Find Her Alive

by Regan, Lisa

  Josie asked, “She didn’t have a best friend in high school?”

  “No,” Shannon said. “It was always very sad. We would want to take her places and we’d suggest she invite a friend to go with us, but there was no one. All the other girls had paired off, but she was just alone, all the time. Any time she tried to make friends, it fizzled.”

  “Remember that one girl?” Christian asked. “Her family was on vacation at the beach at the same time as us the summer before Trinity’s freshman year of high school?”

  “The parasailing girl? Of course I do. That bitch.” Shannon looked at Josie. “This girl was in Trinity’s class at the middle school. She was going to the same high school. She hung out with Trinity the entire week we were at the beach. We took them parasailing together and they had a blast. I thought it really bonded them since it was a pretty intense experience. Trinity was on top of the world. For the first time in a couple of years, I had hope for her. She had a friend finally. Someone her own age to do things with. As soon as we got back to Callowhill, the girl acted like she didn’t exist.”

  “I think it’s called ‘ghosting’ now,” Christian said.

  “It’s called being a terrible human being,” Shannon spat. “Then and now. I even called her mother, tried to set up some get-togethers but she blew me off as well. Trinity spent the rest of the year wondering what she had said or done wrong.”

  Josie’s heart ached for her twin. “That’s terrible.”

  Christian shook his head. “No, that’s not terrible. After what happened to her during freshman year, that really wasn’t so bad.”

  Shannon wiped more tears from her eyes. “You’d think after all these years, that dumb high school stuff wouldn’t bother me anymore, but it still does.”

  “What happened?” Josie asked.

  Shannon moved to the kitchen sink, searching the cabinet above it until she found teabags. She heated water in a kettle on the stove as she spoke. “It started with this purse she found at a thrift shop in Philadelphia. It was an eighties-style thing—patchwork with lots of different colors and patterns. She loved it. God knows why, but she was so thrilled with it. It was unlike anything anyone else had, she said.”

  “Because it was from twenty years before her time,” Christian said.

  Shannon shook her head. “That shouldn’t have mattered. She liked it. It was a bag. Well, she took it to school, and it was like blood in the water to those horrible kids. Immediately they started making fun of her, calling her ‘ugly bag lady.’”

  “How creative,” Josie said.

  “Yes, well, they were never very smart, those kids,” Shannon said. “Then they said she couldn’t afford a real bag and started calling her ‘Poorhouse Payne’ and that pretty much set the tone for the entire year.”

  Christian said. “Trinity couldn’t understand why they would make fun of her for being poor when we clearly weren’t. We tried to explain that wasn’t the point—these kids were being cruel for cruelty’s sake.”

  Shannon chimed in. “We told her it was unacceptable for anyone to make fun of another person because of their socioeconomic status, and that if they weren’t calling her ‘Poorhouse Payne’, they’d find something else to tease her about.”

  In her mind, Josie catalogued the handbags she’d found among Trinity’s things upstairs. “What happened to the purse?”

  Shannon poured hot water into a mug and dipped a teabag into it. “She threw it away. Before she even left school. She was mortified. I marched her right back down to school to pick it out of the trash because I wanted her to keep taking it to school to prove a point—”

  Christian smiled. “Which was that those kids could shove their taunts right up their asses, although I believe my wife used much stronger language back then.”

  Shannon went on, “But when we got there, all the trash bins had been emptied. There were about a hundred trash bags in the dumpster. Trinity’s day had already been horrific, I didn’t want to make it worse by making her dumpster dive for the very thing that had made her the object of such ridicule.”

  Josie could just imagine if anyone from school had seen that. Poorhouse Payne dumpster diving with her own mother? The rumors and verbal abuse would be relentless. “Good call,” she told Shannon.

  “We told her to ignore them, to keep her head held high, that it didn’t matter. They were just being cruel for no reason and who would want to be friends with people like that, anyway?”

  All things that well-meaning parents told children who were being bullied, Josie knew, but which rarely helped in any situation. Then again, what else was there to say or even to do?

  “The next day,” Shannon continued. “She took one of my very expensive bags from my closet without telling me and wore it to school.”

  Josie flinched. Although she and Trinity had had similar tastes in high school, their personalities couldn’t have been more different. If it had been Josie who’d endured all that abuse over a vintage eighties bag at fourteen, she would have made the loudest and most obnoxious bully wear it as a hat by the end of the day, and then she would have paraded that person around so all of his or her cronies knew not to mess with her anymore. Then, she would have saved up for an entire collection of vintage eighties handbags and taken a different one to school each day of the week, daring anyone to make fun of her.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if she’d been like that because she wasn’t raised by Shannon and Christian. Had her own shitty childhood given her some grit she might not have developed otherwise? Shaking the thoughts from her head, she focused on her parents. “What happened after that?”

  Shannon put the mug of tea in front of Josie. “Chamomile,” she said. “It will help you sleep.”

  Christian said, “The kids said she stole it. One of them took it from her and said they were going to turn her into the main office for stealing. She said it was her mother’s, and then a group of about four of them destroyed it.”

