Vanishing Girls(66)

I replace the notepad and move to the door, stepping out into the hall. From the front office comes the burble of conversation and ringing telephones. I don’t see Hernandez anywhere. But, coming toward me, a huge tote bag slung over one shoulder, is a woman I do recognize. It takes me a second to call up her name: Margie something, the reporter who has been covering the Madeline Snow case for the Shoreline Blotter and has been all over local TV.

“Wait!” I shout. She obviously hasn’t heard me and keeps walking. “Wait!” I call, a little louder. A cop, bleary-eyed, looks up at me from another glassed-in office, his expression suspicious. I keep going. “Please. I need to talk to you.”

She pauses with one hand on the door that leads out to the parking lot, scanning the room to see who was speaking, then has to sidestep as a cop enters from outside, propelling a lurching drunk in front of him. The man leers at me and drawls something I can’t make out—it sounds like Merry Christmas—before the cop directs him down another hallway.

I catch up to Margie, feeling breathless for no reason. In the glass doors, our reflections have the look of cartoon ghosts: big dark hollows for eyes, sheet-white faces.

“Have we met?” Her eyes are quick, assessing, but she pastes a smile on her face.

The receptionist behind the desk, the one who led me to Hernandez, is watching us, frowning. I angle my back to her.

“No,” I say, in a low voice. “But I can help you. And you can help me, too.”

Her face betrays no emotion—no surprise, no excitement. “Help me how?”

She studies me for a minute as if debating whether or not I can be trusted. Then she jerks her head to the right, indicating I should follow her outside, away from the watchful gaze of the receptionist. It’s a relief to be out of the stale air of the police station, and its smell of burnt coffee and alcohol breath and desperation.

“How old are you?” she asks, turning businesslike as soon as we’re standing on the curb.

“Does it matter?” I fire back.

She snaps her fingers. “Nick Warren. Is that right? From Somerville.”

I don’t bother asking her how she knows me. “So are you going to help me or not?”

She doesn’t answer directly. “Why are you so interested?”

“Because of my sister,” I reply. If she can dodge a question, so can I. She is a reporter, of sorts—and I don’t know that I want a story about Dara blowing up in the Blotter, not yet. Not until we know more. Not until we have no other choice.

She makes a grabbing motion with her hands—like all right, show me what you’ve got.

So I tell her about my trip to Beamer’s and the conversation I overheard outside Andre’s office. I tell her that I’m pretty sure that Sarah Snow was working for Andre, doing something illegal. As I talk, her face changes. She believes me.

“It fits,” she murmurs. “We know Sarah didn’t come home until almost five a.m. on Monday. She lied about it initially. She was scared of getting in trouble.”

“What if Madeline Snow saw something she wasn’t supposed to?” I say. “What if Andre decided to . . . ?” I trail off. I can’t bring myself to say get rid of her.

“Maybe,” Margie says, but frowns, unconvinced. “It’s a stretch. The cops know all about Beamer’s. But they’ve never pinned anything on Andre—nothing major, anyway. A few fines here and there from the health department. And last year an eighteen-year-old came in with a fake ID and then had to get her stomach pumped. But murdering a nine-year-old child?” She sighs. Suddenly she looks twenty years older. “What do you want from me?”

I don’t hesitate. “I need to know where the photographs were taken,” I say—not a request, a command.

Her expression turns guarded.

“What photographs?” she says. She isn’t much of an actress.

“The photographs on the red sofa,” I say, and then add, “There’s no point in pretending you don’t understand.”

“How do you know about the photos?” she asks, still dodging the question.

I hesitate. I’m still not sure how much I can trust Margie. But I need her to tell me where those photos were taken. Dara has a connection to that place. Whatever she’s afraid of, whatever she’s running from—it’s connected to that place, too.

“My sister was in one,” I say finally.

She exhales: a long, low whistle. Then she shakes her head. “No one knows,” she says. “The photos came from a password-protected site. Members only, super encrypted. All teen girls, most of them still unidentified. Sarah Snow was one of them.”

And Crystal, I think, the mermaid who had to quit FanLand after her parents found pictures of her posing for some weird porn website, at least according to Maude. Crystal is Dara’s age: seventeen this summer. Everything is beginning to make a terrible kind of sense.

“The cops caught a lucky break when they got one of the members to talk.” She pauses, looking at me pointedly, and I think of the accountant who was briefly questioned by police, Nicholas Sanderson, and the comment on the Blotter posted by an anonymous user: he likes young girls. Suddenly I’m positive that this is the “member” who talked to the police. “But even he didn’t know anything else. It’s a private network. Everyone has an interest in keeping it secret—the creator, the members, even the girls.”