The Girl With No Name

Chapter Twenty-Nine

It took Josie fifteen minutes to get to the scene of the accident. Her patrol officers had already cordoned the area off and a crowd of onlookers lingered on the periphery, craning their necks and taking photos of the carnage with their phones. The street was two lanes in each direction. On one side was a row of apartment buildings and on the other was a dirt shoulder marked by foliage. The street circled a densely wooded part of Denton’s City Park—a green space between the college campus and Denton’s Main Street where residents walked their dogs, jogged, and held community events. Inside the park was a large playground, a gazebo, and a small pond. The closest intersecting street was a one-lane residential road several yards away.

In the middle of the northbound side of the road, a mangled Ford Bronco lay on its driver’s side, glass and metal debris scattered around it. Her officers were erecting a pop-up tent around its front end which meant there was a fatality. As Josie walked toward them, she saw blood pooling where the driver’s side window kissed the blacktop. Several feet away, the front of a small red pickup truck had plowed into the passenger’s side of a Toyota Corolla.

“Boss.” Noah came jogging up beside her from the edge of the scene where he’d been interviewing onlookers.

A beep sounded behind them, and Josie looked back to see Anya Feist driving through the police barrier.

“Want to tell me what the hell happened here?” Josie asked Noah.

Josie watched as Dr. Feist parked next to the pop-up tent and hopped out to talk with one of the responding officers. The officer gestured toward the now covered portion of the Bronco, and the doctor marched off toward it.

Noah pointed to the apartment buildings. “A guy on his balcony said he heard a loud boom, like a gunshot. Then the Bronco lost control, hit a parked car and rolled over several times into the northbound lane. The red truck was trying to avoid the Bronco and crashed into the Corolla. Then the witness reports that a blond woman climbed out of the passenger’s side of the Bronco and fled on foot into the park.”

“Conway. Do you have a team out looking for her?”

“Two teams.”

Josie watched Dr. Feist disappear into the tent.

“The truck and the Corolla—any fatalities?”

Noah shook his head. “No, minor injuries only.”

Relief washed through her. Whatever the hell was going on with Kim Conway, Josie didn’t want any innocent bystanders getting killed because of it. “Who’s the driver in the Bronco? Same guy who came to get Kim at the station?”

“We assume so.”

“You don’t know?”

“Chief Quinn,” shouted Dr. Feist.

Josie made her way into the tent, searching for the doctor.

“Chief?”

It was then that Josie noticed the doctor’s legs sticking out of the passenger’s side of the Bronco, which now faced the top of the tent. A close look through the webbed windshield revealed the doctor’s upper body dangling from the passenger’s seat window, hanging down toward the driver.

“What the hell are you doing?” Josie said.

“Trying to get a good look at this guy in situ. Someone blew his damn head off.”

Dr. Feist’s legs kicked and flailed. Josie heard a muffled grunt as the doctor pushed her upper body up out of the cab of the vehicle. She sat on the door and held something out with a gloved hand. Josie looked to Noah, who handed her a set of latex gloves. She snapped them on and took what the doctor was handing her. Another New Jersey driver’s license. This one belonging to Denny Twitch, whose photo showed a thick-necked man with a shaved head: their fake marshal.

Josie smiled at Dr. Feist. “If you could just show up at all of our crime scenes and magically produce victim IDs from now on, that would be great.”

Dr. Feist smiled back and used her forearm to swipe a stray lock of hair from her forehead. “No magic to it. Always check the pockets. By the way, there’s a pistol in there too. I’m just going to take some photos, and then you can have a bus bring him over to my office for a full autopsy, although I can tell you right now he was killed by a close-range gunshot to the right temporal lobe.”

She leaned back inside the vehicle. Josie turned to Noah and held up the driver’s license so he could take a photo of it. “I’ll run a background check,” he said. “And see if he works for Eric Dunn.”

“Great,” said Josie. “What about the vehicle?”

“It’s his private vehicle,” Noah answered. “Registered to him.”

She took another look at the Bronco and sighed. “That’s a pretty old model, isn’t it?”

Noah grimaced. “Yeah, there’s no GPS.”

“Phone?”

“Once Dr. Feist is finished, we’ll see if we can find it.”

“So, no point in paying a visit to Eric Dunn quite yet. Not until we confirm that Twitch worked for him, see if we get anything from his phone. Also, we have to find Conway.”

“Should I call the press?” Noah asked.

Josie shook her head. “No. Keep her off the news, would you? If Dunn’s organization is so bent on finding her that they’re willing to send someone to impersonate a United States marshal, then I want her and the search for her to be as off the radar as we can make it. I don’t even want them to know for sure if she’s missing.”

“WYEP is still running her as Jane Doe,” Noah pointed out.

“Then call them, tell them she has been identified and we’re working on reuniting her with her family. Then stress the need for privacy. Tell them we are not releasing her name at this time. Thank the viewers and all that. Make it sound good. I don’t want them getting wind that there’s a story here.”

“You got it,” Noah said.

Josie took a slow walk around the wreckage, glass crunching underfoot. She wondered just how scared Kim Conway was that she would shoot a man in the face while he was driving the car she was in. Trinity’s words echoed inside her head. Eric Dunn is not a good person. “Noah,” she called.

He had disappeared into a patrol car to use the computer inside. He stepped out. “What’s up, boss?”

“I want a K-9 unit out here looking for Conway. See if the sheriff can loan us one, would you? She may very well be injured from the accident. I don’t want her out there wandering around if she needs medical attention.”

He nodded and got back into the patrol car, his cell phone already pressed to his ear. Josie turned away from the wrecked Bronco and studied the tree line. She wondered how far Kim Conway would get on foot. Or would she hide until the patrols stopped searching the park for her? Josie knew she had more than enough people to search for her, that she should go back to the station or home to get some sleep like Gretchen had suggested, or even to Bowersville, where she’d originally been headed when Noah called her, but instead she walked toward the tree line and disappeared into the woods.