  “Ripped it to shreds,” Shannon said.

  “My God.”

  “It was bad,” Christian said. “We decided enough was enough and got the principal involved. Shannon even called the police.”

  “Over a bag?” Josie couldn’t help asking.

  Shannon shook her head. “Not over the bag. I didn’t care about the bag. These kids forcibly ripped this bag from Trinity’s body and destroyed it. Can you imagine walking down a city street and someone coming up to you, tearing your purse from your body and then shredding it right in front of you? That’s not acceptable behavior. We wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior as adults in a world that has consequences. Why should we let high school kids get away with it?”

  “True,” Josie conceded.

  “Imagine these kids going into the workforce thinking they can act like this? That they can do whatever they damn well please and nothing will happen to them? Assaulting people verbally and physically, destroying other peoples’ property? Grown-ups have to respect the rules of a civilized society, why shouldn’t high school kids have to do the same?”

  “Shan,” Christian said.

  She waved a hand in the air. “Okay, okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Josie said. “What happened after that?”

  Christian said, “Well those particular kids were disciplined, and they didn’t dare come after Trinity again—not physically—but they turned everyone else in the school against her. Don’t go near Poorhouse Payne or she’ll call the cops and say you did something to her. That sort of thing. She still had issues. Lots of them, including getting into a fight with a girl from another school during a school trip. That’s what led to the whole community service thing.”

  “But she never found her place in high school,” Shannon said. “It was hell from beginning to end. I still wonder if we should have home-schooled her. If we did the wrong thing by forcing her to go there every day.”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. “It might hav
e prepared her well for the job she has now. She works in a pretty cutthroat industry—and she’s exceptionally good at what she does.”

  “Maybe,” Shannon said. “Sometimes in life you just never know if you’re doing the right thing when you’re actually doing it.”

  Thirty-Five

  The first time Alex saw the black vultures was on one of his adventures with his father. He often mistook them for hawks when they flew high overhead. It was only when they glided closer to the ground and he saw the black underside of their great wings that he knew they were vultures. His father told him to ignore them. “Dirty scavengers,” he called them. “They don’t even have nests. They roost on the ground and in abandoned buildings.”

  Alex didn’t see the problem. In his mind, the vultures were the intelligent ones. There was no waste. They fed on things already dead. They were twice as large as most of the other raptors that his father seemed to worship.

  “Ugly, stupid things,” Frances called the scavengers. He did whatever he could to ensure they didn’t come onto the land, but there was too much wildlife. Inevitably, a deer or coyote or smaller game like a rabbit or raccoon would die and they would descend on the corpse, picking it clean with savage efficiency.

  This was what Alex found awe-inspiring.

  He liked to go out by the rocks and leave them a gift—there was no shortage of carcasses in the woods. Then he waited for the vultures to arrive. There was plenty of time since he’d been banished from the house other than mealtimes. One day he was watching them scavenge a red fox when he heard a noise behind him. Expecting Frances, he whirled, on guard for insults and ready to be shooed away from the activities of the “stupid, dirty scavengers,” but it was Zandra.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I’m exploring.”

  “No,” he said. “How did you get out?”

  “I told her what he was doing in that room.”

  Alex felt a wave of disgust wash over him. He swallowed. “What room?”

  “I know you’re not that stupid,” she said. “My bedroom.”

  He said nothing.

  She picked up twigs that had gathered in the cracks of the rocks and tossed them toward the group of vultures, but they were undeterred. They maintained singular focus. When they were doing their work, very little could disturb them. Alex particularly liked this about them.

  Zandra said, “That’s really disgusting.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s gross.”

  She couldn’t see the beauty, not just in the majestic black birds, but in the art of scavenging. He didn’t respond.

  A moment later, she spoke again. “I want to be outside, with you.”

  “You can’t be,” he said. “You hurt mother. I’m supposed to stop you. Sometimes, I don’t really want to. Sometimes I want to let you… do bad things.”

  “You do?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I have bad thoughts.”

  “About Mom?”

  “About everyone,” he whispered.

  “Even me?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?”

  He looked away from the scene unfolding before them where one of the vultures had just loosened a small bone, flying away with it. Alex said, “I want to know what you look like without skin.”

  Thirty-Six

  Josie didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, especially after the revelations about Trinity’s childhood. No wonder Trinity was the way she was—ambitious, driven to a fault, and almost callous in her pursuit of stories. By all accounts and from the photo albums that Josie had pored over that morning, Trinity’s early childhood had been idyllic whereas Josie’s had been straight out of hell. By high school, when Josie went to live with Lisette and her life was finally getting on track, Trinity had descended into her own special sort of hell. As Josie lay in the guest room, blackout shades drawn, she wondered why Trinity had never told her any of this. Then she realized it was the same reason that Josie never talked willingly about the woman who had kidnapped and raised her. Those horrors were in the past and that’s where they belonged. Josie had no desire to revisit them, not for anyone. Still, as she drifted off to sleep, her heart was heavy with regret for all the conversations she’d never had with her sister.

