Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,112

Mettner and Gretchen were back, and it was time for her and Noah to join the search once more. They spent another six hours on the two properties with dozens of other searchers.

But Trinity wasn’t there.

Nor were the remains of the mirror victims. Or any human remains, for that matter.

Even the trusty K-9 unit failed to find anything. The search and rescue dogs followed Trinity’s scent to the truck. The cadaver dogs gave several passive indicators on the Cahill property behind the arboretum, lying down when they detected the scent of human remains, however, after digging up several areas, no human bones were found.

“That doesn’t mean someone wasn’t here,” one of the handlers explained. “If someone decomposed in these places where the dogs are indicating, there could be cells or other decomp materials that have leeched into the soil. What’s most likely is that there were bodies in these places, and they were moved.”

Josie trudged back to the caretaker house where Drake dealt her another blow. “There is no one named Zandra. My team couldn’t find any evidence that she even existed. They interviewed staff and faculty from the college going back thirty years. Several people remember Frances and Hanna. They remember them having a little boy, but that’s it. Two people even remembered Nicolette and confirmed that she ran off one day and never came back. The only possibility is that Hanna gave birth to Zandra at home. That’s the only thing that would explain why there is no record of her.”

Josie swiped at her brow with her forearm. She badly needed a shower. All of them did. “Maybe,” she conceded. “But if that’s the case, we have no way of knowing if she’s alive or dead. Either way, she’s not here. No one is here. No bodies, no Trinity. Drake, he took her somewhere. He would have known all we’d have to do is get the dogs out here and we’d find her.”

“All right, let’s say he figured out that we might be onto him or he simply decided to take precautions in case we showed up on his doorstep, which meant moving Trinity,” Drake said.

“He moved her, but he stayed even though he suspected we were coming for him,” Josie added.

“Why?”

“Because we’re still playing his game,” Josie said. “And it’s my move.”

“But why?” Drake asked. “Why continue when he’s caught? He gets nothing out of this now. I guess—I guess unless she’s dead. Then he has the satisfaction of you figuring out his cryptic, sick little game, knowing that you’ll be devastated in the end. Or he gets the satisfaction of this Zandra escaping forever because she technically doesn’t exist.”

Josie shook her head. “No, Zandra isn’t part of this game.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The way he talked about her—”

Drake shook his head. “You can’t believe anything this guy says. You know that, Quinn.”

“Not the way he talked about her when I spoke to him. The way he talked about her to Trinity when she was taking down his story. Zandra wasn’t nice to him. She didn’t believe in him. She was a thorn in his side. I don’t know what happened to her, but she’s not part of this game. I still need to find my sister. We need to maintain focus on that goal.”

Drake threw his arms in the air. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the last forty-eight hours, Quinn? You think I like slogging through almost two hundred acres of mud and bird shit looking for human remains? You think I’m here for a damn vacation?”

“Calm down,” Josie told him.

But the cool fa?ade of professionalism had cracked. Drake whirled and kicked at the front door. Grunting, he kicked and kicked until the wood splintered.

“Drake,” Josie said.

“I’ll calm down when we find her,” he shouted. His fists pummeled the door at lightning speed. Sweat poured from his hairline. The tendons in his neck pulled taut. Smears of blood dotted the front door. His knuckles bled.

“Drake!” Josie shouted. She tried to grab at his arm but nearly took an elbow to the face. In his frenzy, she had no chance against him. He was too big, too powerful.

She looked around for another FBI member, or any other law enforcement colleague, but there was no one. She thought about calling someone from her own team, but they would take at least ten minutes to get here and the blood on the door had gone from smudges to streaks. Drake was seriously going to