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Tuesday
All four parents were clustered around a single laptop, studying the grainy security video of their girls in front of the concessions booth. With no sound, it was like watching a silent movie.
Darcy was wearing a skin-tight black T-shirt with a rose on the front of it over black tights with mesh inserts, and Mia sported a crop top that didn’t meet her low-cut jeans. The girls were bracketed by two young men. The encounter appeared friendly. All four of them were laughing as they approached the counter. One of the men had long hair and wore plugs in his earlobes; the other had tight curls of dark hair and a beard that needed trimming. The men bought flavored waters and French fries for the girls, soft drinks and fries for themselves, and then they all wandered away.
“Who the hell are those guys?” Paul Ireland asked the others.
“They’re not the ones I’m worried about,” Robin said. “Rewind, please.” She watched as the video backed up a few frames to the scene where the girls were standing in front of the concession counter. “There! Stop!” She poked a finger at the screen.
Finn focused on an inmate in the background. He was carrying a trash bag over his shoulder, his upthrust arm obscuring part of the GCDC lettering on his shirt. His head was turned toward the camera, his gaze aimed at the concession stand.
Robin wasn’t looking at the inmate. “I don’t know the boys on either side of the girls,” she said. “But that guy in the back, the one with the earring? He looks familiar to me.” She pointed.
The grainy video showed a youth waiting in line behind the girls. He was of average height with light-colored, cropped hair. The only distinctive feature was a blobby earring dangling from his right ear. Finn guessed that the blob might be a silver skull, but the video was not clear enough to determine that for sure.
Andrea shook her head. “Doesn’t look familiar to me. He looks older than our girls.” She leaned forward to peer closer. “Is he staring at Mia?” She turned to the other mother.
“Give me a minute,” Robin muttered, turning away from the screen to stare at the wall.
The two husbands exchanged blank looks.
After a few more seconds, Robin snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it. That boy is older. He was a senior at Stanton when Mia and Darcy were in ninth grade. He had darker hair, then. He was kind of a scary kid.”
Finn raised an eyebrow. “Scary?”
Robin met his gaze. “See, I volunteer-tutor special needs students. Back then I had this one really pretty girl, Taylor, a junior at the time. Very sweet and very naive. She was extremely dyslexic; that’s why I was working with her. That kid”—she pointed to the screen again—“stalked her. Taylor didn’t like him, but he wouldn’t stop leaving her candy and notes, and she told me he’d hide behind corners and jump out to surprise her. She was really scared of him. He was reprimanded multiple times but never seemed to get the message. After he keyed her car because she wouldn’t go out with him, the parents transferred Taylor to another school.”
Interesting. Finn turned to the Irelands. “Was that scratch on Darcy’s car when you last saw it?”
“I honestly don’t remember,” Andrea murmured. “Darcy never said anything about it.”
Paul remarked, “It seemed fresh to me, like it might have happened in the last few days.”
Andrea raised both hands to her face. “Oh my God, why didn’t I know any of this? That creep was at the festival with the girls?”
Robin glanced at the other woman but then continued her story. “After the problem with Taylor was solved, I thought it was over. But then, in a couple of later photos from school events, I noticed his eyes were always on Mia. I was just getting ready to complain to the principal when his family moved away, thank God.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “What was his name?”
She moved her focus to the wall again for a long moment as she thought, muttering, “Connor something . . .” She abruptly snapped her fingers and swiveled back to Finn. “No, it was Cooper. Cooper Trigg! T-R-I-G-G.”
Finn glanced at Keith Valdez.
The man held up both hands. “Don’t look at me.”
Finn made a note on his pad, did the math in his head. “So this Cooper would be around twenty-one now?”
“Or maybe even twenty-two or twenty-three, depending on when his birthday is. A lot of parents hold back their boys for a year,” Robin informed him. “Boys are less mature, and Cooper certainly fit into that category.” She chewed on her thumbnail and stared at the computer screen, a worried expression on her face.
Stifling the urge to defend the males of his species, Finn wrote down the information. “When did you last see this Cooper Trigg?”
“Oh, gosh, his family moved away at least three years ago,” Robin told him. “I’m not sure Mia really knew him. Cooper was an oddball at the Academy; there on some sort of hard-luck scholarship.” She glanced again toward the image frozen on the screen. “I hope the girls didn’t run off with him.”
“Do you know where the Trigg family moved to?” Finn asked.
Robin shrugged. “No. I just knew Cooper was gone and I didn’t have to worry anymore.”
