‘She alibied him, under caution, for the time the van we’re looking for was hit on the freeway. And given how mad she is at him, I think it’s a safe bet she wouldn’t cover for him if he wasn’t actually there.’
‘So we’re back to square one.’
‘Not exactly.’
Eric looked interested.
‘Let’s expand your body shop theory. We started with the ones that have handled hot cars but if it’s our perp from Georgia, he doesn’t know which shop to go to out here in California, does he? He picks whatever is convenient from the freeway and figures that, with enough incentive, he can keep the shop quiet.’ Scott pulled a printout closer to him. ‘I’ve got twelve more body shops we can check in that radius you set up around the accident site. There’s hope for your gold star yet.’
Eric had stood up to scan the list over Scott’s shoulder when someone knocked on their open door. Weiss was waiting for their attention.
‘Heard you guys were in the building. Thought you should get this from Thirty-two One direct.’
At his summons, Jayne and Steelie appeared, the latter carrying a toolbox. Eric gestured for her to take his empty chair while everyone greeted each other.
‘You found something?’ Scott asked.
Jayne announced, ‘There’s a surgical plate in one of the arms.’
Neither agent reacted at first. Then Eric put the question. ‘What does that mean for the case? Do you know who she is?’
Steelie smiled. ‘
Jayne explained, ‘If the plate is batch-stamped or coded in any way, and you add that it’s screwed into the right humerus of a woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty, say, then you guys are about as close as you’re going to get to a shortlist of people who had this procedure done off of that batch of plates.’
‘You’ll notice there are a couple of
‘And there’s another way we can search, right?’ Eric commented. ‘Using the National Crime Information Center database, we could generate a shortlist of all missing women in that age range with a plate in the right arm.’
‘That, too,’ agreed Jayne.
‘
Scott looked thoughtful. ‘Was there a scar? Like, from when she had surgery to put the plate in?’
Steelie smacked her forehead lightly and turned to stare at Jayne. ‘Of course! We got so carried away by the plate, we forgot about the scar. Of course there’s a scar.’
‘So,’ Eric concluded. ‘We can do a simple search on “scar, upper right arm” and forget about the person who put in the misper report knowing what kind of surgery or accident led to the scar?’
Jayne commented to Steelie, ‘And you always had a low opinion of these law enforcement types.’
Scott rocked back in his chair and grinned at Eric before saying to Jayne, ‘He just wants the gold star I promised him.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that what they taught you at Quantico? Carrot and stick?’
He paused, locking eyes with her, then said, ‘Well, you’ve been there—’
Steelie cut in. ‘No, we were only there for a week giving our two cents on NCIC Two Thousand. At the time, your main object of study appeared to be a beer bottle.’
Scott dragged his eyes away from Jayne to respond to Steelie. ‘Then you wouldn’t know that the Bureau stalwarts who teach us think the only place for a carrot is in a side salad – shredded.’
‘And even then, it’s suspicious,’ Eric added.
Scott grinned at him. ‘Plenty of stick around, though.’ He stood up. ‘And we should escort you out before our boss comes in here wielding his.’
EIGHT
Jayne went into the Agency’s laboratory to put away the biometric equipment they’d used to measure the X- ray images Tony Lee had printed at Critter Central. Steelie was booting up the lab computer. After it whirred to life and executed a few beeps, she said, ‘Check it out. Our first message via the All Coroners Bulletin. From a coroner in Anchorage about Thomas Cullen.’
Jayne pulled up a stool and read the couple of paragraphs, whose font was all capitals. Then she translated, ‘The coroner’s saying that they have a John Doe with a projectile in the sphenoid but they have his cause of death down as GSW with that bullet as the projectile that caused death? So . . . they don’t think it’s Cullen but they’re notifying us as a courtesy?’
Steelie nodded. ‘Looks like they ascribed the bullet to a more recent gunshot, not an old bullet that was sitting in his head for years.’
Jayne pushed back from the desk and frowned. ‘But how could they confuse the two?’
Steelie shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s not Thomas Cullen but rather some guy who
Jayne looked back at the coroner’s message. ‘It’s a decent match on the identifiers though . . . Caucasoid male, forty years plus or minus five, five-foot-nine plus or minus two, dark brown head hair, eyes brown, picked up in nineteen ninety-eight . . .’
‘So he’s a forty-year-old white guy with brown hair and eyes, no known scars, marks or tattoos. No wonder they’ve never had any hits in NCIC; there’s almost nothing there to discriminate between him and thousands of other missing men. Doesn’t mean it’s Cullen, that’s all I’m saying. They could be right and it’s a different guy.’
‘Send them another message.’
‘I’m going to. I will encourage them, in polite language, to compare any X-rays they’ve got with the one we digitized. They haven’t done that yet.’
Jayne got up. ‘OK, I’m going to write up the report on the BP’s for Scott and Eric. Let me know if you hear anything.’
By the time Steelie came to Jayne’s office, she was tidying the papers on her desk at the end of the day.
‘Did you get an acknowledgment from Tony on our report?’
‘Yes and he said he’d make sure Scott and Eric saw it when they got back.’
‘Which was when?’
‘God knows.’
Steelie perched on the edge of the desk. ‘So where are you meeting Gene tonight?’
‘They put him up at the Omni—’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘His company, I guess. So I’m picking him up—’
‘He doesn’t have a rental?’
‘No . . .’ She waited for Steelie to interrupt again but she didn’t. ‘And we’re going to eat in Little Tokyo.’
‘Which restaurant?’
Jayne stopped pulling the papers together. ‘I don’t know. We agreed to walk around, see what takes our fancy. If you’re so curious, why don’t you come too?’
Steelie gave a little shudder. ‘I hear your cry for help and yet I am not moved.’ She went out the door, then stuck her head back around it. ‘But call me when you get home afterwards.’
Jayne nodded. She finished at her desk, closed up the building, and left. At home, she changed clothes and put on mascara and lip gloss, realizing that the last time she’d seen Gene, they’d been at Kigali Airport in Rwanda almost a decade earlier. She’d still had a pair of well-used leather gloves sticking out of the back pocket of her cargo pants even though she and Steelie were leaving the mission in a matter of hours. He’d been wearing dusty boots, on his way to UN HQ, staying in the mission for another six months as he’d joined the team late, on loan