The Fight Against Crime: Notes from the Front : Investigators Search for a Happy Ending

Detective Raynette Sincosky sat quietly at the end of a long wooden table in the Missing Persons office at Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, staring at a color snapshot.

Down both sides of the table--amid coffee mugs, an empty doughnut box and stacks of papers--other detectives were on the phone, filling out forms or chatting about the upcoming weekend.

A portable radio tuned to an oldies station played Elvis singing, “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”

The photo was of a woman with an intense, serious expression, standing in front of a wood-paneled wall. It was Suzanne Black Arbell, 62, who was last seen by friends on April 18 at her Van Nuys apartment.

That evening, Arbell told a neighbor she was going out of town for a couple days. Her car was found April 25 in a remote area near Victorville, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. There were no signs of foul play. The car had gas and was drivable. The only personal item inside was Arbell’s curling iron.

There are no leads or suspects.

“If this woman shows up just fine somewhere,” Sincosky said, “I’m going to just feel like slapping her and saying, ‘Don’t you know there were people looking for you?’ ”

Sincosky, who transferred to the Missing Persons Unit at Parker Center only four months ago, looked at the photograph so intensely it seemed she was hoping there was something--anything--there that would reveal what happened to Arbell. Her partner, Detective Ken McCourt, smiled and shook his head.

“This is her first really good one,” said McCourt, who has been working missing cases for about five years. “It’s cases like this that can make a man bald.”

McCourt, of course, is almost bald.

Together, McCourt and Sincosky handle all the missing cases in the San Fernando Valley that come to the attention of the Police Department. In a normal week, that amounts to 40 to 50 cases, according to McCourt. They also handle all the cases on the Westside.

Luckily, the majority of these missing people are easily found.

“In over half, we make the first call after we get the report and they are already back,” McCourt said.

Sincosky was on the phone to a mother who had earlier reported her teen-age daughter missing. The daughter, whose angelic picture was included among the paperwork on the case, had returned.

But the mother was still distraught. “The daughter has a cocaine problem,” said Sincosky after she hung up.

Sincosky gave the mother some help-line telephone contact numbers, but could do little else.

“People sometimes want us to find out what their kids or spouse are doing out there as much as they want to find them,” McCourt said. “I tell them they need a private detective, not us.”

Some cases are tougher, he said: “We get people who call up and say, ‘I have no idea why my wife left, we get along great.’ Then you check in the computer and out comes four or five spousal abuse reports. We start looking for her in the women’s shelters.”

Some of the most heartbreaking cases are people with Alzheimer’s who wander away from home. “They are a priority,” Sincosky said, “because they can’t take care of themselves.”

And some cases simply look bad right from the beginning. McCourt goes to the computer to check the name of a topless dancer from the Valley who has not been home in several days. “Maybe she is just off with a new guy. But there is always the chance it could be bad.”

Sometimes it turns out to be a murder case, sometimes a suicide. And sometimes a case remains a mystery.

Arbell, a United Airlines retiree of less than a year, does not fall into the usual missing persons categories.

“We call each other on our days off, just to talk about this one,” Sincosky said.

Last week with no leads left to follow, they took the rare step of issuing a public missing persons bulletin in the hope that a news report might generate some leads.

“Right now we’ve got zero,” McCourt said.

Both McCourt and Sincosky picked up telephones to make calls about new cases. The radio was playing, “Wonderful World.”