Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(18)

“I figured that. Where’d you learn to rappel?”

“College. It’s my favorite hobby. And in grad school, I joined a volunteer S-and-R team.” She sighed. “What else? Oh, salsa dancing.”

He arched his brows.

“You don’t like salsa?” she asked.

“Dancing’s not my thing. I’m more into sports.”

She tried to guess which one. Football, maybe? He had the tall, trim build of a receiver. Or maybe he’d been a runner. He certainly had the long legs for it.

And now she was thinking about his body again. She sipped her drink to distract herself. This wasn’t a date. It was a business meeting. He was here for her expertise.

“How is it?” he asked.

“The beer? It’s good.” She cleared her throat. “So, Nolan, I’m preparing my report, and I’ve got most of the basics covered at this point. But there are a few things I wanted to talk through.”

He nodded.

“First of all, it isn’t Kaylin Baird.”

Disappointment flickered in his eyes, and she realized the Bairds weren’t the only ones who had been holding out hope that the bones belonged to Kaylin. Nolan had to know that the chances of finding Kaylin alive after fourteen months were slim, so his most realistic hope was to get her family some closure and move forward with the investigation.

“The remains are female, likely Caucasian—”

“Likely?”

“Ancestry is based on data collected over many decades. But more and more, we’re living in a melting pot, so the lines are blurred.”

“Okay.”

“As for age, looking at cranial sutures and tooth development, I’d say very early twenties. Possibly even as young as nineteen. And stature—she was somewhat shorter than average, about sixty-two inches. We recovered some soft tissue, as I mentioned, but it’s desiccated and discolored, so not necessarily reliable in determining race. However, from the bits of hair we have, we know she was a brunette.”

Sara watched him, waiting for him to absorb all this. She had done some googling of her own and knew from several news stories that Kaylin Baird was a five-foot-four blonde.

“Another important factor is PMI,” she said.

“Postmortem interval.”

“That’s right. The condition of the remains reveals a lot. I can tell you she most likely died between six and ten months ago. But I’d like to provide you with something more specific than that, and I keep coming back to her location.”

“In Rattlesnake, you mean.”

“Yes, down in the gorge. In that particular location, buried the way she was under sand and debris.”

He tilted his head to the side. “I’ve been thinking about that, too. It didn’t look like a man-made grave.”

“Exactly. And the site is remote. Not near a highway. I can’t see anyone hauling a body down there, on a two-point-six-mile trail, so it seems more likely she was dumped off a cliff and her body ended up there as a result of natural forces.”

“In other words, you think she was dumped upstream and then washed down in a flood?”

Sara nodded. “It’s a possibility, yes.”

“October ninth of last year. That’s the last flash flood.”





CHAPTER 7


“You looked it up already,” Sara said, surprised.

He nodded. “We got six inches of rain in four hours.”

They really had been thinking along the same lines, and Sara felt relieved. So often she had to spend time and energy bringing detectives around to her conclusions, but Nolan was already there.

“It’s a theory, and I can’t be certain,” she added. “But what really supports this idea is the bones themselves.”

His brow furrowed. “How do you mean?”

“They show trauma—fractures consistent with an inert body being dropped from an elevation. So the body could have been dumped off a cliff upstream. But when it was subsequently buried in sand and debris, the skeleton was intact. That’s the key. If decomposition had been advanced at the time of the flood, the connective tissue would have been mostly gone when the floodwaters hit, and we would have found the bones scattered. Or maybe never found them at all.”

“That narrows our time frame,” he said.

“Exactly. Now we’re talking about a PMI of nine to ten months. In other words, her body was dumped shortly before the last flood on October ninth.”

“A four-week window for the murder. That helps me a lot.”

She felt a wave of satisfaction. One of her core objectives was to help investigators as much as she could. She liked the spark in Nolan’s eyes, as though he couldn’t wait to run with this lead.

“This is great. Thank you.”

“Glad to help.” She sipped her beer again, watching him.

“So what’s your next step?” he asked.

“As of this moment, she’s a Jane Doe. But I have DNA, which I’ll submit to the missing-persons database, see if we can get a hit. I’ll also submit her dental X-rays.”

“I’ll be in touch with law-enforcement agencies, starting local and then moving farther out.” He paused. “I assume you’re treating this as a homicide?”