Q is for Quarry (Kinsey Millhone 17)

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.