The Last Sister

by Elliot, Kendra

  Alice turned out to be quite chatty. Her side of the conversation had a tendency to ramble in odd directions, and her eyes had moments of clarity that ebbed and flowed.

  “What’s her name?” Ava asked with a gesture toward the skull.

  The older woman leaned her weight against the fallen trunk, willing to wait now that Zander had explained they were getting help for her friend. “I don’t know,” Alice said thoughtfully. “But I call her Cindy.”

  “Do you know how long she’s been here?” asked Zander.

  Alice frowned. “A very long time, I believe.”

  He had gone with Alice’s assertion that the remains were female because he had no idea how to tell the difference. When he looked at the skull, his gut told him it was a woman, but that could be Alice’s influence.

  “Did you know her before?”

  “Before what?”

  I can’t be vague. “Did you know her before she was . . . a skeleton?” He grimaced at the word.

  “No.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I saw them bring her here.”

  Adrenaline rocketed through his muscles. “Who brought her here?”

  Alice’s hands fluttered and picked at her coat. “I don’t remember.” She no longer met their eyes. He glanced at Ava, who made a subtle slow down motion with her hands.

  He wanted to press but knew Alice would close off more.

  The arrival of two deputies and Sheriff Greer interrupted their discussion. Their response had been quick—within ten minutes.

  “Good evening, Alice,” Greer said kindly as his sharp gaze took in the sight of the bones by the tree. “Getting cold this evening, isn’t it?”

  Alice muttered something and refused to meet the sheriff’s eyes. She’d tensed as the three law enforcement officers arrived and shuffled closer to Ava. Zander suspected she’d had previous run-ins with the sheriff’s department.

  A quick conversation with Greer confirmed that suspicion. “She gets confused,” Greer told them as they stepped away from the scene, leaving a deputy to keep an eye on Alice. “She means well, but several times she’s wandered onto other people’s property and even looked in their windows. We just take her back home. She’s been evaluated, but every time we get the same reply: she’s capable of taking care of herself and doesn’t present a danger to herself or others.”

  “She’s thin,” Ava pointed out.

  “She’s been thin as long as I can remember,” answered Greer. “But even I’ve run into her at the grocery store. She’s quite competent . . . most of the time.”

  “Then why is she wandering around in the forest? She could get lost.”

  The sheriff was emphatic. “No one knows these woods or the coastline like Alice. She’s been wandering both for the last fifty years.” He gestured for one of the deputies to come closer and asked him to drive her home. “We can question her tomorrow,” he told the agents. “She’s sharper in the mornings.”

  By the time Alice left, Zander noted she looked exhausted.

  “Who are your missing persons in the area?” Ava asked the sheriff, all business now. “We might need to go back decades. Clearly the remains have been here awhile.”

  “Well, now . . . I’ve heard of bodies reduced to skeletons in less than a year,” the sheriff said, tapping his chin, deep in thought. “Depends on the environment and how exposed they are.” He tipped his head at the skull. “Doesn’t look like anybody buried the body. Could have died naturally. Maybe got lost in the woods or had a heart attack.”

  “Yes,” Ava said impatiently. “Any of those could have happened, but they’d still be reported missing, right?”

  “True. Let me think . . . We had a woman go missing from a trail along the cliffs south of here. Her husband was found guilty of her murder even though they never found the body. He claimed she slipped while taking a photo and went over the edge. State police handled that one.”

  Zander eyed the skull. “Could her husband have dumped her body here and claimed she went over the cliffs in an accident?”

  “Possible,” said Greer. “Either way, he’s already locked up.”

  “What about Hank West?” asked the remaining deputy as he strung crime scene tape and listened to their conversation.

  The sheriff’s face cleared. “That’s right. How long’s that been? Five years?” He looked from Zander to Ava. “Old Hank had dementia. Wandered off from his home in Warrenton. Never did find him.”

  All three of them turned their attention to the skull.

