by Lisa Regan
“A baseball bat?” Gretchen asked.
Dr. Feist frowned. “Maybe, but it’s more likely something smaller and heavier.”
“Tire iron?” Josie offered.
The doctor nodded. “That’s more likely. Whoever hit her used a great deal of force. It’s hard to say from just bones, but I’m not sure the struggle—if there was one—lasted long. She doesn’t have any other fractures. Of course, she may have sustained bruising or lacerations, but we’ll never know that now.”
“How about the angle?” Josie asked. “What would you say? Someone taller than her? Shorter? Same height?”
Dr. Feist held up a finger. “I estimate her to be about five foot three. I would say she was killed by someone about the same height, but using an overhead strike.” She motioned to Gretchen, who was about her height. Gretchen moved closer, and Dr. Feist approached her from the side, slightly to her rear, both arms raised high over her head as though she was clutching something in them. She brought her invisible weapon down on Gretchen’s head, stopping before she made contact. “If it was someone taller than her, or if she had been kneeling, I would expect the fracture to be more depressed, because there would be more follow-through with the strike.”
“All right,” Gretchen said. “So we suspect she was struck over the head by someone close to her own height, and then she was buried in the woods.”
“And we suspect whoever killed her was a woman,” Josie said.
“How do you figure that?” asked Noah.
Josie said, “How many men do you know who are five foot three?”
“Not many, but they exist,” Noah countered.
“I’m aware,” Josie answered. “But if I had to make an educated guess in this instance, I would say we are more likely looking for a female assailant.” Josie turned back to the doctor. “No way to tell if she was killed there in the woods, or if she was killed elsewhere and then moved to the grave?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Noah turned his gaze to Dr. Feist. “No way to tell if she was sexually assaulted?”
Dr. Feist gave him a tight smile. “There’s no way to tell a lot of things. This poor girl has been buried for a long time.”
She walked over to a table along the wall and picked up a brown bag, which she emptied out onto the exam table near the skeleton’s feet. Dirty scraps of fabric came first, and then a larger garment. It was dirt-covered and faded, and some of it had disintegrated, but Josie could see that it was a windbreaker—dark blue with squares of what used to be bright yellow, teal, and pink on the shoulders and where the pockets were. There was only one sleeve left, and as Dr. Feist held the garment up, Josie could see several swaths of fabric missing from the back, the collar, and the waist—worn away by time and the earth’s erosion.
“This is what’s left of her clothing,” the doctor said.
Gretchen raised a brow. “No chance there are any identifying items in her jacket pockets?”
Dr. Feist laughed and placed the jacket carefully onto the countertop. “The insides of the pockets are gone. Decomposed. The rest,” she waved at the scrap pile, “is just buttons, a shoe sole, and what are probably scraps of leather.”
Josie stepped forward and looked down at the sad collection of items: a rusted zipper, a couple of blackened grommets from shoes requiring laces, a few small scraps of leather, the tiny folded nickel clasps of a bra, and a grimy rubber shoe sole deteriorating around the edges. Josie looked from the pile to the jacket and then pointed to the jacket. “What material is that made from?”
“My guess is nylon.”
“Looks like something from the 1980s,” Gretchen said. “Windbreakers were all the rage back then, especially the style with the blocks of bright colors.”
Josie nodded. “How long does nylon take to decompose in the ground?”
Noah pulled out his phone, his fingers working fast over the screen. A moment later, he said, “Thirty to forty years.”
“Seems about right,” Dr. Feist said. “The challenge in a case like this is figuring out how long the body has been in the ground. Usually the items we find along with the bones—if any—are the most helpful in trying to pin down a time frame. I was going to have a friend of mine from the college’s Archeology Department consult, but thirty to forty years would be a place to start.”
“That’s all fine and good,” Josie said. “But you know as well as I do that we don’t have any missing teenage girls in the entire county going back that far.”
Dr. Feist grinned and raised a finger in the air. “Oh, I may be able to narrow it down for you.”
Josie, Noah, and Gretchen stared at her. Gretchen’s busy pen finally stilled in anticipation.
“Wait till you see this,” Dr. Feist said as she returned to the head of the table and grasped the sides of the skull with both hands. She lifted it away from the lower jaw bone and held it under the overhead light so they could see inside what would have been the roof of the girl’s mouth. All three police officers leaned in.
“Holy shit,” Noah said. “Are those fangs?”
Behind the two front teeth were two additional, conical teeth that came to points.
“Supernumerary teeth,” Dr. Feist explained.
“Extra teeth?” Josie asked.
“Yeah, pretty much. The condition is called hyperdontia. It’s an inherited defect. Extremely rare. Something a dentist in a city this small would remember, especially given the fact that her supernumerary teeth actually looked like fangs. I did a little research. Supernumerary teeth can appear anywhere in the dental arch. Not all patients present with extra teeth that look so fanglike. Trust me, this girl would have been memorable to look at.”
Josie met Noah’s eyes, and then Gretchen’s. “Well,” she said. “Start tracking down dentists who were practicing in the city thirty to forty years ago.”
