The Nowhere Girls

A cheer went up in the FBI office.
My face was on the TV screen hanging from a wall.
Another interview on how I broke the Mattheu case. Below my
face, a crawl moved across the screen identifying me as: “Nikki
Cassidy, the star FBI agent who rescued Julie Mattheu and
delivered a dramatic message to her kidnapper!”
I stood up from my desk and acknowledged the applause
from everyone, holding up a bottle of seltzer water in a mock
salute.
“Thank you, thank you,” I said. “It was nothing really.
Any dogged, determined, brilliant FBI investigator cut from
the same cloth as J. Edgar Hoover like I am could have
done it.”
Alex Del Vecchio, the woman agent sitting at the next desk,
leaned over to me as I sat down. Alex was dark-haired, Italian—
about the same age as me in her thirties. Alex and I had worked
a number of cases together, and we’d become friends as well as
partners.
“J. Edgar Hoover?” she asked.
“Too much?”

“I can’t believe that you’re actually comparing yourself to J.
Edgar Hoover, Nikki.”
“Why not?”
“History has shown us that J. Edgar Hoover was a pretty
mean, petty and despicable person.”
“Yeah, but we both liked to wear dresses.”
I’m riding pretty high in my career at the FBI right now. I
was doing well before the Mattheu case, but that one really
pushed me over the top and put me on everyone’s radar. Of
course, that’s not the reason why I did what I did. I did it
because I was determined to !nd Julie Mattheu.
Julie is a thirteen-year-old girl who disappeared from her
school in a suburb of Denver four months earlier. One minute
she was walking down the hall to class, the next she was gone.
After weeks of futile searching by police, my unit—the Crimes
Against Children Squad of the FBI—was called in to assist the
local authorities.
I spent long hours interviewing everyone who knew Julie
Mattheu—her family, her friends, teachers and others at her
school, even her minister where she went to Sunday school
every week. It was all a dead end. Everyone just assumed the
girl had been abducted and murdered, and that her remains
would be found. Everyone except me.
I operated on the theory that Julie was still alive, and I had
to save her. Finally, after days of interviews and record checking
and knocking on doors, I discovered that a school employee—a
janitor—had quit his job not long before Julie’s disappearance.
That was why I’d never talked to him when I was interviewing
school personnel. Then, when I went to his home, I learned he
had moved away from there too.
I’m still not sure if that was the red #ag that motivated me to
!nd him. Or that I had no other potential leads, so I chased this
one because there was no other choice. But I eventually tracked
him down to a small town in Oregon where he had moved.

The minute he opened his door, I knew he was the one.
Maybe it was the look of shock on his face when I showed him
my FBI credentials, maybe it was his nervousness in talking to
me, maybe it was the way he kept looking around the house like
he had something to hide. I got a search warrant, and that’s
when I found Julie Mattheu. He’d kept her chained up in a
small, locked room o! the basement. She was scared, she was
emaciated, but she was alive.
That by itself would have probably been enough to get me a
lot of media attention.
But then something else happened.
Just before we found Julie Mattheu in the basement and
arrested him, the guy made a break for it. He knew we’d “nd
her downstairs, so he broke away from the o#cer that was
guarding him. He ran out the front door, but I was right behind
him. I chased him down, got him on the ground and pinned him
there while I cu!ed him and read him his rights.
But I did a bit more than that too. I launched into a tirade
against him. Promising him he’d never have another day of
freedom in his life.
Of course, someone watching the whole thing had a cell
phone and got it all on video.
That video quickly went viral with millions of hits on
YouTube and Instagram and all the rest of social media.
Usually, that kind of viral video is bad for a law enforcement
o#cer. But this time the opposite happened, and public senti‐
ment was overwhelmingly on my side. I was a hero. And, even
more importantly, I’d saved a young girl’s life.
On the personal front, I’m in a relationship these days. A
real relationship. The most serious relationship of my life. His
name is Greg Ellroy, and he’s an attorney with a prominent
Washington, D.C. law “rm.
I met Greg about six months ago. It was a totally chance
encounter. I was standing in line at a Starbucks next to the FBI

offices to get my usual black coffee, which I needed to get
started every morning.
Except when I took the lid of the cup I’d gotten, it wasn’t
black coffee. It had whipped cream and specks of green and
other stuff I didn’t recognize.
“Are you looking for a black coffee?” I heard a voice behind
me say.
I turned around and saw a guy—good-looking, well dressed,
smiling—next to me.
“I am.”
“I’m looking for a peppermint mocha.”
“I have no idea what a peppermint mocha even looks like.”
“I do, and this is not it.” He showed me a cup of black
coffee. “I think we got each other’s orders by mistake.”
“So I guess we should exchange our drinks…”
“Not so fast. Not without some negotiations first.”
“Negotiations?”
“I’m an attorney. I negotiate everything.”
“Look, what do I have to do to get my black coffee?”
“Drink it with me.” He smiled.
That’s how it started. Everything moved very quickly after
that. And—a few weeks ago—he popped the question over a
candlelit dinner at Bourbon Steak, one of Washington D.C.’s
most prestigious restaurants. He proposed, I said yes, he gave
me a ring and our wedding is planned for a few months from
now in the fall.
So that’s me right now. A rising star in the FBI. A media
celebrity. Engaged to a successful, charming, loving man.
I guess I should be happy. And I am happy. But sometimes
—crazy as it sounds—I wish I could be… well, happier.
I still have the feeling that’s there’s something missing from
my life.
Something I wish I could fix.
Even though I’ve never been able to.

But life can hit you with unexpected twists—shocking
changes that turn your whole world upside down in a few
seconds.
And that’s what happened to me that day in the FBI o!ces
in Washington as I basked in the glory of my newfound fame.
Suddenly, and without warning, everything changed
for me.
“Someone called for you while you were taking your victory
laps,” Alex Del Vecchio said to me. “A lawyer. Said they repre‐
sented a client in prison who had information about a murder
case. Wants to meet with you in prison to discuss it. Wouldn’t
tell me anymore—said the prisoner insisted only on talking to
you.”
“Did the lawyer give you the prisoner’s name?”
“Yes, his name was David Munroe.”
Alex saw the look of shock on my face.
“Do you know him?” she asked.
“David Munroe is the man who murdered my sister.”