Find Her Alive

by Regan, Lisa

  “An ornithologist,” Josie muttered. “Or a biologist. Hang on, I’ll ask the others to run this down.” She fired off a text to the rest of the team.

  Shannon, Christian, and Noah came into the kitchen. Shannon rubbed sleep from her eyes. “Noah told me what’s going on. We don’t remember the name of that place, but it was an hour from Callowhill.”

  “Is it still there?” Josie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Christian answered.

  Josie opened her laptop and spun it around to face them. “Do you think you could find it on Google Maps?”

  “We can try,” Shannon said. They sat side by side in front of the computer while Lisette kept reading.

  Vanessa:

  My time at the nature preserve is almost up. I’m kind of bummed, which is weird, right? I hate the work but everyone is nice to me and leaves me alone. Even creepy Max. He kind of stopped talking to me after I asked about his dad. I’m dying to know about his scar. I heard one girl ask him last week—she just came right out and asked. Just like that. He looked kind of annoyed and mumbled something about cooking and hot oil or something. I couldn’t quite make it out from where I was. I wanted to ask her after he left but I don’t want to be that person. I’ve tried to talk to him again but he’s never near where I’m working. Lately he’s just in the woods all the time. I don’t even know what he’s doing out there.

  Lisette stopped reading and turned some more pages. Across from her and Josie, Noah leaned in between the Paynes to study the computer screen.

  Josie said, “Is there anything more, Gram?”

  Lisette looked up from over her reading glasses and said, “Oh, one more you might be interested in.”

  Vanessa:

  I saw Max in the woods today. I don’t know if I should say something to the preserve director or not. It was so weird. It’s not like he was really doing anything wrong. I was out collecting litter and I saw him on one of the other trails. He was messing with this dead animal. I mean, it’s not unusual to find dead animals in the woods. I’ve seen more dead animals working at this stupid preserve than you can even imagine. Anyway, not the point. It was small—like maybe a rabbit or something—and already skeletonized which also is not unusual cause any dead animal in the woods gets picked clean by the scavengers. Basically, other animals. Circle of life, food chain, something like that. This is stuff I have to write about for the judge when I complete my community service. Max was arranging the bones, making different shapes with them. I watched him for a long time. I have no idea what he was trying to do but the whole thing was making me sick. I didn’t say anything to him. Finally, he just threw the bones into the woods, all scattered around and walked back to the main building. Really bizarre, right? I thought about telling on him, but what would I say? Max found some old bones in the woods and played with them? So what? It’s not like he killed the animal. He didn’t keep the bones. Plus, he’s a boy and boys are freaks. I mean, this boy at my school takes his little sister’s Barbie dolls, burns their private parts off, and brags about it, but no one cares about him. So what if Max touched some animal bones? The whole thing gives me the heebie jeebies.

  Shannon, Christian, and Noah were all staring at Lisette by the time she finished. Noah said, “No wonder she became obsessed with the case. She knew this guy.”

  Josie said, “She didn’t know him, though. Not really. He was a weird boy she met when she was fourteen. But I think the deeper she got into her investigation, the more she suspected that the bizarre guy she worked with at the nature preserve when she was a teenager might be the Bone Artist.”

  Noah said, “She would have recognized him when he pulled up to the cabin. Especially when she saw his scar.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Christian said.

  Shannon touched his arm. “Come on, we have to find the preserve. Keep looking. Lisette, you can keep reading.”

  Nodding, Lisette turned a few more pages. Then she started to read once more.

  Vanessa:

  I haven’t written in a few days because everything has been crazy. I’m done at the nature preserve now, finally. I was feeling bad about leaving, but the last week there really freaked me out. I found human bones! Like a dead body! It was so weird and nothing like I thought it would be. It didn’t even smell or anything. I guess because the guy was dead for so long. Turns out it was this hunter who went missing last year. An elderly guy. It was very sad. Anyway, I was out clearing debris from the hiking trails but what I was really doing was looking for Max. I couldn’t stop thinking about him and those bones. I was wondering if he went out all the time searching for bones. I think I was right because I found him standing over that hunter’s body with the skull in his hands. Can you believe that? He touched a dead person’s skull!!!! Gross doesn’t even begin to describe it. He saw me, and I must have looked super shocked cause he said he was out taking a walk and just found them. I got a closer look at them and it looked like someone curled up on their side and went to sleep or something. The police already said there was no ‘foul play’. The guy got lost and froze to death. Anyway, I asked Max why in the hell he would touch a dead person’s skull?!?! He looked at me and said something like, “Haven’t you ever wanted to see a person without their skin?” I was so skeeved out. I told him I was going to get the director so she could call the police. When I got back out there with her and the police, Max was gone. I never saw him after that. Mom and Dad didn’t let me go back after that although they did let me do some TV interviews about finding the guy.

  “Here it is,” Shannon said. “Quail Ridge Nature Preserve. Looks like it’s still in operation. A little over an hour from here.”

  Noah took his phone out again. He looked at Josie. “I’m calling Mettner. Let’s go.”

