Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn #6)- Lisa Regan Page 0,117
in your butterfly garden. The butterflies are going to emerge at any moment. They may have already.”
“You saw it? You were in my room?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “Your mom showed me your room so I would know more things about you. To help me find you. She also showed me the bear your dad gave you—the one he leaves you messages on.” She didn’t mention that Gideon had tainted it. If it was up to Josie, Lucy would never hear his voice again.
“I talked to your teacher, too,” Josie went on. “I saw the chrysalis in your desk, and the one you left at your mom’s friend’s house, the one in the hunting cabin, and the one on the Overlook. Did you leave them so we would find you?”
“I just like making them,” Lucy said. “It makes me think of stuff that’s not bad. That man put a lot of bad things in my head.”
“I know he did,” Josie said. “But like I told you, he’s in jail now. He’s never getting out. It’s time to go home and see your mom and dad.” Josie walked over to the base of the tree and reached a hand up. “Can you come over to me?”
Her arm ached with the effort of holding it aloft but finally, the branches above them fluttered and rustled and a moment later, a small, cold hand fit itself into Josie’s. Gretchen was at her side and took her flashlight as Lucy fell into her arms. The girl curled herself against Josie’s body, wrapping her thin legs around Josie’s waist and her arms tightly around Josie’s neck. She nestled her head into Josie’s chest. Josie’s abdomen ached with each step, but she didn’t dare try to disentangle the girl from her. Luke, Gretchen and several other searchers lit the way as Josie carried her out of the woods and to a waiting ambulance.
Seventy-One
Josie rode in the back of the ambulance with Lucy. She stayed with the girl in the ER while the doctors and nurses examined her and asked what seemed like a thousand questions. She didn’t leave Lucy’s side until Colin burst into the room and scooped his daughter into his arms, sobbing into her hair. “Thank God,” he cried. “Oh Lucy. Thank God.”
Tears stung Josie’s eyes. Quietly, she slipped out of the room and down the hall toward the exit. As the ER doors whooshed open, Dan Lamay shuffled in. “Boss,” he called, waving a sheaf of papers in the air.
Josie stopped and waited for him. They stepped away from the doors and into the waiting area, which mercifully, was nearly empty. “What’s going on, Dan?”
Out of breath, Lamay handed her the papers. “Hummel pulled Amy Ross’s elimination prints and had them run through AFIS, like you asked.”
Josie raised a brow. “I’m not sure that matters now. We’ve got Lucy. It’s not up to me to decide if Amy should be prosecuted for what she’s done. If the FBI wants to pursue the identity theft angle, they can do that. Anything she did or didn’t do in New York is up to prosecutors there.”
“Oh, I think you’ll still want to see this.”
She took the pages from him and began looking them over. “This can’t be right,” she said. “Are you sure this is right?”
Lamay nodded. “Hummel had the state police run the AFIS search twice. It’s right.”
Josie stared uncomprehending at the old photograph before her while Lamay filled her in. “Amy Ross’s fingerprints are a match to a little girl who went missing when she was eleven years old from Cleveland, Ohio in 1990. The local police did a fingerprinting event at her school as part of an initiative in the late eighties to reduce the number of missing children. They came in and fingerprinted all the kids and sent the prints home for parents to keep on file. Her mother turned them back in to the police when she went missing and they were entered into the national database. Her name is Penny Knight.”
“Penny Knight,” Josie murmured, studying the face of the smiling girl from nearly thirty years ago. It looked like a school photo with its sky-blue background, and Penny posed artificially with her arms folded on top of a stack of books. Her hair was short and uncombed. Bright blue eyes gazed out earnestly over a toothy smile. Josie could see traces of the grown Amy in the girl’s face—her eyes and the shape of her mouth. “Did you call Cleveland PD?”