"Any luck?" He turned to find Nancy standing behind him, holding out a cup of coffee to him. Gratefully, accepted the coffee and took a sip.

"No," he sighed. "You were right. This is like looking for needle in a haystack."

"Well," she said with a shrug. "We've only been here for about an hour. Can't give up on it yet." She sat down at a workstation near Joe. "If Greg doesn't have anything in his files, Clarissa may. She does a pretty good job as his assistant."

Joe nodded. "Can't hurt to look. I had just sort of hoped that maybe one of those girls from LA had been reported as a runaway. Then I might have been able to get enough personal information to talk to their parents or friends. Maybe someone knows why these girls filed missing persons reports on their babies and then never followed up.

Nancy stared at him for a moment. Joe could almost see the wheels turning in her head. "Why not just try to get addresses from the detective in charge of the cases."

Joe shook his head. "You know better than that, Nan. He's not going to give out information of any kind to just anyone."

"But if you explained that you were working with Frank, he could call Frank's precinct and verify your story.'

Joe just shook his head again. "I'm still a civilian. I'm not a part of either the NYPD or the LAPD."

"You already tried, didn't you?" she asked.

"Yup. And was given an emphatic no, followed by the third degree concerning why I was digging into these girl's backgrounds. I wouldn't be wasting your Sunday afternoon with this if I'd gotten anywhere on an official level."

Nancy typed a few keystrokes on the computer in front of her and sat back. "I suppose I could try getting the last known addresses from detective in charge. I mean, I know they were blacked out on the files I got for you the other day, but if I told him that I had a lead..." She stared at the screen for a moment.

"And," Joe prompted her. "Don't leave me hanging here."

"Maybe we're going about this all wrong."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Maybe," she began, "we're wasting our time looking into the past of these girls. Maybe we should try looking into their present."

"You mean talking to them instead of their friends? Now why didn't I think of that?" He pretended to smack himself on the forehead. "Oh, yeah, that's right. Maybe because all 3 of the LA cases listed the mothers' current whereabouts as unknown."

"Yeah, but how hard has anybody really looked for them? Two of them were 17 at the time their babies disappeared. The other was 16. All three girls came from pretty poor home lives, according to the files. Their names aren't coming up here as runaways. So one of two things have happened. Either no one cared enough to report these girls as missing; or they just flat out left home. Packed their stuff and moved out. The police department is understaffed and overworked. After no contact with these girls for a while, the cases probably ended up at the bottom of the stack. And believe me, Joe, the stack of missing kids here in LA is a pretty good sized, never ending stack. "

"Well then, what do you propose?" he leaned back in Greg's desk chair.

"I say we search the internet," she said. "We look for email addresses, phone records, websites that collect information to pass on to others who are looking to reconnect - like that Classmates web site. These girls might not have vanished. They may have just moved on with their lives. And if they've used the internet, they've probably left a trail behind them."

Joe looked thoughtful. "You may be right. Can't hurt to try." He closed out the document he'd been reading and connected to the internet. "I'll look for possible email or phone numbers and you search that Classmates site. Do we know where those girls went to school?"

"Yeah," she said. "It was in their files. Although one of them dropped out when she turned 16."

"Doesn't matter," Joe said. "Even if their names don't come up, you could get the names of the kids they would have went to school with. Maybe we can track them down through their classmates."

Two hours later, Joe and Nancy had a fairly lengthy of possible kids to contact. Joe had found the email addresses for four different Amber Martin's in the LA area. Two of them had telephone numbers listed, but neither woman answered the phone. Joe left messages on their machines in the hopes of one of them returning his call. A search on Jennifer Price came up empty. Clarissa Johnson had done the same, until Joe ran her name through a search engine. That had produced a small wedding announcement from a newspaper in Salinas, California. As of May, 2001, she was now Mrs. Trevor Carter.

Nancy had come up with similar findings. She found an Amber Martin listed among the graduates with the class of 2000, but there was not enough information in her profile to help them narrow down Joe's list of Ambers. She'd found a listing for Trevor Carter in Salinas, but nothing on Jennifer. Instead, she compiled a list of Jennifer's classmates and had begun searching the LA phone directory for listings.

"BOO!" came a high voice from behind her.

Startled, Nancy jumped and dropped the phone book. She turned to see Laurie grinning up at her. "What?" she began as she saw Kevin standing close by, holding a cardboard holder filled with sodas.

Laurie set a plastic KFC bag down at her feet. "We thought you might be hungry, Mommy," she said.

Joe swiveled around in Greg's chair and grinned. "You bet we are," he said. "I'm always hungry. What did you bring us, kiddo?"

Laurie grinned, and climbed onto Joe's lap. "Fried chicken! It's my favorite food in the whole wide world!"

"Really?" Nancy asked skeptically. "I thought last week you favorite food was pizza."

Laurie rolled her eyes at her mother. "No, silly, it's chicken now." She looked back at Joe. "Do you look fried chicken?"

"I sure do," he replied. "And I like mashed potatoes and coleslaw. I don't suppose you brought those too, did you?"

"Uh huh." she said. She leaned over to whisper in his ear. "And you can have my coleslaw. I don't like it very much."

Joe laughed. "Anything you want," he told her.

Nancy sighed. "I guess we're taking a break, then," she said.

Kevin nodded. "You left the house over four hours ago. I don't know what you two are searching for, but I figured that you could take a break long enough to have lunch."

Joe grinned. "You bet. As my friend Chet would say, 'there's always time to eat.'"

After lunch, Nancy gave Kevin a brief summary of what they had been searching for all morning. After giving in to his insistence that he be allowed to help, Nancy and Kevin began to place phone calls to the classmates of Jennifer Price while Laurie amused herself by drawing. It didn't take long before Kevin came up with a lead.

"You do?" Nancy heard Kevin tell the person on the other end of the line. "Really? I'm so glad that you know her - I was beginning to think I that I was going to have to go through the whole yearbook before..." he paused, a frown creasing his forehead. "Oh, I see." Nancy stopped what she was doing to listen to the conversation. Obviously, he'd found someone that knew Jennifer. She motioned for Laurie to go get Joe.

"You could show us? That would be really helpful. No, really, I mean it. I'm sure...yes...well, I think we could meet you there. Just let me gather my friends....yes, they're the ones that were trying to find her...ok, ok. Yes, we can be there in an hour." He slowly hung up the phone.

"Hey, great job!" Joe exclaimed as Kevin swiveled in his chair to face him. "Twenty minutes of sleuthing and you've already set up a meeting with a possible witness."

"Well," Kevin said slowly. "Not exactly." He sighed. "I think I found your girl, though."

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?" Nancy asked.

He looked at the list Nancy had given him. "According to Darcy Marx, Jennifer Price is still in Los Angeles. But you won't be able to talk to her. You can talk to Darcy, however. That's who I set the meeting up with."

Joe looked perplexed. "Why can't we meet with Jennifer?"

Kevin shrugged. "Because she's at Westfield Memorial, over on Glendon Avenue.

Nancy's face fell. "Oh, no," she said softly.

"Clue me in here," Joe said. "I didn't know there was a hospital on Glendon Avenue."

Nancy turned to face Joe. "Westfield Memorial is a cemetery, Joe."