Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,106
trailer park? From the tread of the killer’s truck?”
Josie leaned over, studying the document. It was a lab report of the soil composition from the sample that Jenny Chan had taken. Denton’s ERT had collected the evidence but it had been turned over to the FBI labs for processing. The DNA testing from the combs and the rib found in front of the Price family’s trailer would still take weeks, if not months, but Josie knew soil samples could be processed in as few as seven days. She ran her finger down the list of the test results until she found the reason that Drake was smiling.
“Eastonite,” she said.
“It’s a mineral,” Drake said. Josie looked over to see him bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet.
“I know,” she said. “It’s only found in two places in the world—a small locality in Norway and Easton, Pennsylvania.”
He stopped bouncing, staring down at her with a disappointed expression. “How the hell do you know that?”
Josie smiled. “Noah’s sister runs a number of quarries in Pennsylvania. I picked some things up. But it doesn’t matter how I know that. What matters is that we’ve got a search area! Let me get the rest of the team.”
* * *
Four hours later, they all sat at the conference room table with laptops open in front of them. A half-eaten box of pizza lay in the center of the table. Empty coffee cups and soda bottles littered the rest of the table. The energy they’d started with was now a distant memory. No one spoke. Occasionally, someone would grunt or issue a heavy sigh. An acute ache bloomed behind Josie’s eyes as she studied property records within Easton, Pennsylvania and the areas surrounding it that she’d already been over a half dozen times. She rubbed her eyes and stretched her arms over her head. “I’ve got nothing,” she said.
“Same here,” Gretchen grumbled.
Drake said, “There are people in Easton named Max, property owners named Max—first and last names—but no one is matching up either age-wise or by driver’s license.”
“It can’t be this hard,” Noah said.
“We’re missing something,” Mettner agreed. “I even struck out with the colleges again. There are two in Easton—Lafayette and Aubertine—and neither of their biology departments believed anyone on their faculties in the late nineties or early two thousands had a son named Max or a son with a scar on his face or a faculty member with a particular interest in raptors.”
Noah said, “Maybe we need to stop looking for Max and look at actual properties. Some place with a lot of land, enough land where a group of twenty to thirty black vultures gathering wouldn’t be all that noticeable.”
“Maybe somewhere near a railroad,” Gretchen said. “Has anyone looked at the satellite images? Maybe we can spot a large property with one or more shipping containers on it.”
“I did,” Mettner said. “Nothing stood out, but the shipping container could be obscured by tree cover. Or the satellite photos could be out of date. Bobbi Ingram was held in one six years ago.”
“Noah has a point, though,” Josie said. “We’re focusing too hard on the name. We’re focusing too hard on trying to assemble all the pieces. Maybe we only need one to point us in a direction.”
Drake huffed. “Which one?”
Josie clicked out of the property records and pulled up her internet browser, using it to pull up Google satellite images of Easton and its surrounding areas. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’ll know it when we see it. Let’s keep looking.”
Noah said, “You’ve got the aerials?”
She nodded. He rolled his chair over, around Mettner’s, and next to hers. Together they studied the overhead view, zooming in and out and moving from area to area. Josie kept coming back to a small, almost circular area of what looked like boulders that stood out among the trees surrounding it. She zoomed in on them. It was impossible to say how big an area they covered but they were grouped closely together with no room for vegetation.
“What is it?” Noah asked.
“Boulders,” Josie said. She zoomed back out, noting that the several acres around them were green. There were lots of trees and then an area that looked almost like a farm or the grounds of a large estate. She pointed to it. “What is this?”
“Let me see.” He used the mousepad to manipulate the images on the screen and then pointed to a large group of buildings. “Well, this right here is Aubertine College.