by Regan, Lisa
“It’s definitely a female,” Dr. Feist called out. “The skull has a smooth, vertical frontal bone and a more rounded chin than we’d expect to see in a male. The mastoid process—this small, conical bone behind the jaw where the neck muscles attach—it’s very small. Much smaller than that of a male.”
Noah and Josie moved closer.
Dr. Feist pointed to the pelvis. “See how the opening of the pelvic girdle is broad and round? That’s typical of a female. The pubic arch, here at the bottom where the two sides come together, is wide, greater than ninety degrees, all of which is to allow for childbirth, as both of you know.”
Noah’s hand wrapped around Josie’s upper arm just as her knees buckled. She leaned against him to stay upright but continued to stare at Dr. Feist, who went on, “Whoever this is, she didn’t die here. The grass underneath is pristine. If this body had decomposed here, the ground would not look like this. When a body decomposes, the fatty acids leak into the ground and leave a greasy residue. This body decomposed somewhere else and then someone brought these bones here.”
“Can you tell how long they’ve been here?” Noah asked.
“Normally, I’d say a few hours,” Dr. Feist said. “Only because out here, in the woods, this little arrangement here wouldn’t last longer than that.”
“What do you mean?” Noah asked.
“Animals would have found these bones and carried some of them off or at least disturbed them,” Josie put in.
“Exactly,” Dr. Feist said. “Bodies left out in the elements, exposed, are usually subject to scavenging. Out here, there are all kinds of animals that would be interested in a decomposing body. There’s not much left of this one that would be of interest to scavenging animals but that wouldn’t stop them from investigating.” She leaned over, one of her gloved fingers hovering over the rib cage. “Actually, it does look like something got to these bones.” She beckoned them closer. Noah kept a careful hold on Josie’s arm, and they took a few more steps together. Dr. Feist pointed to the two lower left ribs where it looked as though pieces of fibrous material clung to the bones. “See this? This is soft tissue that wasn’t entirely removed from the bones. See how the bone looks frayed? That’s usually from scavengers picking the soft tissue off the bones.”
Josie thought she might be sick.
Dr. Feist kept talking. “This body was definitely exposed to scavengers during decomposition, but that didn’t happen here.”
Noah said, “You said ‘normally’ you’d say a few hours. You think these remains have been here longer than a few hours?”
Dr. Feist nodded. She shifted her weight and pointed to the arm bones. “Yes, but only because they’ve been pinned down.”
“What?” Josie said.
Dr. Feist reached down and tugged something from the ground. It was metal, about ten inches long, pointed at the end that went into the ground with a clear plastic piece on the top of it. “Steel tent stakes,” Dr. Feist explained. She held the stake in one hand and with the fingers of her other hand, she pinched a clear string that attached to another stake on the other side of the bones. “Fishing line. Someone tied one end to each stake and then used it to keep the bones tied down to the ground.”
“Fishing line?” Noah said.
Josie’s throat was dry. “So it doesn’t interfere with the way the display looks. It doesn’t distract from… this.”
Dr. Feist said, “Someone spent some time over this.”
“Even with the stakes, a determined animal would be able to make off with some of these bones, don’t you think?” Noah said.
Dr. Feist laid the stake back onto the ground. “Sure, but like I said, there’s not much left on these bones to entice them.”
“How long?” Josie asked. “How long have they been out here?”
Dr. Feist stood. “You know I can’t say with certainty, but knowing what I know about bones and animals and this area, I’d say no more than a day or two.”
“Can you tell how long the victim has been dead?” Noah asked.
“That’s a little more complicated. Since the body didn’t decompose here, we don’t know what kind of temperature or condition it was left in during the decomp process. To estimate the time of death, we generally rely on being able to determine the temperature of the environment in which the body decomposed, ideally going back as far as two months, as well as whether conditions were moist or dry. We rely on the presence of insects and bacteria in the soil. We also know that scavengers and extreme heat can accelerate decomposition considerably. Oftentimes, we can tell a lot by any personal items found along with it. Without any of those contextual clues, I can’t really say how long this victim has been dead. I might need to consult an expert in forensic taphonomy to give you any idea at all.”
“Forensic taphonomy?” Noah repeated.
“It’s the study of how remains decompose and fossilize,” Dr. Feist said.
Hummel, who had been standing nearby listening, said, “We’ll take those stakes in for analysis. Maybe we can get a print or a partial print. We’ll definitely check for manufacturer and which stores sell them.”
“Thanks, Hummel,” Josie said.
He nodded. “I’ll get Chan out here to get these remains transferred to the morgue. You want to have a look inside?”
Nine
Josie was about to say that she’d been inside, but Noah was already steering her away from the bones, around the cabin and through the front door. She did feel as though she could breathe better away from the crime scene. They were looking around when Mettner walked in.
“I talked with the landlord. He hasn’t heard from Trinity since they signed the rental agreement. Her lease was up this week. He hasn’t been up here and hasn’t had any complaints. Four of the other properties are rented right now. I called in some extra units to go around and canvass those cabins, see if anyone heard or saw anything unusual.”
“Good call,” Noah said.
