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I HANDED JOHN SAMPSON the ID, and he studied Corey McGovern’s picture. “No way she’s twenty-two,” he said.
“More like fifteen, sixteen,” I said. “But that ID is probably good enough to fool most liquor-store owners.”
“And maybe strip-club managers,” he said, still staring at the picture.
“Do you recognize her? There’s something about her that reminds me of someone.”
“Fresh-faced. Innocent. And yeah, there’s something about her that’s familiar.”
The medical examiner arrived to join the CSI techs, and we let the issue of the victim’s identity slide for the moment. Sampson organized a canvass of the people living in the ravine.
The tool-rental store would open in an hour, the vape store at ten, and the Avid Eyeball at four p.m. Whatever the security cameras might have picked up would have to wait.
While the ME worked, I tried to see if I could get the cell phone we’d found in the purse to unlock. The phone’s screen saver was a selfie of the same girl in the ID, heavily made up with lipstick and mascara and eyeliner. I looked at the birth date on the driver’s license and tried a couple of combinations of the month and day, with no luck. After a few failed attempts, I was temporarily blocked and had to wait to try again.
Sampson finished talking to someone down in the ravine, then climbed up and walked over to me.
“No one in the ravine has heard of Choir Boy,” he reported. “And there are no teenage girls living down there who might be our vic.”
Before replying, I glanced down and noticed that the block on the phone had lifted. I’d almost given up. But for the hell of it, I tried again with the birth date on the ID but adding seven to the year.
“I’m in!” I exclaimed, showing Sampson the cell phone.
“How’d you get that open?”
“Dumb luck.”
“Always better than intelligent misfortune.”
“You’re a very strange guy, you know that?”
“Always,” he said, and grinned. “Who is she? Check the settings.”
I thumbed the settings icon. The screen jumped to life.
“Phone belongs to Corey McGovern,” I said. “Same name as on the driver’s license, clearly the same girl.”
“Pictures? Social media?”
I backed out of the settings screen, found the photos icon, and tapped it. Hundreds of pictures. I went to the most recent, another selfie of McGovern grinning but looking far younger than the image on her screen saver.
The time stamp was the day before. There was a river below her in the background.
She wasn’t wearing any makeup in the photo. But it was the hairstyle that shocked me and triggered a memory. I turned the phone back to Sampson. “I know her now. So do you.”
He frowned and stared at the screen. “Are you sure?”
“The pigtails, John. The yellow ball cap.”
He blinked, looked into the distance, then back at the phone, and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. This is the same girl who walked across the top tier of the south embankment right before we saw Hawk yesterday. You think Corey was visiting Hawk?”
“I’m thinking we better have a second Hawk talk and—” I stopped abruptly. I’d been thumbing through pictures on the victim’s phone and froze when I saw one from four days ago.
“What?”
I held up the phone to Sampson. The photo was of Corey McGovern sitting on an upside-down five-gallon bucket. Hawk was standing on one side of her. And a taller, younger, and heavier man stood on her other side. He wore a ball cap, dark sunglasses, shorts, and a gray T-shirt with two words emblazoned across the chest in faded ornate calligraphy:
