immediately. Urgent.
The other said:
There’s a problem at the mill. The installation cannot go ahead. Please check the parking lot immediately.
Josie and her team passed them around as Drake continued, “The first one was taped to the front door of the salvage yard office, left there overnight, we assume after he left the bones. There weren’t any cameras on the exterior back then or in the back two lots. The second one was left in the mailbox of the artist who had been chosen to do the installation.”
Noah asked, “No prints on the paper?”
“Nothing. We analyzed the paper and the ink he used. Every little thing. It all led nowhere. That’s the thing. He leaves nothing behind.”
“Except the bones,” Josie said.
“Right. But other than that, he’s never been caught on camera. He’s left no prints, no shoeprints, no tire tracks, no DNA. He’s a ghost.”
Thirty
“A ghost didn’t take my sister,” Josie said, “We’ve got something else. A comb.”
Drake raised a skeptical brow. “What? Like a hair comb? How do you know it’s his?”
Noah said, “He left it in our mailbox addressed to Trinity.”
Mettner took out his phone and pulled up a photo of the comb that Josie had sent him earlier in the day, “We believe it’s made of bone. It can’t be a coincidence that Trinity was neck-deep into this case and then had this delivered to her anonymously.”
Drake stared at the photo. “You can’t be serious.”
“Where else would it come from?” Josie asked.
Mettner swiped to the photo of the packaging.
Drake said, “Did you send all of that for analysis?”
“Of course we did,” Gretchen interjected.
“You won’t get anything. He’s too careful. The comb? You won’t get anything from that either.”
Josie said, “If we’re right, and it’s made of bone, we need to know who it came from. We can do DNA testing, run it through CODIS.”
“That’s not going to help you find this guy,” Drake argued.
Josie held his gaze. “The four victims in your file—were there any bones missing?”
“No, but—”
“That means there could be other victims out there. Victims we don’t know about yet. Besides that, we’ve got a new victim. Between Nicci Webb’s murder and Trinity’s abduction, there may be a way to track this guy down.”
“He never leaves clues behind,” Drake argued.
“But it’s an avenue we can’t ignore,” Josie said.
When Drake didn’t respond, Mettner said, “You told us about the third victim, Kenneth Darden. He disappeared in 2012 from Paoli, thirty days later his bones showed up in Philadelphia.”
“Right,” Drake replied, looking away from Josie and resuming his recap of the Bone Artist case. “Those were in a very public place, so he didn’t need to leave any notes.”
“Yeah,” Gretchen said, fingering a photo of Darden’s remains with a river in the background. “That particular area on the bank of the Schuylkill River sees a lot of traffic. Joggers, bikers, walkers, rowers, homeless people. You name it. Also, there were no cameras there back then, so that was smart.”
Drake said, “The 911 call on that one came in at five-thirty in the morning.”
The door to the conference room opened and they all turned to see Hummel standing there with a laptop in his hands. “Boss,” he said, addressing Josie. “Thought you’d want this. It’s Trinity’s.”
“Thanks, Hummel,” Josie said. She took the computer from him and sat back down. To Mettner and Gretchen, she asked, “Were there any documents on here about the Bone Artist?”
“No,” Mettner replied. “Which was not surprising given what her assistant said. If she was that worried about getting scooped, she wouldn’t leave notes on the computer.”
“I’ll check the emails,” Josie said, opening the laptop and powering it up.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Mettner told Drake. “Please, tell us about the fourth victim.”
Drake nodded and continued, “The fourth victim was a thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker named Robert Ingram. He lived in East Stroudsburg—the upper east side of the state of Pennsylvania. His wife drove him to the train station and dropped him off for a meeting in New York City that day. He never made it inside the station. Thirty days later his bones were found arranged on the Bloomsburg Fairgrounds.”
The laptop screen came to life, showing a photo of a French villa. The small eye beneath the camera began scanning for Trinity’s face. The words Looking for You flashed beneath it. Josie leaned in and kept still. The eye focused on her. Then it disappeared and the words Welcome, Trinity Payne popped up before the home screen appeared.
Mettner said, “East Stroudsburg? That’s almost a hundred miles from