didn’t even bother to quiz my purposes before she gave me the current phone number and the Colgate address. Shame on her. I could have been a stalker or a bill collector.

I checked my city map and drew a bead on my destination— a tract of middle-class homes just beyond the Fair Isle off-ramp, where Cloris Bargo had seen the girl. I locked the office, fired up the VW, and took Capillo Avenue as far as the 101.

The day was mild and hazy, the landscape muted, as though washed with skim milk. I rolled down my car windows and let the speed-generated wind blow my hair to a fare-thee-well. Traffic was light and the trip to Colgate took less than six minutes.

I took the off-ramp at Fair Isle and headed toward the mountains, counting the requisite number of streets before I turned left on York. The house I was looking for was halfway down on the left side of the street. This was a neighborhood of “starter” homes, but most had undergone major renovation since the sixties when the area had been developed. Garages had become family rooms; porches had been enclosed; second stories had been added; and the storage sheds in the rear had been enlarged and attached. The lawns were well established and the trees had matured to the point where the sidewalks buckled in places where the roots were breaking through. The children, mere toddlers when their parents had moved in, were grown and gone now, coming back to the neighborhood with children of their own.

I pulled up in front of a two-story white stucco house with a frame addition on the left and an elaborate new entrance affixed to the front that involved arches, a rustic wooden gate, climbing roses, and a profusion of hollyhocks, hydrangeas, and phlox. I let myself through the gate and climbed the porch steps. The front door stood open and the screen was on the latch. From the depths, I could smell something simmering; fruit and sugar. The radio in the kitchen was tuned to a call-in show, and I could hear the host berating someone in argumentative tones. I placed a hand on the screen, shading my eyes so I could see the interior. The front door was lined up exactly with the back door so my view extended all the way to the rear fence that separated two yards. I called, “Hullo?”