by Regan, Lisa
Trinity’s phone was in the console. She could have reached for it, but she didn’t. Josie wondered what time of day Trinity had tried to leave. “Hummel, were the headlights turned on?”
He shook his head. “Nope.”
So it had been daylight when Trinity got into the car three weeks earlier. Even in daylight, the kidnapper would have clearly seen her head bent to the screen had she attempted to use her phone. She could have drawn the letters on the door panel without ever looking away from him.
What was she trying to tell Josie by evoking that name?
Before Josie had a chance to consider it, Hummel said, “There’s one more thing I want you to see. Come into the other room.”
Thirteen
Josie and Gretchen followed Hummel back into the room beside the garage. Hummel walked over to a set of shelves and changed his gloves, snapping on a fresh pair and tossing the old ones into a garbage bin. At the stainless-steel table, he flipped open Trinity’s suitcase and spoke as he riffled through it. “I’ll have Chan catalogue the items. It’s mostly clothes, shoes, purses, toiletries, make-up, hair care products, and then we’ve got a laptop and charger.” One gloved hand reached inside the mesh pocket on the inside of the flap and came up with a small box wrapped in brown paper.
Josie said, “That came for Trinity the day she left our house. Noah found it in our mailbox and brought it in.”
Again, she saw the neat, block print in black marker spelling out Trinity’s name and Josie and Noah’s address. No return address. No postage. At one end, the wrapping had been torn where Trinity had looked inside. Gingerly, Hummel reached inside and pulled out a small black box, like the kind jewelry came in.
“Where was that?” Josie asked.
“Just where you saw it—in her suitcase.”
“What’s inside it?” Gretchen asked.
Hummel set aside the larger box with its torn wrapping and then pried open the smaller one, revealing a bed of black velvet with a single French-style hair comb resting in it. Gretchen immediately took out her phone and snapped a few photos of it while Josie stared. It was a strange color between tan and cream, delicate, smooth, and shiny. Another image of the strange array of bones behind Trinity’s rented cabin flashed in her mind. “Oh good God,” she said. “Do you think that’s—do you… ?” Her throat seized. She sucked in several deep breaths, trying to get her vocal cords to work again. Hummel and Gretchen waited patiently. Finally, she managed, “Is that made of bone?”
Hummel set it down on the table and peered at it. “I don’t know. We can send it to the lab. You think this is from whoever left those remains? You think he was stalking her or something?”
“It’s unusual,” Josie pointed out.
Gretchen said, “People do make jewelry and hair accessories from bone, although it’s usually from tortoise shells or antlers.”
Hummel said, “This may be animal bone. Like I said, we’ll ask the lab to test it.”
“There was only one?” Josie asked.
“Yeah, that’s all that was in this box. I mean if there was another one, it’s not here or in Trinity’s car or in the cabin.”
Gretchen said, “Have them analyze the packaging as well.” She turned to Josie. “Did she mention anything about a stalker to you? Did she get any other unusual packages?”
Josie sighed. Her mind felt clouded. She needed another coffee. “She never said anything about a stalker. The only other package that I know of that she received at our house was from her assistant. She’s on her way here but Mett already confirmed with her that she mailed Trinity a package to our house prior to this one arriving. This one, however, didn’t come by mail. It had no postage. Someone had to have dropped it off. Also, right after she looked inside it, she took off.”
“I thought you said she had an argument with Noah.”
“She did,” Josie answered. “Sort of. But she really didn’t start arguing with him until she had looked inside the package. She was already worked up before that because we were discussing her problems with her network. I thought when she freaked out on Noah she was just overreacting. I didn’t think the box had anything to do with it. But now… I don’t know.”
Gretchen nodded. “You said Noah found it in your mailbox. You’ve got one of those cameras, don’t you? Those Ring cameras?”
Josie felt a jolt. “I do!” A few years earlier she had had surveillance cameras installed around her house after a robbery. It was an old system that she could only access using her laptop. When Noah moved in, they switched over to Ring cameras which they could set to alert their phones if there was any motion detected. Josie didn’t remember getting any unusual notifications the morning Trinity took off. Then again, it might not have picked up any movement at the mailbox since it was at the end of their driveway and the motion detection range didn’t extend that far. She took her phone out and opened the app, pulling up the Event History and going back a month. Gretchen watched over Josie’s shoulder. On the screen, the app showed fourteen events on that date. Most of them were of Josie and Noah leaving and arriving throughout the day as well as Trinity going in and out of the house to retrieve her things and then leaving.
“There’s nothing else here,” Josie said.
“Doesn’t it have footage of the entire day?”
“Not going back thirty days,” Josie said. “It only keeps history of the events, which is whenever the motion sensors picked something up.”
“Your motion sensor doesn’t go off when someone accesses your mailbox?”
“No,” Josie said, pulling up the motion settings on the app. She pointed to the screen which showed her front stoop, driveway, front yard, and then the street beyond. A blue haze hung over the area in front of the stoop, just barely reaching the fenders of hers and Noah’s vehicles. “See this? That hazy area is where the motion detection starts. You have to walk all the way up to it in order to set off the camera. When we first installed the camera, we had it set to pick up motion all the way out to the street but then every time a car drove past, or one of our neighbors walked their dog, our phones were going off. It was all day long.”
