Con said, "I think it was a fishing expedition. He might've tried five or six gals and finally one said yes." He shifted to a scooping technique, using his chopsticks like a little shelf onto which he pushed the bite of chicken. 'He got the hunk as far as his lower lip. Nope. I saw him shake his head. "I don't think we're dealing serial. This feels like a one-off." He tried again, this time lunging, his lips extended like an anteater's as he lifted his chopsticks. He captured a snippet of orange peel before the rest fell back onto his plate.

I grabbed a fork from the next table and handed it to him. Stacey made a doodle on the napkin, which by now was completely tattered. "Hang on. Let's back up a second. Agewise, it seems to me like she's bound to be closer to the high end – sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and up, instead of the twelve, thirteen end of the spread. Young girl like that, somebody's going to report she's gone, regardless of whether she leaves voluntarily or stomps out in a huff. You're a parent, you might shrug and not think too much about it, but when she doesn't come home, you're going to worry. You call around and find out her friends haven't seen her either and you're going to call the cops. If she's twenty and disappears, it might not raise any flags at all."

"Right. She could've had a history of taking off. This might have been one more in a long string of disappearances."

Dolan pushed his plate aside. "As long as we're making wild-ass guesses, here's another one. I don't think she's local. Killer didn't get into any facial mutilation so he must not've been worried someone would know who she was. He didn't know how long she'd be lying there. Suppose she's found the same day and they run a description of her in the paper? She's local, somebody's going to add two plus two and figure it out fast."

I said, "What if she's from another country altogether? England or Spain. There are probably plenty of places where dental care didn't rank that high in those days. It might also explain why she wasn't reported missing."

Dolan said, "A missing-persons report might've gone through Interpol and never reached us. It's worth checking. Maybe they have something on file."

"There's a note in there somewhere-woman claims she saw a hitchhiker who fit the girl's description outside of Colgate. This was a couple of hours before the clerk in the Gull Cove minimart saw that hippie girl on August 1. Could be she was working her way up the coast," Stacey said.