The Girl With No Name

Chapter Eighteen

Noah waited outside the interview room for her. “Well, that was productive,” he smirked.

Josie suppressed a cutting reply, instead firing off a text to him which immediately made his cell phone chirp. He looked at it. “I thought you didn’t take her picture,” he said.

Josie smiled. “She was so busy performing, she didn’t even notice me taking it. Send it to WYEP. I want it on the news within the hour.”

“I thought you were giving her four hours.”

“We don’t have four hours. Put her in holding. Make her comfortable. Get her photo out on the news and on social media. We’ll say she was found at the scene of a crime, and we’re trying to determine her identity.”

“What if she’s a domestic violence victim? What if the guy who broke her face comes to get her?”

“I can help her,” Josie insisted. “I can protect her, but right now she is my only link to Luke. She knows something. She is my only chance of finding him—if he’s even still alive. If she can’t or won’t tell me who she is then I have to use whatever means I can to find out. I have no choice.”

Noah looked as though he was going to argue with her, but then he swallowed and said, “Okay. I’ll call WYEP.”

“Then shoot over to Foxy Tails and show her picture around—see if anyone recognizes her.”

“You think she knew Misty?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know. What I do know is that Misty was beaten to within an inch of her life yesterday, and her newborn was abducted. Hours later, we find Luke on tape visiting Misty at Foxy Tails because he had some kind of business with her. Then he goes missing after an obvious struggle, and this woman is at his house. It’s all too much of a coincidence. Get that photo out immediately, will you? Let’s see how Jane Doe likes being lied to.”

“You got it, boss. By the way, Misty’s cell phone didn’t respond to the GPS or triangulation.”

“So whoever took it, likely destroyed it. That’s a dead end. What about midwives? I still want to know if any midwives in the city have been reported missing.”

“Gretchen was working on that,” he said. “She hasn’t found anything suspicious.”

“Well, that’s good. Where are we with the locksmith getting Misty’s desk open? It’s probably a dead end, but I’d like to know if there’s anything useful in there.”

“Gretchen had a locksmith out there yesterday, but there’s some special tool he needed to open that particular desk. Did you know it was imported from England? It’s almost two hundred years old. Anyway, the locksmith said he doesn’t have the right tool, but he has a buddy a few towns away who does.”

“Goddamn period furniture,” Josie muttered.

“Say the word and we’ll smash the lock and open it ourselves.”

“No. That desk must cost thousands. I’m not paying for it. The most we’re going to get from any documents in it is a better idea of who the baby’s father is, and I’m pretty confident about the list of potential daddies we’ve already put together. Just let me know when you guys get it open, okay?”

“Of course.”

Noah disappeared down the hall, already on the phone. Josie’s cell phone rang, and she pulled it out to see Gretchen’s name and number on the display. “What’ve you got?” she answered without preamble.

Gretchen’s voice sounded strained. “I went over to Luke’s, like you said. Had a look around the outside. The yard, the barn, the perimeter.”

Josie’s mouth went dry. “What did you find?” she asked. Gretchen wouldn’t be calling unless she had found something significant.

“I’ve got a body here, boss. Out behind the barn. Buried. Looks like he’s been here a while.”

“So not Luke,” Josie blurted out.

“I don’t think so, no. I called the medical examiner. She’s on her way. You want to meet us out here?”

Josie looked around. She noticed three of her officers leaned against their desks, their gazes on the television affixed to the wall. There was Trinity Payne again, covering day two of the Aaron King trial on national news. Like everyone in the country, Josie’s staff was consumed with the trial. Why wouldn’t they be riveted to the King coverage? There were no leads to follow in the Misty Derossi missing infant case. No leads to follow in Luke’s disappearance. Jane Doe wasn’t cooperating. “I’ll be there in twenty,” Josie said into the phone and hung up.

She called to one of the officers watching the news and told him to get an evidence response team out to Luke’s house immediately. She tracked Noah down to tell him about the most recent development. He promised to catch up with her later once he got their Jane Doe situated and ran down some of the leads Josie had asked him to look into. Josie headed toward Luke’s house, the seventeen miles there among the longest of her life.