  When she woke three hours later, her phone showed that it was just after one in the afternoon and she had two missed calls from Noah. Josie called him back before she even had a chance to blink the sleep from her eyes. “What’s going on?” she asked when he answered. “Any news?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m sorry. But Drake made some calls and got the evidence taken from the scene at the cabin forwarded to the FBI lab and expedited since this is now a serial case. I don’t know what kinds of strings he had to pull, but having all this stuff analyzed sooner rather than later can’t hurt.”

  “What about the prints from the cabin, Trinity’s car, and her phone case?” Josie asked. “Have they been run through AFIS?”

  “Yeah, but no hits. There are some unknowns from both the car and the cabin, but we can’t be certain that any of them belong to the killer. No prints on the packaging from the comb except mine and Trinity’s. They’re still analyzing the rest of the packaging and the comb but that’s going to take longer to process. Also, Drake’s got agents checking out the leads you suggested—ornithologists, veterinarians, game commission officers—Mettner gave them a list.”

  “Did you sleep?” Josie asked.

  “A few hours.”

  She stood up and peeked into the hallway. The smell of food cooking wafted upstairs. “I think Shannon is going to try to feed me again before I come back.”

  “Let her. We’ll be here.”

  Josie hung up, used the bathroom, and headed downstairs. In the kitchen, she found Christian at the stove instead of Shannon. “Your mother’s in the attic, putting things away,” he told her. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear her.”

  “I was pretty tired,” Josie said.

  A moment later, Christian slid a dish with pasta and roasted vegetables in front of her. “Eat,” he said. “I’ve got to make some calls since I won’t be going to work for the time being. You okay here?”

  Josie nodded. As soon as he was gone, she went to her bag and took out the copy of the Bone Artist file she had brought with her. The first thing she did was tuck the copies of the photos into the back of the file. If Shannon or Christian walked back in, she didn’t want them seeing those. As she ate, she thumbed through the autopsy reports, DNA profiles, victim profiles, trying to see what Trinity had seen that had unlocked the case for her. She had to have put something critical together if she was able to make contact with the killer, especially after law enforcement had been looking for him for over a decade.

  But nothing stood out to her.

  She went back to the psychological profile, reading it more carefully. Someone—she assumed Drake—had written in the margins and at the end: craves attention and validation for his intelligence; wants to feel important; employ Supercop strategy? Josie made a note to ask Drake about that later. She read through the profile twice, trying again to view things through Trinity’s eyes. Nothing stood out. She finished her meal and washed the plate in the sink. Returning to her seat, she kept still and strained to hear Shannon and Christian in the house. Christian’s voice carried easily from his first-floor study—he was still on the phone. A few thumps from upstairs assured her that Shannon was cleaning the hallway. Confident that they’d both be engaged for a few more minutes, Josie took a deep breath and pulled out the photos she’d hidden earlier. She steeled herself, realizing too late that it wasn’t the best idea to eat just before viewing them. She took another deep breath. Forcing her eyes to focus on the remains marked as Robert Ingram’s, she tried to think clinically about this instead of emotionally. She needed to remove the element of horror and try to think like the killer. He wasn’t horrified by what he did. Most serial ki
llers enjoyed their work. This killer in particular not only enjoyed his work but was trying to make a statement. But what kind? He deemed himself an artist. These garish displays were art to him. Symbolic of something. Josie reached down into her bag and took out her notebook and pen.

  She began to draw the shape of the display, starting with a circle, like a clock. Inside that circle she drew another circle to represent the torso. Where six would be, she drew a line representing the arm bones, then more shapes at the end of them to match the skull and pelvic bone. She went to draw a line from two o’clock where the leg bones had been arranged and stopped suddenly.

  “What the hell?”

  She turned a page in her notebook and started again with the circle, drawing a line downward from six o’clock and then another line crossing it.

  She riffled through the photos until she found Terri Abbott’s remains. In that display the pelvis and skull had been placed in a reverse position at the end of the leg bones which were at two o’clock. Josie turned another page in her notebook and drew a new circle, this time with a line outward from the two o’clock position and a line at the end of that—not a line, she realized. An arrow.

  She sat back in her chair and stared at her crude drawings. Symbols. Female and male.

  Closing the file, she took out her cell phone and called Noah.

  Thirty-Seven

  He answered on the second ring. “You okay?” he asked. “You on your way back?”

  “I’m leaving soon,” Josie told him. “Where are you? Are you with the team?”

  “Gretchen went home to sleep but Mettner and Drake just got here. They grabbed a few hours of sleep this morning. What’s going on? Did you find the diary?”

  “No,” Josie said. “Not that. But I think I figured out what the displays mean. Get the photos out, would you?”

  “Hold on.”

  She heard him moving around, talking, gathering Drake and Mettner. She heard footsteps pounding down stairs, a door creaking open, papers rustling. Then Noah came back on the line. “Okay, we’ve got the photos. I’m going to put you on speakerphone.”