  Fifty-Four

  Cheyenne Thomas was the current director of the Quail Ridge Nature Preserve. Josie estimated her to be in her mid-twenties. She’d only held her current post for two years so she didn’t remember Trinity or Max or the dead hunter who had been found there nearly twenty years earlier. She was, however, extremely helpful and allowed Josie’s team, as well as several FBI agents, to search the preserve without a warrant while she checked their employment records. Unfortunately, they didn’t go back that far. There were also no employees currently on staff who would have been there when Trinity and Max were there.

  Mettner drove their team back in a department issue SUV while Drake followed behind with several of his agents. Josie sat in the front seat, her mind fighting fatigue and fogginess. “High schools,” she said. “He was sixteen. He would have been a junior at one of the local high schools within an hour from the preserve.”

  From the backseat, Gretchen said, “I’ll get on that.”

  Noah said, “How many guys named Max are there in the state, anyway? We know his age. We should try searching that way, too.”

  Mettner said, “As soon as we get back, someone needs to start contacting colleges within an hour or two of the preserve and see if we can track down an ornithology or biology professor with a son named Max.”

  Josie leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. They were getting close. Noah, Gretchen, and Mettner kept talking. Gretchen called Drake on his cell phone and put him on speakerphone so they could coordinate with him. They’d hit the ground running as soon as they got back to Denton. As the car sped down the highway, Josie couldn’t fight her exhaustion any longer. She drifted off to sleep, sending a psychic message to Trinity. We’re getting close. Just hold on a little longer.

  When she woke, the sky was dark. The dashboard clock read seven thirty in the evening. They were outside her house. Noah shook her shoulder lightly and she looked around bleary-eyed. “No,” she said. “This isn’t right. I’m going to the station house with you guys. I have to help.”

  From the back seat, Gretchen said, “You have to sleep, boss. You’re concussed and sleep-deprived.”

  “When’s the last time you ate?” Noah asked pointedly
.

  Mettner added, “None of us will go home yet, okay, boss? We’re going to work on this until we find Trinity. You get some sleep. When you come back in, one of us will rotate out. It will be all hands on deck, I promise.”

  Josie looked at them one by one. She knew she was truly at a new level of tired when tears leaked from her eyes. She couldn’t remember ever crying in front of her team. “Thank you,” she told them and let Noah walk her into the house.

  * * *

  She slept for twelve hours and woke in a full-blown panic. She’d only meant to sleep for two or three hours at most. She checked her phone but no one on the team had called her. Downstairs, her family wandered around the house at loose ends, passing the time by playing and cuddling with Trout. None of them had heard from Noah or anyone else either. Josie was ready in fifteen minutes. Christian dropped her off at the station house. In the great room, Mettner was slumped over his desk, drooling on a pile of what looked like background checks. Across from him, Gretchen was obscured by a stack of what appeared to be high school yearbooks. She leafed through one, turning the pages slowly. At his desk, Noah spoke on the phone. “He would have been on your faculty sometime around the year 2000, perhaps earlier than that? Specializing in ornithology, zoology, or biology? Maybe a subspecialty in raptors?”

  Gretchen offered Josie a smile. “Good to see you, although I wish we had better news.”

  Josie’s heart sank. “Nothing yet? Nothing at all?”

  Gretchen closed the yearbook. “Sorry, boss. He’s not in any of these yearbooks. It’s possible he was home-schooled, especially with his scar. Maybe his parents didn’t want him in school or maybe he had too difficult a time with bullying.”

  Josie sighed and plopped into her chair. Noah hung up. “We struck out with colleges.”

  “How is that possible? There have to be over fifty colleges within an hour of that preserve.”

  “Only a handful of those have ornithology or zoology programs,” Noah said. “Drake took his guys to check those out in person. They got nothing. Then we started working down the rest of the list, checking colleges with departments of biology. The FBI took half and we took half. We can’t find anyone who fits the bill.”

  “Because it’s too vague,” Josie said. “What we’re looking for is too vague. A professor maybe of ornithology or maybe of zoology or perhaps biology who worked there in the late nineties, early two thousands with a teenage son named Max who has a scar? Departments don’t keep records of their faculty’s personal lives.”

  Gretchen said, “We’ve got a name now. A thirty-five-year-old white male named Max with a red scar down the middle of his face. We should get you back out in front of the cameras.”

  “No,” Josie said. “He’ll disappear again. I want him to know we’re on to him, but I don’t want him to know we’re struggling. If I go out there and say his name is Max and that’s all we’ve got, he’s going to know he’s winning. It’s my move. I’m not ready to make it yet. We need something more.”

  Noah looked over at Mettner. A line of drool leaked from the side of his mouth onto the page beneath his head. “Mett!” Noah shouted.

  Mettner’s head sprung up, sending pages flying across all their desks. “I’m up,” he said.

  They gave him a minute before Noah asked him, “You get anywhere with the Maxes in the state?”

  Mettner sifted through some pages. “There are a bunch of guys named Maxwell, Maximus, Maximillian. Plenty of them in the age range. I looked up all their drivers’ licenses. None of them are scarred down the middle of their face.”

  Josie shook her head. How could they have gotten such a huge break but not be any closer to finding him? “No tips from the news conference?” she asked. “No one called in about the scar? It’s pretty distinctive.”

