Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,56

Bloomsburg. Why so far?”

“We don’t know,” Drake admitted. “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to where he leaves the bones.”

“Except places where there are no cameras,” Noah said. “I’ve been to the Bloomsburg fairgrounds. When the fair isn’t going on, they’re empty. There aren’t any cameras there, and the area is pretty large. Was a note left for someone that time so the bones could be located?”

“No. He left them in a part of the fairgrounds where they could easily be seen from Route 11 or the overpass going to Route 42. Someone spotted them as soon as the sun came up.”

Trinity’s home screen showed a photo of the entire Payne family in front of a Christmas tree. Josie recognized it from the year before, only about four months ago. The sight of it pained her now. She had the same photo printed out and framed in her and Noah’s living room. She pulled up Trinity’s email app and started trawling through her inbox while she listened to her team and Drake discuss the Bone Artist.

Gretchen said, “So this guy is careful enough to not be caught on camera taking people, careful enough to stage their remains where there are no cameras, but takes the risk of delivering notes. He always leaves the bodies in April exactly thirty days after he’s taken them, but there’s no pattern at all to where he leaves them. I mean, those first three victims were found relatively close to where they went missing but the last one was very far from where he went missing.”

“What about the victims themselves?” Noah asked. “Any commonalities? Did any of them know each other or have mutual friends or acquaintances?”

Drake shook his head. “Nothing.” He went through more photos in the file until he came up with photos of each victim. All of them looked as though they’d been pulled from the victims’ social media profiles. “They have no friends, family or acquaintances in common. Nothing job-related in common. They don’t even look alike, other than they’re all Caucasian. We even had their medical histories compared. There’s nothing. We believe that the victims are chosen for convenience. The killer sees an opportunity to abduct someone where there are no cameras or witnesses or, as with Terri Abbott, in such a crowded place that no one would notice her going off with him.”

“So he’s not choosy,” Mettner said. “He doesn’t have a type.”

Josie found nothing in Trinity’s emails to indicate she had ever known or come into contact with Nicci Webb. Nothing in her email was unusual or sending up any red flags. It was all work-related. There were three emails exchanged between Trinity and her assistant three months earlier where she asked Jaime to see if the network had ever done any pieces on unsolved serial cases. Jaime had later sent her links to segments about the Zodiac Killer, the Alphabet Murders, the Tylenol poisoning and the Freeway Phantom. It looked as though the only link Trinity had clicked on and viewed was the one for the Alphabet Killer. Josie clicked on the link as well. She muted the video segment but quickly read the transcript below it. The killings had occurred in the 1970s in Rochester, New York. The three victims’ first and last names all started with the same initial. Josie saw that Trinity had only visited the site once. Her search history didn’t turn up any more links for the Alphabet murders, only the Bone Artist and several news stories about Codie Lash’s murder. Josie kept skimming Trinity’s emails. The email exchange between Trinity and her assistant regarding Lash’s personal effects was exactly as Jaime had described it. There was no clue as to why Trinity had wanted the items.

Josie sighed and closed the laptop. They had nothing.

Thirty-One

Josie turned her attention back to Drake and the team as they continued to review the Bone Artist file. Noah said, “Also there’s a break in the geographical pattern. Three victims on the eastern side of Pennsylvania and one on the western side. Why?”

Drake said, “We really don’t know.”

Josie thought about the Post-it notes she had managed to glimpse in her guest room before Trinity had torn them down. OCD? Symmetry? Mirror killings? She said, “Are you absolutely sure there haven’t been any other Bone Artist cases on the western side of the state?”

“None,” Drake answered.

Trinity had been looking for patterns just as they were now. As if reading her mind, Noah said, “That one outlier, the