Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,53

the journalists back in 2014, how did he do it?”

Drake said, “Letters.”

“Postage?” Noah asked.

Drake replied, “No postage. We’re still not sure how he got them into the mailrooms of the networks, but there were far too many people in and out of those buildings all day and all night long for us to pinpoint any suspects after the fact.”

“Did he ever leave them packages?” Josie asked.

“No.”

“But he dropped the letters off in person without being seen or noticed by anyone,” Josie said.

Drake nodded.

Noah said, “The Bone Artist has Trinity.”

Drake smiled. “There’s no way the Bone Artist took Trinity. This was a wild goose chase that she was on. That’s not my concern. My concern is that whoever did take her has a whole lot of classified information.”

Gretchen said, “Lieutenant Fraley is correct, Agent Nally. The Bone Artist took Trinity.”

“The Bone Artist is dead,” Drake said.

Mettner took out his phone, tapped, scrolled and held it out for Drake to see. “This photo was taken this morning behind the cabin Trinity had rented.”

Drake stared at the photo, his face rapidly losing color. “My God,” he mumbled. “This isn’t—this can’t be right. This isn’t possible.”

“You think it’s a copycat?” Noah asked.

“No, I—I—” Drake stammered. “It can’t be. The public never saw the displays. No one has, except the responding officers and task force.”

Josie said, “He’s got her. He took her.”

Drake rubbed his hands over his face, recovering some of his composure. “What did he use to hold the bones down?”

Mettner said, “Tent stakes and fishing line. Our Evidence Response Team already checked out the stakes. They’re a generic Walmart brand. Could have been bought anywhere in the country. Fishing line could have been bought at any store that stocks fishing supplies.”

“My God,” Drake said again. “Is that—is that—”

“It’s not Trinity,” Noah said. He filled Drake in on all they knew about Nicci Webb and her disappearance.

“This isn’t right,” Drake said. “Seventeen days—he’s never left someone on display after only seventeen days, it’s always thirty—and he took Trinity and Webb? That’s not his pattern.”

“But that’s what happened,” Noah said.

“We have to go through your files,” Gretchen said to Drake. “We need to see everything that Trinity saw so we can figure out how she contacted him. If we can figure that out, maybe we can find him.”

“Can you get us what we need?” Josie asked.

Mettner said, “We’ll make an official request.”

“The Bone Artist is my file. It was assigned to me as a cold case after the last agent working on it retired. I can get you what you need.”

“Thank you,” Josie said.

“But there’s one thing you need to understand,” he added. “You said that Trinity went missing three weeks ago. If he took her… I mean his pattern is all out of whack, obviously, with this Webb woman, but still, this guy, he always leaves the remains on day thirty. She could already be—”

“We know,” Noah said, cutting him off. “But that changes nothing. No matter what happens, we’re going after this guy with everything we have.”

Twenty-Nine

“Take us through it,” Mettner told Drake. “The entire case, piece by piece.”

Drake looked at each of them. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Condense it, then,” Noah said. “But you’d better start telling us what you know, and what Trinity would have known. The sooner we know what she knew, the sooner we find her and the Bone Artist.”

Drake raised a brow at Noah. “No offense, but we’ve been after this guy for over ten years. You have any idea how many law enforcement officers and other experts have been over this file? You think I’ll give you a presentation on this case and you’ll just figure it out? When no one else could?”

Gretchen said, “Why not? Trinity figured out enough to make contact with this guy.”

“Whatever our Evidence Response Team turns up on Trinity’s abduction and Nicci Webb’s murder might help as well,” Mettner added.

Drake shook his head. The fingers of his right hand tapped on the table. “You think your team’s going to turn something up that the Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn’t?”

Josie stood up, gathered the remains of the file in front of Gretchen, walked over to Drake, and slammed it onto the table in front of him. His flinch was barely perceptible, but Josie saw it. She leaned down, her face inches from his. “What I think is that every second you sit here questioning our competence, is one more second we could have spent finding my sister. I don’t care how