  “Sorry, boss,” Mettner said. “Nothing that’s panned out. Drake’s guys ran down a few leads, but they were no good.”

  “We have to be missing something. His middle name is Max or maybe his last name is Maxwell. Dammit. He’s right under our noses. What about the truck? Have we checked for any white Chevy trucks registered to someone with Max in their name?”

  Gretchen said, “I can check on that.”

  Josie held out her hand to Mettner. “Let me see your notes. I want to go back over this.”

  Noah stood up. “I’m going to track down Drake and see if we can double-check all the professors we already checked out, or maybe expand the search radius.”

  “Please,” Josie said. “He’s here somewhere. He’s not a ghost. He’s real, and we have to find him before he kills my sister—if he hasn’t already.”

  Fifty-Five

  No one attended Hanna’s funeral except for Alex and Zandra. Even after her illustrious art career, which took off even more after Frances’s accident, in death she was alone. They buried her on a Tuesday, in the rain, in a cemetery she had chosen. She had had time to decide what they were to do with her remains. She had had time to instruct them on how they could continue to live the small life they’d carved out in the old house since the accident. They didn’t know much else. Only Alex had been out in the world. Zandra had only left the property a few times. She had said she wanted to leave but once Hanna took her out into the world, she no longer wanted any part of it. Alex, however, was fascinated with it. There were new adventures, ones he could embark on by himself and without Frances’s censure. People were a lot like the raptors Frances loved so much. Not all of them, but many of them.

  Without Hanna there, his bad thoughts emerged like animals waking from hibernation. He didn’t have to watch Zandra anymore or keep her in check. He felt free for the first time in his life, and he realized how much of a prisoner she had made him when they were growing up. His entire life had revolved around policing her and her urges so she didn’t hurt or even kill their mother. He had suffered because of her, been put out in the cold because of her. Perhaps she sensed his growing anger toward her because after Hanna’s death, Zandra kept herself locked away most of the time.

  She did come out to see his first art installation, which he’d created on a remote part of the land Hanna had left them. The foundation of an old building still stood beneath a cluster of trees. He had spent months building it up, little by little, until it provided enough cover for him to do his work. He didn’t even know that Zandra was aware of what he was doing until she showed up one day with no warning.

  “I’m almost finished,” he said, smearing paint across the floor with one hand.

  She looked around, her eyes taking in every detail. “This is disgusting,” she said.

  He stopped painting. “No, it’s not. This is art. Our mother left us a blank canvas.”

  “You think you’re some kind of artist? Like she was?”

  He said nothing and resumed painting.

  “You know this isn’t art, right? No one is going to think this is art. I’m pretty sure you’d go to prison for this. I mean, how dumb can you be?”

  “You don’t need to be here anymore,” he muttered.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You could leave.”

  “No, I can’t,” she said. “You need me. You’ve always needed me.”

  He laughed. “You’re so selfish.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she spat. “Is that really what you believe? Do you honestly think I’m the selfish one here?”

  He didn’t answer. His hand worked harder to rub in the paint. He put his entire body behind it until he was gasping with the effort. When he was satisfied, he sat back on his haunches and wiped his brow with a forearm. Zandra was still there.

  “I’m going to kill you one day,” he told her.

  She said, “I know.”

  Fifty-Six

  The search for Max went on for a week. Between Denton PD and the FBI team, they worked around the clock to try to locate him. Hours were spent behind computers, sifting through documents, driving out to residences and properties, question
ing people. Sitting at her desk, sifting through drivers’ license photos of all the males in Pennsylvania between thirty-five and forty with Max in their name for the hundredth time, Josie couldn’t stop the questions or the sense of desperation she felt. Trinity was slipping away. The entire case was in danger of disintegrating into dust. She was beginning to think she was crazy. Or maybe they’d been all wrong about the diary. Maybe Trinity had been all wrong.

  But the scar, she reminded herself.

  Which led to her next question: how was this guy going unnoticed by everyone in the state, it seemed, when he had a scar running down the middle of his face? How was that possible when Trinity’s abduction by the Bone Artist was the top story every single day? She remembered what Bobbi Ingram had said; that he could cover it with make-up. Josie had had a flash of his face in the truck the day he’d run her off the road. It had only lasted a second, maybe two, but she’d seen it. It was true, make-up would help. It might not entirely cover the scar, but it would certainly minimize it. It was an easy thing for him to hide his truck and put on some foundation whenever he went out.

  But where the hell was he?

  “Quinn!” Drake strode into the room, waving a piece of paper. He looked around. “Where is everyone?”

  “Gretchen and Noah are at home resting. Mettner’s down in the break room. Why? What’ve you got?”

  He smiled. In the two short weeks she’d known him, she hadn’t seen a smile that went all the way to his eyes. Until now. Her heartbeat picked up pace. She said, “Don’t smile like that unless you have a real lead. An actual, honest to goodness lead. Please.”

  He placed the paper in the center of her desk and tapped an index finger against it. “Remember your ERT took a sample of mud from the trailer park? From the tread of the killer’s truck?”