Leaving the building, she looked at Jackson, impressed. “Boy, you don’t talk much, but when you do, you really have something noteworthy to say. You realize this means a lot more reading for us.”
Given half a chance, Jackson preferred being outside, in the field, but when it came to this case, he’d resigned himself to more indoor work.
“As long as it leads to the bastard who did this, it’ll be worth it.”
* * *
“This has got to be the most vapidly vain documented generation to have ever drawn breath,” Jackson commented more than a day later, utterly exasperated.
They had been going through a mind-numbing number of social-media pages ever since they’d left the morgue. It seemed like one page just naturally led to another link, which led to another and another. It had been like that for the last thirty-six hours.
“Why would anyone take pictures of their food?” he demanded incredulously, shaking his head. “Why not just eat it?”
Brianna shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to remember what it looked like when it was served.”
She felt as if she was reaching the end of her rope, tired of going through pictures as she searched for some hidden trigger in all of these commemorated non-occasions.
“You want to remember a sunset, the look in someone’s eyes when they turned toward you at just the right moment. You don’t want to remember food,” he insisted, his tone bordering on disgust.
“Hey, don’t get all worked up. I agree with you,” Brianna protested. “But I guess these people think differently. Maybe we could use a break,” she suggested, closing her eyes and rubbing the bridge of her nose. All the photographs were beginning to run together and the people in them to look alike. “Say, go out to get something to eat and come back,” she proposed.
“Sure,” Jackson answered. “I could—Wait—”
She shrugged, willing to put her suggestion on hold. “No problem. I’ll wait. I’ll just flip to another incredibly boring site.”
But Jackson shook his head. She didn’t understand. “No, I mean, wait—I think I might have found something.”
She didn’t bother to suppress the groan that escaped. “Not another page of someone posting someone else’s embarrassing photos.” They’d already come across several less-than-flattering picures. “I’m still trying to erase the last ones from my mind.”
He didn’t bother contradicting her supposition. “Come here,” Jackson said, beckoning her over to his computer. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, afraid it might just vanish. “Look at this.”
Coming around to his desk, she looked over his shoulder at the photo he had frozen on the monitor. “That’s a pretty fancy-looking party,” Brianna commented. According to the caption, the photograph had been taken at a fund-raiser. Everyone there was wearing clothes that would have set back most people half a year’s salary, if not more. “Whose social-media page are you on?”
“I’ve lost track,” Jackson confessed. He hit an arrow that took him back to the last location he had pulled up. “It belongs to Jocelyn Aurora.”
Brianna looked at him. “That’s Winston’s daughter,” she recalled. The thin, colorless girl had all but faded into the wall the one time she had met her.
“Yeah, but look here, over in the corner,” Jackson directed. “That girl with Damien Aurora. Doesn’t that look like one of the girls in the missing-persons report?”
Right now, everyone looked like everyone else to her. “Enhance it,” she told him.
“How do I—? Oh.”
Impatient, Brianna reached over and did the honors herself. Touching the screen, she spread her fingers out, making the section beneath her fingers grow until it was three times as large.
“You’re right,” she said, excitement building in her chest. “It is one of the girls. It’s—Hold on—” Turning away, she quickly riffled through the stack that had been on her desk, spreading the pages out so they covered his desk. “I just saw that face a few minutes ago on her own page.”
Brianna shuffled through the pages a second time, more methodically, looking at each face intently.
“There!” she declared, jabbing her finger at the page she had been looking for. “That’s her. That’s—” She read the name beneath the photograph. “‘Mandy Prentice.’”
Brianna held up the page beside the enlarged photo on Jackson’s computer monitor. She stared at the two images, one sharp, a graduation photo enshrining a far happier time, and one fuzzy despite the enhancement, clearly a shot taken when Mandy—if it was Mandy—was trying to disentangle herself from the grip of the person holding on to her wrist.
Damien Aurora.
“We need to print this picture,” Brianna cried. “Hot damn, I think we just got our break!” She threw her arms around Jackson’s neck and pressed an elated kiss to his cheek. “There’s more where that came from if this turns out to be what we’re looking for,” she promised, excitement all but pulsating in her voice.
“You two partying?” Del Campo called out, looking up from his computer.
“Just maybe,” Brianna told him. “I want you to drop whatever you’re doing and get any kind of medical records you can find on a Mandy Prentice. When you find them, bring them over to Kristin Cavanaugh at the morgue. If we’re right, the mystery of the Old Aurora Hotel is about to be unraveled.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Jackson cautioned. “This picture could be just a picture. Winston Aurora and his wife throw these fund-raisers all the time. Just because Damien is there and grabbed that girl’s wrist doesn’t mean he killed her.”
“Maybe not,” she agreed reluctantly, “but it’s a starting point.” She looked back at the picture. Enlarged, Damien’s expression was clearly visible. He didn’t appear playful or even annoyed. Instead, he seemed