“But he’s here,” Andrea interjected. “And he keyed Darcy’s car.”
Her husband, Paul, rubbed her arm in sympathy or comfort. “Maybe he thought it was Mia’s.”
Robin frowned at him.
“We don’t know for sure that this guy is Cooper Trigg or that he keyed the car,” Finn reminded them.
“Maybe Mia and this boy are online friends?” Keith Valdez suggested.
“Maybe.” Robin nodded. “If he reached out to her. I don’t think she ever noticed him when they were both at Stanton.”
“Maybe Instagram?” Andrea said. “Darcy uses it nonstop. Oh, God. Do you think the girls are with this Cooper guy? Or whoever these two in front are?” She turned to Finn for an answer.
“No way to know for sure, but it’s a place to start. The girls probably met them here. And at the time of this video, it doesn’t look like either of the girls have even noticed Cooper. Can you get into your girls’ Instagram accounts?” Finn asked all of them.
Furrowed brows all around. Clearly, none of them knew how to do that.
“We could create our own accounts and follow them,” Paul Ireland suggested, pulling a cell phone out of his pocket.
Finn thought that would likely be a waste of time, but these parents needed something to do. “Might be a good idea,” he said.
His cell phone buzzed.
Deputy Wilder told him, “Your canine crew is here.”
“I’m on my way.” He pocketed the cell phone again. Bending down to squint at the computer screen, he made a note of the time stamp on the video. “This is from Saturday, so there may be more. Keep watching.” He pushed the notebook back into his shirt pocket. “I’ll let you know when I locate Cooper Trigg.”
Both sets of parents returned to their respective areas and focused again on the security videos.
* * * * *
The canine Search and Rescue teams were not what he’d expected. A chunky, middle-aged woman named Suzanne, dressed in jeans and a blue SAR T-shirt, held a beagle on a leash. A younger man, Tim, wore a matching shirt, and was partnered with a black Lab. After taking one glance at Finn’s skeptical expression, Suzanne chuckled. “Quit worrying, Detective. Maggie and I are the best tracking team east of the Columbia, and Tim and Shade here are a close second.”
“Hey!” The man elbowed Suzanne. “If we can’t find ‘em, no dog can.”
The beagle uttered one sharp bark, as if to emphasize the point. The Labrador retriever glanced sideways at the beagle like he was appalled by the noise.
“Okay, then,” Finn said. “We’ve got two missing teenagers.”
“When did they disappear?” Tim asked.
“Most likely around forty-eight hours ago.”
The dog handlers glanced at each other, their expressions grim. Then Suzanne said, “That’s a long time. Hundreds of people could have crossed this area since then, right?”
Finn nodded glumly. “That’s certainly possible.”
Tim met his gaze. “Well, we’ll try, but the odds are against us.”
“Understood.” Finn snapped on his latex gloves and pulled open the car door. “I presume clothing is best?”
“The smellier, the better.” Suzanne stepped forward.
He found two pairs of panties and two T-shirts so stained and wrinkled that the girls might have been living in them. “I can’t remember what belongs to which girl.”
“Doesn’t matter since we’re searching for both.” Suzanne took the items from him and held them out toward her dog.
The beagle pushed her nose into the bundle of clothes, still wagging her tail, and then made a soft noise that might have been a groan of satisfaction. The Lab was slightly more dignified, but thumped his tail and made an excited huffing sound, his eyes focused on his handler.
“Find, Maggie!” Suzanne ordered. “Find!”
Tim echoed, “Find, Shade!”
The beagle gave a yip of excitement and tugged at the leash. Tim shoved the clothing back into Finn’s hands.
“Okay to let them off the leads?” Suzanne asked.
Finn didn’t see any reason why not.
Tim and Suzanne unsnapped the leads from their dogs’ collars. All four of them took off, the handlers trotting after the dogs down a gravel pathway that led from the campground toward the amphitheater. Finn placed the clothes back into the car and then followed at a slower pace, keeping the dog teams in sight as he talked on his cell phone, asking Miki back at the station to locate Cooper Trigg and find out if he or his parents owned vehicles.
The beagle was in full bugling mode now, and Finn stopped to watch as the canine teams jogged across the grassy area above the amphitheater. At one point the beagle hesitated and zigzagged across the ground for a few minutes, then took off again down a sidewalk toward the concession stand. The Lab cruised the aisles of the amphitheater for a bit, then also headed for the concession area.