Gretchen said. “It’s a long shot, but I can have some units canvass your neighbors to see if they saw anyone suspicious lingering around the last six weeks.”
“Thank you,” Josie said.
Gretchen made a quick call while Josie continued to stare at the comb. Had Trinity known the person who left it for her? Why hadn’t she said anything? Would she have had any idea that it might be made of bone? Even if she hadn’t, Josie couldn’t remember ever seeing Trinity wear a French hair comb before. This one wasn’t Trinity’s style at all. It was simple—Trinity preferred simplicity in her clothing and even in her home décor—but it lacked the elegance that Josie usually associated with her sister. Maybe Josie didn’t know as much as she should about Trinity, but she knew the comb was not something Trinity would ever purchase for herself—or wear even if she’d received it as a gift.
Was Josie right in saying that it was the package, and not Noah’s ill-timed joke, that sent Trinity spiraling out of control and storming from the house? But if that was the case, why would she feel the need to leave? What did the package mean?
“We need to take a serious look at the stalker angle,” Josie said. “We should talk with people she worked with at the network to find out if she mentioned or reported anything or anyone unusual or menacing.”
Gretchen looked over at Josie and nodded. Hummel said, “A stalker would make a lot of sense. Maybe there will be something on her phone or laptop. Chan already did a dump on the laptop. She’ll give you the drive with all of its contents when you leave. Take her phone as well. Dr. Feist has the remains over at the morgue.”
“Thanks,” Josie said. She turned to Gretchen. “Let’s stop over there now.”
Fourteen
Denton’s city morgue consisted of a large windowless exam room and one small office presided over by Dr. Feist. It was house
d in the basement of Denton Memorial Hospital, an ancient brick building on top of a hill that overlooked most of the city. The smell hit them before they even entered the exam room—a putrid combination of chemicals and decay. Inside the room, Dr. Feist stood next to a stainless-steel autopsy table, arranging the bones from the cabin into a loose facsimile of a skeleton. A large, movable light shined down on them. The skull’s empty eyes stared at Josie once more, somehow less creepy here in Dr. Feist’s clinical domain, but still disturbing. She felt a pang thinking about how a human being could be reduced to just a pile of off-white jigsaw pieces like this. A table full of bones; incomplete, small, and sad.
Was it Trinity? Was this all that was left of Josie’s dynamic force of a sister?
Josie looked up to see Dr. Feist staring at her. “As I told you at the scene, this is a woman. She’s over thirty, based on the fact that all of her growth plates are fused, including the medial aspect of her clavicles.”
Gretchen said, “You mean the end of the collarbone that goes into the shoulder?”
“Right,” said Dr. Feist. “As you will recall, the long bones in the body have three parts: the diaphysis—that’s the shaft—the metaphysis, which is the part where it widens and flares at the end—the knobby end—and then the epiphysis, which is basically the end cap of the bone or the growth plate. In children, there is a gap between the epiphysis and the metaphysis but in adults, the epiphysis and the metaphysis are fused together.”
Josie said, “So, in adults, the knobby end of the bone fuses with the cap on the end of it.”
“Right. The clavicles are the last to fuse and that happens between nineteen and thirty at the latest. In this woman we see that fusion. I actually think she may be much older than thirty.” Dr. Feist moved to the head of the table, her gloved fingers hovering over the top of the skull. She indicated very faint traces of squiggly lines running from front to back of the skull and also horizontally across the back of the skull.
“See these cranial sutures? They’re openings in the skull that remain open and stretch as our brains grow from birth to adulthood. Some close in childhood but these two that you see here—well, you can barely see them since they’re closed now—usually they’re open well into adulthood. This one running along the center of her skull from front to back is the sagittal suture, and this one running across the back of the skull is the lambdoid suture. Both are almost completely closed which doesn’t normally happen until between ages thirty and forty, although sometimes the sagittal suture can remain open into the fifties.”
She moved down to the pelvis, pointing to the planes of the large curved bones. “Examination of her pelvis indicates she likely had children. When the pubic bones separate to allow the baby to fit through, the ligaments pull away from the bone and can sometimes cause scars. I see some pitting scars here which are sometimes an indicator of that. Again, it’s not an exact science, but it’s a good indicator.”
With each word, Josie felt a spasm of relief until her limbs felt weak and jelly-like.
Gretchen leaned over, peering at the pubic bones, glasses sliding down to the end of her nose. Josie, too, leaned forward to get a closer look. “The bone looks almost spongy,” she noted.
Dr. Feist nodded. “That’s another reason I believe she is over forty, possibly in her fifties. When a person gets into their forties, the pelvic bones take on a more porous look.”
Josie said, “This woman can’t possibly be Trinity. She’s had a child and she’s much older.”
Dr. Feist replied, “I believe so, yes, but I would prefer to wait until I’ve got Trinity’s dental records before confirming that definitively.”
