Authors: Thomas Perry
Emily could imagine what it must have looked like: At first the opening page appeared in a small window in the center of his screen. He clicked on the Enlarge box and it blew up, the pale white face coming at him like a swimmer rising toward him from the bottom of a lake. The picture was a reproduction of a newspaper article. The caption: BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND.
There was a printout of the page in the file that Emily was reading. She could see that it was a picture of the same young girl that was in the snapshots. She could tell that seeing her face again must have been a shock to Phil.
She could almost hear Phil making that sound of surprise, just a quiet “Uh” as though he had tripped. He would have turned instinctively to exclaim to someone about what was on his screen, but there was nobody to tell. Sam Bowen had retired two years ago and moved to Seattle. Ray and Dewey and Bill were probably out of the office on jobs, and he had never told even Ray much about the case. The only one always in the agency office in the middle of the day was April, and she was beyond the glass wall, on the telephone. Even though he must have felt affection for her, the idea of telling her any of this would have seemed impossible to him.
Phil described the difficulty he had trying to understand the article. The name was Allison, and the picture was Allison Forrest, but it said she was dead. Could the paper have made some weird mistake at the time when Allison was missing?-maybe assumed some unidentified body was hers and printed her picture? He looked at the date at the top of the article. It was November eight years ago, a few months after he had brought Allison home alive and well. This made no sense. Maybe the mistake was that some other girl was missing and had been found dead, but the paper had accidentally used an old picture from the time when Allison Forrest had disappeared.
Phil said he looked at the screen and forced himself to scroll down and read the article-just as Emily read it now. The article said the girl’s name was Allison Straight. She had been found in an abandoned irrigation ditch on a large farm ten miles outside Mendota. The ditch was just a trench about five feet wide and four deep that ran alongside a huge empty field about five hundred yards from a road. The trench was part of an old irrigation system that had been handdug around the early 1900s.
A hunter had come onto the land without permission, and was walking along the trenches looking for the game that hid in the ditches. He came across human remains. At first he thought it was a girl who had fallen into the ditch during a rainstorm and drowned. But the coroner was able to say the body was more recent than the rains, and a police officer and the coroner both thought they recognized the girl. Through photographs and dental records she was identified positively as Allison Straight, a sixteenyear-old Mendota girl who had been missing from her home for six months. Phil printed the article and searched for others.
Phil must have been sweating. This was unquestionably the girl he and Sam Bowen had taken off the street that night in Hollywood eight years ago. He kept his eyes on the screen and clicked on other articles. The story was repeated over and over. There was one that had been printed in the Stockton paper much earlier, when the girl had first disappeared. It quoted the girl’s mother, Nancy Straight of Mendota. Emily could imagine Phil muttering to himself, “What the hell?” over and over, and dreaming up possible explanations.
Maybe the girl’s mother had been Theodore Forrest’s wife at one time. No, the girl’s name would still have been Forrest. But in the paper it was Straight. Maybe the mother had been a girlfriend who had gotten pregnant. But Phil had seen a birth certificate that said Forrest.
Did Forrest even have a wife? Forrest had never involved his wife in the discussions with Phil and Sam. Phil thought he remembered some reference to her being “distraught,” and after that he had thought little of her. Lots of his fancier clients didn’t want to have their wives talking with anybody as rough and low-class as a private detective. He kept thinking of explanations that accounted for all of the seeming contradictions, then rejecting each one. Emily could tell Phil was trying to keep this from being what he thought it was. Anyone could see it was a horrible, sad story, but Phil wanted it to be a particular kind of sad story, an ordinary family tragedy.
Phil wanted Theodore Forrest to have been a doting father who had hired Phil Kramer to find his wayward daughter Allison and bring her back to her comfortable, safe home. He wanted the daughter to have been one of those girls who had a gift for getting into the worst kinds of trouble. Girls like that vanished all the time, and maybe two years later, or twenty years later, somebody found a small, delicate set of female bones in the woods.
