“You know that for sure?”
“From what I’ve been able to sort out… yes. You remember how Mrs. Dublin said that when Trisha saw her and recognized her, the other girls closed in around her, and she was hidden from sight? And then she never saw Trisha again, even though she looked for her a few times?”
Micah tried to swallow the lump in her throat, understanding. “They weren’t protecting her. They were protecting the organization. Making sure that no one could connect with Trisha, that she couldn’t talk to anyone she knew from the past. Hide her and get her out of the neighborhood to make sure no one could rescue her.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know which organization had her? Are there different cartels here in town? I don’t understand how a group like that could operate here, let alone more than one.”
“They are part of larger organizations. They may not be based here in town. They may run out of Billings or even out of state. I have some intelligence on which one Trisha may have worked for, but they don’t have membership lists or org charts. We don’t have someone we can go out and arrest because he is involved in the trafficking. Investigations into trafficking run for years. You don’t bring down an organization over one victim.”
Micah rubbed her forehead. It was just one conversation, but she was already feeling fatigued. Was she ever going to put in a full day of work again? She felt like her body was falling apart.
“But the father is out there somewhere and he knows that we found the baby.”
“And he knows that we’ve found Trisha,” Bellows said, “because we couldn’t keep it out of the media that we found human remains in the mountains. The media isn’t stupid; they’ve already connected it up with the Sweetgrass Doe case.”
Micah shook her head. “Too bad you couldn’t keep that a secret.”
“What do you have on your attacker? Do you have a picture for me?”
“I’ll work on it today. I just have what the computer spit out, and I can do much better than that. Once I factor in age and weight and any other details I can remember or get from the genome and epigenome, I’ll have something much closer to how he looks now.”
“Okay. I’m going to leave you alone to do that. Are you okay? Here by yourself?”
“My parents are supposed to be coming; they should arrive any time. But I think I’m going to need to lie down for a nap for a little while. Then I’ll get right on to Papa Doe.”
“Take care of yourself. Remember, this isn’t a race. I know that all of the TV shows will tell you that the first forty-eight hours are the most important, but we’re long past that now. From now on, it’s a plod, not a sprint. So spend what time you need to to get it right.”
Micah stood up, leaning on the table. “Thanks. I’ll try to get you something today, but if my body doesn’t cooperate, I won’t worry too much if it takes an extra day.”
“I’m not letting this case get cold. We’re still actively investigating it. We’re going to find out what happened to Trisha and the baby.”
“You don’t know whether it was an accident or homicide? Trisha’s death?”
“No finding yet. It’s pretty hard to tell from a body whether someone fell or was given a little push. She might have been wandering around in the dark, disoriented or unwell. Or she might have met the father out there, and…”
“He’s violent,” Micah said. “We know he’s violent.”
Bellows nodded grimly. He moved toward the door. “If the father had something to do with it, yes. We’re making that assumption, but we don’t have the evidence to support it yet. Just our suspicions.”
“He wouldn’t attack me if he didn’t have something to do with Trisha’s death, would he?”
“No… I can’t think of a reason he would.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Micah spent most of the day, at least when she wasn’t sleeping, working on the composite of Sweetie’s father, who she had dubbed Mr. X. She closed her eyes and tried to picture him, his height, weight, the contours of his face beneath the mask. And she scoured all of the information she could find in his genetic and epigenetic code.
The methylation clues put Mr. X at around fifty-five, so she aged the composite accordingly. The default for EvPro’s computer program was twenty-five, so aging made a significant difference. She added silver to his hair, especially around the temples. A cleft chin. She experimented with glasses but, in the end, went without them. He hadn’t been wearing glasses when he’d attacked her. Contacts, maybe.
She looked for diet and lifestyle indicators. Mr. X didn’t appear to be a smoker or a heavy drinker. His diet and the trace elements in his environment were right for someone living in Montana, but they already knew that. It looked like he had grown up in the geographic region. There were no malnutrition indicators like there had been with Trisha. Quite the opposite, it would appear that he’d had a rich diet, and he had no major stress indicators. He was likely upper-middle class or higher. She knew from their encounter that he was vital and muscular.
When she finished, she had a very different picture from what she’d had when she had initially visualized Trisha and her boyfriend, the father of her baby. She had pictured a skinny kid, another foster child, addict, or bad boy. The type of person who would have circulated in the same social circles as Trisha. But what she had was the opposite. A middle-aged white guy, big, tough, and privileged. The kind of guy who would be running a sex trafficking ring? Or was he a john, one of her clients? How had he known that he was the father of the baby?
Micah lay down again to rest and to meditate on the possibilities. He was the father, and somehow he knew it. Maybe Trisha had a paternity test done while she was still pregnant. It would be unusual, but not impossible. Both amniocentesis and maternal blood testing were available.
