She handed Mrs. Nelson the five sketches, and the woman dropped her hand off the doorjamb. Paged through them slowly.
“I don’t know this guy,” she said. “What color is he?”
I blinked. Was she trying to align the sketches with the man who had been with her daughter?
“What ethnicity was Dog?” I asked.
“Hispanic.”
“Let’s presume the sketches are of a Latino man, then. Do they look like him?”
“Like Dog? Nuh-uh.” She handed the papers back. “This guylooks big. Dog acted tough, but a solid wind could blow him over. He was thin. Cute. You know the type?”
“Certainly do,” Cassie said. She asked for a list of Melanie’s friends, but the mother was a stone wall.
“The daughter I know is long gone, darlin’,” she said. “A day after high school graduation, there wasn’t a scrap in her room. Emptied out, y’understand? I can’t tell you nothing.”
Cassie gave me a hard look, and I clocked the meaning of it. The woman wasn’t telling us anything, and Cassie wanted me to deliver a death notification in the hopes that it would shake something loose. Increase the velocity on the case.
It was Detective Quinones’s job to do this. Not us. In fact, over the last three decades, local police had developed the best procedures on performing proper death notifications. The news should be delivered in teams of two, one of which was typically a uniformed officer. And it was best done inside the family home, to which Rebecca Nelson had already blocked our access.
Still, Cassie and I only had one day on the investigation.
“Local police have discovered the body of a young woman,” I said. “It’s possible it could be Melanie.”
The mother was inscrutable. “What do you mean it’s possible?”
There was a particular vocabulary used in death notices, and expressions likeit’s possiblewere central to it.
“Did she get hurt in some way?” Rebecca Nelson asked, squinting. “So it don’t look like her anymore?”
“We can have a patrolman come out here,” Cassie said. “Bring you down to the Shilo police station. There, you could help make an identification or rule her out.”
“You don’t have a picture on your phone?” she asked.
Cassie did, in fact, have a photo on her phone. But it was of a set of bones.
She lifted her cell from her back pocket and scrolled instead to a photo of the necklace that Melanie’s friend had identified as being on her person the day she went missing. The one found along with her remains.
“This piece of jewelry was found with the body,” she said, showing it to Mrs. Nelson. “Do you recognize it?”
The mother pursed her lips then, and her cheeks rode up high on her face. Her eyes watered, but she didn’t cry. “Mel’s grandma bought that,” she said. “For her eighteenth.” She glared at Cassie. “What condition is this body in? Is it beaten up?”
“No,” I said, trying to divert attention off Cassie.
But the mother didn’t turn to face me.
“I see,” she said, her nostrils flaring two millimeters wider, the edges of her nose turning from pink to white. “It’s some skeleton, then? Like those women they found two years ago?”
Cassie’s face tightened. She looked to me, but I wasn’t sure I knew what to say. “If you could just come down to the station—” Cassie started.
“And what?” Rebecca Nelson said to her. “You want that I look at some bones and ID my daughter? Is that it?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I stood at the side of Highway 21, eighty feet from a mini-mart where Cassie had stopped to get a coffee and use the bathroom.
“This job, huh?” she said, coming out with a paper cup in hand.