Chapter Nine
A week passed, and every night Josie dreamed of the tall maple tree in the woods behind the trailer that was her childhood home. Sometimes her father was there, a hole in the top of his head, a macabre smile on his face. He beckoned her. “Come,” he said. “I have to show you something.” Each time, Josie was too afraid to get close to him. Sometimes Ray, her ex-husband, was there—only it was Ray at nine years old, crashing through the woods behind her, telling her not to get any closer. She woke sweaty and thrashing in her king-sized bed, her limbs twisted in the sheets.
Today was no different. Her eyes snapped open, her heaving chest and gasping breaths slowing gradually in the warmth of the sunlight streaming through her bedroom windows. She sat up, pulling her sweat-soaked T-shirt away from her skin, and looked around the room, taking in the high ceilings, the large windows, and the walls painted a soothing cream color. It was her favorite room in the house, open and airy in a way she usually found comforting, but still she shivered as the sweat on her body dried, leaving her clammy. She would have just enough time to shower and stop for coffee before reporting to work.
Twenty minutes later she was locking her front door, her mind on the performance evaluations and equipment requisitions waiting on her desk at the station, when her cell phone rang. It was Noah.
“What’ve you got?” Josie answered.
Noah’s laughter filtered through the phone line. “You’re getting better at the small talk, Boss. I’m fine, thank you.”
Josie smiled as she made her way from her stoop to where her Escape waited in the driveway. “I’m glad to hear that, Fraley,” she said. “I’d really love a latte from Komorrah’s Koffee. Maybe you could make your way over there before I get to the station. How’s that for small talk?”
“The latte is already on your desk,” he responded, making Josie smile.
“You may need a raise,” she joked. “Now, what’ve you got?”
“I’ve got a preliminary ID on our mystery girl. We didn’t get any hits in Denton, so Gretchen expanded the search area. We tracked down a dentist in Bellewood who inherited his father’s
practice about ten years back. His dad practiced for decades before he retired. Apparently, his dad repeatedly mentioned the patient with hyperdontia he treated in the late ’70s, early ’80s, because the condition was so rare. Gretchen is over there now getting the chart so Dr. Feist can see if they’re a match.”
Josie stood beside her Escape, feeling a tingle of excitement. An ID in a week. It was a good start. “That’s great,” she said, fishing her key fob out of her jacket pocket.
“Yeah, we lucked out with her having those fangs.”
“Extra teeth,” Josie corrected. Ever since she’d seen them, she couldn’t help but wonder what the poor girl had been through because of them; kids could be exceptionally cruel.
“Sorry,” Noah said. “Supernumerary teeth. Anyway, we might have never tracked down her identity if it weren’t for them.”
Josie lifted her shoulder and used it to keep the phone pressed against her ear as she reached for the handle of her Escape. On the underside of the door handle, her fingers sank into something cold and mushy. “What’s her name?” she asked.
The smell reached her nose the moment she took her hand away from the door handle—foul and stomach-clenching. She held her fingers up in front of her face, the brown color confirming her guess. “Shit,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Her name?”
“Belinda Rose. Date of birth October 15, 1966.”
Josie felt the color drain from her face, the clamminess of the early morning returning and coating her skin like a greasy film. In that moment, she wasn’t sure what made her feel queasier—the excrement covering her fingers or hearing the name from Noah’s lips.
She held her hand away from herself, looking around, realizing she’d have to go back inside to clean up. But her legs felt heavy and stuck in place, and her lungs were filled with lead.
“Boss?”
“That’s not possible,” Josie croaked.
“What’s not possible?”
“Belinda Rose can’t be dead—she can’t have been dead for over thirty years.”
“Oh yeah? Why is that?”
“Because Belinda Rose is my mother’s name, and as far as I know, she’s still alive.”
Chapter Ten
JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD
The trailer only seemed too small when her mother was angry. When she got really worked up, her fury filled the whole place like thick clouds of steam from a hot shower. Her rages were inescapable, even when Josie hid beneath the kitchen table and watched her feet stalk back and forth, back and forth. It was never good when she started pacing.
“I don’t know who he thinks he is,” her mother growled, spittle flying from her mouth. The refrigerator door opened and slammed closed, and Josie heard the snap of a beer can opening. She clutched her threadbare Wolfie to her chest, shrinking back as far as she could, out of reach from her mother’s hands, which she knew would thrust under the table and drag her out eventually.
But they didn’t come. Josie’s eyelids grew so heavy she could barely keep them open. She stifled a yawn and tried to ignore the cold that seeped from the tiles into her nightgown. It was late. She knew because it was dark outside.
“That bastard,” she heard her mother mutter, her feet suddenly moving again across the kitchen.
Josie tried to tune out the sound, listening hard for the sound of her daddy’s truck outside. She wished he would come home. Next, she heard the sound of kitchen drawers being torn from their homes and silverware clattering to the floor. Then her mother’s voice again, thick and slurred this time, talking though no one else was there. “You’re not going to get away with this. Goddamn you. I’ll destroy everything you love. Everything.”
Then suddenly—terrifyingly—her mother’s face appeared in the tiny space beneath the table. She smiled at Josie, and Josie got that sick feeling in her stomach she always got when her mother did bad things. She reached out a hand to Josie.
