Free 13 Stolen Girls by Gil Reavill

yes, but also skin cells, hair, saliva, fibers from clothes. As we pass through the world we leave a detectable trail, like the phosphorescent wake left by a boat in the ocean.
    With a big enough computer and omniscient collection devices, our life paths could conceivably be traced all the way back to birth. Remington imagined swirling human trails covering the earth’s surface, spinning out, crossing one another, intertwining. Sometimes one human’s path ended when it encountered another’s. She recalled speaking to the broken mother, Brandi Henegar at the task-force event, and felt a fierce responsibility to pick up the least scrap of evidence. Something, anything, that might lead to the monster who took away a living girl and then brought her back to her mother dead.
    A figure came out onto the flagstone patio to her right. The undercover cop she had encountered before, out for a smoke.
    “And he’s still here,” Remington said.
    “Yup.”
    “Tell me again how you just happened to be in the neighborhood.” Remington regretted her tone. Maybe she was more tired than she cared to admit. She had actually caught glimpses of the guy throughout the previous night, staying out of the way, mostly, but being quietly helpful, directing the techs to this or that area of the house.
    “I’m driving around in the Valley, I hear this unbelievable call come over the two-way. Like I can hear even dispatch can’t believe it. I clock them reaching out to you, saying, like, ‘Mrs. Henegar wants to talk to Detective Remington.’ ”
    Jesus
, Remington thought.
Is everybody going to dog me with that?
    “I get my bony ass down here, put my shoulder to the wheel.”
    “Right,” Remington said. “Stepping up just like a real police.”
    “I know, I know, I get your tone. You’re wondering what a skeevy undercover is doing nosing around your case. It is your case, right? I mean, you’ve got the department’s blessing, right?”
    “How about I tell you this is my case, Tarin Mistry’s my case, and every damned missing girl in L.A. is mine, too?”
    Brasov mimed being blown backward by Remington’s ferocity. “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Sorry. I’m just…”
    “Frustrated, yeah. The brass, right? Plus those two LAPD dickwads, Rack and Ruin. The farther up the ladder you go, the farther your head’s stuck up your ass, am I right?”
    Brasov held out his hand for a low five, but Remington left him hanging. He shrugged it off. “Well, okay. Here’s me, and I’m thinking, I’ve got similars, maybe I can help the good lady detective out.”
    “Oh, you’ve got similars? You mean you have cases where missing individuals were brought back deceased to their former residences?”
    “Well, no—that’s a new one on me, and I bet it’s a new one on you, too. Soon as the TV hacks get wind of it, the NewsFive chopper is going to be hovering right about there.” He pointed upward. “Maybe, you know, you can indulge in some of your famous target practice, bring down a big one this time.”
    Remington let the comment pass. “So, similars, like how?”
    “Females under twenty-five gone missing. Vanished, like, no body, no witnesses, no nothing. ‘Family bereft, police puzzled,’ you know?”
    “It happens.”
    “Sure, it does. I’m working up a criminological treatise on how come our culture hates young girls so much while all the time professing to love them. Present my research paper to some big conference of sociologists, go on the morning talk shows.”
    “Good luck.” The guy was maddening. “I’m still not getting you.”
    “You delve much into the MUPR on Marilee Henegar?” He meant the initial Missing/Unidentified Person Report, pronounced “mooper.”
    Remington didn’t want to confess that she hadn’t yet studied the report. She merely shook her head.
    “It’s interesting. Compiled mainly by an interviewer at the Lost Hills sheriff’s station, down there right across the freeway from us. Deputy name of