The Last Sister (Columbia River)(56)

He observed with fascination. The doctor’s hands were gentle with reverence—reminding him of her husband’s hands at the autopsy—as she raised the skull for a closer look. The mandible still lay on the dirt, and Zander’s stomach twisted, jarred by the sight of the jawbone outside of its rightful position on the skull.

Dr. Peres softly hummed as she studied the skull and turned it in her hands, holding it closer to one of her bright lights, peering inside, and then studying the face again. “Hello, pretty girl,” she said in a quiet voice.

“It is female?” Ava asked.

“Oh yes, definitely. Young, too.”

Zander scratched Hank West, the missing man with dementia, off his mental list. “How young?”

The doctor turned the head upside down, ran a finger across the teeth and then along a few of the seams in the skull. “Teenager. Early twenties at the latest.”

She glanced down at some of the half-buried bones. “I need to examine everything to give a definite answer, but you can take that with ninety-five percent certainty.”

“Got some coins of some sort here, Doc,” said one of the techs as she pushed a small grid stake into the dirt. Zander squatted beside her, not surprised they hadn’t noticed the small disks. They were caked with dirt and blended perfectly into the ground. The tech poked at a few with a tool. “I don’t think they’re money . . . at least not US money.”

Zander agreed. They were larger than quarters but smaller than half dollars. The faint pattern under the dirt was unrecognizable, and he stopped himself before picking one up to wipe it off. “Maybe a foreign tourist?” he suggested to the tech, who shrugged.

“You can’t tell us how long she’s been here, can you?” Ava asked.

“No. I’ll need to do some testing,” said the doctor. “But she has a few composite posterior fillings. No alloy. That tells me she’s probably not from the 1970s or earlier. Dentists were doing composite fillings pretty regularly from the 1980s on, but primarily on anterior teeth. These posterior fillings indicate she’s from a more recent decade or else had an ahead-of-his-time dentist. Sorry . . . I know that’s vague.”

“It helps,” said Zander. “Tightens the window of when to search.”

“She’s African American.”

Zander went still.

“You’re sure?” Ava asked in a flat voice.

The doctor’s lips rose. “Yes.” She raised an are-you-questioning-me brow at Ava.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ava began, dismay in her eyes.

“See the rectangular shape of her orbits?” The doctor traced the edges of the bones around where her eyes should be. “Caucasians have angular orbits. Asians, round. But that’s not all I see. At the top of the skull there’s a slight depression where it’d be flat on Asians and Caucasians, and the nasal aperture is broad and rounded—”

“We trust your judgment, Victoria,” Ava said quickly.

“How was she killed?” Zander cut in, his heartbeat pounding in his ears.

Dr. Peres eyed him over the top of her glasses and made a deliberate show of examining the skull. “She wasn’t shot in the head.” She gave him a side-eye.

He knew he had asked too early. “Forget I asked that,” he said in apology. “It was unfair.” He met Ava’s eyes. “Did Greer mention any missing African American teens when you went for food?”

She pointed. “No. But you can ask him.”

Zander turned and saw the sheriff returning to the scene. The deputy who’d taken Alice home was with him. Both men had their jacket collars turned up against the cold, and the deputy wiped his nose continually with a tissue.

Ava introduced the sheriff to Dr. Peres. “The doctor says this is an African American female in her teens or early twenties,” she announced. “Does that match any missing person records?”

The sheriff looked grim and exchanged a glance with his deputy. “Yep. Cynthia Green.”

Cindy? “Alice called her Cindy.”

Surprise crossed the sheriff’s face. “Well, why in the hell didn’t Alice tell us this missing girl was up here?”

“Because she’s Alice,” said the deputy.

“True.” Resignation flashed in Greer’s eyes.

“Missing from when? What happened?” Ava crossed her arms, her tone one of heavily tested patience.

The sheriff pulled out his phone and tapped on the screen. “Cynthia Green’s parents reported her missing a couple of decades ago.” His eyes darted back and forth as he read. “They’re from Seattle and were vacationing along the Oregon coast during spring break. Their nineteen-year-old went for a walk along the beach south of here near Gearhart and never returned.”

“She vanished on their vacation,” Ava repeated, her eyes wide. “But we’re miles from Gearhart.”

“I remembered the case once I saw her name come up in our search,” Greer said. “I was a deputy, and all of us spent many hours combing the beach and surrounding hillside, even though the state police were in charge of the investigation. I remember they’d speculated that she’d been picked up by a car or knocked into the ocean by a sneaker wave. She had two younger sisters, and her parents were out of their minds. It was heartbreaking.”