The Last Sister

by Elliot, Kendra

  “What else did you and Sean talk about?” asked Zander, a hint of impatience in the tightening around his mouth. Emily understood. She didn’t see how shanghaiers in the nineteenth century could have anything to do with the Fitch murders of today.

  “Let’s see . . .” Simon pinched his lip again. “He was researching crime on the northern Oregon coast, so information on Fort Stevens, crimes against the Clatsop Indians and other races . . . A lot of these crimes took root in Portland and spread over here. I also gave him research on founding city families, Columbia River bar pilots—”

  “I’ve never heard of a bar pilot,” said Zander.

  “All those big ships I mentioned? They needed a local pilot to board and safely navigate the shallow passage of the Columbia River. Where the river meets the Pacific Ocean is one of the most treacherous navigated waters in the world, so they’d boat out an experienced local to guide the ships in safely. Local pilots are still required by law for every ship engaging in foreign trade. These days they board the ships via helicopter or boat about fifteen miles from the mouth of the river.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” said Zander.

  “Very dangerous. Boarding the ships in the rough ocean was a huge risk for bar pilots in the past. Still can be.”

  “Did Sean contact you after the meeting at all?” Zander asked.

  “He came back for a short visit a day or two later. I’d sent him to Harlan for more information.”

  “The mayor,” Emily clarified for Zander. “He had an ancestor who owned a tavern in Astoria that was a very active shanghai location. Everyone knows he has a ton of research on the topic. It’s one of his hobbies.”

  “Harlan isn’t the only one in town with a relative accused of shanghaiing,” Simon said with a wink at Emily.

  “True, but no one in my family is fascinated the way Harlan is. We prefer to let the stories about our lawbreaking ancestors fade away.”

  “No, no, no.” Simon vehemently shook his head. “I’ve had many discussions with Dory about this. You don’t let history die.” He opened another file cabinet, and his fingers danced across the tabs. “Here it is.” He slid out a narrow file. “I’ve been working on this as a surprise for your aunt, but I think you should spend some time with it.” He thrust it at Emily, and she instinctively took it. The printed label on the tab read BARTON.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  “Your homework. You need to learn to appreciate the stories of your past. I’ve made copies of everything I come across that relates to Dory’s family—which includes you. One of these days, I’ll put it in a nice big binder as a gift for her—so don’t let her see it.”

  Emily stared at the file, stunned. “This is so thoughtful.”

  The historian blushed. “Just put in a good word with Dory for me.”

  “I will.”

  “I’m sorry Simon wasn’t much help,” Emily said as Zander drove her home. “It was a waste of your time. I can’t see a connection between Sean’s research of hundred-year-old shanghaiing crimes and his murder.” The agent didn’t appear that disappointed, but Emily suspected he hid it well.

  “It was interesting,” Zander said. “I think hanging and shanghaiing have a tenuous correlation—weren’t men hanged back then for abandoning their ship’s duties?”

  “I don’t know. Could be. But the relationship seems to be a stretch.”

  “Agreed.”

  She studied his profile in the pale light. He was preoccupied, his mind hard at work on the case, no doubt. “I feel like I’ve distracted you from your primary investigation.”

  He glanced her way in surprise. “Not at all.”

  “First my accident and now Simon—”

  “Stop right there. Nate Copeland’s shooting requires me to take a closer look at your shooting. Yes, I’m juggling a few things. The Fitches. Nate Copeland. The skeleton we found—who I hope is confirmed as Cynthia Green with dental records soon. It’s all important. Interviewing Simon Rhoads had to be done. Just because it didn’t pan out doesn’t mean it was a waste of time.”

  “But your manpower has been reduced.”

  “The sheriff is helping, and I’ve got another agent coming tomorrow.” He stopped at the curb in front of the mansion. “Someone shot at you. I don’t take that lightly. Especially since you were at the Fitch deaths.” He turned off the engine and faced her, determination rolling off him.

  He meant every word.

  His gaze went past her, and he frowned. “Who is that?”

  Turning, she spotted Isaac loading an armful of small fir branches into a wheelbarrow. A hood covered his head, and rain ran down his coat. “It’s Isaac. I asked Madison to get our uncle over here to hang around—a male presence at the house, you know? But it looks like she recruited Isaac instead and gave him some outdoor busywork. There’s no point in picking up those branches until this storm is over.”

  “He’s scrawny.”

  Her mouth twitched. “He’s stronger than he looks.”

  “Your safety is a concern.”

  “So is the safety of my sister and the aunts,” she said pointedly. “We take what we can get. If deputies driving by the home is a deterrent, then I think seeing a man working around the house can help too. Hopefully my uncle is also here somewhere.”

  “True.” He continued to stare past her, following Isaac’s movements.

  She wanted to know what he was thinking. He often wore a perfect poker face, probably necessary in his line of work. But at the hospital, she’d caught a glimpse behind it. Zander Wells had very strong emotions; the FBI-agent attitude was a front.

  “Thank you for telling me about your wife and daughter today,” she said softly, watching his eyes in the fading light of the evening.

