Cole was beginning to rethink this entire setup. This place was upscale, and Jo sat on a plush white sofa with a cup of coffee. He hoped they would leave this place in as good a condition as they found it. He was too busy making sure Jo didn’t spill her coffee to bother drinking his own as he sank into the much-too-comfortable sofa.
“The sketches are incredible, by the way. They look the same,” he said.
“They’re not,” she said around a mouthful of bagel.
“On purpose?” Dumb question.
“No, by accident.” She grinned at him. “I’d been wanting to re-sketch them anyway, to change the shadows and the angles.”
“Why? The difference isn’t enough to, well ... make a difference.”
“Oh, it is. Trust me.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“You will.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I hope you will. I plan to show the sketch of the face to the Michigan detective. He could recognize him with the changes. Put the face in the database. Something. I know you already sent the image to Allison, but you could send my rework to her. Have you heard from her?”
“Just a quick text update that she had nothing on the face yet ... or your father.”
Cole wished he understood more about the forensic art process or aboutJo’sspecific artist process. “So, the bridge. Why’d you re-sketch that?”
“I’m not finished with it,” she said.
“What more could you add?”
She stared out the window, drinking her coffee. “More detail.”
He scratched a place under his eye. She’d been so exhausted, and still she needed to sketch? “What about the bridge needs more detail?”
She set her mug on the glass coffee table. “I was thinking about what Allison said about Advanced Technologies wanting engineers. She suggested maybe Pop was applying for a job or went there for an interview.”
“And that has to do with the bridge how?” he asked. She’d taken Cole out to the decommissioned bridge once, not too far from her home and about a mile up from where the river emptied into the ocean.
“Pop and I went on long walks in the woods. He couldn’t get enough of nature, but he always gravitated to that bridge. We’d sit on a boulder overlooking the river, but we never walked out onto the bridge. He told me all about how bridges are built and why this one was decommissioned. He talked about some formula. Strength is greater than or equal to the load times the factor of safety.”
Jo held his gaze.
She was onto something.
“When Pop explained it, the whole thing sounded reasonable and made sense. I’m going to butcher it, but basically, the point is to design a bridge—or anything, really—to be only as strong as it needs to be to satisfy whatever the factor of safety is.”
“So it’s cost-effective and efficient,” he said.
“He said to picture a big log, the heaviest, thickest tree trunk that someone puts across a ridge like the one this bridge crosses. An engineer can figure out the very best tree trunk, the smallest one, to get the job done safely. I mean, he kind of talked above my head. That was him simplifying it for me.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Cole, who designs bridges?”
Cole waited for her answer.
“Engineers. As I think back on that, I can see it so clearly now. What if he was an engineer? Those skills could lend themselves to his mechanic work at the R&D too. He was just a natural.Isa natural.”
“Okay, I didn’t see that coming. That’s a great observation. I’ll text Allison and give her this new information. It could help the search for his true identity. Maybe he was a civil engineer before.”