“Our family is on their way to the police station,” Josie said. “They’ll meet us there, but our mother, Shannon, already told me she hasn’t heard from Trinity in a few weeks.”
Mettner frowned. “I’m betting the rest of them won’t have heard from her either. Her phone is in the console of her car, as you know. She was getting ready to leave and someone showed up here. That’s what it looks like.”
“Or someone was here with her,” Noah suggested. “Regardless; someone took her. We’ll need her dental records. The doc also said the remains were brought here from some other location.”
“I’ll have Hummel print this place,” Mettner said. “Especially since the door was open. Although nothing in here looks disturbed.”
Josie looked around again, something pricking at the edges of her mind. “Her car too,” she said.
“You think someone touched the car?”
Josie walked over to the door and looked out into the driveway. “Her keys were in the ignition. She had already gotten into the car.”
“Unless whoever took her made it look that way,” Noah said.
“Why would someone do that?” Mettner asked.
Josie studied the red Fiat Spider. “She was already in the car,” Josie said. “Her phone is where she always put it. When she left our house last month, she positioned her suitcase and purse exactly like that, except for—”
She broke off and looked at Noah. As if reading her mind, he said, “The boxes.”
Mettner looked up from the note-taking app on his phone. “What boxes?”
“She had two boxes with her when she left our house,” Josie said. “Document boxes. She loaded them into the car when she left, put them on top of the suitcase, and put her purse inside one of the boxes.”
Mettner said, “There’re no boxes in the car or in this cabin.”
“Maybe the person who took Trinity took the boxes, too,” Noah said.
A sense of deep foreboding gathered in Josie’s stomach. “There’s a locked trash bin on the
side of the cabin. Someone needs to check it.”
Mettner stepped out of the cabin momentarily to speak with a member of the ERT. Josie watched as he pointed to the side of the cabin where the trash bin was located. When he came back in, he asked, “What was in the boxes?”
“I’m not sure,” Josie said. “Documents, photos, what looked like personal effects. It looked like a cold case file of some kind.” She turned to Noah. “You said her room looked a mess. Did you get a look at anything she had hanging on the walls or scattered around?”
“I’m sorry, Josie. I didn’t see much more than you did. I just happened to walk past one day, and her door was cracked. I just glanced inside. I didn’t want to invade her privacy, so I didn’t go in. From what I could see, there were some photos of what looked like skeletal remains.”
“I saw that, too,” Josie said.
Mettner said, “Like the kind of remains we’ve got out back?”
“I’m not sure,” Noah answered. “All I saw was a photo of a torso, and it was just a quick glance.”
“So it could have been a close-up of the rib cage,” Mettner said. “With all the other bones arranged around it just like out back but not actually shown in the photo.”
Noah nodded. “It’s possible, yes.”
“I saw that photo as well,” Josie added. “I also saw a few others—leg bones, a pelvis, some smaller bones—but they were all close-up photos, and I only got a quick glance. I would remember if she had a photo showing something like what’s out back.”
Mettner said, “Where’d she get those boxes? Did she bring them with her from New York?”
“I’m not sure,” Josie said. “I think so.”
Noah said, “I’m pretty sure one of those boxes came from her assistant. Remember Trinity said she had her assistant mail stuff to the house. We should talk to her. She could tell us what was in at least one of the boxes.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “That’s a good idea.”
Hummel rapped on the cabin door, beckoning them. Josie stepped outside with Mettner and Noah in tow. “Chan checked the trash bin,” Hummel said. “Bunch of microwave meal boxes, various food wrappers, crumpled paper towels, coffee grounds…”
“I want to look,” Josie said. “To see if there’s anything I don’t think Trinity left.”
Hummel pointed in the direction of the trash bin. “Be my guest.”
But there was nothing unusual in Trinity’s trash. There wasn’t much there as she had only spent one week at the cabin. When Josie and Hummel returned to the front of the cabin, Noah asked, “No documents? Photos?”
“Nothing,” Josie said.
Hummel led them over to Trinity’s car and used a gloved hand to open the driver’s side door. “We’ll need warrants, but we’ll definitely pull whatever prints we can from the car. As you can see, there are no obvious signs of a struggle. No blood, no scratches or damage of any kind to the interior of the vehicle. At least at first glance.”
Josie peered inside. Besides the suitcase and purse crammed into the passenger’s seat, the car looked pristine, as though Trinity had just driven off the lot. Josie knew she rarely had a chance to drive it. She usually kept it in a garage just outside of New York City. She used public transport or cabs to get around inside the city. The only time she drove it was when she visited Josie or her parents and brother two hours from Denton and not every visit. If the weather was bad or she thought she’d have to venture too far from her family’s homes, she would rent a car. Josie had often wondered why she’d even bought the damn thing. She was surprised that Trinity had braved the gravel roads leading to the cabin with her prized Fiat.
Hummel said, “We’ve got to impound it, take it for secure processing. The tow truck is on its way.”
Josie knew this meant they’d tow the car to Denton’s police impound lot where they had two car bays that were accessible only to the police. They were used specifically for processing vehicles. The secure indoor environment made it easier for Hummel’s team to do their job and less likely that anything would be lost or overlooked.