  “Maybe we should do a database search for missing persons instead of relying on memory,” Ava suggested tactfully.

  “Not that many people go missing around here,” Greer said. “But that would be more efficient. I’ll get someone started on it. My deputy can bring up some lights and watch the scene if you want to grab dinner. It’ll take a few hours for that anthropologist to get here from Portland.”

  Zander scanned the darkening woods. It was cold, but an inner voice wouldn’t let him leave. “I’ll stay. I can help with the lights.”

  “I’ll pick up some takeout,” Ava told him. “And lots of coffee. It’ll be a late night.”

  Dr. Victoria Peres arrived two hours later, and the forensic anthropologist immediately took charge of the scene. Peres was tall, with librarian glasses and long, dark hair. Zander had heard her referred to as the Ice Queen but had never seen anyone say it to her face.

  The forensic anthropologist was intimidating.

  She shook Zander’s hand and gave him a once-over even though they’d met a few times. Ava knew her quite well. As they worked, the women exchanged small talk about mutual friends and Ava’s upcoming wedding.

  Zander watched Peres in admiration. The doctor moved with an economy of motion as she gave orders to her assistants and set up the station for removal of the skeletal remains. Everyone jumped to do her bidding. Even the wind had stopped after she glared at the swaying trees. She had lighting, tarps, buckets, sifters, and bins ready to start her excavation. As she waited for her assistants to set a grid and finish taking photos, she lifted the skull.

  He observed with fascination. The doctor’s hands were gentle with reverence—reminding him of her husband’s hands at the autopsy—as she raised the skull for a closer look. The mandible still lay on the dirt, and Zander’s stomach twisted, jarred by the sight of the jawbone outside of its rightful position on the skull.

  Dr. Peres softly hummed as she studied the skull and turned it in her hands, holding it closer to one of her bright lights, peering inside, and then studying the face again. “Hello, pretty girl,” she said in a quiet voice.

  “It is female?” Ava asked.

  “Oh yes, definitely. Young, too.”

  Zander scratched Hank West, the missing man with dementia, off his mental list. “How young?”

  The doctor turned the head upside down, ran a finger across the teeth and then along a few of the seams in the skull. “Teenager. Early twenties at the latest.”

  She glanced down at some of the half-buried bones. “I need to examine everything to give a definite answer, but you can take that with ninety-five percent certainty.”

  “Got some coins of some sort here, Doc,” said one of the techs as she pushed a small grid stake into the dirt. Zander squatted beside her, not surprised they hadn’t noticed the small disks. They were caked with dirt and blended perfectly into the ground. The tech poked at a few with a tool. “I don’t think they’re money . . . at least not US money.”

  Zander agreed. They were larger than quarters but smaller than half dollars. The faint pattern under the dirt was unrecognizable, and he stopped himself before picking one up to wipe it off. “Maybe a foreign tourist?” he suggested to the tech, who shrugged.

  “You can’t tell us how long she’s been here, can you?” Ava asked.

  “No. I’ll need to do some testing,” said the doctor. “But she has a few composite posterior fillings. No alloy. That tell
s me she’s probably not from the 1970s or earlier. Dentists were doing composite fillings pretty regularly from the 1980s on, but primarily on anterior teeth. These posterior fillings indicate she’s from a more recent decade or else had an ahead-of-his-time dentist. Sorry . . . I know that’s vague.”

  “It helps,” said Zander. “Tightens the window of when to search.”

  “She’s African American.”

  Zander went still.

  “You’re sure?” Ava asked in a flat voice.

  The doctor’s lips rose. “Yes.” She raised an are-you-questioning-me brow at Ava.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Ava began, dismay in her eyes.

  “See the rectangular shape of her orbits?” The doctor traced the edges of the bones around where her eyes should be. “Caucasians have angular orbits. Asians, round. But that’s not all I see. At the top of the skull there’s a slight depression where it’d be flat on Asians and Caucasians, and the nasal aperture is broad and rounded—”

  “We trust your judgment, Victoria,” Ava said quickly.

