Shay Van Dorne was a different matter. Her body had been buried. Faith had listed the parents’ information alongside the number for the funeral home that had handled her internment. In Faith’s usual thoroughness, she had called the home and ascertained the location of the body. Shay Van Dorne was buried in Villa Rica, sixty miles east of GBI headquarters. There was one word that caught Sara’s attention. Faith had written VAULT in caps, then circled it.
Sara dialed Amanda’s extension into her phone.
Amanda answered, “Quickly, I’m expected on a conference call in four minutes.”
“I understand why you’re reluctant to expand the investigation into the women from the articles.”
“But?”
“What if it was just one jurisdiction, one coroner, one police department?”
“Continue.”
“Shay Van Dorne.”
“You want to exhume the body?”
“She was buried in a vault.” Sara explained, “That’s an outer seal around the casket. It’s made of one of four materials—concrete, metal, plastic or composite. They’re watertight to keep out the elements and prevent the earth from crushing open the casket. The more expensive ones are air-sealed, but not hermetically. Legally, funeral homes can’t make guarantees that the decedent will be preserved, but I’ve done exhumations where the body is mostly intact.”
“You’re saying that a three-year-old body could be perfectly preserved?”
“I’m saying she’ll be decomposed, but the damage could be minimized,” Sara said. “If Shay was mutilated in the same way as Alexandra McAllister and the others, then we’ll know she was a victim. And maybe, hopefully, we’ll find a piece of evidence that points us to the killer.”
“Do you think that’s going to happen?”
Sara wasn’t holding out hope, but anything was possible. “The killer has gone undetected for at least eight years. Sometimes, experience can make you sloppy. Shay Van Dorne’s body is possibly another crime scene. If we’re going to clutch at straws, that’s the first one I’d reach for.”
“That’s a big ask from the parents.” Amanda said, “Have you looked at Gerald Caterino’s notes on his phone calls with the Van Dornes?”
“Not yet.”
“Read them. Text me. Let me know if you want to request an exhumation.” Sara was about to hang up, but Amanda said, “There’s a living witness.”
Sara’s stomach clenched again. She was in Tommi Humphrey’s backyard, sitting across from Jeffrey. They were trying to walk the girl through her attack, and Tommi had said—
I don’t know that person anymore. I don’t remember who she was.
Sara was intimately familiar with that sensation. She could only vaguely recall the Sara who had gone to senior prom with Steve Mann, the Sara who had been ecstatic about getting accepted to medical school, the Sara who had confidently applied for a match at Grady Hospital. The memories felt like they belonged to someone else, an old friend who had slipped out of her life because they had so very little in common.
She told Amanda, “All I can do is try. Tommi is under no obligation to speak to us.”
“Thank you, Dr. Linton. I, too, am familiar with the laws of the United States.”
Sara luxuriated in an eye-roll.
“Let me know what you want to do about Van Dorne,” Amanda said. “I’ll update you as I have information on my end.”
Sara hung up the phone, but she couldn’t summon the desire to jump back into work.
Images of Tommi kept flashing into her mind. She squeezed her eyes closed, forcing them to clear away. What she really wanted to do was call Will and talk about how all of this was stirring up her own horrendous memories of rape. That conversation could’ve easily taken place twenty-four hours ago. Now, it felt like rubbing salt into a very raw wound.
All she could do was concentrate on the job that was in front of her.
Sara returned to her laptop and opened the Dougall County coroner’s report on Shay Carola Van Dorne. The man was a dentist in his real life, but his opening lines showed an interest in cartography.
Van Dorne, a thirty-five-year-old Caucasian female, was found lying prone at the north-northwestern corner of the Upper Tallapoosa River sub-basin of the ACT River Basin, .32 miles off the Mill Road Parkway, at 33.731944, -84.92 and UTM 16S 692701 3734378.
Sara clicked through pages of maps until she found the relevant passages.
The kindergarten teacher was not known to be a hiker and was dressed in the clothes she normally wore to school. The victim apparently slipped, hit her head on a rock and succumbed to a subdural hematoma, a brain bleed that was generally associated with traumatic injury.
This was where the dentist lost Sara. How the man had diagnosed the injury without X-rays or visualizing the brainpan was a medical miracle.
He lost her again when she got to the summary description of injuries. The dentist had noted: Animal activity in sex organs as detailed in drawing.
She clicked forward to find the sketch of the body. The eyes and mouth were X’d out. Two large circles were drawn around the breasts and pelvis with an arrow pointing to the words see photos.
Sara found the jpegs in the main menu. The dentist won back a tiny bit of her respect when she saw that he had taken over one hundred photographs. Sara would’ve expected two dozen at best, the same number that was taken of Alexandra McAllister by the White County coroner. The Dougall County coroner had gone several steps further. She recognized the efforts of a man who was willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of his time on a hobby that grossed him $1,200 a year.
Sara tabbed through the photos. The body was indoors, on a stainless-steel gurney she assumed belonged to a local hospital or funeral home. The lighting was excellent. The camera was