Josie thought she might need to sit down. So profound was her relief that every inch of her body felt unsteady. Yet, the longer she stared at the bones, the more that relief receded, leaving her back in a state of high anxiety. Trinity could still be alive, but the woman before them was not. Somewhere she had loved ones—a child or children. Surely, they were looking for her, wondering what had become of her? Josie ached with the thought of the devastation that lay ahead of them.
Gretchen asked, “Can you determine her race?”
Dr. Feist moved back toward the skull. “I’m not a forensic anthropologist, but I can make an educated guess based on what I know and what I’ve seen in my career.”
“Which is what?” Josie coaxed.
“I would say that this is a Caucasian female based on the narrow nasal opening and the fact that the nasal bridge is so pronounced and high up on the face. Also, if you look at the eye sockets—”
Josie had to force herself to look at them again.
“—they’re quite circular but their margins are squared. That’s consistent with Caucasoid skulls.”
Josie looked away from the skull once more.
With a nod, Gretchen said, “Let me call Noah and see if he’s gotten anywhere with the warrant for Trinity’s dental records.”
As she walked off into the hallway, Josie asked, “Can you tell how this woman died?”
Dr. Feist frowned. “I’m afraid I can’t. There is no evidence of trauma. No fractures of any kind. No damage from bullets. Her hyoid is intact. If she had been strangled, I’d expect to see damage to the hyoid. Although that’s not one hundred percent accurate as an indicator. She might have been strangled without her hyoid being damaged. She could have asphyxiated—that wouldn’t cause visible trauma to the bones. I don’t see any marks that indicate that she might have been stabbed, although it’s possible she was stabbed, and the damage was to the soft tissue only. At this advanced stage of decomposition, there’s no soft tissue left for me to make that determination.”
Josie said, “So right now all we know is that this is a Caucasian woman, likely in her forties or older, who has probably had children. What about distinguishing characteristics? Individual characteristics?”
Dr. Feist frowned. “I’m afraid there’s nothing.”
Gretchen returned to the room, her phone in hand. “Dr. Feist, check your email. Noah got Trinity’s dental records.”
“That was fast,” Dr. Feist said, walking over to the stainless-steel counter to open her laptop.
If Noah had been there, Josie would have hugged him. She was certain his doggedness had procured the dental x-rays in record time. It often took several days for the police department to obtain the necessary records or images to move their cases forward.
A few moments later, Dr. Feist’s screen showed images of Trinity’s dental x-rays side by side with those that had been taken of the woman on the autopsy table. Josie and Gretchen crowded in on either side of the doctor, studying the images. Dr. Feist pointed to several places on the mystery woman’s x-rays where posts had been placed into her root canals to hold crowns in place. “Trinity doesn’t have this many crowns and hers are on the top. None on the bottom.” She turned and met Josie’s eyes, a grim smile on her face. “This woman is not your sister.”
Tears stung the backs of Josie’s eyes. There was a chance of getting Trinity back alive.
Gretchen said, “If they’re not Trinity’s remains, whose are they?”
Fifteen
Alex sat on the bench next to the front door, itchy in the stiff suit his parents had made him wear. Zandra had wanted to wear a puffy, glittery pink dress with matching pink bows in her hair. There had been quite an argument over her choice, which their parents had won. Frances chose the outfit, and that was that.
From upstairs Alex could hear his parents talking. Moments later, his mother descended the steps wearing a silky red dress and heels, her long brown hair swept back from her face. She looked like a movie star. A few minutes later, his father came down, dressed in his only suit. He looked at Alex. “This is a big night for your mother,” he said gravely. “There will be some very important people at her art show this evening. If she sells just one piece, it could mean financial security for our entire family. Do you understand?”
Hanna placed an elegant han
d on Frances’s arm. “You don’t need to worry about Alex, not tonight.”
“Somehow, I find that hard to believe,” he told her. Turning back to Alex, he said, “If you don’t keep your sister in check, you’ll be sleeping in the yard for a month, do you understand?”
Hanna’s brow furrowed. “Really, Frances, it’s going to be fine. Alex and Zandra know how important this night is for our family. Alex will do everything he can to make sure things go off perfectly. He has a stake in it, too, you know.”
She gave Alex a conspiratorial smile.
Frances frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The painting you love so much? The one you said should be the centerpiece of the show? Alex finished it, not me. The wings were his idea. He collected the feathers and arranged them on the canvas. Amazing, isn’t it? Perhaps he’ll be an artist like me.”
Alex expected Frances to be as delighted with this news as Hanna was delivering it. Instead, his dark eyes flashed with fury. He whirled on Hanna. “You let the boy finish your painting?”
Hanna took two uneven steps back, away from him. “It doesn’t matter. Everyone loves it. Besides, we’re the only ones who know.”
Frances pointed a finger at Alex, but kept his gaze on Hanna. “You let this stupid, awful boy destroy the very centerpiece of your show? Are you out of your mind?”
Her lower lip trembled. “I think you’re overreacting,” she said.
Frances pulled at his tie. “We’re not going.”
A tear slid from the corner of Hanna’s eye. “We have to go. They’re expecting us. There are going to be over a hundred people there. Frances, it’s one painting. No one will know.”