And then when the baby had been born… what? Trisha had decided she couldn’t take care of her and had taken her to the Sweetgrass Hills to abandon her there, figuring that the chances she would die of exposure would be higher there than if she abandoned her in town. Had she wanted her to die, then? Why else leave her out there?
After abandoning Sweetie there, leaving her under that bush where she would be found the next day… then what? Trisha lost the way back to her car? She was disoriented or feverish and fell into the chasm by accident? Or had she run into Mr. X there and he had chased or pushed her to her death?
That would suggest that she had either gone there with him, or he had followed her. He must have kept a close eye on her, just as he had on the investigation. He knew that Micah was involved in the case and had wanted her out of the way, perhaps so that she couldn’t produce the composite of him. If he’d been that concerned about Micah being involved in the investigation, then she had no doubt that he’d been keeping track of Trisha. Maybe using electronic surveillance, and maybe using human spies who kept him informed on what she was doing. And so he had followed her out there, into the Sweetgrass Hills, to get rid of a problem that might lead back to him.
Micah jolted awake with a jerk. Her heart was pounding hard and fast, like someone had just knocked on the front door and she was in danger. Who knew how long it would be before Mr. X showed up at her door again. She fumbled on the nightstand, knocking things off.
“Micah?” Marianna materialized next to her. “It’s okay, honey. What are you looking for?”
Micah continued to feel blindly for it, swiping pills and the glass to the floor with a crash, growing more desperate. “My phone!”
“It’s plugged in. The battery was getting low. Here. Just stop for a minute.”
Micah stopped flailing and waited while Marianna reached around the lamp to where the phone was connected to a charger. She pulled it off and handed it to Micah.
“There you go. Do you need a hand?”
“I can manage to make a phone call by myself,” Micah snapped.
Marianna withdrew and let her have the room to herself. Micah didn’t look at the floor
to see what kind of devastation she had caused. She could clean up anything broken later. She needed to get ahold of Bellows.
“Micah,” he greeted after a couple of rings. “How are you feeling?”
“Where is Sweetie?”
“Mmm, what?”
“Sweetie. The baby. Where is she? You have to make sure she is safe.”
There were a few seconds of silence. “Did you just wake up?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He said it as if that explained the phone call. “Give yourself a few more minutes to finish waking up. Sweetie is fine. She’s safe with her foster family. You don’t need to worry about her.”
“He killed Trisha and he tried to kill me. He’s trying to wipe out all evidence that he fathered that baby.”
It took a couple of beats before Bellows followed that premise to its obvious conclusion. “And you’re afraid that he’s going to go after the baby herself.”
“Of course. Wouldn’t you? He knows that she can be used to establish his paternity. He might not know about the Lazarus or that we already got his DNA from his attack on me, but he knows about paternity tests. Her DNA establishes his guilt.”
“His guilt in what?”
“I don’t know. In having sex with a minor. Engaging a prostitute. If he’s part of the organization, then in his role in the sex trafficking.”
“Yes,” Bellows said slowly. “But what if he is not part of the organization? What if all he did was hire her services? He can say that he thought she was eighteen. That the only thing he’s guilty of is a minor prostitution charge. That’s not worth killing people over.”
Micah thought about that. She sat up in bed and rubbed her forehead with her free hand. She had still been disoriented when she called him, he’d been right about that. But she’d been absolutely sure that Sweetie was in danger.
“Then there’s something else. He’s a high-powered politician or something like that. He has a reputation that he’s trying to protect.”
“That’s a possibility,” Bellows agreed. There was a pause. “How are you doing?”
“I’m mostly okay. Still sleeping a lot.” Micah realized what it was he had been careful not to ask. “I do have a picture for you.”
“Excellent. Do you have a scanner, or do you want me to come over and pick it up?”
“I have a good scanner. I’ll email it to you.”
“How does the picture look?”
“Pretty good. I’ll do a few variations over the next few days, but it should be recognizable. I have the age and everything pinned down, so unless he’s had a lot of plastic surgery or other modifications, it should be accurate.”
“I’ll be watching for it. And… I’ll check in with the social worker. Get her to contact the foster mom to make sure she hasn’t had anyone lurking around there or anything she’s concerned about. But it’s going to be a lot harder for our unsub to track down an anonymous baby in foster care than it was for him to trace you. Babies don’t have an electronic footprint, and everyone on this case is well aware of the need for confidentiality. He won’t be able to find her.”
“But you’re going to check anyway. Just in case.”
“Yes.”
Micah let her breath out. “Good, thanks.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Micah was awakened the next day by the ringing of her phone. She rubbed her eyes and looked over at it, trying to decide whether she needed to answer it. She sat up so that she could see the caller ID and groaned.
Amy Bradshaw.
She couldn’t very well duck calls from a vice president of the company.
