Find Her Alive

by Regan, Lisa

  His voice was so quiet, Josie strained to hear it. “Everything we had,” he said. “Cleared suspects, the investigation, all of it. That’s what I believe. There were things she talked about that she could only have known if she’d had access to the files.”

  “That’s what you were fighting about,” Josie said.

  “How do you know we were fighting?”

  “Because when I called you, you thought I was her, and you said, ‘I haven’t changed my mind.’ You didn’t ask her how she was, you didn’t say it was good to hear from her. What was it that you didn’t change your mind about?”

  “Helping her,” Drake said. “She wanted to solve the case.” His eyes flitted to the table, a half smile curling one side of his mouth. “This woman—she thought she could solve a cold serial case that an entire task force and the FBI hasn’t been able to solve.”

  Josie fought her own smile. “Of course she did. That’s Trinity. But she’s not wrong. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes makes all the difference. There was a blogger in Minnesota who helped solve the abduction case of Jacob Wetterling twenty-seven years after his kidnapping. She had help from law enforcement, of course, but it was her work that led to the perpetrator.”

  Mettner said, “Why would Trinity think she could make contact with him? What did she see that no one else did?”

  “I don’t know,” Drake said, “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  That was classic Trinity, Josie knew. She’d never tell Drake without some assurance that she wouldn’t be shut out of the investigation.

  “She had some kind of theory,” Drake explained. “But I don’t know what it was.”

  “What did she ask you to do?” Gretchen asked.

  “She wanted to draw him out into the open, and I could arrest him, she said.” He rolled his eyes. “It sounded like some kind of press stunt which could and would most likely go down in flames.”

  Noah said, “You weren’t willing to take the chance.”

  Drake turned to him. “That’s not how these things work. You guys know that. If she had a lead or a theory, she should have just told me and let me take it from there.”

  Josie said, “That’s not how Trinity operates.”

  “No shit.”

  “How did she even become fixated on this case in the first place? Why this killer?” Gretchen asked.

  Drake rubbed a hand over his face. “Right after we started seeing one another, she had some spat on the air with a correspondent. This was probably four months ago. The correspondent was doing an ongoing true crime segment. He chose a geographical area each week and prepared a segment on killers in those areas who had never been caught. That particular week, he did a piece on serial killers in the Northeast which included the Bone Artist. His theory was that the Bone Artist and a couple of the others in the report were dead or in prison and that was the end of it. Trinity thought that that was just an easy way out and argued that just because a serial killer was inactive for a period of time didn’t mean that they were no longer a threat. She said maybe some of these guys were smart enough to know when they had to take a break in order not to get caught. Anyway, she was all fired up about it. I guess she got a talking-to by the brass although the viewers liked it. They saw it as her being a ‘hard-hitting’ journalist. But at the time, she was pretty bent out of shape. We talked about it over dinner, and she played the whole thing for me. I told her that actually, the going theory was that the Bone Artist was dead or in prison. She asked how the hell I’d know that, and I told her it was my file.”

  Josie raised a brow. “Trinity might have liked you, but she wouldn’t get that obsessed with a cold serial case just because you had the file.”

  “Well, she got obsessed with it. She was miffed that I didn’t side with her on the whole thing. I think she was trying to prove me wrong.”

  “Initially,” Josie said. “But the deeper she got into the case details, the more she became convinced she could solve the case. Then when she got banished here to Denton after her on-air faux pas, she thought she might use the whole thing to get back in the limelight.”

  Mettner said, “Do you know how she planned on making contact with him?”

  “I have no idea,” Drake said.

  Noah asked, “When the Bone Artist contacted the journalists back in 2014, how did he do it?”

  Drake said, “Letters.”

  “Postage?” Noah asked.

  Drake replied, “No postage. We’re still not sure how he got them into the mailrooms of the networks, but there were far too many people in and out of those buildings all day and all night long for us to pinpoint any suspects after the fact.”

  “Did he ever leave them packages?” Josie asked.

  “No.”

  “But he dropped the letters off in person without being seen or noticed by anyone,” Josie said.

  Drake nodded.

  Noah said, “The Bone Artist has Trinity.”

  Drake smiled. “There’s no way the Bone Artist took Trinity. This was a wild goose chase that she was on. That’s not my concern. My concern is that whoever did take her has a whole lot of classified information.”

  Gretchen said, “Lieutenant Fraley is correct, Agent Nally. The Bone Artist took Trinity.”

  “The Bone Artist is dead,” Drake said.

  Mettner took out his phone, tapped, scrolled and held it out for Drake to see. “This photo was taken this morning behind the cabin Trinity had rented.”

  Drake stared at the photo, his face rapidly losing color. “My God,” he mumbled. “This isn’t—this can’t be right. This isn’t possible.”

  “You think it’s a copycat?” Noah asked.

  “No, I—I—” Drake stammered. “It can’t be. The public never saw the displays. No one has, except the responding officers and task force.”

  Josie said, “He’s got her. He took her.”

  Drake rubbed his hands over his face, recovering some of his composure. “What did he use to hold the bones down?”