  “How was she killed?” Zander cut in, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

  Dr. Peres eyed him over the top of her glasses and made a deliberate show of examining the skull. “She wasn’t shot in the head.” She gave him a side-eye.

  He knew he had asked too early. “Forget I asked that,” he said in apology. “It was unfair.” He met Ava’s eyes. “Did Greer mention any missing African American teens when you went for food?”

  She pointed. “No. But you can ask him.”

  Zander turned and saw the sheriff returning to the scene. The deputy who’d taken Alice home was with him. Both men had their jacket collars turned up against the cold, and the deputy wiped his nose continually with a tissue.

  Ava introduced the sheriff to Dr. Peres. “The doctor says this is an African American female in her teens or early twenties,” she announced. “Does that match any missing person records?”

  The sheriff looked grim and exchanged a glance with his deputy. “Yep. Cynthia Green.”

  Cindy? “Alice called her Cindy.”

  Surprise crossed the sheriff’s face. “Well, why in the hell didn’t Alice tell us this missing girl was up here?”

  “Because she’s Alice,” said the deputy.

  “True.” Resignation flashed in Greer’s eyes.

  “Missing from when? What happened?” Ava crossed her arms, her tone one of heavily tested patience.

  The sheriff pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Cynthia Green’s parents reported her missing a couple of decades ago.” His eyes darted back and forth as he read. “They’re from Seattle and were vacationing along the Oregon coast during spring break. Their nineteen-year-old went for a walk along the beach south of here near Gearhart and never returned.”

  “She vanished on their vacation,” Ava repeated, her eyes wide. “But we’re miles from Gearhart.”

  “I remembered the case once I saw her name come up in our search,” Greer said. “I was a deputy, and all of us spent many hours combing the beach and surrounding hillside, even though the state police were in charge of the investigation. I remember they’d speculated that she’d been picked up by a car or knocked into the ocean by a sneaker wave. She had two younger sisters, and her parents were out of their minds. It was heartbreaking.”

  “Alice said she saw the people who brought Cindy here,” Zander stated. “We pressed her for a little more info, but she shut down.”

  Greer didn’t look surprised. “Gotta know how to handle Alice. She’s skittish.” He shook his head ruefully. “Don’t know how good her memory will be.”

  “Alice said, ‘She is safe here’ when she showed us the skull,” Ava added. “Maybe she didn’t tell anyone because she was worried for the girl’s safety.”

  “Even though she was already dead?” asked Dr. Peres.

  “It might have made sense in Alice’s mind,” Zander said, remembering the protective look on the woman’s face as she brushed the debris from the skull.

  “How long will it take you to remove the remains?” Greer asked Dr. Peres.

  “A few hours, maybe less. It appears nothing was deliberately buried. We’ll get the bulk of it tonight and then come back tomorrow to widen the search area.”

  “Widen?” asked Ava.

  “Yes, tiny animals will have dragged off the smaller bones of the hands and feet. Frequently we find them nearby.”

  “Will you be able to tell how she died?” Greer asked.

  Greer asked the question in a much better way than Zander had.

  “Sadly, with skeletal remains, what I can find is very limited. Bones can show stab marks, blunt force trauma, strangulation if the hyoid is present—which I don’t hold a lot of hope for since it’s a tiny bone and the body might have been here for twenty years. We’re lucky we have as many bones as we do.” She gave a curt nod, determination in her gaze. “I’ll do my best.”

  The skull in her hands held Zander’s attention.

  Are you related to the Fitch case?

  The race of two of the victims and their adjacent locations were the only connections.

  Only connections so far. The length of time between the deaths—

  “Sheriff, what’s the exact date of Cynthia Green’s disappearance?” he asked.

  Greer checked his phone and told him.

  Ava’s wide eyes met Zander’s.

  Cynthia had vanished two weeks before Emily Mills’s father had been hanged.

  23

  Zander had barely slept.

