The Last Sister (Columbia River)(70)

Damn, I wish this investigation was behind us.

He moved closer and kissed her, the sensation warming her everywhere. She melted into the kiss, frustrated by the vehicle console between them.

Too soon, he pulled back and rested his forehead against hers, his chest rising with deep breaths. “When this is over.”

“When it’s over,” she promised.





28

A few hours later, Zander was alone in his hotel room and working on his laptop, but his mind kept wandering.

I shouldn’t have kissed her.

Like he could have stopped. He’d felt a subtle pull toward her the first time he saw her. Now that he’d voiced it out loud, he wanted more. But anything between them had to wait. He had a killer or two to find, and Emily was waist-deep in this case.

Be a fucking professional.

The thought made him grouchy. His phone and laptop rang, and he answered through the laptop.

“Wells.”

“Good evening, Agent Wells. I’m Dr. Lacey Harper from the medical examiner’s office, and I did the dental comparison on a case of yours.”

Zander immediately sat up straighter. “Is the skull Cynthia Green?”

“It is.”

He pumped a fist. Finally something was going his way. “Thank you. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.”

“Not a problem. It’s rewarding when I can definitively identify someone. It helps answer questions for family members left behind.”

“You’re positive about this, correct?” Zander asked tentatively, afraid he was insulting her.

She laughed. “I am. Would you feel better if I showed you how?”

“I’m not questioning your work,” he added rapidly, relieved that she hadn’t taken offense. “But I would like to see how it’s done. Teeth look alike to me.”

“Can you FaceTime?”

“Yep. Switching over now.” A few moments later he was looking at a very attractive blonde woman with a broad smile. “You work with Dr. Peres?” he asked.

“I do. She’s a close friend, and I’ve met Ava a few times, and I know her fiancé very well. I’m glad to hear she’ll be okay.”

“Me too. What can you show me?”

She switched to the other camera on her phone, and a computer screen of dental X-rays was in front of him. The screen had two large films, the type that show the entire jaw and the lower half of the cranium. They were grim skeletal smiles, creepily stretched wide to convert the three-dimensional objects into two. The images were a mishmash of shades of gray. He could identify teeth and jaw joints but not much else.

“I received Cynthia’s dental records from the state police, who’d collected them after she went missing twenty years ago. I’m glad they still had them, because the dentist whose name is on the films closed up his practice over a decade ago, and he was legally required to only keep records for seven years. They might have been tough to hunt down.”

She touched the top image. “This is from the state police and was taken seventeen months before Cynthia disappeared. It’s a copy of the dentist’s original panoramic image, which is why it seems dark. Copies are good, but not as clear as original films. Below is an X-ray I took today on the skull. We don’t have a panoramic X-ray machine here, so I took it at a friend’s dental practice. It was a bit awkward to shoot.”

Zander had experienced the dental X-ray machine that rotated around his head as he stood in a booth.

“I had to crouch while holding the skull above my head with one hand. I’m just glad they kept their patients from walking by at that moment.”

The mental image made him snort. He looked from one image to the other. “They look different, though. The top one is grainier and seems to . . . uh . . . smile a little more?”

“It’s the angle that makes it smile. I tried to match it the best I could, but it always takes trial and error. The graininess is because mine is digital. The top one is real film that they had to run through a developer. They’re always sharper.” Her fingertip stopped on the last tooth on one side of the lower jaw and then touched the same tooth on the opposite side. “Wisdom teeth. As you can see, they’re both angled differently than the rest of the teeth. They tip in quite a bit instead of being straight up and down.”

“Right.”

“And up here.” She touched the corresponding teeth in the top row. “These wisdom teeth are still high in her maxilla. You wouldn’t see them if you looked in her mouth.”

“But you’d see the bottom ones?”

“Partially. The partial exposure shows better on the next set of films. But my point is that the wisdom teeth are in identical positions in the old film and the one I took today.” She moved her phone closer and shifted between the films a few times.

“Okay.” He took her word for it. They were blobs to him.

“She’s nineteen, right? The length of the roots and the position of the wisdom teeth don’t contradict that age.”

She indicated the bottom film. “She has two white fillings. Here and here.”

He squinted. More shades of gray.

“I can’t make them out.”

She clicked something, and the panoramic images vanished, replaced by eight little rectangular films. The type taken frequently at the dentist.