Beneath Forbidden Ground by Doug McCall Page A

case, since her driving was mostly confined to the city.
    Simple math proved that when she brought the car in for servicing, the odometer read 34,550 miles, since the figure 37,550 was shown on the sticker. When the Civic was recovered, the odometer read 34,599. The car had been driven a total of forty-nine miles from the oil-change shop to it’s final destination. Allowing two miles from the shop to the insurance agency she worked for on the northwestern edge of Houston, then thirty miles to Waller, that left roughly seventeen miles unaccounted for. Everyone who had worked the cases, which now included Scallion and Murtaugh, was convinced those missing miles held the answer. But from the hardware store in Waller, there were an infinite number of locations within seventeen miles. A needle in a haystack seemed simple by comparison.
    The other evidence was the presence of dried mud on the floorboard of each car on the driver’s side. Plenty of samples were obtained, and the makeup of the soil easily identified. The kicker was that the soil type identified was prevalent throughout the region—there was nothing unique about any of the samples.
    Scallion breathed a frustrated sigh, settling into a chair. “There has to be an answer. Somebody, somewhere knows something.”
    “I know this has been voiced before,” Murtaugh said, “but maybe there is no connection. The cars weren’t all found the same morning, and they were spread over a thirty mile distance. Could just be coincidence.”
    Scallion thought about it, as he had several times since joining the case, then shook his head. “I can’t buy that, Denny. Call it instinct, if you want, but something ties these girls together.”
    His partner didn’t answer right away. Returning the photos to the file, he asked, “So whatta you think? Go back to the families again, see if their memories have improved over ten years?”
    Scallion could tell from the man’s tone he wasn’t too excited about that prospect, and neither was he. But it was the only logical step. There were definitely other cases they could address; never a shortage in that category. The missing girls, however, pulled at him. Maybe it was because he had a daughter whose age would match theirs if they hadn’t met whatever fate had befallen them. He and Marti would need what people now called “closure”, and their families deserved no less.
    “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Why don’t we split ‘em up? I’ll take the Crews and Juarez contacts, and you the other two.”
    The matter settled, the two cold case detectives prepared to face the muggy conditions, ready to scrape around the edges of old memories.
     

 
     
    7
     
     
     
    Arturo Juarez had immigrated legally to the U. S. in late 1991, several months following his sister’s disappearance. The two had aspirations of operating a restaurant together, providing Houstonians a taste of their native Panama. Freda was the oldest in her family, so she had come first to test the waters, managing to find work in one of the many Tex-Mex restaurants in the area. She sent money home whenever she could, and called at least every other week to let her parents know she was okay.
    It was a call they received from the restaurant manager that had changed everything. She had been missing from work for two days, and then her worn-out Nissan Sentra was found in the parking lot of an abandoned plant in Brookshire, nearly fifty miles away. Pulling her family’s phone number from her file, the manager’s main interest was in knowing if they had heard from her, and would she be returning to her job. Fearing the worst, Arturo and his father obtained temporary visas, allowing them to travel to Houston, hoping to find some trace of the girl. They were stunned and disheartened upon their arrival in Texas when informed that Freda’s disappearance was now being investigated along with three other similar cases of young women vanishing; their vehicles also discovered