been on your faculty sometime around the year 2000, perhaps earlier than that? Specializing in ornithology, zoology, or biology? Maybe a subspecialty in raptors?”
Gretchen offered Josie a smile. “Good to see you, although I wish we had better news.”
Josie’s heart sank. “Nothing yet? Nothing at all?”
Gretchen closed the yearbook. “Sorry, boss. He’s not in any of these yearbooks. It’s possible he was home-schooled, especially with his scar. Maybe his parents didn’t want him in school or maybe he had too difficult a time with bullying.”
Josie sighed and plopped into her chair. Noah hung up. “We struck out with colleges.”
“How is that possible? There have to be over fifty colleges within an hour of that preserve.”
“Only a handful of those have ornithology or zoology programs,” Noah said. “Drake took his guys to check those out in person. They got nothing. Then we started working down the rest of the list, checking colleges with departments of biology. The FBI took half and we took half. We can’t find anyone who fits the bill.”
“Because it’s too vague,” Josie said. “What we’re looking for is too vague. A professor maybe of ornithology or maybe of zoology or perhaps biology who worked there in the late nineties, early two thousands with a teenage son named Max who has a scar? Departments don’t keep records of their faculty’s personal lives.”
Gretchen said, “We’ve got a name now. A thirty-five-year-old white male named Max with a red scar down the middle of his face. We should get you back out in front of the cameras.”
“No,” Josie said. “He’ll disappear again. I want him to know we’re on to him, but I don’t want him to know we’re struggling. If I go out there and say his name is Max and that’s all we’ve got, he’s going to know he’s winning. It’s my move. I’m not ready to make it yet. We need something more.”
Noah looked over at Mettner. A line of drool leaked from the side of his mouth onto the page beneath his head. “Mett!” Noah shouted.
Mettner’s head sprung up, sending pages flying across all their desks. “I’m up,” he said.
They gave him a minute before Noah asked him, “You get anywhere with the Maxes in the state?”
Mettner sifted through some pages. “There are a bunch of guys named Maxwell, Maximus, Maximillian. Plenty of them in the age range. I looked up all their drivers’ licenses. None of them are scarred down the middle of their face.”
Josie shook her head. How could they have gotten such a huge break but not be any closer to finding him? “No tips from the news conference?” she asked. “No one called in about the scar? It’s pretty distinctive.”
“Sorry, boss,” Mettner said. “Nothing that’s panned out. Drake’s guys ran down a few leads, but they were no good.”
“We have to be missing something. His middle name is Max or maybe his last name is Maxwell. Dammit. He’s right under our noses. What about the truck? Have we checked for any white Chevy trucks registered to someone with Max in their name?”
Gretchen said, “I can check on that.”
Josie held out her hand to Mettner. “Let me see your notes. I want to go back over this.”
Noah stood up. “I’m going to track down Drake and see if we can double-check all the professors we already checked out, or maybe expand the search radius.”
“Please,” Josie said. “He’s here somewhere. He’s not a ghost. He’s real, and we have to find him before he kills my sister—if he hasn’t already.”
Fifty-Five
No one attended Hanna’s funeral except for Alex and Zandra. Even after her illustrious art career, which took off even more after Frances’s accident, in death she was alone. They buried her on a Tuesday, in the rain, in a cemetery she had chosen. She had had time to decide what they were to do with her remains. She had had time to instruct them on how they could continue to live the small life they’d carved out in the old house since the accident. They didn’t know much else. Only Alex had been out in the world. Zandra had only left the property a few times. She had said she wanted to leave but once Hanna took her out into the world, she no longer wanted any part of it. Alex, however, was fascinated with it. There were new adventures, ones he could embark on by himself and without Frances’s censure. People were a lot like the raptors Frances loved so much. Not all