He’d worked cases where dogs had found corpses and hidden suspects, and in one rare, happy event, an autistic teenager who’d wandered away from a train station while his family was traveling.
He wondered if his own dog Cargo would be able to find someone. He couldn’t envision the giant mutt zigzagging around on a mission like Maggie and Shade were now. Cargo could probably locate someone only if that person had dog chow in his pocket. The dog didn’t even fetch. Lok and Kee were actually much better at that. The cats were also experts at locating spiders and insects in the house, and they’d once imported a small garter snake that had freaked him out when it emerged from beneath under the coffee table.
Finn hoped the dogs would indicate that the girls had walked away from the festival grounds, perhaps toward the Columbia Gorge, but after nosing around the closed concession stand for a few minutes, the two teams headed back toward the camping area, where they circled a bit more. Finn got tired just watching the handlers jog behind their dogs.
Finally Maggie’s hindquarters dropped to the ground only a few yards from the abandoned car. Fixing her soulful eyes on Suzanne’s face, the beagle barked twice. The Lab, too, stopped but remained standing, staring into the distance toward the road and then looking back to his owner.
The woman turned to Finn. “Clearly the girls, or at least one of ‘em, walked all over the place here, and probably sat or laid down there on the grass.” She pointed to the general area where the dog had zigzagged. “But now Maggie’s telling me that the scent trail ends right here around the campground. Shade agrees.”
“Which means that the girls most likely did not leave here on foot,” Tim summarized.
Finn rubbed his chin, realized he’d miss a patch of whiskers while shaving this morning. “I was afraid of that.”
“Now you know for sure,” Tim concluded.
Finn stared toward the entrance road as if he could conjure the girls. “I don’t suppose Maggie or Shade can give me a hint about the type of vehicle they got into?”
Suzanne laughed. “If only.”
“Thanks.” As he watched the canine teams depart, Finn felt a new appreciation for Grace’s signing gorillas. Neema had originally described Finn as Dog Cat Gun Man because she’d smelled cat and dog essence on his clothing and noticed his gun. If she had seen a vehicle, the gorilla might be able to describe the color, and maybe even a distinguishing feature or two. Maggie’s bark and Shade’s body language provided no clues other than that the girls had vanished from the campground in a vehicle, which he’d already suspected.
In the distant hills, he spotted a line of horseback riders. When the news broke about the missing girls, the local 4H horse club had volunteered to search the area around the amphitheater. He was grateful they were already on the job. This afternoon, another club had promised to launch drones and film the area. Since the girls seemed to have left in a vehicle, he wasn’t hopeful, but it would make his life easier if the volunteers could find a clue or two. Please, he thought, don’t let them find a corpse.
His phone buzzed. He was surprised to see the caller identified as “Alice Foster, FBI.” He’d worked with Foster before, when Ivy Morgan had been abducted as an infant. “Hello, Agent Foster,” he answered. “Detective Finn here.”
“I see you filed an alert for two missing teenagers in your area?”
The FBI trolled all of Washington’s law enforcement sites? “Unfortunately, yes.”
“Can you give me an update?”
Her tone, which seemed to imply that she perceived herself as his boss, grated on him, but his irritation was eased when almost instantly she added, “I’d like to help if I can. The girls vanished from a big music festival at the Columbia Gorge, correct?”
“Yes. A multiday event called the Sasquatch Festival. I’m still collecting information. We have identified a person of interest on a security video.”
“Do you suspect the girls may have been kidnapped?”
He sighed. “That’s one possibility. They left a car and a tent in the campground here. But they might have just gone off partying, too. The caretaker tells me that happens from time to time.”
“Big concert events like that can be hunting grounds for human traffickers. Multiple abductions have happened in other states at similar venues. And the proximity of the Gorge site to a major trucking route like Interstate 90 makes it even more attractive to traffickers.”
He gulped. That possibility of human trafficking hadn’t even occurred to him. Two pretty young women would be prime targets. “I’d appreciate your assistance, Agent Foster. Are you still in the Los Angeles office?”
“I’m in Seattle for a seminar. I can be in Evansburg tomorrow morning.”
He was grateful she hadn’t mentioned anything about gorillas. They arranged to meet at the Evansburg Police Department at nine a.m.
When Finn told the Valdezes and the Irelands that the FBI was sending an agent to assist, their faces registered even more alarm.
“Trust me,” he told them. “This is an excellent development. The more resources and personnel we have working on this case, the faster we’ll find Mia and Darcy.”
