We moved to the couch.
“So,” I said, once we were seated, “knowing her name should help you find her killer, right?”
“Maybe. We’ll try, but I don’t know if we’ll get anywhere, even with the ID.”
“Tell me about her anyway. Why do you only have an age range if you learned who she is? And how did you find out?”
“She was nineteen when her family last had contact with her. She might have been older when she was murdered, though, because they haven’t heard from her in four years. So if she was murdered soon after she went missing, then frozen for all this time, she was nineteen. But if she was murdered more recently, she could have been as old as twenty-three. We’re working on narrowing that down, and having a name will help us do that. As for how we learned about her, we caught a break from NamUs.”
You live with a cop, you learn acronyms. But this one I knew from writing about missing persons. NamUs offered the best hope for putting names to unidentified dead that had come along in years. It’s a national database designed so that any individuals can enter information about their missing family members and search for matches, and also submit DNA samples without cost.
“So who was trying to find her?”
“Her sister. Peyton King. She’s three years older than Lisa.”
I felt my brows go up. “Not the parents?”
“Father’s dead, but the stepfather and mother had not reported her missing.”
“What? Her own mother didn’t wonder where her daughter was?”
“No, apparently there was a falling-out. Reed went to Nevada to make the notification and see what the locals could tell us-and he said everybody in the family seemed genuinely shocked by the news, and guilt-ridden. He remains suspicious about the stepfather, but not for the murder.”
“Suspicious-why?”
He shrugged. “No proof of anything, just a possibility of some kind of abuse. But it might just as easily be what the step-dad said it was-Lisa felt that her mother’s marriage to him was a betrayal of her father’s memory and never let go of her anger about that. Whatever the case, as a teenager, Lisa King had a history of running away from home.”
“Did her sister-Peyton? Did she have any theories?”
“Not that she was willing to discuss with us. She said that Lisa was ‘just a free spirit.’” He shrugged. “Again, some people are.”
“Some,” I agreed, “but if you get them to stop singing ‘Free Bird’ for a few minutes, you find out there’s often more to it.”
“Exactly,” he said, then fell silent.
“Sorry,” I said. “She’s-I didn’t mean to be flip-she can’t tell us her story.”
“We’ll make sure it gets told.”
Seeing the determined look on his face, I felt utterly confident that he would. “So tell me the rest of what you know of that story so far.”
He told me that Lisa King had settled down long enough to get a high school diploma but, soon after graduation, started roving again. During the first year she was gone, she called Peyton every few weeks. Lisa also sent pictures taken of herself here and there. In most she was grinning, smoking a cigarette, holding a drink, and shown partying with people she had chanced to meet along the way. She never named those in the photos.
Every now and then she’d give Peyton a cell phone number, and Peyton would call her, too, but most of the time Lisa didn’t carry one with her. The calls came less often in the second year, and in the spring of that year, on Peyton’s birthday, they had an argument.
“April twenty-sixth,” Frank said. “The last time she heard from her. Lisa was in California, but one of the reasons they argued was that she wouldn’t be more specific than that. She was acting coy. Peyton lost patience with it, hung up on her.”
“So now she’s on guilt overload?”
“Yes, even before we showed up. The news we had didn’t help, of course, but we tried to let her see that if she hadn’t entered the information on NamUs, she never would have had even this much resolution.”
“So what’s next?”
“We’re working with the local authorities to get a look at the phone records, so that we can at least try to figure out where Lisa called from.”
Within twenty-four hours, most of what Frank had told me was public knowledge. The police were actively seeking the public’s help at that point. Lisa King’s last call was placed in Las Piernas, from a phone booth outside a liquor store. The owner of the liquor store didn’t remember her, wasn’t even sure he still had records showing who had worked in his store that night, and security camera recordings from that date were long gone. Peyton had supplied some of the photos that were now being shown on the evening news-and that Ethan had up on the station’s Web site-so I got a chance to replace the single image of Lisa King I had been carrying around in my head. Now I knew what Lisa looked like thawed, clothed, and unpainted.
At least, not painted with moths. She was about five feet four, slender but curvy. She had large, light green eyes and favored heavy use of eyeliner. Her look wasn’t goth, though-it was almost Garbo. In nearly every photo, she wore a dark gray cloche hat. It looked good on her-she had a pretty face, a straight little nose, and full lips. She wore a silver cross on a delicate chain around her neck. A silver filigree cuff bracelet was the only other jewelry visible in any of the photos. In most of them, she wore short-sleeve, long, draping tops and dark jeans, and carried a large, cloth shoulder bag that I suspected doubled as a suitcase.
Phone calls started coming in. The hat had made her memorable, and the photos jogged memories. She was a fixture on the local party scene. She had a knack for finding someone who would give her a place to stay for a few days. None of the people she had stayed with-not all of whom volunteered that information themselves-had seen her after the date of the phone call.
Police used the information from the more reliable reports to conclude that it was likely she either met her killer not long after the call or perhaps already knew him by then. They began canvassing the neighborhood near the liquor store.
Two additional “boyfriends” were located, but both of them were college students who had been home for the summer. Neither had been in Las Piernas in the weeks before Lisa disappeared, and she had been seen alive after they had returned to school.
At that point, the investigation seemed to hit a dead end. Police followed up on any information that came their way, but none of it led them any closer to her killer.
Efforts to find Parrish and those who’d helped him escape were also ongoing but didn’t meet with any greater success.
I started seeing my therapist again, visits that at first kept me from going completely around the bend and eventually helped me calm down enough to sleep through most nights. She reminded me that Parrish was not Godzilla, and even when I replied that no, indeed, Godzilla was a much nicer monster, she helped me to stop supersizing Parrish and his power in my imagination.
She also reminded me to consider my own power, and the changes I had made since my last encounter with Parrish, including regular lessons and practice with Rachel in self-defense.
Life, as it goes on, always provides variety, and that alone kept me from living in a permanent funk. The days, after all, weren’t unrelentingly grim. Guy and Lydia’s wedding gave me a chance to celebrate their happiness, and if the presence of two of Parrish’s most likely targets meant a visible police presence as well, the occasion lost none of its joy as a result.
I was enjoying my new job as well, finding that the challenges in changing from print to radio reporting were more than a distraction from my fears, and stimulating. If it was a little strange to be mentored in this by Ethan, whom I had mentored at the Express, it wasn’t the cause of any resentment. I appreciated his willingness to teach me the ropes.