“Print the inside, too, would you?”
“Will do,” Hummel replied. “We’ve got Trinity’s prints on file as elimination prints from an earlier case, so we’ll be able to identify those.”
“Okay,” Josie said. She motioned toward the purse and suitcase. “Hummel, Trinity was working on something before she left. I’m not sure what, though, I’d like to have a look at her phone and laptop when you’ve finished processing everything. I’m assuming her laptop is packed away in her suitcase.”
“We can dump the electronics—we’ll make sure we get a warrant for them—but you know that if we try to get latent prints from the outside of the phone or laptop we’d have to use the cyanoacrylate fuming, right?”
“Cause they have non-porous surfaces,” Josie replied, seeing where he was going.
“Yeah, so if we use the cyanoacrylate to develop latent prints, it will more or less destroy the electronics.”
“Right,” Josie said. Cyanoacrylate was basically superglue. Fumes from it reacted with the moisture in latent fingerprints to produce a visible, white film which formed over the ridges of the print that could then be photographed. The problem was that the white material was sticky and near-impossible to remove from any surface it was developed on. “I think her phone has a case on it. Just remove it and see what you get from the case. If the laptop is somewhere deep in her suitcase, I don’t think you need to try to pull prints from that. Whoever took her left her phone so they weren’t concerned with Trinity’s electronics.”
Hummel closed the driver’s side door. The rumble of a large truck sounded from the direction of the road. A moment later, a flatbed tow truck lumbered into view. Hummel waved to the driver, who spent several minutes getting the truck into position to haul away Trinity’s car. Then he hopped down from the truck and pulled on a pair of gloves before approaching the car.
“Hummel,” Josie said. “I need everything you can get as soon as you can get it.”
He nodded. “You got it, boss.”
Ten
Alex stared at his mother’s unfinished painting. The one his father said was missing something. She hadn’t worked on it in days. She was having one of her dark times. That’s how he thought of them; when she stayed in her darkened bedroom for days on end. Sometimes he wanted to creep inside and try to coax her back out, but his father forbade it. Alex had watched her stand in front of the painting for hours each day, brooding over what it was that Frances found wanting. He, too, had studied its abstract whorls and lines and splashes. To him, it looked the same as the last several paintings she had sold that had made Frances so proud of her. Yet, she hadn’t finished it.
He went back into the hallway and listened. Frances was out tending to his duties. Zandra, as usual, was locked away.
She had told him that she hadn’t meant to hurt their mother, but that wasn’t true. It had given her some kind of thrill. Alex knew it. He had been aware of the look on her face as their mother bled. It was the same expression Alex had seen on their dad’s face the day the raptor flew down from the sky and snatched the snake away. A sort of wonder. Admiration. Almost… joy. The first few times Zandra did it, their mother scolded her but didn’t tell Frances. But the last time—the time Zandra had sliced Hanna’s arm so badly that she needed stitches—their mother had called their father on the telephone. “We’ve had an incident,” she’d said. Then she’d looked at Zandra with regret. As though she was sorry for what was about to happen to her.
Shaking the memory from his head, Alex made his way down the steps and outside. An hour later, he had gathered enough feathers to complete the painting. He used his mother’s hot glue gun to fix them onto the painting until it looked like wings were emerging from a fusion of color beneath. He was surveying his work when he heard a gasp from the doorway. He turned to see Hanna standing in her shift, one hand covering her heart.
“Oh Alex,”
she murmured. “It’s beautiful. It’s exactly right, isn’t it?” She stepped forward, admiring it. “Wait until your father sees this!”
Wordlessly, Alex unplugged the glue gun and shuffled toward the door.
“Honey,” she called after him.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Thank you. Let’s just not tell your father, okay? For now?”
“Sure.”
Eleven
Josie, Noah, and Mettner sat at their desks in the second-floor great room at Denton PD headquarters. Chief Bob Chitwood stood before them, his thin arms crossed over his chest. Beneath gray stubble, his acne-pitted cheeks grew pinker with each fact that the detectives relayed about Trinity’s disappearance. Wisps of his white hair floated over the top of his scalp as he turned his head from Mettner to Josie and back. When they finished recapping what little they knew, Chitwood pointed a finger at Mettner. “This is your case. Quinn and Fraley can assist, but you’re the lead.” Chitwood aimed his finger at Josie. “You. Stay on the sidelines, you got that?”
“Sir,” Josie protested. “It’s my sister.”
“I know that, Quinn. That means you’re too close. This is Mettner’s case, understand? He calls the shots.”
“Yes, sir,” Josie said, relieved he wasn’t going to send her home or forbid her from having any involvement at all.
“When Detective Palmer gets here, she can run secondary. But Quinn,” he added in a warning tone, “your sister is a celebrity. The minute the press gets wind of this, they’re going to be on us like flies on crap. They’ll want interviews and comments. I don’t want to see your face on TV unless Mett says so. You got that?”
Josie nodded. Chitwood gave her a long, appraising look, one of his bushy white brows kinking upward before he turned toward Noah. “You stay out of it too, you got that, Fraley?”
“Chief—” Noah began but Chitwood cut him off.