  He met her gaze, and the agent mask lifted a bit. “I’m sorry that I—”

  “I was married too.”

  His gaze intensified. “What happened?”

  “Nothing at all like what you went through.” She felt a little embarrassed for bringing it up. “It ended five years ago. He was . . . controlling.”

  Anger flickered. “He hurt you?”

  “No. He never laid a hand on me.” She gave a shaky laugh. “He slowly tore me down inside. It was emotional and mental. His words, his actions, some gaslighting . . . I was no longer myself. He’s a narcissist. Everything is about him, and he wanted everything about me to be about him.”

  “You mentioned him in the present tense.”

  “He’s still around.” Emily snorted. “In fact, I saw him yesterday morning. Would you believe he has the gall to think we could get back together? The narcissist in him still doesn’t understand why I filed for divorce.”

  “Sounds like a prince.”

  “He’s a cop in Astoria.”

  “Emily.” Zander leaned closer. “Could he have shot at you?”

  She sat very still. “No—I would have known it was him.” But her brain raced through a million possibilities.

  “He’s a cop, so I assume he’s a decent shot. Could he still be bitter? If you saw him yesterday, you’d be on his mind.”

  Emily couldn’t speak. Her limbs were frozen. Would Brett . . .

  “No,” she whispered. “I would have recognized his stance, his shape. Even though I didn’t see a face, every part of me says the man I saw wasn’t him. I know Brett.”

  Zander didn’t look convinced. He pressed his lips into a tight line, and his gaze softened, making her face warm.

  He cleared his throat. “This is inappropriate and poor timing, but when this case is over . . .”

  Emily instantly understood. “I have a lot of baggage,” she murmured, unable to pull her gaze away from him.

  The way he’s looking at me . . .

  I could get lost in his eyes.

  His smile was wistful. “Then that makes two of us.” He took her hand, holding it and running his thumb over her palm.

  Her heart rate quickened. He feels it too. She’d bee
n immediately attracted to him but had shut the feelings away. Until now.

  “One time I made a mistake by keeping my feelings to myself,” he said. “I swore I’d never do that again. I know now is not the time . . . but I had to say something in case time slipped away from me again.”

  “I understand. And I’m glad you said something.” Happiness bubbled deep inside her chest.

  Damn, I wish this investigation was behind us.

  He moved closer and kissed her, the sensation warming her everywhere. She melted into the kiss, frustrated by the vehicle console between them.

  Too soon, he pulled back and rested his forehead against hers, his chest rising with deep breaths. “When this is over.”

  “When it’s over,” she promised.

  28

  A few hours later, Zander was alone in his hotel room and working on his laptop, but his mind kept wandering.

  I shouldn’t have kissed her.

  Like he could have stopped. He’d felt a subtle pull toward her the first time he saw her. Now that he’d voiced it out loud, he wanted more. But anything between them had to wait. He had a killer or two to find, and Emily was waist-deep in this case.

  Be a fucking professional.

  The thought made him grouchy. His phone and laptop rang, and he answered through the laptop.

  “Wells.”

  “Good evening, Agent Wells. I’m Dr. Lacey Harper from the medical examiner’s office, and I did the dental comparison on a case of yours.”

  Zander immediately sat up straighter. “Is the skull Cynthia Green?”

  “It is.”

  He pumped a fist. Finally something was going his way. “Thank you. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

  “Not a problem. It’s rewarding when I can definitively identify someone. It helps answer questions for family members left behind.”

  “You’re positive about this, correct?” Zander asked tentatively, afraid he was insulting her.

  She laughed. “I am. Would you feel better if I showed you how?”

  “I’m not questioning your work,” he added rapidly, relieved that she hadn’t taken offense. “But I would like to see how it’s done. Teeth look alike to me.”

  “Can you FaceTime?”

  “Yep. Switching over now.” A few moments later he was looking at a very attractive blonde woman with a broad smile. “You work with Dr. Peres?” he asked.

  “I do. She’s a close friend, and I’ve met Ava a few times, and I know her fiancé very well. I’m glad to hear she’ll be okay.”

  “Me too. What can you show me?”

  She switched to the other camera on her phone, and a computer screen of dental X-rays was in front of him. The screen had two large films, the type that show the entire jaw and the lower half of the cranium. They were grim skeletal smiles, creepily stretched wide to convert the three-dimensional objects into two. The images were a mishmash of shades of gray. He could identify teeth and jaw joints but not much else.

  “I received Cynthia’s dental records from the state police, who’d collected them after she went missing twenty years ago. I’m glad they still had them, because the dentist whose name is on the films closed up his practice over a decade ago, and he was legally required to only keep records for seven years. They might have been tough to hunt down.”

  She touched the top image. “This is from the state police and was taken seventeen months before Cynthia disappeared. It’s a copy of the dentist’s original panoramic image, which is why it seems dark. Copies are good, but not as clear as original films. Below is an X-ray I took today on the skull. We don’t have a panoramic X-ray machine here, so I took it at a friend’s dental practice. It was a bit awkward to shoot.”

