Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(30)

She typed back: Have you checked out Drummond’s prison friends?

Chief already asked me to look into it. DON’T TEXT ME AGAIN.

She typed in a cutting reply, but then deleted it and simply wrote thank you instead. She might need Ray in the future.

“Are you online?” Luke asked.

She looked up to see him feeding stiff, uncooked lasagna noodles into the boiling pot of water.

“Uh, yeah,” she said.

Coleman had not been found at Drummond’s house, and neither had June’s messenger bag, which meant there was another location and someone else involved. Yet she couldn’t see Drummond being involved in trafficking. It made no sense. He was a collector. He had prepared a room—what had Ray said? He had outfitted it like a cell. Drummond had likely been planning to take someone. He’d wanted June for his own gratification, not to make money from her. Traffickers made money from the women and children they bought and sold.

Round and round it all went in her mind. Going nowhere.

“Josie?”

She looked up from her phone. Luke was standing beside her, an uncertain smile on his face. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “I said the lasagna will be ready in a half hour. Did you want to open a bottle of wine?”

She flashed him a smile. “I’d love to.”

Not as much as I’d love to do some digging in the police database, she added silently.





Chapter Twenty-Five





The lasagna turned out rich and exquisite. Even following the recipe, Josie doubted she could reproduce the flavor that Luke had. After dinner, they finally made it to the bedroom where Luke carefully inventoried and kissed all of her injuries from the Stop and Go, before he fell asleep, exhausted and snoring, in Josie’s bed. Her alarm clock read twelve fifty-eight as she slid out of bed, slipped into some sweats and a faded Denton PD T-shirt, and took her laptop into the kitchen.

She logged into her Facebook first, finding June Spencer’s page and running through her posts and profile pictures. There weren’t many. Going by what Solange had told her, Josie could imagine that the girl simply had very little to post about.

Next, she brought up Google and entered June Spencer’s name into the search bar to see if Trinity Payne had come up with anything new on the case, or if the story had been picked up by the national news outlets. There was a smattering of headlines proclaiming: “Denton Girl Missing for One Year Found Alive” and “Teen Runaway Kept as Sex Slave for a Year.” Josie checked the sources. They were all local, mostly WYEP and the few local newspapers in the area. A few listings below the stories about June, an older headline caught Josie’s eye: “Missing PA Housewife Found Alive in Denton.” Josie clicked on the story from USA Today and quickly scanned it. Then she opened a new browser window and entered the housewife’s name into the search bar. It turned up hundreds of news reports, the headlines all screaming the same thing:

MISSING PENNSYLVANIA WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH



* * *



MISSING PA MOTHER FOUND ALIVE



* * *



MISSING ALCOTT COUNTY WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER 3 WEEKS



One by one, Josie clicked through and read each piece. Six years ago, Ginger Blackwell, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three from Bowersville, the next town over, west of Denton, disappeared on her way home from the grocery store. Her vehicle and all of her personal belongings—purse, phone, keys—were found on the side of a rural road between the grocery store and her home. Her groceries were still in the back of her car and her driver’s side front tire was flat. She had vanished without a trace.

The Bowersville police, the state police and the FBI searched day and night. A command center was established near the grocery store where she was last seen. Even a tip line was set up. All the major networks picked up the story. Blackwell’s husband was an early suspect even though he had an alibi. Once he passed a polygraph the police focused their investigation elsewhere, but with absolutely no leads the investigation ground to a halt. Josie vaguely remembered the case. Back then she hadn’t yet joined the police force; she was fresh out of college, living with her grandmother and still partying more than anything else. She was sure she was aware of it since it had happened so close by, but it hadn’t stayed vividly in her mind.

After three weeks, Ginger was found on the shoulder of Interstate 80 between the two Denton exits, bound and naked. She claimed that a woman had stopped to help her with her flat tire, and the next thing she knew she was being held prisoner, but she could not describe where she had been held or the person, or persons, who had held her. “It was just complete darkness,” she was quoted as saying. “Like being kept in a cupboard. The darkness was absolute. Like a black box.”

Josie sucked in a sharp breath as invisible fingers crawled up her spine. Like a cupboard. Like a closet. She didn’t have to imagine; she knew Blackwell’s terror. Was it too much of a coincidence? Blackwell had vanished without a trace along a lonely rural stretch of road, just like Spencer and Coleman. All three women had disappeared within a six-year period. That was a lot in a short amount of time for an area as small as Denton. Had the same person who had taken Isabelle Coleman, and possibly June Spencer, also taken Ginger Blackwell? Josie pulled up the Megan’s Law site in a new window and checked Donald Drummond’s page again. He had been in prison when Ginger Blackwell was abducted.