“You’re full of crap.” Sam spun in her chair, watching her office walls fly by.
“I swear by all that’s holy that I have your girl. Her name is Mary Margaret de Rossi.”
“Are you sure it’s her? I mean really, that frickin’ database hasn’t ever made a match. How can we be sure it’s correct?”
“I’m sure. Can you come on over here? Taylor wants to call her parents, but she needs you to make a positive on the records.”
“Hell yeah, I’m on my way.”
63
An hour later, Sam was staring at Mary Margaret de Rossi’s antemortem radiographs on the computer screen. Her mind was crowded with a future image of the poor girl’s parents, bravely sitting in the family waiting room at her office, waiting to fill out the paperwork. There was no reason to show them the body; it was burned beyond recognition, and Sam didn’t want them to have that image of their daughter.
Mary Margaret’s parents had told Taylor the sad story of their runaway daughter. They had only recently found out that she was alive and living in Nashville. They were so proud she’d gotten her life together, kicked her demons, was in college, and had found her own way back to the real world. They’d forgiven her, and she’d forgiven them.
When she first went missing, several years earlier, they didn’t know she had simply run away from home. They had filed a missing person report with the Atlanta police. The police investigation turned up nothing. Because of her age and background, they chalked it up to a runaway situation and dropped the case. But a year or so ago, a young detective had contacted them. He was looking at all the missing person cases for the past ten years, and asked if they were still looking for their daughter. When they admitted they still didn’t know where she was or if she were alive or dead, the young cop suggested they provide her dental records for him to put in his new database. He had warned them that finding a match was unlikely, but wanted to give it a shot.
He was excited to learn about all the work that had been done on her teeth. Braces in her youth hadn’t fully corrected a large frontal gap, so her parents had spent even more money, ten thousand dollars, to have veneers put on, which even they agreed took their daughter from ugly duckling status to elegant swan. The detective was certain the work done on her teeth would differentiate her radiographs, and give them a better shot at finding a match should her body ever be found.
When Mary Margaret finally contacted her family, they had forgotten to let the detective know she’d been found. The records languished in the system until Lincoln made his triumphant match.
Sam used the slides from the database to make her final confirmation. The veneers were a dead giveaway. The antemortem records showed the gap in the girl’s teeth. The records were a 100 percent match.
Based on Mary Margaret’s distraught parents’ information, Lincoln had called over to Aquinas and found one of the nuns who had been close to her.
Sister Agatha sounded a hundred years old, but despite her quavering voice, she seemed sharp as a tack. Lincoln told her the nature of his call, and the old nun broke down. Lincoln heard her saying a rosary in the background. She finally pulled it together and apologized.
“I am so sorry for that poor girl. I think she’d had a hard life. I didn’t know much about her. She had the look of a young girl who’s seen too much of the world. But she was lovely and studied so hard.”
“You say you don’t know much about her past. Can you tell me what you do know? Her parents are trying to fill in the gaps.”
“Of course. She came to us from the Sisters of the Covenant out in Colorado. Wonderful women, they run a small hospital up there in the mountains. Let me see here, I’ve got her record right in front of me. She was getting straight A’s, the poor lamb. Taking a full load, too, and working in the Student Center. My goodness, it shows here she was also auditing classes over at Vanderbilt last semester. Working so hard. Oh, this is just too much.”
Lincoln’s heart beat a little faster. He motioned to Taylor and wrote on his blotter MM audited at Vandy last sem.
Taylor knocked her knuckles against the desk. There it was. There was the link between the girls.
Lincoln dragged his attention back to the old nun. He had missed some of what she was talking about, but a name caught his ear.