Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(44)

Aaron peered over her shoulder at the images on her screen. “You still stuck on that pendant from the burial site?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing similar in the system?”

“Not that I can find.” She leaned back in her chair. “But I keep wondering if it has some personal significance that might help us in some way. What does an arrow symbolize?”

“Hmm, offhand? I don’t know. Cupids? Native Americans? Sagittarius?”

She smiled. “I didn’t realize you were into astrology.”

He shrugged. “My birthday’s in December. The zodiac symbol for Sagittarius is an archer.”

“What are we talking about?” Kelsey asked as she walked in, also armed with a giant beverage, although Sara suspected hers was decaffeinated.

“Arrow symbolism,” Sara said. “Any ideas?”

Kelsey walked over and looked at the pendant in the baggie beside Sara’s computer.

“I don’t know. Maybe she just picked it up at the mall or somewhere because it’s pretty. I’d buy it.” She leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. Like Sara, Kelsey wore her typical work attire of lab coat and jeans. Unlike Sara, her lab coat barely reached her knees because she was so tall.

“This isn’t some cheap trinket, though,” Sara said. “It’s eighteen-karat gold. Which makes me think it’s probably a gift.”

“Hmm. Could be.” Kelsey nodded at Sara’s computer. “Where are we on identifications? Anything in the system?”

“Good news,” Sara said. “We got a DNA hit on remains from the second burial pit.”

“You’re kidding.”

Sara exited out of the personal effects page and pulled up the record. “Her name is Lisa Ryan. She’s from Dallas.”

“Holy crap,” Aaron muttered. “I’m always amazed when it works.”

“Me too,” Kelsey said.

Their disbelief was understandable. Of the estimated forty thousand unidentified human remains being stored in morgues, crime labs, and police departments across the country, only a small fraction had been entered into NamUs. Most understaffed and underfunded agencies didn’t have the resources to make entering records a priority, whether records of found remains or missing persons. Overworked cops, especially, were lax about entering their cases, and some didn’t even know the system existed. Sara was committed to changing that by raising awareness, one cop at a time.

“I submitted her dental X-rays yesterday,” Sara said. “We had a hit in no time.”

Of course, some victims didn’t have dental records. And some had never been fingerprinted, so even when investigators meant well, it wasn’t always easy to upload useful information on a missing person.

“Age?” Kelsey asked.

“Twenty-one. She was last seen leaving work, possibly on her way to join some friends at a bar. The police in her case have always thought it was an abduction.”

Kelsey studied Lisa Ryan’s photo. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and a petite frame.

“Physically, she reminds me of those two victims in Tennessee,” Kelsey commented.

“I think so, too,” Sara said.

“She the one with the arrow pendant?”

“No, that was found in the other grave,” Aaron said. “Hey, I thought of another one—Diana, goddess of the hunt, from mythology. She was an archer, wasn’t she?”

Alex Lovell walked in with a computer bag in hand. She worked in the cybercrimes unit, where the standard uniform was jeans and flip-flops.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked.

“We were talking about mythology,” Sara told her.

Alex wrinkled her nose. “Ew, freshman English. My teacher was a dick. Also, he was about a thousand years old.”

“Yes, Diana was the archer,” Kelsey said, getting the conversation back on track. “But I still don’t think it has to mean anything, even if it’s real gold. Maybe whoever bought it simply liked the design.” She looked at Alex. “We’re talking about a piece of jewelry found in one of the pits at White Falls Park.”

“That’s exactly what I’m here about. You have a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Let’s go to your office. I need to set up my laptop.”

Sara led Alex into the small office she shared with her coworkers. Now that Kelsey had returned from vacation, it looked as cluttered as usual. Sara moved a stack of files off a chair and pulled it over to her desk.

Alex took the seat and quickly booted up her computer. “Okay, I’ve been investigating that drone footage you found online.”

“I didn’t find it. One of Kelsey’s anthro students did.”

“Well, whatever. I’ve been looking into it, and it’s more interesting than I first thought.”

“How so?” Sara sat down in the chair beside her. The image on Alex’s screen showed the video clip that had presumably come from a drone camera high above their worksite.

“Whoever posted this started on Twitter. It came from two accounts. Then people saw it, and it went viral with users in this area.”

“People who know White Falls Park.”

“That probably accounts for a lot of them,” Alex said. “And then when the media got hold of it, it was shared on a much larger scale.”