Their second call bore no greater results. The young man had only attended a few of the sermons. He had since become a born-again Christian and spent most of his days working at a local homeless shelter, a story that checked out.
Sunday afternoon had traditionally been Jake’s kick-back time. It was when a lot of his friends and casual acquaintances went to a sports bar, sometimes to Nick’s, drank beer, told fish stories and watched football on television. Not that Sunday. He’d been too busy with electrical and water hookups. He hadn’t even crawled in to Nick’s at night; he had gone to see his father, who, though his mom had been gone for nearly two years, spent too much of his time sitting alone in the darkness, telling everyone he was doing just fine.
In a way, he’d done as ordered. The problem was that no command, no sense, no logic, could keep him from thinking, puzzling and planning.
Obsessing.
He had barely reached his desk on Monday morning when he received a call from Neil Austen in the forensics unit.
“I just wanted to let you know we’re doing what we can to get an I.D. on Friday’s Jane Doe. Our best bet is a dental match, but so far we’ve got nothing. I don’t think she was a local. If she was, no one reported her missing. Or else she never went to a dentist. And maybe she didn’t—the poor girl died with perfect teeth. Perfect. Her wisdom teeth came in without a hitch. She didn’t have a cavity. We have the information out, so hopefully someone out there will be able to get us a match. How many people reach their mid-twenties with perfect teeth?”
“Thanks for the effort and the information, Neil,” Jake told him.
“I wish I could give you more. Unfortunately, these things usually take time.” They both knew the sorry truth of that statement. There were many cases when just discovering the identity of a victim in such a condition could take weeks or months.
And there were times when bodies went unidentified forever. But thanks to forensics and computers, there were some occasions when identification came quickly.
“Can you give me anything else? Mid-twenties, perfect teeth…?”
“She probably stood about five foot six. Medium build. Never had a child. Gannet says it looks like a ritual murder.”
“Same as…?”
“Yeah, same as.” Neil gave a soft, regretful sigh. “She was probably a pretty young thing. The guys up here have given her a nickname. Cinderella. She’s not actually covered in ash, but the way she was found…Funny, you see case after case, and some are still especially hard. I’ll send you the reports on what we have. Oh, and Gannet says she’s been dead two to four months.”
“Thanks, Neil.”
“Yep. I’ll update you immediately on anything new we can come up with.”
“Great.”
Jake hung up the phone and pulled out the file on the last of the victims who had been killed five years before. A picture of a young woman with a shy smile was clipped to the right of the page.
Dana Renaldo.
She, too, had been in her mid-twenties. Twenty-seven, actually, five foot six, one hundred and twenty pounds, an eager, attractive young woman. Her parents had been deceased. She had been reported missing by a cousin almost a year before her body had been discovered. She’d come from Clearwater. The police had investigated at the time but hadn’t followed up on the missing persons report because of the findings of their investigation. She had packed up her bags and cleaned out her bank accounts. Three months prior to her disappearance, she had gone through a messy divorce. There had been no children involved, so—until her body had been discovered in Miami-Dade—it had appeared to her local authorities that she had chosen to take off and start over again. It was legal for an adult to be missing if that person so chose. Prior to her disappearance, Dana had worked in real estate and insurance, and, immediately before she had left, she had been a paralegal at a law firm in Tampa. She had sent a letter of resignation and it was in her handwriting, according to the lawyer for whom she had been working.
Their Jane Doe—or Cinderella, as the forensics guys were calling her—sounded very similar in appearance.
He switched files.