“You come here now, girl.”
Chapter Eleven
Josie went inside and got cleaned up without making a mess anywhere. But even after she had scrubbed her hand several times and assured herself the excrement hadn’t gotten on any of her clothes, the smell still lingered deep in her nostrils. She’d ended the call with Noah abruptly, but he was on his way to her house, and that knowledge settled her agitation a little. She went into one of her spare bedrooms, where she kept her laptop on a small desk in the corner of the room. She pulled out the chair, sat, and booted it up.
She’d had a security camera installed in her driveway a month earlier, after she’d found all four of her tires slashed—just a week after all the department vehicles at the station house had suffered the same fate. Replacement tires for her Escape had cost her a small fortune, and she wouldn’t let the vandal get away with it a second time.
She queued up the footage from the moment she’d pulled in the night before, and then fast-forwarded until she saw a figure slink into the driveway. Josie looked at the time stamp: 3:12 in the morning, when she had been fast asleep. The person wore baggy pants and a hoodie pulled down low over their face. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, but based on the height—she guessed about six feet—Josie thought it was probably a man.
She watched the hooded figure reach into a paper bag, come out with a handful of dark matter, and push it up under the door handles of Josie’s car. So she would have to clean all four handles.
“Great,” she muttered to herself.
When the figure was done, Josie could see him peeling off latex gloves, shoving them into the paper bag, and then jogging off down the street, bag in hand. Resetting the footage to when the figure first appeared, Josie leaned back in her chair and sighed. At three in the morning, none of her neighbors would have been up. Even if they were and had seen the guy, it was unlikely they’d seen anything more than what Josie had caught on camera.
Noah arrived ten minutes later. She let him in, and they reviewed the footage together. Josie saved it to a flash drive and handed it to him. “I want a report filed. By you. No one else.”
Noah sighed. “You’re documenting this, but you’re not letting me do anything about it.”
Josie gave him a dismissive look as she stood. “There’s nothing to be done. These are little teenage pricks doing pranks. I don’t need a detail.”
He knew better than to start that argument with her again. Instead, he took the flash drive from her and dropped it into his pocket. “The craigslist ad is a dead end. You were right. All we can get from the IP address is that it was somewhere here in Denton—this time near the mall. Probably someone piggybacking off the free wifi of one of the stores, or something like that.”
“Figures,” Josie said.
Noah didn’t move from the doorway. His gaze made her face feel hot. She put her hands on her hips. “What?” she said.
“We need to talk about Belinda Rose—and your mother.”
Chapter Twelve
JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD
The hospital was big and bright, with endless tiled hallways and ugly blue curtains for walls. Behind every curtain Josie could hear hushed voices and sometimes cries of pain. Nurses dressed in periwinkle scrubs rushed up and down the halls and in and out of the curtains. After a long, agonizing wait while her whole head throbbed, one of them stopped by her cubicle, snapped on a pair of latex gloves, and prepared a smelly, folded piece of gauze to clean the wound on the side of Josie’s face.
“This is gonna sting, hon,” the nurse told Josie. She beckoned for another nurse to hold Josie to the bed before pressing the wet pad against her jawline.
It felt like her skin was ripping open and they were setting it on fire. The more she squirmed against their big hands, the harder they pressed her against the plastic mattress. The nurse holding her head loosened her grip for a moment to check the wound, and Josie looked down at her blood-soaked nightgown. Her heart did cartwheels in her chest. Had she died?
&
nbsp; No, she thought. She hadn’t died.
She hadn’t died because Needle had shown up just at the moment her mother’s knife had sliced down the side of her face. Needle wasn’t his real name. Josie didn’t know what he was really called, only that he came to the trailer when her daddy was at work, and he always brought sharp, dangerous needles. He wasn’t a nice man, but when he’d walked in that night, he had looked scared, and that terrified Josie more than her mother’s white fury, and more than any blade.
It was Needle who’d prized the knife away from Josie’s mother. It was Needle who’d insisted that Josie needed to go to the hospital, scooping her off the floor and carrying her to the car. Josie couldn’t remember if he had come with them, but she definitely hadn’t seen him at the hospital. Needle was gone.
She couldn’t be dead if Needle had made her mother stop. But the blood. There was so much blood. She struggled against the nurses, fighting for her life.
“Josie, honey, you have to hold still.” Her mother’s voice came from somewhere beside her.
“I’m sorry, hon. I know it hurts. We’re almost done,” said one of the nurses.
She wanted her daddy.
Finally, they stopped. Her breath came in heavy gasps. Gently, one of the nurses turned her onto her back. “I’m real sorry, hon,” the nurse said, a pained smile directed down at Josie. The big light behind the nurse’s head burned Josie’s eyes.
The other nurse turned to her mother. “She’s gonna need stitches. You wanna tell us what happened?”
Chapter Thirteen
Josie watched Noah circle her Ford Escape, leaning over to get a good look at the shit caked under her door handles. He wrinkled his nose, snapped some photos with his phone, and turned to her. “Want to send a sample to the lab? See if it’s human?”
