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.