Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,108

last name, but Frances is not listed on the birth certificate.”

Mettner added, “Hanna was a pretty famous and successful artist in the nineties. Then, for some reason, she faded into obscurity.”

“Frances and Hanna weren’t married?” Chitwood asked.

“No,” Gretchen said. “We couldn’t find any record of them having married.”

“Were there any other children?”

Mettner said, “We couldn’t find any evidence of other children. But we did find that Hanna dedicated one of her last art shows to—” he looked down at his notes. “My darling Alex and Zandra.”

“Who is Zandra?” Chitwood asked.

“We don’t know,” Mettner said.

Josie said, “We thought it might be short for Alexandra.”

Drake said, “As in Alexander and Alexandra—creepy twins, perhaps? But there is no evidence at all that Hanna Cahill had twins. There is no Alexandra Thornberg or Alexandra Cahill. There was only Nicolette and Alexander.”

Josie said, “I asked Monica Webb about Nicci’s childhood. Nicci told her that her mother died when she was fifteen, and that she left home. That would have been in 1990.”

“But Hanna Cahill didn’t die until 2005,” Mettner put in.

“Which means Nicci lied to her daughter about why she left home,” Noah said. “At least, that’s our assumption.”

Chitwood said, “Why would Nicci Webb lie about her mother? Why wouldn’t she tell her daughter about Alexander? That’s Monica Webb’s uncle.”

Josie said, “There’s no way for us to know for certain, but I’d guess there was some kind of abuse going on in the household. Nicci fled, and her little brother Alex turned out to be a serial killer.”

Gretchen said, “After Nicci left, Alex was home-schooled, evidently, and at some point in the late nineties, the entire family became recluses.”

“Is the dad still alive?” Chitwood asked.

“We don’t know,” Josie responded. “There’s no death certificate for him, and he still draws a salary from the college for caretaking. Alex Thornberg became an official employee of the Foundation in 1998 when he turned eighteen. He, too, is listed as a caretaker.”

Chitwood patted down the hairs floating over his head. “What else?”

Drake said, “My team is going to take point on this. It’s a lot of area to cover—fifty-five acres of land in the arboretum. There are five structures.”

“And,” Josie said, “the land to the north, adjacent to the arboretum, was purchased by Hanna Cahill in 2001. One hundred acres. No structures on record but plenty of land.”

Chitwood shook his head. “You’re telling me that this guy has had a hundred-acre playground for over twenty years?”

“Well he would have been sixteen when Hanna bought the land,” Drake said. “But yeah, the land passed to him when the mother died. Well, it would have passed to Nicci Webb in part as well, but since she wasn’t around, it was a non-issue. The deed was never changed over anyway. Property taxes were always paid on time, so no one cared about the title to the land. Oh and a shipping container was removed from the property three years after Bobbi Ingram was released.”

“No shipping containers now?”

“No,” Drake answered. “Which means he has to be holding Trinity in his private residence.”

“How about our guy, Alexander Thornberg?” Chitwood asked. “He have a driver’s license?”

Noah took a sheet of paper from his desk and held it up for Chitwood to see. The sight of it still chilled Josie. There he was—the man she had seen in the truck, who had later tried to take her. In his driver’s license photo, the scar was barely visible. He must have used make-up to cover it before getting his photo taken. But still, she could see its faint mark.

Chitwood studied it. “Does he have a criminal record?”

Josie answered, “No. Not as an adult. It’s possible he had one as a juvenile, but we wouldn’t have access to that, or it would have been expunged by now.”

“Okay,” Chitwood said. “You’ve got this guy, probably holding Trinity in the caretaker’s residence. Of the people living there after Nicolette Webb left, his mother is deceased, but the dad is unaccounted for, which means he could still be on the property.”

“Right,” Drake said.

Chitwood said, “You’ve still got a lot of ground to cover. A lot of places this guy could hide if you don’t get him. Your team have a plan in place to end this thing?”

Drake said, “We’re working on it now.”

Fifty-Eight

The reporter was a curious creature. Alex had never seen anyone so beautiful in person. She was also insufferable, with her incessant demands and nonstop talking. He’d never met anyone who talked as much as she did. For a