  Zander had experienced the dental X-ray machine that rotated around his head as he stood in a booth.

  “I had to crouch while holding the skull above my head with one hand. I’m just glad they kept their patients from walking by at that moment.”

  The mental image made him snort. He looked from one image to the other. “They look different, though. The top one is grainier and seems to . . . uh . . . smile a little more?”

  “It’s the angle that makes it smile. I tried to match it the best I could, but it always takes trial and error. The graininess is because mine is digital. The top one is real film that they had to run through a developer. They’re always sharper.” Her fingertip stopped on the last tooth on one side of the lower jaw and then touched the same tooth on the opposite side. “Wisdom teeth. As you can see, they’re both angled differently than the rest of the teeth. They tip in quite a bit instead of being straight up and down.”

  “Right.”

  “And up here.” She touched the corresponding teeth in the top row. “These wisdom teeth are still high in her maxilla. You wouldn’t see them if you looked in her mouth.”

  “But you’d see the bottom ones?”

  “Partially. The partial exposure shows better on the next set of films. But my point is that the wisdom teeth are in identical positions in the old film and the one I took today.” She moved her phone closer and shifted between the films a few times.

  “Okay.” He took her word for it. They were blobs to him.

  “She’s nineteen, right? The length of the roots and the position of the wisdom teeth don’t contradict that age.”

  She indicated the bottom film. “She has two white fillings. Here and here.”

  He squinted. More shades of gray.

  “I can’t make them out.”

  She clicked something, and the panoramic images vanished, replaced by eight little rectangular films. The type taken frequently at the dentist.

  “Four copied original films at the top, and the four I took at the bottom. Film images versus digital images again, so mine will be grainy.” She picked up a pencil and pointed at a tooth on a lower X-ray, outlining a small shape. “Can you see the filling here?”

  He could. It was whiter than the rest of the tooth. Automatically he checked the coordinating film above it. The same exact shape appeared in that tooth.

  “It’s the same as the film from the state police.”

  “Yes. And here is the other one.” Her pencil tapped the odd shape of another, whiter filling.

  He compared it to the film above it. “But it doesn’t match the original X-ray.”

  “Correct.”

  “Why not?”

  “She had the filling placed after the dentist took the films.”

  “But you can’t know for certain. Doesn’t this bring everything into doubt?”

  “It doesn’t.” She touched the state police’s film with a pencil and moved her phone in close to the film. “You probably can’t see this, but she has a cavity in this tooth. The dentist would have filled the cavity after diagnosing it on the films he took.

  “A virgin tooth can acquire a filling. But you can’t return a tooth to its virgin state or make a filling disappear—there will always be something in that tooth once it has been worked on. It can be a bigger filling or a crown, or the tooth might have been removed.

  “There are many other things that match up in the films. Bone levels, root shapes, sinuses. But the fillings and wisdom teeth confirm it for me. Teeth shape and positions are unique. You won’t find the same dentition in two people.”

  “What if they’ve had braces?”

  “The tooth positions and angles will be different, but the fillings and tooth shapes will be the same.”

  He mulled it over.

  Lacey appeared on his screen again. “Trust me. I can’t explain everything I learned in four years of dental school and ten years of practice in this call.”

  She was right.

  “I believe you. The missing filling made me doubt for a moment.”

  “Good. I’m glad we identified her. Her family has been waiting a long time.”

  “Did Dr. Peres find a cause of death?”

  Lacey looked grim. “No. That’s common when the rema
ins are completely skeletal. I’m sure you’ll have a report from her tomorrow. I’ll email my findings later tonight.”

  Zander thanked her again and ended the call.

  Cynthia Green. Nineteen-year-old African American woman. Missing twenty years.

  What happened to you?

  Vanished two weeks before Emily’s father was hanged.

  She’d disappeared from the coast and turned up miles away in the forest. How?

  It bothered him. In his short time on the northern coast of Oregon, he’d learned there usually wasn’t a lot of violent crime. Two incidents so close together made his senses tingle.

  Zander checked the time. It was late, but he suspected he could reach his contact at the prison.

  He needed a favor.

  29

  Zander studied his computer monitor early the next morning, waiting for the start of the video interview with Chet Carlson, the convicted killer of Emily’s father, from the state prison.

  Chet shuffled into the frame and sat down.

  He looked like a murderer.

  If Chet had been cast in a movie, the audience would know he was the killer the moment he appeared on-screen.

  He was big, intimidatingly big, with hands that appeared to be twice the size of Zander’s. The shaved head and neatly trimmed goatee enhanced the stereotype.

  Chet studied Zander on his screen as a guard chained his hands to the bar in the table. His weight was on his forearms as he leaned on the table, curiosity on his face.

  According to Zander’s research, Chet Carlson had lived at a dozen addresses before he was arrested in Astoria for Lincoln Mills’s murder. He was a wanderer, never in one place for very long, with a lengthy record of arrests for vagrancy, theft, and DUI. He’d been using a suspended driver’s license when he was arrested.

  Zander introduced himself. “I have some questions about Lincoln Mills.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “It was.”