Another little girl has disappeared on Christmas night in Boulder.
Lauren was breathless when she tiptoed back into the kitchen. “Grace is fine,” she said.
“Yes.” I put my arms around her and planted my hands on her ass. Lauren and I were parents of a little girl who hadn’t disappeared on Christmas night. Somewhere else in Boulder another pair of parents couldn’t say the same.
“Are you catching? You’re not catching, right?” I asked. One of Boulder County ’s prosecutors was always on call for legal emergencies that might require the presence of a representative from the DA’s office. Infrequently, that meant that she was called to crime scenes. Like to the location of the disappearance of a girl.
“No, no,” she said, pulling away from my hug. “I couldn’t leave town if I was on call. You know that. Should I wake Grace?” she asked.
“Let me finish loading the car first. We’ll both get much more accomplished if she stays asleep until the last possible moment.”
An hour later we were climbing through Mount Vernon Canyon on I-70 into the mountains, sharing the freeway with at least a million other vehicles. Maybe two million other vehicles. Every one of the other vehicles carried skiers or snowboarders who had, like us, crawled out of warm beds before dawn in order to beat the traffic. I searched for irony, knowing it was there somewhere.
In back, secure in her high-tech car seat, Grace was flipping through a fat cardboard book about erudite dogs and talking to herself, while next to me Lauren was flipping through radio stations trying to find the latest news about what was going on with the missing girl back in Boulder. I wasn’t really listening to the radio, partly because Grace’s almost incomprehensible monologue was too cute to ignore, but mostly because none of the radio reporters seemed to know much about what was happening with this year’s missing girl, so they were using their airtime to talk about the other missing girl, the one who had disappeared eight Christmases before.
I’d long before decided that I despised hearing rehashes of that dreadful story.
“It’s a teenager. They think she’s fourteen,” Lauren summarized for me as the Denver station she was listening to faded away, its signal lost hopelessly in the mountain canyons. “Her father went to check on her early this morning. She wasn’t there. They were going to go skiing today, just like us. We did the exact same thing with Grace.”
I thought, But at our house Grace was in her bed, and felt a chill crawl up my spine and goose flesh spread across my shoulders and neck. What would it be like if she hadn’t…? I tried comforting myself with the fact that it wasn’t really as bad as the last time a girl went missing on Christmas night in Boulder. It wasn’t.
The last time the girl they couldn’t find was only six years old.
The last time a terrifying note was discovered on the stairs.
And I soothed myself with the obvious, the obvious being that six-year-olds don’t often run away from home, not for real, and certainly not on Christmas night. I reminded myself that a fourteen-year-old girl might run away.
Fourteen-year-olds do run away. Maybe this girl had just run away. Probably this girl had just run away.
Numerals representing the ages of the two missing girls lined up in front of my eyes as though they were symbols spinning on a slot machine. As the numbers came to rest, I did the math. Today’s fourteen-year-old missing girl was the same age-had been born the exact same year-as the tiny blonde who went missing eight years to the day before. If that other little girl had survived, the two children might be classmates, or friends, or sleep-over mates. They might go skiing on Christmas holidays with each other’s families.
I felt another chill.
“Their house is only a few blocks away from, you know,” Lauren said. She meant from the other house, the one where the little beauty queen’s dead body had been found by her father on the day after Christmas in an unused room in the basement, her head smashed, her neck cruelly cinctured with a homemade garrote.
“Where exactly?”
“On Twelfth, they said.”
Three blocks away. Just three blocks and eight years separated two little girls gone missing on Christmas nights in Boulder.
At that moment we were passing an overhead digital highway sign, the kind that in winter usually cautions motorists of icy and snowpacked conditions ahead. But this one had an even more sobering message-an Amber Alert. All concerned citizens were supposed to be on the lookout for a missing blond-haired, 115-pound, five-foot-six fourteen-year-old. No name was given.
My first reaction? Selfish. I hoped I didn’t know her. I hoped she wasn’t the daughter of any of my friends, or any of my patients. I wanted to feel the relief of insulation. I wanted her to be a stranger.
“Amber Alert,” I said to Lauren. “Look.”
She stared in the direction of the highway sign until we passed below it, then turned on her seat and faced our daughter. She said, “Your parents really love you, Gracie.”
Gracie laughed.
Obliviousness, I thought, can be a very, very good thing.
My detective friend, Sam Purdy, told me later on that it was as though a giant warehouse had been surreptitiously constructed nearby when the other case of the missing girl had finally faded into near oblivion and that all the satellite trucks, and all the microwave trucks, and all the flimsy network pop-up tents, and a few hundred cameras and microphones had simply been secreted away so they’d be ready for the next time.
The next time had turned out to be the massacre at Columbine and the time after that had been the Kobe Bryant circus up in Eagle County. After the Kobe invasion, all the equipment had apparently been returned to the secret warehouse to await the next, next, next time the almost-tabloid media would mobilize for a full-scale assault on a Colorado town. That was the only explanation Sam could concoct for how quickly the equipment reappeared on the streets of Boulder on the day after Christmas.
I was determined to miss it all.
By noon on that Boxing Day, Grace was either enjoying or enduring her first day ever in ski school and I was busy chasing Lauren, who was a much better skier than me, and a much, much better powder skier than me, through untracked down on the forest edges of the Golden Eagle run at the top of Beaver Creek.
In Boulder, three thousand feet below us in altitude-based on what Sam would tell me later-the cameras were already in place, the high-tech satellite and microwave trucks were bouncing signals around and through the atmosphere, and producers had already begun choosing locations for the stand-ups the on-air talent would do for that night’s news.
Some of the reportorial faces would be familiar from the last time Boulder had endured this invasion. Others were recognizable because of what the country had endured in the intervening years because of the tragedies that had befallen Chandra Levy, or Elizabeth Smart, or Laci Peterson. Or because of the innocent lives ended by the Beltway snipers. Or because of Kobe Bryant and whatever happened at Cordillera. Or because of whatever Michael Jackson was accused of lately. Or because of some other crime du jour.
Or.
In America, there were always plenty of candidates.
As each fresh tragedy was anointed a mega-news event, I’d quickly grown fatigued of the relentless television and newspaper and Internet and magazine coverage afforded, or foisted upon, all the previous victims and all the previous perpetrators, and upon the unsuspecting but apparently ravenous populace.
Somebody had to be watching all this coverage, right?
I suspected that I’d fatigue of this latest criminal/media extravaganza, right in my hometown, even faster. I really was determined to miss it all.
I was. Honestly.
Lauren and I grabbed a late lunch at Spruce Saddle, the big mid-mountain restaurant at Beaver Creek. It wasn’t lost on me that I was only a couple of ridge tops away from the elegant resort where Kobe and a young woman had crossed paths, and was within shouting distance of the courthouse where that diseased melodrama played itself out.