Below the Bones (Widow's Island #5) - Kendra Elliot Page 0,17

when Cate pointed out that he’d been caught. In his mind he’s still leading the game, even though he’s sitting in jail.”

“I had an odd encounter with the sister of Luke Ruell yesterday,” Henry said, trying to imagine the odd kayak-business owner being mentored by Jeff Lamb.

It didn’t add up.

“Ice cream guy?”

Henry told him about the incident. “I passed it on to Bruce. He or Tessa was going to pay Luke a visit.”

“Good.” Mike eyed Henry over the rim of his beer glass. “You and Cate are good together.”

“I know.” Henry didn’t need someone to tell him the obvious—especially not an old boyfriend of Cate’s. But he figured it was Mike’s way of apologizing about getting steamed over Cate’s interview mess up.

“She seems happy.”

“We both are.”

An awkward silence stretched as they both focused on their food. A long minute later, Cate approached along with her brother and Tessa. Each had a pint of beer in one hand. “Look who I found at the bar,” Cate announced. She introduced Logan to Mike, and the men shook hands. “Tessa has an update.”

“I went to Luke Ruell’s home. Bruce told me about your encounter with his sister at your clinic,” Tessa told Henry. “Wendy is an odd one.”

“They’re both odd,” said Henry.

“Turns out Luke had no idea Wendy had gone to press you for information. She made up the sore throat, by the way.”

“I figured.”

“Luke admitted he’d hung around and watched from the woods after we told him to leave that morning. He saw us looking at the other possible grave spots. When he got home, he told his sister about it.” Tessa sighed. “Wendy has a fascination with crime stories. You should have seen her eyes light up when she saw me in my uniform at their front door. She looked like a junkie staring at her next fix. Back home she keeps a police scanner and listens nonstop. She runs a local Facebook page where she posts a lot of the calls from the scanner.”

“Like a crime gossip page,” said Henry, wondering why people had nothing better to do.

“Anyway, I think Luke is just nosy,” said Tessa. “And his sister even more nosy.”

“Did you expand your list of missing persons?” asked Mike.

“I did. I got a tighter age range from the anthropologist and used the years after the date on the quarter, but I broadened the search area. Did the whole state of Washington. Added Vancouver Island and some of the Canadian mainland. The medical examiner says tomorrow his odontologist will have dental workups from the remains and can compare them to my list of women.”

“Do you have old dental records for all the missing?” asked Henry, knowing the dental workups were ineffective on their own unless directly compared to a victim’s dental records.

“I do for nineteen of them. Five I don’t.”

“There’s that many missing women in the area?” Henry was surprised.

Tessa nodded. “I suspect some left deliberately, but with any luck we’ll have some identifications tomorrow. Then we might find some leads on who did this.”

Hopeful, Henry raised his beer. “Here’s to bringing some closure to three families,” he said in a somber tone.

The five of them clinked glasses, determination on their faces.

9

Around lunchtime the next day, Cate was talking to Mike in the bookstore. He’d continued to use the back room to work in, stating that his hotel had weak Wi-Fi and no private work areas. Cate was a fan of powerful Wi-Fi and had installed it in both the bakery and bookstore.

Her phone chimed with a text.

“Tessa wants to know if you’re in the bookstore,” she told him.

“Why didn’t she text me?”

“Good question.” Cate typed an affirmative reply. “She says she’s headed our way.” Minutes later there was an enthusiastic knocking on the bookstore’s back door, and Cate let in her friend.

“We’ve got two positive identifications,” Tessa announced in an excited voice. “The ME is absolutely certain—well, the odontologist is absolutely certain.” She set down her laptop on the worktable, took a seat, and opened the lid. Cate and Mike moved behind her shoulders to see her screen.

“I’ll take two out of three,” said Mike. “Honestly I was afraid they wouldn’t identify any of them. Two is great. We can start to look for connections between the two.”

“I want that third identification,” said Tessa. “It’s possible it’s one of the missing women without dental records. I’ve got Kurt searching for more info that can show up in the skeletal remains . . . old broken bones, et cetera.