She didn’t know whether Amy knew she was at home, recovering from her injuries, or whether she thought she was just calling Micah at work. Her work extension twinned to her cell phone so she could answer it wherever she was and people didn’t have to try to track her down by calling multiple numbers.
Micah groaned aloud, then reached for her phone and answered it. “Micah here.”
“Micah,” Amy sounded like she looked. Cool and professional, never smiling unless it was socially requisite. “I’m glad I caught you. I really hate to interfere with any of my teams, but I have heard that you are still working on the Sweetgrass Hills abandonment case. I thought we had talked about that.”
“Uh, yes, we did.”
“But it looks like you’ve still been working on it.”
Micah tried to figure out what Amy might have seen or heard. She’d been careful not to post anything to the server that might alert someone to the fact that she was still active on the Sweetgrass Doe case. The DNA profile and pictures had been saved to pseudonym files. She didn’t think she had touched anything on the Sweetgrass Doe file that would give her away.
“Where did you hear that?”
“I hear things. They trickle in here. So is it true? You’re still treating the file as active?”
“You may have seen some activity on it because of the mother being discovered,” Micah suggested. “There were human remains found in the Sweetgrass Hills, and preliminary identification shows that it was Trisha Madro, Sweetie’s mother. But that didn’t come from me, that was the police on their own. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You didn’t.”
“No.”
“You’re still all buddy-buddy with the cop though, aren’t you? The one in charge of the case?”
“Uh, Frank Bellows. I wouldn’t say that we’re buddies. We’ve talked.”
“And you went with him on interviews, which is totally outside of what we do here.”
“I haven’t since you talked to me.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
Micah winced and tried to answer the question honestly, but without getting herself into deeper trouble. “I’ve talked to him. He wanted to know how I was doing after the assault. But no, I haven’t been doing any more interviews with him.”
“He must have other people to interview.”
“After finding Trisha’s remains… I expect so. But I haven’t been privy to that.”
“You don’t know where they are in their investigation?”
Micah shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position. Her muscles and joints were sore. She hadn’t taken any painkillers since the previous evening, and her body was letting her know it.
“I’m sure Deputy Bellows could fill you in if you gave him a call.”
“I see. Well, then. How are you coming on the annual report information?”
“I haven’t had a lot of time to work on it. I didn’t think it was a high priority.”
“It isn’t rush, but it is important. We can’t get new investors and funding or new customers without having something to show them about how we are doing. We need evidence that shows we are making a difference to law enforcement and the way these cases are being solved. And that we are at the forefront of the technology.”
“Yeah, of course. I’ll take another look at it today.”
“Can you get me something by close of day?”
She just wanted some statistics on the number of cases they had closed in the past year using Forensic DNA Composites, where the technology was going and how they were staying ahead of it, and a representative case study where investors could read a summary of a particular ‘solved’ case and feel good about themselves. It normally would not have been a big deal, but Micah had to ration her energy like she never had before.
“Yes, I can get you something. It might not be final, though. Is first draft sufficient?”
“That will give Graphic Design a chance to see how much space it is going to take up and what kind of images we are going to need.”
“Great. I’ll have something preliminary to you before the end of the day.”
“Thank you, Micah. And one more word on the Sweetgrass Doe file.”
“Yes.”
“If I find out that you have been working the file after you were told not to… there will be consequences.
So don’t let me down.”
“Okay,” Micah said, drawing the word out. She couldn’t claim that Amy hadn’t made herself clear the first time. But Micah had continued to work the file, and if they brought down the hammer, it was too late for her to change her decision. She had already broken the directive, and she might not be able to cover her tracks.
“Good,” Amy said, and terminated the call.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
After a shower and some coffee, Micah logged in to the work server and had a look around. She checked the Sweetgrass Doe file to make sure she hadn’t left any electronic fingerprints that she hadn’t remembered. It might be too late to be worrying about it, but if there were any damage she could mitigate, it was best to do it right away.
Everything looked clean and untouched, so she left it that way and went on with her other work. She could work on some additional composites of Mr. X later. For the moment, she had the annual report to work on, and other files were piling up. She didn’t want to get too far behind in her work.
But on the other hand, she still didn’t have the stamina needed to get through her day like she usually would. She needed to pick and choose what to tackle.
The priority for the day wasn’t hard to pick since Amy had just told her what it was. Get the first draft of the annual report for her team done. Micah pulled a report from the server on the number of files that had been opened that year and which had been solved. That was the easy part. She needed to pick a representative case as well as to summarize the improvements in the technology.
She was excited to include the findings of Trisha’s full genome within Sweetie’s blood sample. That had never been done as a practical exercise before. The way that Micah had been using epigenetic data to enhance the composites would be a big part of the report. She could do so much more than she had been able to two years before. And as far as she knew, no one was using the epigenome as extensively as she was. EvPro’s competitors were just starting to look at epigenetic data on an experimental basis. None of them had an extensive trait database already built up like EvPro.
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