Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,28
your mind?”
Her lower lip trembled. “I think you’re overreacting,” she said.
Frances pulled at his tie. “We’re not going.”
A tear slid from the corner of Hanna’s eye. “We have to go. They’re expecting us. There are going to be over a hundred people there. Frances, it’s one painting. No one will know.”
Frances stormed upstairs. Hanna gave Alex a weak smile before running after him.
An hour later they were all in the car, headed to the gallery. The moment they walked into the building, people converged on Hanna, praising her work and asking her questions about individual pieces. Frances disappeared in the crowd.
It took nearly an hour for Hanna and Alex to work their way through the throngs of Hanna’s admirers to the painting they’d created together. Hanna clamped a hand over her mouth. A woman beside her said, “This is an interesting piece, Hanna. It has an unfinished look about it, doesn’t it?”
Alex looked up at his mother. Tears spilled from her eyes, over the hand covering her mouth. Without a word, she ran off, leaving him standing in front of the naked canvas.
All of the feathers were gone.
Sixteen
Josie pointed to Dr. Feist’s laptop. “Do you mind if I use this?”
Dr. Feist closed out her tabs and waved Josie over. “Be my guest.”
With Gretchen peering over her shoulder, Josie pulled up the website for NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, and logged in. She selected Pennsylvania and searched, turning up a total of 438 missing persons in the entire state listed in the NamUs database.
Gretchen said, “She might not be listed in NamUs. She might not even be from Pennsylvania.”
“True,” Josie conceded. “But it’s a good place to start.”
Dr. Feist looked over Josie’s other shoulder and gave a low whistle. “That’s a lot of missing people to sort through. This could take a while.”
“No, it won’t,” Josie said. “We’ll sort by sex, age, and race. Thanks to you, we’ve got some parameters to work with. Here we go.”
Together they studied the list. There were nine Caucasian females between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five currently listed in the NamUs database as missing. One by one, Josie clicked on them and she and Gretchen read the details. Four of them had been missing for decades.
“We have no idea how long this woman has been dead,” Gretchen pointed out. “We’d have to check out every single one of these.”
“First things first,” Josie said. “Let’s cross-check to see if any of these women’s dental records have been submitted to the National Dental Image/Information Repository. If we can get dental records for comparison, we can start narrowing down our list.” She glanced back at Dr. Feist. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. The sooner this woman is identified, the sooner her family can begin to have closure.”
Only four of the nine women were listed in the NDIR database, their dental records having been uploaded so that Josie, Gretchen, and Dr. Feist could review them. When Josie pulled up the dental x-rays for the third woman on their list and placed them side by side with the images that Dr. Feist had taken of their victim, Dr. Feist slapped the counter excitedly. “That’s her!”
“Are you sure?” Josie said, peering at one set of images, then the other, and back again. But as she looked more closely, she could clearly see the similarities for herself.
Gretchen reached across Josie and clicked back to the details of the missing woman’s case. “This can’t be right,” she said.
Dr. Feist said, “That’s a match. What’s her name?”
“Nicci,” Josie read off. “Nicci Webb. Age forty-five.”
Gretchen said, “But she only went missing a couple of weeks ago. Seventeen days ago to be precise.”
“Only a few days after Trinity went missing,” Josie pointed out.
“True,” Gretchen said. “We’ll have to see if there’s a connection. But seventeen days? This can’t be Nicci Webb.”
The three of them turned and stared at the remains on the autopsy table.
Dr. Feist said, “It’s not impossible for a body to decompose that quickly, but as I told Josie, the conditions would have to be right. Extreme heat, insects, scavengers… like I told Josie at the scene, the body didn’t decompose behind the cabin where it was found. We have no idea of the location or conditions in which her body decomposed.” Turning back to the laptop, she reviewed the x-ray images once more. “This is a match,” she added. “I’m sure of it.”
Josie glanced at Gretchen. “We could contact the detective in charge of the case and tell him