  Mettner said, “Tent stakes and fishing line. Our Evidence Response Team already checked out the stakes. They’re a generic Walmart brand. Could have been bought anywhere in the country. Fishing line could have been bought at any store that stocks fishing supplies.”

  “My God,” Drake said again. “Is that—is that—”

  “It’s not Trinity,” Noah said. He filled Drake in on all they knew about Nicci Webb and her disappearance.

  “This isn’t right,” Drake said. “Seventeen days—he’s never left someone on display after only seventeen days, it’s always thirty—and he took Trinity and Webb? That’s not his pattern.”

  “But that’s what happened,” Noah said.

  “We have to go through your files,” Gretchen said to Drake. “We need to see everything that Trinity saw so we can figure out how she contacted him. If we can figure that out, maybe we can find him.”

  “Can you get us what we need?” Josie asked.

  Mettner said, “We’ll make an official request.”

  “The Bone Artist is my file. It was assigned to me as a cold case after the last agent working on it retired. I can get you what you need.”

  “Thank you,” Josie said.

  “But there’s one thing you need to understand,” he added. “You said that Trinity went missing three weeks ago. If he took her… I mean his pattern is all out of whack, obviously, with this Webb woman, but still, this guy, he always leaves the remains on day thirty. She could already be—”

  “We know,” Noah said, cutting him off. “But that changes nothing. No matter what happens, we’re going after this guy with everything we have.”

  Twenty-Nine

  “Take us through it,” Mettner told Drake. “The entire case, piece by piece.”

  Drake looked at each of them. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Condense it, then,” Noah said. “But you’d better start telling us what you know, and what Trinity would have known. The sooner we know
what she knew, the sooner we find her and the Bone Artist.”

  Drake raised a brow at Noah. “No offense, but we’ve been after this guy for over ten years. You have any idea how many law enforcement officers and other experts have been over this file? You think I’ll give you a presentation on this case and you’ll just figure it out? When no one else could?”

  Gretchen said, “Why not? Trinity figured out enough to make contact with this guy.”

  “Whatever our Evidence Response Team turns up on Trinity’s abduction and Nicci Webb’s murder might help as well,” Mettner added.

  Drake shook his head. The fingers of his right hand tapped on the table. “You think your team’s going to turn something up that the Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn’t?”

  Josie stood up, gathered the remains of the file in front of Gretchen, walked over to Drake, and slammed it onto the table in front of him. His flinch was barely perceptible, but Josie saw it. She leaned down, her face inches from his. “What I think is that every second you sit here questioning our competence, is one more second we could have spent finding my sister. I don’t care how long you’ve been after this killer or how many people failed to find him in the past. Right now, we have a case to solve. It’s as simple as that. We’ve got a lot of work to do, so if you’re not going to help us, then shut up and get out of my stationhouse. I’ll get in touch with your SAC. I’m sure she’ll be happy to lend any assistance she can on this.”

  Josie moved aside and held her arm out, gesturing toward the door. Slowly, Drake stood, smoothing the lapels of his jacket. “You’re just like her,” he said quietly.

  He picked up the file and moved past her, but he didn’t go to the door. Instead, he circled the table and walked over to the large whiteboard at the back of the room. He put the file on the table and opened it, spreading out reports. He motioned toward Gretchen’s neatly organized piles. “Do you mind?”

  She slid them over to him. He plucked the dry erase marker from the whiteboard ledge and uncapped it, listing dates, names, and brief notes as he spoke.

  “We didn’t know this was a serial case until the third victim, so the first two cases were handled by local departments. It wasn’t even clear they were connected until just before the third victim went missing.”

  Drake tapped his marker against the board where he had written Anthony Yanetti, 2008. “This guy was a truck driver. Forty-one years old. Wife and one kid. He lived in Newtown, Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s in the southeastern part of the state, right?” Mettner asked.

  “Yeah,” Josie said. “A couple of hours from here.”

  Drake continued, “He delivered furniture for a local store. He was out delivering. He made a stop at about eleven a.m., left that stop, and drove off to his next destination. Except he never made it. The customer called the store to complain when he didn’t show. No one could get in touch with him. A few hours later, his truck was found on a rural road outside of Newtown. Keys still in the ignition. Wallet, phone, lunch all still in the truck. It was like he pulled over, got out, and never came back. Thirty days later, some guy working in a salvage yard finds bones arranged on one of his back lots in King of Prussia, roughly thirty-five miles from where he went missing. That was treated as a homicide in that jurisdiction. He was identified using dental records.”

  Drake picked up a set of photos and passed them around. This set included close-ups of each bone group, like the ones both Josie and Noah had glimpsed in the guest room when Trinity stayed with them.

  Noah said, “You said earlier that the killer struck every two years. Are we talking to the day? Two years from the abduction or from the staging of the bones?”

  Drake drew an arrow from the name Anthony Yanetti to the name Terri Abbott. “The victims are always abducted in March and their bones are always found in April, usually early April. It’s two years to the month.”

  Josie tried to suppress the shiver working its way through her body. It was nearly April. “The exact dates don’t matter?” she said.

