She used the same techniques to follow Markovich out of DC that she had used to track him to Solyanka. He drove north, out of the District via the Baltimore-Washington parkway. From there, it was a series of highways until they got off at the Russell Street exit in Baltimore.
It was hard for Angie to focus for the hour and thirty minutes the drive took. She kept battling the urge to look at the image from NCMEC. She didn’t want to give it a cursory glance. It needed to be studied, valued.
What would that little girl look like now? Where was she living? Who was she? But the biggest question loomed largest in Angie’s mind. Why had her mother asked for forgiveness?
Even with Mike following, Angie refused to lose her concentration even for a moment. To do otherwise would be unprofessional and undisciplined . . . and uncharacteristic.
They followed Markovich down Martin Luther King Boulevard and onto Cathedral Street. There were some nice shops there, a little gentrified—not a hood, not that intense—but they were on the outskirts of Middle East, Baltimore, a neighborhood patrolled by the Baltimore Police Department’s eastern district, and the place most responsible for the high per capita murder rate.
The Wire and Homicide had filmed there—which Angie wouldn’t have known if Mike hadn’t told her.
On Markovich’s tail, Angie and Mike drove past a Zumba studio, a flower shop, and an art supply store. The sparse pedestrian traffic showed a blend of races, though white was in the minority.
Markovich pulled into the parking lot of an auto repair place adjacent to a three-story brick apartment building that had no fire escape, but all of windows had bars.
Angie wondered if the top floor tenants worried about a rock climber breaking in. Those bars aren’t for keeping people out, she thought.
She came to a stop in front of a commercial printer over on the next block. It would be too conspicuous to park in front of the auto repair place where Markovich had gotten out. Using her binoculars, she watched Markovich make his way down an alley between the parking lot of the repair place and the apartment building.
She got Mike on the phone and wondered if he shared her gut feeling. “Do you think there’s a rear entrance to that apartment building?”
“I was asking myself that very question. Let’s watch this place for a while.” He was parked on the other side of the two-way street, a few cars behind her, facing the opposite direction.
“You watch for me for a bit. I want to take a look at this girl.”
From her PI work, Angie knew a great deal about age progression. It was especially tricky to do with very young children from a single photograph. Face shapes change dramatically by adulthood, making it hard to predict the changes. Variables in lighting, shadows, and expression compounded the challenge.
NCMEC was good at solving that complex problem. Its age-progressions had, over the years, been instrumental in the recovery of hundreds of missing children. It was part art and part science, and the folks at NCMEC were kind to apply their expertise to Angie’s case.
NCMEC could also help her with identification, since they regularly shared age-progressed images with the FBI and with thousands of police departments across the nation. But this photo came with no parent for NCMEC progression experts to consult. Nobody could say anything about the girl’s personal tastes—how she maybe loved bangs or preferred her hair short. They didn’t have photos of the parents as children or of other siblings to better predict how the skull and face would lengthen. Age progression of the single photograph amounted to little more than a shot in the dark.
Angie held a breath, waiting for the image to display on her phone. And there she was.
The older version of Jane Doe had fuller lips than the original photograph. Her eyes were round and wide, but a bit more deeply set, which perhaps was why her smile still seemed a little sad. The forensic artists gave her dark brunette hair and made it long and layered. The face shape they selected was more oval than the young girl’s and the nose had grown prominently.
Angie got a sense this girl was from some distinct ethnicity. Italian, she thought. The darker complexion seemed to go with her darker hair. She had flawless skin, which was nice to imagine, but probably inaccurate.
She was, however, very pretty, heads-turning pretty. And if anybody did give her a look, they would see a beautiful woman with one perfectly formed ear.
Angie could not take her eyes off the image. This girl was connected to some secret part of her mother’s life.
Angie called Mike again. “Did you look at the rendering?”
“Of course,” Mike said. “How could I not? Beautiful girl.”
“It’s driving me crazy not knowing.”
“NCMEC will send it around. They’re going to see about running it through the FBI’s face recognition database.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“We’re going to get an answer, Ange. It’s just going to take time.”
“Between that picture from New York City in 1988 to this one, I can’t stop wondering about our girl’s journey. What do you think her name is?”
“How am I supposed to know?”