Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn Book 6)(99)

Seventy-One





Josie rode in the back of the ambulance with Lucy. She stayed with the girl in the ER while the doctors and nurses examined her and asked what seemed like a thousand questions. She didn’t leave Lucy’s side until Colin burst into the room and scooped his daughter into his arms, sobbing into her hair. “Thank God,” he cried. “Oh Lucy. Thank God.”

Tears stung Josie’s eyes. Quietly, she slipped out of the room and down the hall toward the exit. As the ER doors whooshed open, Dan Lamay shuffled in. “Boss,” he called, waving a sheaf of papers in the air.

Josie stopped and waited for him. They stepped away from the doors and into the waiting area, which mercifully, was nearly empty. “What’s going on, Dan?”

Out of breath, Lamay handed her the papers. “Hummel pulled Amy Ross’s elimination prints and had them run through AFIS, like you asked.”

Josie raised a brow. “I’m not sure that matters now. We’ve got Lucy. It’s not up to me to decide if Amy should be prosecuted for what she’s done. If the FBI wants to pursue the identity theft angle, they can do that. Anything she did or didn’t do in New York is up to prosecutors there.”

“Oh, I think you’ll still want to see this.”

She took the pages from him and began looking them over. “This can’t be right,” she said. “Are you sure this is right?”

Lamay nodded. “Hummel had the state police run the AFIS search twice. It’s right.”

Josie stared uncomprehending at the old photograph before her while Lamay filled her in. “Amy Ross’s fingerprints are a match to a little girl who went missing when she was eleven years old from Cleveland, Ohio in 1990. The local police did a fingerprinting event at her school as part of an initiative in the late eighties to reduce the number of missing children. They came in and fingerprinted all the kids and sent the prints home for parents to keep on file. Her mother turned them back in to the police when she went missing and they were entered into the national database. Her name is Penny Knight.”

“Penny Knight,” Josie murmured, studying the face of the smiling girl from nearly thirty years ago. It looked like a school photo with its sky-blue background, and Penny posed artificially with her arms folded on top of a stack of books. Her hair was short and uncombed. Bright blue eyes gazed out earnestly over a toothy smile. Josie could see traces of the grown Amy in the girl’s face—her eyes and the shape of her mouth. “Did you call Cleveland PD?”

Lamay said, “I did. She lived in an apartment in a run-down part of the city with her mother. Single mom. Habitual drug user. Apparently, Penny’s dad was never in the picture. He’s not even listed on her birth certificate. Her mother used to send her to the corner grocery store to buy food when she was too messed up to go herself. One afternoon she sends Penny down to the store for some eggs and milk. Penny never made it to the store and never came home. Mother didn’t report it for almost two days.”

“Two days?” Josie exclaimed.

“She thought Penny had gone to stay with friends and would just come home, but when she didn’t, the mom reported her missing. Police could find no evidence of any foul play.”

“They thought she was a runaway? At eleven?” Josie asked incredulously.

“They couldn’t make a determination one way or another. They carried out a pretty extensive investigation and the mother stayed on them to keep looking until she overdosed in 1996.”

“Penny—or Amy—would have been seventeen then. She didn’t have any other relatives?”

“None that she or her mother were close to. Apparently, the mother’s family didn’t have much to do with her on account of her drug use,” Lamay said. “So, whether Penny ran away or someone took her, once her mother died, she didn’t have a home to return to.”

“The year Penny turned eighteen was the year Amy Walsh died,” Josie said. She remembered how cryptic Amy had been about her past, saying she didn’t remember who she really was or what her name had been. That Tessa Lendhardt was a fiction. Because it was an identity that Martin Lendhardt had given her after he took her. Once she escaped him, she shed that identity. It had never really existed in the first place.

“My God,” said Josie.

“Are you going to tell them?” Lamay asked.

“Yes,” Josie said. “They need to know. But not tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll talk to Amy and Colin.”





Seventy-Two





Four days later, Josie stopped outside the door to Amy Ross’s hospital room, peeking through the tiny crack in the door and listening as Lucy told her mother a story about a real luna moth she had seen in the woods when she was away with the “bad people”. She was seated cross-legged next to her mother, her tiny frame squeezed in between the guardrail and Amy’s side. As she spoke, Amy stroked her blonde hair and stared at her, a look of pure wonder on her face. Josie listened as Amy asked her questions, and listened carefully to her answers. Not for the first time, Josie felt a tremendous wave of relief and gratitude wash over her. The Ross family had lost a lot. They’d been traumatized. Amy’s secrets had been laid bare. Lucy would likely need years of therapy after the things she had witnessed while with Natalie and Gideon. They would forever mourn the loss of Jaclyn, who had been like family to them. Josie also knew that Amy carried around a lifetime’s worth of guilt over the death of Wendy Kaplan. But they were all alive, and from the looks of it, Amy’s secrets hadn’t driven her husband away. Lucy’s family unit was still intact.