ultimately lead to erasing his existence from a house that would no longer feel like her home.
She took a deep breath and opened the door. The office still looked like he had just stepped out to refill his mug of coffee or use the bathroom, as though at any moment he might slip past her through the doorway and plop down on his worn leather chair. From time to time, she opened the door long enough to allow the air to circulate and imagined him sitting there at his desk, combing through his records on the computer in anticipation of the coming day's appointments, researching test results, and following up on the financial end of his practice. Billing was contracted out to an agency, but the bottom line was that he and his partner were responsible for keeping their office in the black. It was a small practice in an even smaller town, which meant that maintaining any kind of profit margin required constant oversight. Warren could have easily made twice as much over in Dallas; however, it had been important for her to stay in Jefferson, where she had been raised and where she wished to raise her child, and so it had been important to him, as well. Besides, he liked the idea of being a small-town physician. Half of the town relied upon him. It made him feel necessary, gave him a greater sense of worth. And like old Dr. Patterson, from whom Warren had purchased the practice upon his retirement, he got a kick out of making the occasional house call to the outer fringes of the city limits, just like real doctors used to do back in the day. When it had been a noble service profession, and not an assembly-line, treat'em-and-street'em job.
She flipped on the lights.
The cicadas were crawling all over the keyboard and the computer monitor on the antique maple desk. Their fat bellies filled and deflated as they sang.
For the first time in two years, she crossed the threshold. It smelled of dust, but there was still the faintest hint of Warren's aftershave and the hazelnut coffee he loved so much. She felt as though she were stepping into the past, into a better time when the future was only a dream.
She nudged his chair aside and watched the black and gold insects scurry over the keyboard and the monitor, their eyes like twin globules of blood. Those on the screen took flight and buzzed around her head. She waved them away as those on the keyboard continued to sing.
Several cicadas alighted on the mouse. Warren must have only put the computer into sleep mode, for even the slight application of their weight brought the monitor to life, bright even through the skein of dust.
The screen displayed a page from a website called RapiDx, a site for physicians that featured tools to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of skeletal and physiological maladies using primarily radiographs and lab values from blood draws.
This was the last page Warren had ever viewed, the last diagnosis to occupy his mind.
The page showed x-rays of knees that appeared swollen and deformed, the cortices of the distal femora bowed outward to accommodate patchy black lucencies that lent an almost moth-eaten appearance.
Osteosarcoma.
Trey knew it was a fool's proposition. There was just something about the way Vanessa had asked, about the aura of what could have passed for serenity exuding from her, that gave him pause. Between the dental records and the DNA match of the hair samples, there was more than enough concrete evidence to guarantee the proper identification had been made, but the more he contemplated it, the less convinced he became.
He sat at his desk with the forwarded dental files open on the screen in front of him. The monitor showed the two sets of x-rays, side-by-side. On the left, the broken and reassembled teeth. On the right, the film from Emma's last visit to the dentist prior to her abduction. The fillings, the unfilled caries...they matched up perfectly. So perfectly that none of them had noticed the obvious. All of the teeth had been broken at the roots. Most of them were chipped or cracked in some fashion. All of them, in fact, with the exception of the three with metal fillings and the two with existing cavities. Factoring out the sharp breaks along the root-line, they were otherwise intact. The exact teeth they had needed to determine the identity...and they were so well preserved they might as well have been bagged and tagged before they were buried.
Then there was the hair. Had there been enough of it there to completely cover a child's head? With the complete dissolution of the flesh, there had been no scalp to confirm that the hair had ever been attached to the body. Was it possible that the teeth and hair had been planted in order to make the identification of the remains so simple that no one ever bothered to investigate the skeleton itself? The bones had been so badly broken in so many places that there had been no reason to delve deeper. The cause of death been had fairly apparent, but had the child really died from the beating, or was the condition of the body just another part of the deception like the teeth and hair? Even if this burgeoning theory held water, why would anyone go to so much trouble to hide the identity of a different dead child? Why take the risk of abducting another little girl if only for her hair and teeth? And none of this implied that Emma was still alive. For all he knew, she was buried somewhere out there in the bayou, as well, with larvae feasting on her carcass and gnawing the marrow out of her bones.
The phone on his desk rang. He recognized the number on the Caller ID and had it to his ear before the second ring.
'Walden.'
'What do you know that we don't?' Packard asked.
'Not a thing. I was following a hunch. I take it you were able to compare the DNA from the bones.'
'Yeah.'
'I'm too tired to play Twenty Questions. Out with it already.'
'Let me ask you a question first. Remember how the right knee was misshapen?'
'You mean that crater that looked like it had started to rot where it was broken?'
'We weren't paying close enough attention. Usually, some of the best DNA samples can be extracted from a slice of the femur. We cut just above the crater and exposed a generous portion of the cortex and cancellous bone, which clearly revealed that it wasn't a traumatic fracture. What do you suppose it was?'
'I have no idea.'
'Neoplastic cells with osteoblastic differentiation.'
'In English.'
'A tumor, Walden. A massive osteosarcoma. Did your niece have cancer?'
'Not that any of us were aware of,' Trey whispered. He was already running through the implications in his mind.
'You would have known. A tumor like that? She would have been in a great deal of pain. The survival rate of a cancer like this is only about two in three, even with aggressive chemo and radiation treatments.'
'What about the DNA?'
'The bone didn't match the hair. As far as an ID, I can't tell you who it is without another sample to compare it against, but I can definitely tell you who it isn't.'
There was a long moment of silence. Static crackled across the distance.
'The body isn't Emma's,' Trey finally said.
'Nope.'
'So where in the name of God is she? Why would someone stage the burial to make us think the remains were hers?'
'We need to start with whose body it really is. Now, let me give you something else to chew on. The broken bones? The lack of periosteal reaction suggests that the breaks were inflicted postmortem. This girl was already dead before someone decided to kick the crap out of her corpse. What kind of monster throws a dead child on the ground and stomps every bone in her body, boots her in the face, and dumps her in the swamp with another child's teeth and hair?'
'If she was dead before all of this happened, do you have a formal cause of death?'
'Without the viscera, it's purely theoretical.'
'But?'
'We x-rayed the rest of the bones and found them riddled with mets.'
'The cancer killed her.'
'Probably, but not very long before someone set about destroying what was left of her.'
'To make it look like Emma's body and that she'd been bludgeoned to death.'
Trey thanked Packard, hung up, and stared at the ceiling. He suddenly had more questions than answers, the most urgent of which was where was Emma?
Was it really possible that she was still alive?
