Little Girls(87)

Karski’s house was searched, but no evidence was uncovered. He was officially dropped as a suspect . . . which meant the police no longer had a suspect. At one point, the FBI was notified, but details of what they accomplished—if anything—were vague at best. The only other piece of evidence ever uncovered in the case was one of Tanya Albrecht’s imitation Chuck Taylor’s, lying in a muddy ditch on the side of Kingland Terrance, only a few yards from the overpass. There were no tire tracks in the dirt, no burnt rubber on the pavement, and no additional signs of a struggle. Briefly, the neighborhood hummed with speculation that the Albrecht girl had possibly known her abductor. More locals were questioned by police, but these were all longshots that proved fruitless. In 1993, the Albrecht family relocated to Baltimore after Hal got a job with Domino Sugar. The new tenants that moved into their Highpoint Boulevard row home agreed to keep a laminated sign on their front door. It read:



Tanya baby we moved to a new house in baltmore.

We didnt never give up lookin for you. We always love you.

You come find your way home you come to the new house

We got your old bed and all your toys here waiting for you

Tanya baby.

We love you!





The Albrechts’ new address was printed below this note.

By all accounts, the new tenants left the little laminated sign on the front door until they were evicted in 1998.





Chapter 27


It was Detective Freeling who told Laurie Genarro this information. Of course, he hadn’t been one of the detectives to work the case—in 1989, Freeling hadn’t even been on the force yet—but he was familiar with it, and brought with him the original case file. Inside the file were several witness reports, along with the school photos of Tanya Albrecht that had been provided to the officers that night by her older sister Caroline. Laurie asked to see the photos, which Detective Freeling handed over with hesitation. The girl looked fragile, hopeless. For some reason, Laurie thought she also looked familiar. She thought of the skeletonized hand poking out from the tarp back in the godless, industrial mausoleum of garage 58, and shivered.

It was closing in on midnight. Laurie, Ted, and Detective Freeling sat around the kitchen table while three cups of coffee sat untouched and cooling in front of them. Susan had already gone to bed by the time Laurie had come back home, and the girl had slept through the detective’s assertive pounding on the front door. Laurie had waited to call the police until she arrived back home, her mind incapable of putting all the pieces together due to the strength of her disbelief until she was back in the house. Now, the house seemed preternaturally quiet. Laurie wished someone would speak again, but at the same time, she did not want to hear anything else Detective Freeling might have to tell her.

“Of course,” the detective said after a while, “we won’t be one hundred percent sure until her dental records are examined. But the arm—the one she had broken in two places when she fell out of the tree at age nine—still shows signs of the fractures. The body is badly decomposed, but the size of the remains looks to be about the right age. And, of course, there was the other sneaker.”

The other imitation Converse sneaker had been uncovered about an hour ago, as a search team went through the rest of the garage. It left little doubt.

“Will the family be notified?” Laurie asked.

“We’re tracking them down at the moment. It looks like Hal, the father, died a couple of years ago. Mesothelioma or something, I think. Last known address was some place out in Woodlawn. The kids would all be grown and moved on by now.”

“So who actually owns that garage unit?” Ted asked.

“Well,” Detective Freeling said, “that’s where it gets mucky. Company called Bartwell owns the land, including the shipyards, but leases the buildings—including those garages—to some Russian corporation, who has been working out of there since 2008 or so.”

“Russian?” Ted said.

Detective Freeling shrugged. “It’s not unusual. Hell, back in oh-six, George W wanted to sell off the whole goddamn Port of Baltimore to Dubai, for Christ’s sake. It was big news around here.” He sipped some of the lukewarm coffee.

“Aren’t there any records to show who owned it back then?” Laurie asked. “Back in 1989 when Tanya Albrecht disappeared?”

Detective Freeling’s lips narrowed and his eyebrows arched. He looked passively over the paperwork from the Albrecht girl’s case file that was spread out across the table. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up about that.”

“It was his,” she said flatly. “My father’s.”

She remembered the photo in her back pocket and handed it over to Detective Freeling now. The detective looked at it closely, flipped it around to glance at the back, then set the photograph on the table.

“That was with my father’s stuff,” she said. She pointed to the door with the 58 painted on it. “That’s it right there.”

“It could have gone through a dozen different hands since then,” Ted offered, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

We all know the score, she thought. Are we trying to kid each other?

“You said yourself there had been speculation that Tanya Albrecht might have known her abductor,” she said to Detective Freeling. “My father sold his share of the mill and retired sometime in the early eighties, but he would still have known some of the folks working there in 1989. He knew the layout of the property, knew the workers . . . but he lived out here, removed enough from their society to be forgotten.”