That was a horrible story, but it was horrible in a banal, quotidian way. It was almost routine. In a lot of those cases, the killer was already in jail for some other girl before anybody found this one’s bones. Phil couldn’t keep the story from being horrible, but Emily knew he didn’t want it to be horrible in the way he feared. He wanted Theodore Forrest to be what he seemed. Phil wanted to have given this sad, unlucky man a chance to see his beautiful young daughter again-if only for a month or two-and to have given the daughter a brief reprieve, a chance to pull herself together and live.
Phil worked the keyboard and mouse for an hour or two longer and then studied all of the contents of the old case file before he was certain. Then he wrote down the plain truth, not trying to spare himself. Theodore Forrest had not hired him to find his naive, foolish daughter. He had hired Kramer to find a girl-someone else c daughter-who had escaped his influence, his abuse. Phil kept remembering that when he and Sam Bowen had found the girl, they had quickly gagged and later drugged her. She had never had a chance to give her side of the story, to tell them the truth about who she was. And a month or two later, Theodore Forrest had killed her and buried her body in a ditch at the edge of a remote field.
Emily imagined exactly how Phil must have felt. She also knew from years of observation that by now Phil must have been angry. His anger would be indignation and disgust at the horrible crime, but even stronger would be his hatred of Forrest for using Phil to help him commit it. Forrest had fooled Phil in a terrible way for a terrible purpose. He had manipulated Phil into finding and capturing the victim and delivering her to him bound and drugged, helpless and without hope.
Emily could feel the anger in the way he had written his account. He had constructed the first part of the story patiently and carefully, beginning with the parts that Sam Bowen had already told her, but now the sentences were short and terse: “I had the following facts: Theodore Forrest was not Allison’s father. The documents he provided were forgeries. His victim’s real name was Allison Yvonne Straight.”
Phil went on to list the pieces of evidence inserted in the packet at this point:
I have included copies of the genuine birth certificate in the name Allison Straight I obtained by a search of the public record in Fresno County, the forged birth certificate in the name Allison Forrest given to me by Theodore Forrest, the letter signed by Theodore Forrest giving Kramer Investigations his permission to take charge of and physically transport his daughter Allison, photocopies of the cashier’s checks he provided in payment for the agency’s services, twelve photographs of Mr. Forrest and Allison Straight together in various locations, and copies of tape-recorded telephone calls from Theodore Forrest to Kramer Investigations.
Emily glanced at them, and they seemed to be what Phil said they were. The ones that still struck her as odd were the tape recordings. Even Emily knew it was illegal to tape-record anybody without his knowledge in California. Maybe Phil thought that if this file turned up, he would be beyond prosecution.
She read on. She noticed that Phil wrote the next part in a more measured way, moving away from what he had established to what he believed:
I concluded that the reason Allison Straight was in Los Angeles was that she had fled Mendota to end a relationship with Theodore Forrest. The relationship was a secret one, and I believe it was sexual in nature. Theodore Forrest did not hire the Kramer agency out of concern for the girl, but out of extreme possessiveness and a refusal to let her end the connection. At some point after he had Allison Straight under his control, he caused her death and buried her body in an irrigation ditch on a piece of land he owned, called Espinoza Ranch.
Emily could feel the growing hatred as Phil laid out each phase of this. She knew he had been controlling himself with difficulty, trying to contain his anger. He wrote:
Because of this day’s discoveries, I began an investigation of what had happened eight years ago after I left Allison with Theodore Forrest. I collected evidence to help me understand the crime and the circumstances surrounding it.
Emily looked at the next packet of papers. Phil had a copy of the tax assessment for the Espinoza Ranch, showing its owner as Theodore Forrest. He had photographs of the place where the girl’s body had been found and a map of the property showing precisely where that was. There were photographs of Espinoza Ranch, which looked to Emily like a pretty place.
