reached down into her attaché case. “I took the liberty of bringing in a few newspaper clippings on the off chance you hadn’t seen them already.” She pulled out a few papers with scanned newspaper articles on them and slid them across the table to me.
HEIRESS DISAPPEARS!
Police say few clues
I recognized the headline. The story had been so big—Sophie Thoms was a name so well known—that almost immediately the national news networks also picked up on it and began running with it. Within days , every talking head on television was pontificating about the disappearance of the young woman.
“It was a completely miserable week ,” Cecilia said, “the week after Sophie went missing. We had no idea what to think. I mean, if Nicki had been the one to disappear, we wouldn’t have worried so much. Nicki does things like that from time to time.”
“But not Sophie,” Oliver said.
“No,” Cecilia agreed. “Not Sophie. Sophie was the responsible one of the pair, even though she was younger. She was not one to simply disappear. I was very worried something was horribly wrong.”
Toni and I had followed the case closely this past July —I guess we were as obsessed about a missing-celebrity case as anyone else, especially given our experience with another missing celebrity, Gina Fiore, the year before. We didn’t know Sophie, but based on the lessons we’d learned in the Fiore case, I think we both suspected that it was likely a wealthy young woman like Sophie Thoms had chosen to disappear, just as Gina Fiore had chosen to do the year before. Sophie had probably decided that a break from the dull routine of fund-raising was in order and had secretly jetted off to the Mediterranean for a month. That was our theory, anyway. As a matter of fact, we figured she was probably getting a big kick out of watching the search efforts while safely tucked away in someone’s Lake Como villa.
Of course , Cecilia’s premonition had been proven right and the rest of us wrong—dead wrong—when, at 6:00 p.m . on Monday, July 16, in front of a nationally televised press conference, our friend Dwayne Brown of the Seattle Police Department announced to the world that Sophie’s body had been pulled out of the Cowlitz River ten days prior and had been lying on a slab in the Lewis County morgue the whole time the search had been under way in Seattle. The Lewis County medical examiner confirmed that Sophie had been strangled and dumped in the river on the evening of Thursday, July 5. A couple of fishermen discovered her body the next day, but the Lewis County Sherriff had been unable to identify her. Amazingly, even after the wall-to-wall television coverage, no one in the Lewis County coroner’s office recognized her. After a week , the sheriff sent a flyer to local jurisdictions from Portland to Vancouver, BC, in hopes that someone might know who she was. When the flyer eventually landed on Dwayne Brown ’s desk, the mystery was solved. Dwayne and Gus, being missing-person specialists, transferred control of the Sophie Thoms Task Force over to the homicide detectives. The manpower was doubled and the task force focus shifted from a missing person to a homicide investigation.
Cecilia pushed a strand of her blonde hair back behind her ear and continued. “I should state at the outset that neither of our nieces cared much about decorum. They’ve grown up in an age that seems to reward outrageous behavior.”
Oliver shifted in his seat, and I glanced over at him just in time to see him make a little eye-roll grimace.
Cecilia either didn’t notice, or else she did notice and simply ignored him. “I suspect that their continued appearance on page six must have caused a great deal of embarrassment to their parents—my brother, Sir Jacob Thoms, in particular . Nicki’s sex tape with that American rock-and-roll singer was probably the last straw. It certainly would have been for me.” She shook her head. “Poor
HEIRESS DISAPPEARS!
Police say few clues
I recognized the headline. The story had been so big—Sophie Thoms was a name so well known—that almost immediately the national news networks also picked up on it and began running with it. Within days , every talking head on television was pontificating about the disappearance of the young woman.
“It was a completely miserable week ,” Cecilia said, “the week after Sophie went missing. We had no idea what to think. I mean, if Nicki had been the one to disappear, we wouldn’t have worried so much. Nicki does things like that from time to time.”
“But not Sophie,” Oliver said.
“No,” Cecilia agreed. “Not Sophie. Sophie was the responsible one of the pair, even though she was younger. She was not one to simply disappear. I was very worried something was horribly wrong.”
Toni and I had followed the case closely this past July —I guess we were as obsessed about a missing-celebrity case as anyone else, especially given our experience with another missing celebrity, Gina Fiore, the year before. We didn’t know Sophie, but based on the lessons we’d learned in the Fiore case, I think we both suspected that it was likely a wealthy young woman like Sophie Thoms had chosen to disappear, just as Gina Fiore had chosen to do the year before. Sophie had probably decided that a break from the dull routine of fund-raising was in order and had secretly jetted off to the Mediterranean for a month. That was our theory, anyway. As a matter of fact, we figured she was probably getting a big kick out of watching the search efforts while safely tucked away in someone’s Lake Como villa.
Of course , Cecilia’s premonition had been proven right and the rest of us wrong—dead wrong—when, at 6:00 p.m . on Monday, July 16, in front of a nationally televised press conference, our friend Dwayne Brown of the Seattle Police Department announced to the world that Sophie’s body had been pulled out of the Cowlitz River ten days prior and had been lying on a slab in the Lewis County morgue the whole time the search had been under way in Seattle. The Lewis County medical examiner confirmed that Sophie had been strangled and dumped in the river on the evening of Thursday, July 5. A couple of fishermen discovered her body the next day, but the Lewis County Sherriff had been unable to identify her. Amazingly, even after the wall-to-wall television coverage, no one in the Lewis County coroner’s office recognized her. After a week , the sheriff sent a flyer to local jurisdictions from Portland to Vancouver, BC, in hopes that someone might know who she was. When the flyer eventually landed on Dwayne Brown ’s desk, the mystery was solved. Dwayne and Gus, being missing-person specialists, transferred control of the Sophie Thoms Task Force over to the homicide detectives. The manpower was doubled and the task force focus shifted from a missing person to a homicide investigation.
Cecilia pushed a strand of her blonde hair back behind her ear and continued. “I should state at the outset that neither of our nieces cared much about decorum. They’ve grown up in an age that seems to reward outrageous behavior.”
Oliver shifted in his seat, and I glanced over at him just in time to see him make a little eye-roll grimace.
Cecilia either didn’t notice, or else she did notice and simply ignored him. “I suspect that their continued appearance on page six must have caused a great deal of embarrassment to their parents—my brother, Sir Jacob Thoms, in particular . Nicki’s sex tape with that American rock-and-roll singer was probably the last straw. It certainly would have been for me.” She shook her head. “Poor
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