By the summer of 1991 Amanda Jane Dexter was sixteen and knockout attractive. The Naples-descended Marozzi genes had given her a figure to cause a bishop to kick a hole in a stained-glass window. The blond Anglo-Saxon lineage of Dexter endowed her with a face like the young Bardot. The local boys were over her like a rash and her father had to accept that. But he did not like Emilio.
He had nothing against Hispanics, but there was something sly and shallow about Emilio, even predatory and cruel behind matinée-idol looks. But Amanda Jane fell for him like a ton of bricks.
It came to a head during the long summer vacation. Emilio proposed he take her away for a holiday by the sea. He spun a good tale. There would be other young people, adults to supervise, beach sports, fresh air and the bracing tang of the Atlantic. But when Cal Dexter tried to eye-contact the young man, Emilio avoided his gaze. His gut instinct told him there was something wrong. He said, ‘No.’
A week later she ran away. There was a note to say they should not worry, everything would be fine, but she was a grown woman now and refused to be treated like a child. She never came back.
School holidays ended. She still did not appear. Too late, her mother, who had approved her request, listened to her husband. They had no address for the beach party, no knowledge of Emilio’s background, parentage, or real home address. The Bronx address he had used turned out to be a lodging house. His car had Virginia number plates but a check with Richmond told Dexter it had been sold for cash in July. Even the surname, Gonzalez, was as common as Smith.
Through his contacts Cal Dexter consulted with a senior sergeant in the Missing Persons Bureau of the NYPD. The officer was sympathetic but resigned.
‘Sixteen is like grown-up nowadays, counsellor; they sleep together, vacation together, set up home together . . .’
The Department could only send out an all-points if there was evidence of threat, duress, forcible removal from the parental home, drug abuse, whatever.
Dexter had to concede there had been a single phone message. It had come at a time Amanda Jane would know her father would be at work and her mother out. The message was on the machine tape.
She was fine she said, very happy and they should not worry. She was living her own life and enjoying it. She would be in touch when she was good and ready.
Cal Dexter traced the call. It came from a mobile phone, the sort that operates off a purchased SIM card and cannot be traced to the owner. He played the tape to the sergeant and the man shrugged. Like all Missing Person Bureaux in every force across the States he had a case overload. This was not an emergency.
Christmas came, but it was bleak. The first in the Dexter household in sixteen years without their baby.
It was a morning jogger who found the body. His name was Hugh Lamport, he ran a small IT consultancy company, he was an honest citizen trying to keep in shape. For him that meant a three-mile run every morning between six thirty and as near to seven o’clock as he could make it, and that even included cold bleak mornings like 18 February 1992.
He was running along the grass verge of Indian River Road, Virginia Beach, which was where he lived. The grass was easier on the ankles than tarmac or concrete. But when he came to a bridge over a narrow culvert, he had a choice. Cross via the concrete bridge or jump the culvert. He jumped.
He noticed something pass under him in the jump, something pale in the pre-dawn gloom. After landing, he turned and peered back into the ditch. She lay in the strange disjointed pose of death, half in and half out the water.
Mr Lamport glanced frantically round and saw four hundred yards away through some trees a dim light; another early riser brewing the morning cup. No longer jogging but sprinting, he arrived at the door and hammered hard. The coffee brewer peered through the window, listened to the shouted explanation, and let him in.
The 911 call was taken by the night-duty dispatcher in the basement switchboard at Virginia Beach’s police HQ on Princess Anne Road. She asked as a matter of urgency for the nearest patrol car and the response came from the First Precinct’s sole cruiser, which was a mile from the culvert. It made that mile in a minute, to find a man in jogging kit and another in a dressing gown marking the spot.
It took the two patrol officers no more than two minutes to call in for homicide detectives and a full forensic team. The householder fetched coffee, which was gratefully received, and all four waited.
That whole sector of eastern Virginia is occupied by six cities with contiguous boundaries, a conurbation that extends for miles on both banks of the James River and Hampton Roads. It is a landscape studded with navy and air bases, for here the Roads run out into Chesapeake Bay and thence the Atlantic.
Of the six cities, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton with Newport News, Suffolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, the biggest by far is Virginia Beach. It covers 310 square miles and contains 430,000 citizens out of a total of 1.5 million.
Of its four precincts, Second, Third and Fourth cover the built-up areas, while First Precinct is large and mainly rural. Its 195 square miles run right down to the North Carolina border and are bisected by Indian River Road.
Forensics and Homicide arrived at the culvert around the same time, thirty minutes later. The Medical Examiner was five minutes after that. Dawn came, or what passed for dawn, and a drizzle set in.
Mr Lamport was driven home to shower off and make a full statement. The coffee brewer made a statement, which is to say he could only aver he had heard and seen nothing during the night.
The ME established quickly that life was extinct, that the victim was a young Caucasian female, that death had almost certainly occurred somewhere else and the body had been dumped, presumably from a car. He ordered the attendant ambulance to take the cadaver to the state morgue in Norfolk, a facility that serves all six cities.
The local homicide detectives took time out to muse that if the perpetrators, who seemed to have a moral code on the level of a snake’s navel and an IQ to match, had driven three miles further on, they would have entered the swamp country at the head of Back Bay. Here, a weighted body could disappear for ever and none the wiser. But they had seemingly run out of patience and dumped their grisly cargo where it would be quickly found and start a manhunt.
At Norfolk, two things happened with respect to the corpse: an autopsy to establish cause, time and, if possible, location of death, and an attempt to secure identification.
The body itself yielded nothing to the second search: some skimpy but no longer provocative underwear, a badly torn and slinky dress. No medallions, bracelets, tattoos or purse.
Before the forensic pathologist began his task, the face, which bore lesions and contusions compatible with a savage beating, was restored as best possible with sutures and make-up, and photographed. The photo would be passed around the vice squads of all six cities, for the body’s dress code seemed to indicate a possibility that she had been involved with what is hopefully called ‘night life’.
The other two details the ID hunters needed and got were fingerprints and blood group. Then the pathologist started. It was th
e fingerprints they pinned their hopes on.