Graham said. “I just know that she’s made great strides in the last couple of years.”
“Was it her idea to stop seeing you?”
“Yes. She felt she had reached a stable point. I told her that she was welcome to come back at any time, and I wished her good luck.”
“When was that?”
“About four or five months ago. The next time I saw her was at the park. That’s when I realized that she was using a different name.”
“Do you believe she was telling the truth about being Tessa Lendhardt?”
He smiled sadly. “Oh Detective, I don’t think that poor woman has ever known who she really is.”
Forty-Four
While Mettner arranged for Bryce Graham to stay at a hotel under guard, Josie went upstairs to the great room which held the detectives’ desks crammed together in the center of it. Along one wall Chitwood’s office door stood closed. She wondered if he was inside or if he was off handling the day-to-day business of the city now that all of his detectives were tied up with the Lucy Ross case. Josie sat down at her desk and pulled up the TLO XP database used by law enforcement to search various records. Gretchen appeared behind her as she typed in ‘Tessa Lendhardt’ along with ‘Buffalo, New York’.
Gretchen said, “The volunteer searchers have finished looking in the area of the hunting cabin that was broken into. They didn’t find anything. Oaks is done at Bryce Graham’s house. He’ll be here any minute.”
“Great,” Josie said. “Let’s wait for him and we’ll do a briefing. I need Mett and Noah as well, and if Chitwood wants an update, now would be the time.”
“You got it, boss,” Gretchen said, disappearing once more.
The search results appeared. Zero results for Tessa Lendhardt in Buffalo, New York. Josie widened the search to Tessa Lendhardt in New York. Nothing. Again, she expanded her search parameters to include the whole country. Nothing.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
“Quinn!” Bob Chitwood’s voice boomed across the room as he emerged from the stairwell. Behind him, Agent Oaks, Gretchen and Mettner filed in, followed by Noah, lurching along on his crutches.
“Chief,” Josie said.
“I’d like a briefing. Now.”
Noah pulled his chair out from under his desk and sat down, hefting his casted leg onto the surface of the desk. Gretchen and Mettner sat at their desks while Oaks and Chitwood remained standing. Everyone looked exhausted and haggard and a bit unkempt. Mettner took his phone out and brought up his note-taking app while Gretchen’s pen poised over her trusty notebook.
“There’s a lot to discuss,” Josie said. She briefed them on everything that she had learned that day: that Amy had admitted to being a patient of Bryce Graham; that the name she had seen him under was Tessa Lendhardt; and that Amy had admitted to assuming the identity of Amy Walsh after her death. She went over everything Bryce Graham had told her about Tessa/Amy, which wasn’t much.
“I checked the TLO XP database but there’s no Tessa Lendhardt in the country, let alone New York.”
“That can’t be,” Chitwood said.
Josie motioned to her computer. “Any of you are welcome to double-check my work, perhaps use a different database. I only used one spelling of the last name, so we should probably check using different spellings.”
“We could also search for other people named Lendhardt in Buffalo, New York,” Noah suggested. “Track them down and see if any of them knew a Tessa.”
“I can have a couple of field agents in the Buffalo office work on that,” Oaks said.
Gretchen said, “Maybe Lendhardt was her married name. She could have been married. We really don’t know anything about this woman.”
“Good point,” Josie said. “We also have her elimination prints from when Hummel and his team processed Lucy’s bedroom—after we found the message from the kidnapper on the talking bear. I can have Hummel pull them, and we can run them through AFIS.”
Chitwood shook his head. “You won’t get anywhere with that unless she committed a crime. You said she told you she’s only forty, right? If she took Amy Walsh’s identity twenty-two years ago, she would have just turned eighteen which means any crime that would have put her into the system would have happened when she was a juvenile. She won’t be in there.”
Gretchen said, “She might be in there. If she was arrested at eighteen but fled.”
Oaks said, “From everything she’s told us, it’s more likely she was running from an abusive partner. Quinn, you’ve spent the most one-on-one time with