Shoop’s desk was in the corner of their main office work area. One wall was completely dominated by a seventy-five-inch electronic smart board. The thing was fully integrated with the internet. They could draw on it and pull up just about anything. Kendra was half afraid it had become self-aware and could do the podcast without them.
The underwriter for just about everything they did, J.D. Atwell, had insisted he fund the high-tech equipment. Kendra and Shoop were perfectly happy with their old dry erase whiteboard, but Art insisted they accept.
“When a billionaire wants to buy you something, say yes, and thank you.” That was Art’s edict on the gargantuan smart board.
Kendra was still adjusting to the new tech.
“Okay, so, where are we with all this?” Shoop said.
Kendra sent the picture from her phone to the currently empty screen on the smart board.
The image of the remains of the woman, the tattered bag, and the tights around her neck—the whole of it took Shoop’s breath away.
“Oh, that poor thing,” Shoop murmured.
“I know, I can’t get her out of my head.”
“Any identification yet?”
“No. I called Omari—he’s the one who gave me the original tip—but there’s nothing back from BCI yet. It could be a while since they don’t have much, and it’s been so long.”
“My mom had tights like that,” Shoop said.
“She did?”
“Yeah, they were a leftover from her younger days, but yeah.”
“I was looking at disappearances, missing persons and such, and unsolved cases from the 1980s.”
“And?”
“I need your help. This is going way back. I am going to start at the Ohio Attorney General website. Can you start looking at newspaper archives?”
“On it. Is this our new season?”
Kendra stood up and looked at the enlarged image on the smart board.
She thought about the off-handed comment.
“I don’t know, but I know we have to try to help her.”
“Okay, let’s get to work.”
Kendra nodded and walked into her office, which adjoined the main work area.
She opened up her laptop, and the search began.
The Ohio Attorney General’s website was as good a place as any to start. She’d have been an unsolved case whoever the woman was since only now did they have a body.
Kendra started out with missing persons. There were too many to count. And so many were women that there was no way to connect what she’d seen at the construction site to what was on the missing persons database.
And if she could be from anywhere. Was she from Michigan, or Kentucky, or Indiana?
Kendra decided to look at it from another direction.
Homicides from the 1980s. There were hundreds, of course, so she narrowed again. She wanted to see if any homicides involved the recovery of a body in the same way they’d found the woman at High Timbers.
Slowly, after clicking on results, clicking back, and double-checking, Kendra found an incident that resembled the one at High Timbers:
Body found at highway overpass paving project
The article had been scanned in on the Port Lawrence News Daily online archive. It was from 1978. Kendra entered the relevant links and sent the information to the smart board. A follow-up story revealed the woman’s name, Linda Kay Ellis.
Sending headlines via email wasn’t the same as scrawling them on the board with her big fat dry erase marker, but it was more efficient, she admitted. Thanks, J.D. Atwell.
Kendra walked out to be sure the snippets of information she’d found had, in fact, shown up where she meant them to on the smart board.
She looked at the wall and saw her headline wasn’t the only one. Shoop had found one too.
“Details the same,” Kendra said to Shoop.
“Sincere Anderson, found in our possible time frame, similar circumstances, 1980.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, this isn’t the first time they’ve found a body along I-75,” Shoop remarked.
“No, it isn’t. Or the second.” Kendra walked closer to the board. “There’s a pattern.” Kendra felt it in her bones. In one afternoon, they’d found three.
“The thing is, they’re up and down the highway. Sincere is in Michigan, Linda Kay, Ohio. That could be a reason they’re not connected in a bigger story,” Shoop said.
Kendra looked. Shoop had added a map of I-75 as it went North of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through that state, through Ohio, and down to Kentucky, and off the board south.
Kendra knew there was something here, something that the woman in High Timbers was leading her to.
“But all three were found in a garbage bag to conceal their bodies and at a highway drop site,” Kendra said. She looked at the three victims on the board.
“You have that look,” Shoop said.
“What look?”
“The look that says you’re not going to stop.”
“I imagine you’d see that look in the mirror too right now, Shoop.”
“Maybe.”
“But you’re right. It feels like this is what we’re going to do, these stories.”
“The three we have?” Shoop looked dubious about Kendra’s assertion.
“Sure, yes, who were they? How is it we don’t know them?”
Shoop looked at Kendra and then back at the board.
But neither of them was sure what to do next. Normally they had a victim’s friend. Or a family member who wanted answers. Right now, it was only the two of them, and the victims weren’t high profile or celebrated. They were women who no one seemed to know or remember.
“You know, this is like our I-80 Jane Doe,” Shoop observed.
That was the in their first season, when they’d successfully identified a body, unclaimed for decades. The crime was still unsolved, but they’d at least helped one family have some idea of what happened in the last days of a troubled niece. Annie Walters had been labeled the I-80 Jane Doe for decades until The Cold Trail had figured out who she was.
“Yeah, it’s like Annie Walters, except this time we do have their names,” Kendra responded. “With her, Annie, we had nothing.”
“I guess Kyle dumped you just in time. We’re going to
