Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,18

microwave meal boxes, various food wrappers, crumpled paper towels, coffee grounds…”

“I want to look,” Josie said. “To see if there’s anything I don’t think Trinity left.”

Hummel pointed in the direction of the trash bin. “Be my guest.”

But there was nothing unusual in Trinity’s trash. There wasn’t much there as she had only spent one week at the cabin. When Josie and Hummel returned to the front of the cabin, Noah asked, “No documents? Photos?”

“Nothing,” Josie said.

Hummel led them over to Trinity’s car and used a gloved hand to open the driver’s side door. “We’ll need warrants, but we’ll definitely pull whatever prints we can from the car. As you can see, there are no obvious signs of a struggle. No blood, no scratches or damage of any kind to the interior of the vehicle. At least at first glance.”

Josie peered inside. Besides the suitcase and purse crammed into the passenger’s seat, the car looked pristine, as though Trinity had just driven off the lot. Josie knew she rarely had a chance to drive it. She usually kept it in a garage just outside of New York City. She used public transport or cabs to get around inside the city. The only time she drove it was when she visited Josie or her parents and brother two hours from Denton and not every visit. If the weather was bad or she thought she’d have to venture too far from her family’s homes, she would rent a car. Josie had often wondered why she’d even bought the damn thing. She was surprised that Trinity had braved the gravel roads leading to the cabin with her prized Fiat.

Hummel said, “We’ve got to impound it, take it for secure processing. The tow truck is on its way.”

Josie knew this meant they’d tow the car to Denton’s police impound lot where they had two car bays that were accessible only to the police. They were used specifically for processing vehicles. The secure indoor environment made it easier for Hummel’s team to do their job and less likely that anything would be lost or overlooked.

“Print the inside, too, would you?”

“Will do,” Hummel replied. “We’ve got Trinity’s prints on file as elimination prints from an earlier case, so we’ll be able to identify those.”

“Okay,” Josie said. She motioned toward the purse and suitcase. “Hummel, Trinity was working on something before she left. I’m not sure what, though, I’d like to have a look at her phone and laptop when you’ve finished processing everything. I’m assuming her laptop is packed away in her suitcase.”

“We can dump the electronics—we’ll make sure we get a warrant for them—but you know that if we try to get latent prints from the outside of the phone or laptop we’d have to use the cyanoacrylate fuming, right?”

“Cause they have non-porous surfaces,” Josie replied, seeing where he was going.

“Yeah, so if we use the cyanoacrylate to develop latent prints, it will more or less destroy the electronics.”

“Right,” Josie said. Cyanoacrylate was basically superglue. Fumes from it reacted with the moisture in latent fingerprints to produce a visible, white film which formed over the ridges of the print that could then be photographed. The problem was that the white material was sticky and near-impossible to remove from any surface it was developed on. “I think her phone has a case on it. Just remove it and see what you get from the case. If the laptop is somewhere deep in her suitcase, I don’t think you need to try to pull prints from that. Whoever took her left her phone so they weren’t concerned with Trinity’s electronics.”

Hummel closed the driver’s side door. The rumble of a large truck sounded from the direction of the road. A moment later, a flatbed tow truck lumbered into view. Hummel waved to the driver, who spent several minutes getting the truck into position to haul away Trinity’s car. Then he hopped down from the truck and pulled on a pair of gloves before approaching the car.

“Hummel,” Josie said. “I need everything you can get as soon as you can get it.”

He nodded. “You got it, boss.”

Ten

Alex stared at his mother’s unfinished painting. The one his father said was missing something. She hadn’t worked on it in days. She was having one of her dark times. That’s how he thought of them; when she stayed in her darkened bedroom for days on end. Sometimes he wanted to creep inside and try to coax her back out, but his father forbade