Stone Cold Heart (Tracers #13)(48)
“Weeks?” Talia repeated, looking at Nolan. “If he took that girl from Sixth Street, she might still be alive.”
“What girl from Sixth Street?” Sara asked.
“Grace Murray,” Nolan told her.
“Who’s that?”
“She went missing from her cousin’s bachelorette party last Friday,” he said. “The lead detective thinks there’s a connection.”
“Based on what?” Mark asked.
“Nothing, except he’s desperate,” Talia said. “He’s got no good leads, so he’s basically grasping at straws. But if he’s right and this guy did take her, then she might not be dead.”
CHAPTER 14
Sara collected files from her desk and slid them into her computer bag. She kept meaning to catch up on paperwork, but she kept getting sidetracked with trips to Springville.
“Heading home?”
Nolan stood in her doorway, and Sara smiled before she could stop herself. She hadn’t expected to see him again today.
He shook his head as he stepped into the room.
“What?” She walked around her desk.
“That look. You seem happy to see me now. I’m usually good at reading people, but you confuse me.”
Sara didn’t know what to say to that. She confused herself, too.
“Did you find Mia?” she asked.
“I did.”
“Was she annoyed?”
“Some.” He shrugged. “But she promised to have me something by tomorrow.” He glanced around. “This is the anthro lab, huh?”
“Otherwise known as the Crypt. What brings you down here?”
He looked at her. “I wanted to see where you work.”
The simple answer put a flutter in her stomach.
“Okay, well . . . let me give you the tour.”
She led him into the adjacent autopsy suite, where five stainless steel tables filled the center of the room. All but one was occupied by bones recovered from Nolan’s jurisdiction.
He walked to the nearest table and studied the remains.
“One of our two Jane Does,” Sara told him. “Although I’m optimistic we’ll get a name for her.”
“Why?”
Stepping up to the table, Sara took a pencil from the pocket of her lab coat and pointed at one of the victim’s molars. “She has some distinctive restorations. Also, her femur. See here?” She indicated a hairline fracture in the bone. “This is an old injury. It was properly set at the time, so there should be medical records somewhere. If we can get a lead on who she is, then it shouldn’t be hard to confirm ID.”
“That’s where we come in.”
By the tone of his voice, she knew the responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders. He now had four victims—two still unidentified—in his community, along with a missing-persons case that was fourteen months old. Even with a task force working around the clock, the magnitude of the investigation was daunting.
Sara folded her arms over her chest. “How come you didn’t tell me about the Austin woman?”
He looked like he’d been expecting the question. “I didn’t know till Tuesday night when the detective tracked down Talia.”
“You could have told me Wednesday at the gravesite.”
“Would you have been able to work any faster?”
“No . . . But still. If this link is real, it adds a whole new urgency to what we’re doing.”
“I know.”
He stepped over to a floor-to-ceiling shelf filled with animal bones.
“That’s our reference collection,” she said. “We get a lot of nonhuman specimens, mostly midsize mammals.”
Nolan picked up a deer mandible and examined it. He glanced around the room, and his gaze lingered on the nearby table of bones. She liked that he didn’t crack jokes or make irreverent comments. So many people didn’t know what to make of her job or were put off by it. Patrick had been put off by it. He’d liked her working in the university setting, and when she started talking about how she missed forensics, he told her she’d be crazy to want to leave a good job in academia for grisly death scenes and midnight callouts.
Sara watched Nolan examining her workspace now, glad he’d made the effort to find her down here. He picked up a blue stress ball off the counter and squeezed it as he glanced around. She noticed his gaze land on the photo of her nieces, Ellie and Erin, building a sandcastle at Rehoboth Beach.
Nolan put down the stress ball and walked over to a pair of computer stations. Behind them was a bulletin board, where Sara had tacked photos of various artifacts she’d unearthed. The pictures showed a crumpled ticket stub, a dirt-caked watch, the arrow-shaped pendant she’d been fixated on for days.
“These are from crime scenes?” Nolan tapped the photo of the pendant. “I recognize this one.”
“All those items are from unsolved cases. I keep them posted there as kind of a reminder.”
He nodded. “Keeps them front of mind. I do the same but with mug shots.”
“Like you said, sometimes it’s the small things that break a case open.”
He stepped over to her. “You’re good at what you do,” he said.
“So are you.”