  “They don’t seem to matter, no. He doesn’t leave the remains every April fifteenth or anything like that. Terri Abbott, a twenty-eight-year-old day care worker from Pittsburgh, was walking home from a pre-season Pirates game. Her last known contact was a phone call with her roommate during which she told the roommate she was walking across the Roberto Clemente bridge.”

  Mettner said, “Did you find her on any cameras?”

  Drake shook his head. “It was too crowded. Too many people. We couldn’t isolate her. Her phone and purse were found in the gutter on the other side of the bridge, so we think she did make it across.”

  Josie’s throat was dry. “Then thirty days later…”

  “Her bones were found in the parking lot of an abandoned steel mill outside of Pittsburgh. Some foundation had bought it up, and they were planning to put an art installation there. That’s how her bones were found.”

  Gretchen frowned. “How does he ensure that the bones are found on the thirtieth day if he’s leaving them in remote places?”

  “Hand-delivered notes.” Drake riffled through the pages in the file until he came up with two photos. Both showed a regular piece of white copy paper with the same block writing Josie had seen on the package Trinity had received. One simply said:

  Please check the back lot immediately. Urgent.

  The other said:

  There’s a problem at the mill. The installation cannot go ahead. Please check the parking lot immediately.

  Josie and her team passed them around as Drake continued, “The first one was taped to the front door of the salvage yard office, left there overnight, we assume after he left the bones. There weren’t any cameras on the exterior back then or in the back two lots. The second one was left in the mailbox of the artist who had been chosen to do the installation.”

  Noah asked, “No prints on the paper?”

  “Nothing. We analyzed the paper and the ink he used. Every little thing. It all led nowhere. That’s the thing. He leaves nothing behind.”

  “Except the bones,” Josie said.

  “Right. But other than that, he’s never been caught on camera. He’s left no prints, no shoeprints, no tire tracks, no DNA. He’s a ghost.”

  Thirty

  “A ghost didn’t take my sister,” Josie said, “We’ve got something else. A comb.”

  Drake raised a skeptical brow. “What? Like a hair comb? How do you know it’s his?”

  Noah said, “He left it in our mailbox addressed to Trinity.”

  Mettner took out his phone and pulled up a photo of the comb that Josie had sent him earlier in the day, “We believe it’s made of bone. It can’t be a coincidence that Trinity was neck-deep into this case and then had this delivered to her anonymously.”

  Drake stared at the photo. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Where else would it come from?” Josie asked.

  Mettner swiped to the photo of the packaging.

  Drake said, “Did you send all of that for analysis?”

  “Of course we did,” Gretchen interjected.

  “You won’t get anything. He’s too careful. The comb? You won’t get anything from that either.”

  Josie said, “If we’re right, and it’s made of bone, we need to know who it came from. We can do DNA testing, run it through CODIS.”

  “That’s not going to help you find this guy,” Drake argued.

  Josie held his gaze. “The four victims in your file—were there any bones missing?”

  “No, but—”

  “That means there could be other victims out there. Victims we don’t know about yet. Besides that, we’ve got a new victim. Between Nicci Webb’s murder and Trinity’s abduction, there may be a way to track this guy down.”

  “He never leaves clues behind,” Drake argued.

  “But it’s an avenue we can’t ignore,” Josie said.

  When Drake didn’t respond, Mettner said, “You told us about the third
victim, Kenneth Darden. He disappeared in 2012 from Paoli, thirty days later his bones showed up in Philadelphia.”

  “Right,” Drake replied, looking away from Josie and resuming his recap of the Bone Artist case. “Those were in a very public place, so he didn’t need to leave any notes.”

  “Yeah,” Gretchen said, fingering a photo of Darden’s remains with a river in the background. “That particular area on the bank of the Schuylkill River sees a lot of traffic. Joggers, bikers, walkers, rowers, homeless people. You name it. Also, there were no cameras there back then, so that was smart.”

  Drake said, “The 911 call on that one came in at five-thirty in the morning.”

  The door to the conference room opened and they all turned to see Hummel standing there with a laptop in his hands. “Boss,” he said, addressing Josie. “Thought you’d want this. It’s Trinity’s.”

  “Thanks, Hummel,” Josie said. She took the computer from him and sat back down. To Mettner and Gretchen, she asked, “Were there any documents on here about the Bone Artist?”

  “No,” Mettner replied. “Which was not surprising given what her assistant said. If she was that worried about getting scooped, she wouldn’t leave notes on the computer.”

  “I’ll check the emails,” Josie said, opening the laptop and powering it up.

  “Sorry for the interruption,” Mettner told Drake. “Please, tell us about the fourth victim.”

  Drake nodded and continued, “The fourth victim was a thirty-seven-year-old stockbroker named Robert Ingram. He lived in East Stroudsburg—the upper east side of the state of Pennsylvania. His wife drove him to the train station and dropped him off for a meeting in New York City that day. He never made it inside the station. Thirty days later his bones were found arranged on the Bloomsburg Fairgrounds.”

  The laptop screen came to life, showing a photo of a French villa. The small eye beneath the camera began scanning for Trinity’s face. The words Looking for You flashed beneath it. Josie leaned in and kept still. The eye focused on her. Then it disappeared and the words Welcome, Trinity Payne popped up before the home screen appeared.