Then she came upon a copy of the autopsy report for Allison Straight. Cause of death: Gunshot. Manner of death: Homicide. As Emily looked at the forms, she felt the way she had always felt years ago when papers of that sort came to the office-a squeamish sensation of alarm at each of the marks the pathologist had made on the simple outline drawing of a woman. But this time it was worse. She could imagine the torment the girl had gone through before she died, and she could also feel what Phil must have felt when he had learned about it and known he was partly responsible. There were marks around the wrists and ankles, signs of abuse that had partially healed. The thought of that made Emily feel physically sick, because she knew that meant it had gone on for a long time. She tried to calm herself by reading the paragraphs below, the results of the various tests that had been performed on the body-most of them only because they were always done. But then she read the sentence at the end of the third paragraph: “At the time of death the victim was pregnant.”
Emily read on. The fetus was approximately three months old. Samples of its tissues had been retained as potential evidence in the homicide investigation. She imagined Phil’s surprise and his grim excitement when he saw those words. If tissue from the fetus had been preserved, it would be possible to perform a DNA test.
Suddenly she understood the whole packet of evidence. She had been struck by the large quantity of it, the thoroughness of Phil’s methodical collection. When she had seen the words “the victim was pregnant,” she had wondered for a second why Phil had bothered with the rest of it. The police could compare the baby’s DNA with Theodore Forrest’s, establish that he had impregnated a sixteen-yearold girl whose body had been buried in a remote corner of a piece of land he owned. He had obviously killed her to prevent the revelation of the relationship.
But then Emily’s mind began to supply the obstacles. Theodore Forrest was a rich, powerful man, apparently one who had at least a passable reputation. Phil would have to supply some very compelling facts before a judge would order a DNA test on Theodore Forrest for comparison with the fetus of a murder victim from eight years ago. So Phil had patiently gone about collecting just the sort of circumstantial evidence that would persuade a judge.
Then it occurred to Emily that there was another possibility. Phil was fairly sure that Forrest had killed Allison and, inevitably, her baby. But Phil could not know whether the baby had been Theodore Forrest’s child. The girl had run off and been gone for a couple of months. It was entirely possible that the baby had been fathered by someone Allison met after she ran away. The DNA test could just as easily prove Forrest was not the father as prove that he was. Phil had no way to know in advance of the test. Phil didn’t know the precise circumstances. Forrest might have killed Allison because he was the father of her child, or killed her because he was not. Phil had no evidence that would prove Theodore Forrest had even known eight years ago that Allison was pregnant. And Forrest had to know, if the baby was to be his motive for murder.
Phil had collected a great many exhibits showing that Theodore Forrest had a suspicious relationship with Allison Straight. If a jury believed Phil-and probably Sam Bowen, who would be called to testify-then they might agree with Phil’s belief that Forrest had killed Allison. But they might not. Phil was a big-city private detective who would have to admit to having kidnapped a girl who was murdered a month or two later. And his credibility would also have to survive a thorough investigation by Forrest’s own private detectives. Theodore Forrest could afford the best lawyers to make himself look like a victim.
So Phil had kept collecting and assembling evidence. He had left the box under April’s bed while he had done it. He must have been afraid that his repeated visits to the Central Valley to collect more evidence might be noticed and reported to Theodore Forrest.
Phil had kept at his investigation for months. He had long before delegated all of the real work of the detective agency to Ray and Dewey. Billy Przwalski was still a trainee, but he was alert and energetic and smart. They could handle the cases, and April was appealing enough to keep buying them time when a client got impatient, and to keep at least some clients paying. Phil had spent all of his time on Theodore Forrest.
Emily sat on the wooden deck, holding the box of evidence in her lap and staring out at Puget Sound. The sun was getting lower now, and it looked like a pale red ball through the fog.
Sam said, “What do you think? Was he trying to blackmail Forrest? Is that what this is?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think that at first he was furious. I can feel it. He was trying to assemble all the evidence he could find to prove that Forrest murdered Allison. He was using his officialstatement style to tell what happened. I don’t think there would be any reason for him to do that for Forrest. He did a lot of work, and gathered things from up north that he didn’t know before, just so he would have a complete package. I don’t think he needed pictures of Forrest’s ranch to prove anything to Forrest. I think he was genuinely trying to put Forrest away.”