  The skeletal face of Cynthia Green haunted him as he followed Ava into the county sheriff’s department the next morning, his coffee in hand. He saw Cynthia when he closed his eyes and when they were open. He and Ava had spent an hour last night discussing every direction they needed to investigate in their ever-expanding case. The hate crime of the Fitch deaths was spiraling larger and larger.

  A missing black girl found a few hundred yards from the Fitch residence.

  She’d disappeared two weeks before Emily’s father was hanged.

  A hanging also happened at the Fitch home.

  The same homemade GHB that was in the Fitches had been found in Nate Copeland.

  The facts were tenuously connected, as in a spiderweb, and many pieces were missing.

  “This won’t do.” Ava put her hands on her hips as she considered the table and chairs in the small room. They had asked Emily Mills to meet them that morning for follow-up questions.

  “What’s wrong with it?” It was a bare-bones room that the sheriff’s department used for interviews. Crumbs on the table and fast-food wrappers in the overflowing wastebasket told Zander it was frequently used for other things.

  “I don’t want a table between us and Emily.”

  Zander made a face, understanding what she meant. Ava had insisted on conducting this follow-up at the station because the location “felt official.” Now she didn’t want a table because it could give suspects a feeling of protection, as if they could hide behind the table. She wanted Emily to feel exposed.

  A little anxiety could make people reveal deceptive behaviors—possible indicators of lying.

  He handed his coffee to Ava, shoved the table out of the center of the room and up against a wall, and then arranged three chairs to face each other. “How’s that?”

  She grinned, pleased, and returned his coffee.

  “Nothing from Dr. Peres yet?” he asked as he lowered himself into a chair and stretched out his legs.

  “It’s only nine a.m. Give her a chance to get to work at least.”

  “I figured if her husband started early, then maybe she did too.”

  The forensic anthropologist had driven back to Portland after midnight, promising to have her forensic odontologist take dental films of the skull and compare them to the X-rays from the state police who had originally handled the disappearance of Cynthia Green.

  A silver stud earring and a bea
ded bracelet had been found with the odd coins near the remains. A few small shirt buttons had been scattered in the ground cover, but there were no shoes.

  The sheriff had refused to notify the family until the dental records had been examined and confirmed. “No point in getting their hopes up twenty years after her disappearance when we aren’t positive,” he’d said. Everyone had agreed.

  Even exhausted, Zander could barely sit still in the airless room, needing to know if they had found Cynthia Green. Questions bubbling in his head had kept him up half the night.

  Emily appeared in the doorway, curiosity in her features, a cautious smile on her lips. She was dressed for the cold in tall boots, jeans, and a heavy wool coat.

  Ava’s allegation that Zander had a fondness for the witness had taken hold in his brain, popping up at odd moments and disrupting his focus. Now he purposefully detached to analyze his reaction to the woman in the door.

  He felt a small prickle in his stomach. A pull toward her. And he felt suddenly awake.

  Shit.

  Knowing that Ava was about to expertly grill Emily over her previous interview bothered him. And it wasn’t a worry that he hadn’t been thorough in the first interview; it was a stupid caveman instinct to shield her from Ava’s sharp and probing exam.

  Ava is right about my feelings.

  No wonder Ava had ordered him to say as little as possible to Emily today.

  “Are we doing this here so you can easily lock me up afterward?” Emily joked as she stepped in the room. She slid off her coat, unwrapped the scarf, and pushed her long hair off her neck. Taking a seat, she looked at Ava and Zander expectantly, her gaze acute, her posture alert.

  “Thanks for coming, Emily,” Ava replied with a half grin. “I don’t think we’ll need a cell today.”

  “Maybe I need one for protection.”

  “What?” Zander sat up straight. “Have you been threatened? What happened?”

  Emily held up her hands. “I was kidding . . . sort of. Nothing’s happened, but I’ve had a hard time getting Nate’s death out of my head, and I’m constantly looking over my shoulder. Has it been determined if it was suicide?”