Dr. Anya Feist was in her forties and had been the medical examiner for the city of Denton for over ten years. She was smart, efficient, and no-nonsense. Josie had always liked her. She had always had a young, vital look to her, but the missing girls case had aged her. Josie had watched in the last eighteen months as her shoulder-length blond hair turned nearly silver and the pounds fell away from her five-foot-six frame until people started asking if she was ill. “No,” she always answered. “It’s just the stress of the job.”

Josie found her on her hands and knees behind Luke’s barn, sifting through loose dirt with gloved hands. She had already set up a rectangular grid with metal stakes and string. Gretchen stood outside of it, taking photos with one of the department cameras. Near Anya’s knees, in the center of the grid, a leg covered in brown trousers peeked from the dirt, its foot wearing a mud-crusted black loafer. Josie felt a small wave of relief. Not Luke’s shoes. He had one pair of oxfords which he had paid way too much for and only wore to weddings and funerals, and these were not them.

Anya stopped sifting through the dirt and squinted up at Josie. “Chief,” she said.

“Dr. Feist,” Josie replied, stopping outside of the cordoned off area.

Gretchen nodded at Josie. She stopped taking photos momentarily and used the camera to motion behind her to where Luke’s property ended and a small copse of woods began. “There’s an incline here,” she pointed out. “You have to walk up that little embankment to get into the woods. We had all that rain last week. I think it washed a lot of the dirt and mud away. Otherwise, I would never have spotted part of his shoe sticking out. Doesn’t look like he was buried very deep to begin with.”

Anya used the back of her wrist to push a stray lock of hair off her forehead. “I’ll need to get the rest of my kit from my truck. We’ll need an ambulance to transport this guy to the morgue once I’ve got him excavated.”

“Whatever you need,” Josie said. “How long do you think he’s been here?”

“Don’t know. Can’t guess. I would have to get him on the table and get a good look at him. Judging by the condition of his clothes, though, he hasn’t been here too long. If he’d been here for years, I’d expect his pants and shoes to be a little more worse for wear.”

“What are we talking about?” Josie asked. “Days? Weeks?’

Anya smoothed a bit of dirt away from the bottom of the pant leg. “Four to six months. Could be less. But you know how this goes. I can’t give you a solid answer until I examine the body.”

“I understand. I’ll go get the rest of your supplies.”

“Just a minute,” Anya said. She leaned over the leg, pushing the dirt gently away from the top of the thigh in small, even strokes. Her fingers searched for something along the pant leg. The man’s pocket, Josie realized, as Anya cleared more dirt away and her fingertips disappeared into a seam in the fabric. “Come on,” she muttered under her breath as she tugged gently on something inside his pocket. A moment later, her hand reappeared with a man’s wallet pinched between her fingers. “Detective Palmer,” she said.

Gretchen stepped closer, leaning over the string grid and taking several photos of the wallet. She let the camera hang from her neck and snapped on her own set of gloves before taking the wallet from Anya. Josie picked her way around to where Gretchen stood and looked over her shoulder as Gretchen opened the wallet to examine the contents. She pulled out a New Jersey driver’s license and read the name aloud. “Mickey Kavolis.” She held it out so Josie could snap a photo of it with her phone. Gretchen continued, “He was forty-seven and lived in Atlantic City.”

The man on the driver’s license looked every bit of forty-seven, and then some. His salt-and-pepper hair was thick over his ears and thin on the top of his head, receding at the temples. He had deep-set brown eyes that glared past a nose that looked as though it had been broken so many times it was permanently flattened. His olive skin was riddled with acne scars. The picture looked more like a mug shot than a driver’s license photo. Josie had no doubt that when they ran his name through their various databases, he would come up with a criminal record.

“Atlantic City?” Josie repeated. “What’s he doing all the way out here?”

And why was he buried on Luke’s property?