Alone (Bone Secrets, #4)(33)

“Symbolic, maybe?” Lusco mused.

“Probably not,” answered Callahan. “I think it would have been in his mouth if symbolic. As if to shut him up for speaking out. Still, I want that pen when you’re done with it, doctor.”

“Not a problem,” stated Seth. He’d removed odd objects from corpses before. Lightbulbs, kitchen gadgets, and workbench tools. But the crushed pen in the ear was the first of its kind. He stood and heard his right knee pop. As usual. He pulled off his vinyl gloves and set them on the body to keep any evidence with the corpse.

He’d be seeing the man again in a more intimate setting.





Victoria was in her office, typing her notes about the second skeleton, when her email popped up. Noticing it was from Detective Lusco, she immediately opened it and found herself face-to-face with an image of a young woman from another generation. Excitement bubbled inside of her. Did they have a lead on one of the old remains?

She slowly read the email, fighting the urge to rush through it. Italian heritage, age twenty. A brother had reported his sister missing yesterday morning. Why had he waited so long? She continued to read Lusco’s notes. The brother had consented to a DNA comparison. She scrolled back to the photo and stared at the familiar crooked smile.

She smiled and sent a text to Lacey to meet in her office.

Victoria clicked on her file of lab photos from the three women, and scrolled until she found the teeth views. She studied the upper front teeth carefully in each photo, stopped at the teeth photo of the third skull, and enlarged the shot on her screen.

“Hey, whatcha got?” Lacey breezed in through the open door, a light of curiosity in her eyes. She knew Victoria wouldn’t have messaged if she didn’t have something good to see.

Victoria arranged the police photo side by side with the photo Lacey had taken of the teeth yesterday, and pushed back from her screen with a flourish. “What do you think?”

The blonde dentist leaned over, resting her hands on the desk as she studied Victoria’s screen. Victoria waited impatiently and watched Lacey’s eyes flick back and forth between the two photos. Lacey’s smile started on one side of her mouth and spread rapidly to the other. “Oh, nice! Where’d you get this old head shot?”

“Lusco and Callahan had someone bring it in yesterday, wondering if one of the women from the old scene could be his sister. He gave a DNA sample, too.”

“Excellent. Look how the central incisors overlap.” Lacey pulled a dental probe out of her lab coat pocket and held it up to the lovely woman’s photo, eyed the angle, and then moved it to the lab’s image of the teeth. “The angle and amount of overlap are identical. I’ll get a tooth to the lab so they can grind it and extract the DNA for comparison. But I think we’ve got a great start to figuring out if this is his sister.” She grinned at Victoria, who couldn’t help returning the infectious smile. “I’d hoped to identify this skull. When I was charting the teeth, I knew this overlap would be recognizable to the right person. I wish everyone had as easily identifiable teeth in photos.”

Victoria nodded. To her, most people’s teeth always looked about the same. But this woman’s were rather distinctive.

“What’s her name?” Lacey asked.

Victoria felt a small stab of guilt. She’d breezed right over the name, moving on to the photo in the email. She clicked back to Lusco’s letter. “Lucia Cavallo. She was Italian.”

“Pretty.” Lacey tilted her head as she studied the screen.

Victoria looked at Lucia’s eyes, startlingly similar to her own brown, and wondered what had happened in the girl’s life that’d brought her to a group death in the quiet woods. Had she chosen the death? Or had she been murdered?

So far, none of the skeletons showed trauma. No nicks on bones from knives nor broken hyoids from strangulation. No gunshots in the skulls. Overall, they were a clean group of women. Two skeletons had well-healed breaks and all were of a normal size, no evidence of malnutrition or disease.

These should have been women who’d gone on to raise families and live normal lives. Not end it on the forest floor.

“Let’s go check her out again.” Lacey straightened and looked to Victoria.

Victoria recognized the focus in her eyes and the tilt of the jaw. Lacey was a woman on a mission to find answers. Victoria suspected she often appeared the same way. It was the facial expression that made cops move out of her way and techs listen carefully to what she had to say. She followed Lacey to her lab.

The women didn’t talk as they strode down the halls. Lacey wasn’t prone to useless chatter, and Victoria liked that about her. The two focused on work when they were together, and had found they fostered a similar drive for finding answers. When she’d first met Lacey Campbell, she’d immediately misjudged the dentist to be a blonde bimbo. It’d been a reflexive action. The blonde hair and brown eyes had reminded her of Seth’s wife.

Lacey wasn’t like that. She was honest, direct, and sharp, with a high level of sensitivity and a bit too much fondness for cats. She didn’t seem as intimidated by Victoria as some of her coworkers. They’d discovered they shared an interest in Edwardian English history before it became a trend and a love of Greek food, and both owned television’s single season of Firefly and mourned its cancellation.