“They usually use a full name too,” Javi pointed out. “Whereas ‘Kitty’ might not even be related to the dead woman’s legal name. Let’s be honest. If it weren’t for the picture, it could have been for a cat.”
Cloister turned the card over. He gave a rueful twist of his mouth as he saw the oval portrait printed on the front. It was definitely a woman, not a cat, but that was as far as it narrowed anything down. “Kitty” was a dark-haired woman with blue eyes. It could have been Jessie Macintosh with a dye job and ten years under her belt since the party photo with her family, or it could have been a prop from an Ashley Judd movie. The generous blur the designer had applied to brighten and scour away laugh lines made it difficult to tell.
While Cloister tried to pick out an identifying feature under the digital improvements, Javi went back to his scan of the newspaper. It was an inventory of all the police activity in the paper’s area over a week. It didn’t paint Chant, California in a particularly salubrious light, with overdosed teenagers, sheep theft, car fires, and an unidentified woman found dead in an abandoned house.
“What was done?” Cloister wondered aloud.
“She could have been sick for a long time,” Javi theorized as he traded the stapled printouts for the clipped magazine articles. “Or maybe, if I’m right, the pressure got to be too much, and she killed herself.”
He tilted the glossy sheet toward the strip light in the ceiling. Janet had been a tactile person. She counted the money repeatedly, folded and unfolded her printout of the newspaper, and the plastic on the USB was rubbed shiny and picked at where she’d fiddled with it.
The light picked out smudges on the glossy page where someone had run their finger along specific lines of text.
“… most recently Heather hosted her brother-in-law Austin Lossy’s wedding to vlogger boyfriend Ken Maguire. ‘We couldn’t risk Ken getting cold feet,’ Heather jokes over tea. ‘He was such a flight risk!’”
“Pictures of the couple’s adopted children are everywhere in the house. Along with them, however, are group shots taken at the Wilderness Camp that Heather has run at the family ranch in Northern California for the last twenty years.”
“Jarod admits that he was caught off guard when his wife, a second-generation atheist, took an interest in Buddhism….”
It was possible Janet was just a fan, but the mention of the camp caught Javi’s attention. A camp in Northern California, run by a protocelebrity—outdoors, wilderness, probably lots of sports and hiking. Just the sort of place that a father like Macintosh, equally fond of looking tough and being celebrated, would want to send his son.
From the write-up it sounded like the sort of camp the kid Javi described would have hated, but not the sort Janet would have been scared of.
More hints, but nothing that proved anything one way or the other. Javi set the page back down and picked up the USB. He turned and crooked a finger at the tech, whom he caught sneaking a look at him.
The man slid back from his computer and came back in. He pushed his glasses onto his forehead so he could look at Javi.
“Did you have any luck enhancing the picture we found on this?” Javi asked.
The man pursed his lips and rubbed the dent the glasses had left in the side of his nose. “Some,” he said. “Unfortunately not much. It’s a low-res copy of a photo taken in low light, and even with enhancement, there’s not a lot of detail. I’ve sent it through to the regional computer forensics lab in San Diego. They have specialists who might be able to stitch some faces together from it for us. Is there anyone in particular we want to identify?”
He sounded sort of eager. Odd questions, old case files, the reputation that still hung around from the Hartley kidnapping. People around the station had started to get the idea that Janet Morrow might be another “interesting” case, the kind that got the good sort of attention.
“Anyone we can,” Javi said. “If—”
The slap of a hand on the glass doors interrupted Javi midsentence. He twisted around and saw Tancredi on the other side. She was half into her vest, and her face was so pale her freckles stood out like they’d been made with a Sharpie.
Cloister got to the door first.
“Hostage situation!” Tancredi blurted as she buckled down her vest and yanked her ponytail free from the neck. “At the hospital.”
“Janet?” Cloister asked.
Tancredi shook her head. “No. Galloway. Someone took Galloway hostage at the hospital. We don’t know what they want yet, but we need to get there.”
Cloister lurched forward. “I’ll get my vest—”
Tancredi shoved him back. “Not you. You’re still on desk duty, Witte.” She looked past him to Javi. “Agent Merlo? We don’t have any deputies with negotiation experience. Frome wants you to take point.”
“I have it,” Javi said.
Tancredi gave Cloister an apologetic shrug and then ran back down the hall. With the door open, Javi could hear the clatter of boots on tiles and snapped orders as the station mobilized. Adrenaline pricked the back of his brain and itched along his nerves. He turned to Cloister, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually he could just snap at Cloister to stay out of trouble or stick to the sitrep.
Without that to hide behind and only seconds before he had to go, he didn’t know what to say.
“Same goes for you,” Cloister said.
Javi frowned. “What?”
