Josie retrieved her phone from the countertop and pulled up a search screen. She wouldn’t have access to the police databases now that she was suspended, but she would have access to the Megan’s Law list in Pennsylvania which would tell her what Drummond had been in prison for.
A few minutes of searching was all it took to find him. He’d been convicted ten years earlier of forcible rape and unlawful restraint. He’d served seven years. His photo showed a wide-faced man with features that seemed better suited to a giant. He looked easily ten years older than his stated age of thirty-three and stared at the camera with a flat affect—almost the same expression June had had when they brought her into Rockview. Physically there, but not mentally.
Drummond was in his early twenties when he committed the crime that landed him on the registry, likely to have been his first. It looked as though he’d been on his best behavior once he got out, under the watchful eye of his mother.
Josie searched for her and found her obituary. She had died a few months before June went missing. In theory, with his mother gone, Drummond could have held June for a year and no one would have been the wiser. It was possible that June had packed up her messenger bag and walked away from her uncle’s house, then been picked up by Drummond.
Josie wondered if June’s messenger bag had been recovered at Drummond’s house. She fired off a quick text to Ray, asking him. She could sense his eye roll across the city of Denton. His response came back within minutes: No. No bag. Now stay out of it before the chief fires you.
She typed back: Have you checked out Drummond’s prison friends?
Chief already asked me to look into it. DON’T TEXT ME AGAIN.
She typed in a cutting reply, but then deleted it and simply wrote thank you instead. She might need Ray in the future.
“Are you online?” Luke asked.
She looked up to see him feeding stiff, uncooked lasagna noodles into the boiling pot of water.
“Uh, yeah,” she said.
Coleman had not been found at Drummond’s house, and neither had June’s messenger bag, which meant there was another location and someone else involved. Yet she couldn’t see Drummond being involved in trafficking. It made no sense. He was a collector. He had prepared a room—what had Ray said? He had outfitted it like a cell. Drummond had likely been planning to take someone. He’d wanted June for his own gratification, not to make money from her. Traffickers made money from the women and children they bought and sold.
Round and round it all went in her mind. Going nowhere.
“Josie?”
She looked up from her phone. Luke was standing beside her, an uncertain smile on his face. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “I said the lasagna will be ready in a half hour. Did you want to open a bottle of wine?”
She flashed him a smile. “I’d love to.”
Not as much as I’d love to do some digging in the police database, she added silently.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The lasagna turned out rich and exquisite. Even following the recipe, Josie doubted she could reproduce the flavor that Luke had. After dinner, they finally made it to the bedroom where Luke carefully inventoried and kissed all of her injuries from the Stop and Go, before he fell asleep, exhausted and snoring, in Josie’s bed. Her alarm clock read twelve fifty-eight as she slid out of bed, slipped into some sweats and a faded Denton PD T-shirt, and took her laptop into the kitchen.
She logged into her Facebook first, finding June Spencer’s page and running through her posts and profile pictures. There weren’t many. Going by what Solange had told her, Josie could imagine that the girl simply had very little to post about.
Next, she brought up Google and entered June Spencer’s name into the search bar to see if Trinity Payne had come up with anything new on the case, or if the story had been picked up by the national news outlets. There was a smattering of headlines proclaiming: “Denton Girl Missing for One Year Found Alive” and “Teen Runaway Kept as Sex Slave for a Year.” Josie checked the sources. They were all local, mostly WYEP and the few local newspapers in the area. A few listings below the stories about June, an older headline caught Josie’s eye: “Missing PA Housewife Found Alive in Denton.” Josie clicked on the story from USA Today and quickly scanned it. Then she opened a new browser window and entered the housewife’s name into the search bar. It turned up hundreds of news reports, the headlines all screaming the same thing:
MISSING PENNSYLVANIA WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH
MISSING PA MOTHER FOUND ALIVE
MISSING ALCOTT COUNTY WOMAN FOUND ALIVE AFTER 3 WEEKS
One by one, Josie clicked through and read each piece. Six years ago, Ginger Blackwell, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three from Bowersville, the next town over, west of Denton, disappeared on her way home from the grocery store. Her vehicle and all of her personal belongings—purse, phone, keys—were found on the side of a rural road between the grocery store and her home. Her groceries were still in the back of her car and her driver’s side front tire was flat. She had vanished without a trace.
The Bowersville police, the state police and the FBI searched day and night. A command center was established near the grocery store where she was last seen. Even a tip line was set up. All the major networks picked up the story. Blackwell’s husband was an early suspect even though he had an alibi. Once he passed a polygraph the police focused their investigation elsewhere, but with absolutely no leads the investigation ground to a halt. Josie vaguely remembered the case. Back then she hadn’t yet joined the police force; she was fresh out of college, living with her grandmother and still partying more than anything else. She was sure she was aware of it since it had happened so close by, but it hadn’t stayed vividly in her mind.
After three weeks, Ginger was found on the shoulder of Interstate 80 between the two Denton exits, bound and naked. She claimed that a woman had stopped to help her with her flat tire, and the next thing she knew she was being held prisoner, but she could not describe where she had been held or the person, or persons, who had held her. “It was just complete darkness,” she was quoted as saying. “Like being kept in a cupboard. The darkness was absolute. Like a black box.”
Josie sucked in a sharp breath as invisible fingers crawled up her spine. Like a cupboard. Like a closet. She didn’t have to imagine; she knew Blackwell’s terror. Was it too much of a coincidence? Blackwell had vanished without a trace along a lonely rural stretch of road, just like Spencer and Coleman. All three women had disappeared within a six-year period. That was a lot in a short amount of time for an area as small as Denton. Had the same person who had taken Isabelle Coleman, and possibly June Spencer, also taken Ginger Blackwell? Josie pulled up the Megan’s Law site in a new window and checked Donald Drummond’s page again. He had been in prison when Ginger Blackwell was abducted.
She flipped back to the tab with the Blackwell story on it and read on. Blackwell remembered next to nothing. She had no idea whether the woman who stopped to help her had been involved in her abduction or not. A Bowersville woman, the owner of a local hair salon, came forward later to say that she had stopped when she saw Blackwell’s vehicle broken down on the side of the road but that Blackwell was nowhere to be found. Ginger couldn’t remember if the salon owner was the same woman she spoke with. She didn’t remember being dumped on the interstate. Her injuries were minor. The news reports didn’t address whether or not she had been sexually assaulted.