Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,68

o’clock position and a line at the end of that—not a line, she realized. An arrow.

She sat back in her chair and stared at her crude drawings. Symbols. Female and male.

Closing the file, she took out her cell phone and called Noah.

Thirty-Seven

He answered on the second ring. “You okay?” he asked. “You on your way back?”

“I’m leaving soon,” Josie told him. “Where are you? Are you with the team?”

“Gretchen went home to sleep but Mettner and Drake just got here. They grabbed a few hours of sleep this morning. What’s going on? Did you find the diary?”

“No,” Josie said. “Not that. But I think I figured out what the displays mean. Get the photos out, would you?”

“Hold on.”

She heard him moving around, talking, gathering Drake and Mettner. She heard footsteps pounding down stairs, a door creaking open, papers rustling. Then Noah came back on the line. “Okay, we’ve got the photos. I’m going to put you on speakerphone.”

There was a beep and then Mettner and Drake greeted her. She plunged ahead. “The photos of the male victims, look at them. The skull and pelvic bones in those are on the bottom, at the six o’clock position.”

“We see that,” Mettner said.

“Cover up the leg bones at the two o’clock position. Pretend they’re not there. All you’ve got is a circle with a line extending from the bottom and another line crossing it.”

Someone gave a low whistle. Then Drake said, “It’s the symbol for female.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “Now look at Terri Abbott’s, the only female victim, the pelvic bone and skull are near the top, at the two o’clock position.”

“Got it,” Noah said. “If we cover the bones at the six o’clock position, we’ve got the symbol for male. Holy shit.”

“They’re symbols. Male and female,” Josie said.

Mettner asked, “But why does the female victim get the male sign and the male get the female sign?”

Josie thought about Trinity’s Post-it notes. Symmetry. Something about symmetry. But what? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the males to be marked with the male sign and the female to be marked with the female sign?

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “But this is something.”

There was a long silence. Then Drake said, “This is brilliant, Detective Quinn, and it’s very likely you’re right about these being male and female symbols. Unfortunately, this doesn’t get us any closer to finding this guy.”

Josie slumped in her chair. He was right.

“But,” Drake added. “I’ll talk to my contact in the Behavioral Analysis Unit and see if they can make any sense of it or if they can think of a way to use this in our investigation.”

“Thanks,” Josie said, feeling defeated. “I’m going to head back in a few minutes. I’ll see you then.”

She packed up her things, said goodbye to Shannon and Christian, who promised to follow her back to Denton later that day, and got into her vehicle. As she drove a series of tree-lined rural roads out of Callowhill, her exhausted mind worked through what she’d just figured out. Had Trinity figured it out as well? Surely, she had. If so, where had that led? How had she gotten from the male/female symbols to drawing the killer out of hiding after so many years?

She tightened her hands on the steering wheel as the road narrowed ahead of her. To her right was a drop-off leading to a ravine and to her left were trees as far as the eye could see. A moment later, on her left, a truck came into view. It had been backed into a break in the woods on the shoulder of the road. Its white cab jutted out from the trees. Dirt covered the bottom of the door and someone had used a fingertip to write the words Wash Me in it. Josie gave a little laugh as she passed. From the corner of her eye, below the words, something else caught her eye. A symbol.

She was already well past the truck when its significance registered.

He likely drives a pretty nondescript vehicle but one that could accommodate his activities, so a van or a pickup truck but likely an older model, nothing that would draw a great deal of attention.

Her mind worked quickly through the possibilities. Could she be right? Or was the stress of the case and her lack of sleep making her crazy? Josie shook her head, as if to reorder her thoughts. It couldn’t be a coincidence, she decided. Everything that came next felt like it took hours, but in