“Did she ever mention Russell McIntyre?”
“McIntyre. That’s your name.”
“He was my father. There is evidence that he might have represented your sister in court.”
“Your father knew my sister?”
“Her name appeared in his datebook multiple times,” Faith confessed.
“I don’t recall the name.” Mrs. Stapleton slid her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Was she hired to babysit you?”
“She vanished a year before I was born.” Faith cleared her throat. “When was the last time you saw Josie?”
“The day she was supposed to be meeting the child she’d be babysitting.”
Anything could have happened to the girl that day, but she had one way of narrowing the search. “I brought a quick DNA test. Would you mind taking a cheek swab?”
“Sure. I’ll take whatever test you have.”
Faith removed the packaged test and latex gloves. Carefully, she slid on the gloves before breaking open the test. “Just open your mouth so I can take a quick swab.”
Mrs. Stapleton opened her mouth and watched as Faith swabbed the inside of her cheek. When Faith was done, the woman ran her tongue over the area. “When will you know if the remains you found are linked to me?”
“Very soon.” She replaced the swab in the glass vial and sealed it in a plastic bag. If she could prove that Mrs. Stapleton was her aunt, then she had proven her connection to Josie. But it would take a mitochondrial DNA test to prove the bones in the ground were Josie. “Thank you, Mrs. Stapleton.”
“Call me Maggie.”
“Maggie. I’m Faith.”
Warm eyes studied her closely. “You look like Josie.”
Faith stood perfectly still as her heart thumped in her chest. She wanted to explain everything, but she was in the middle of a police investigation and couldn’t. “Do I?”
“The instant I saw you, I saw her.”
She promised herself as soon as she could she would tell Maggie the entire story. “I guess I have that kind of face.”
A half smile teased Maggie’s lips as she shook her head. “No, you don’t.”
Faith felt an odd kinship with this woman. “One way or the other, you’ll see me again.”
She left, crossing quickly to her car and sliding behind the wheel. She was rattled, unsure, and nervous. But she was also exhilarated. She looked at the DNA test kit and then glanced up to find Maggie still staring. She waved and drove off. At her first stoplight, she called Hayden.
He answered on the first ring. “Faith, are you all right?”
“I’ve just visited Josie Jones’s sister.”
If he heard the tremor in her voice, he ignored it. “Does Nancy Drew ever go to school?”
A nervous smile tugged at her lips. “When it suits. Where are you?”
“At the forensic lab,” he said. “I also have a DNA sample that needs testing.”
“Who does it belong to?”
“PJ Slater.”
“PJ? Did he give you a sample?”
“He left a cup behind,” Hayden said.
“That’s not going to be admissible in court.”
“I’m looking for confirmation that he’s the product of one of those girls, not court evidence.”
“Why PJ?”
“He’s the right age, has your coloring, and his father was at the epicenter of all this.”
“But he wasn’t adopted.”
“So I’ve been told. Would you give me a DNA sample?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Then we’ll know soon enough, won’t we?”
“Why would Margaret and Peter lie about their son not being adopted?”
“I don’t know,” Hayden said.
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” she said.
Faith drove straight to the state forensic lab, and before she went into the building, she pulled a second test from her purse and swabbed her own cheek. Inside, she turned in Maggie Stapleton’s DNA sample, as well as her own. She gave orders for her sample to be compared to Stapleton’s and any one that Captain Hayden had dropped off today.
Rounding the corner, she saw Hayden standing at the end of the hallway. He was leaning against the wall, hat in hand, his right boot resting on the wall as his head tipped forward, cell phone to his ear.
She didn’t know what exactly she had with him or even where it would go. But she was so glad to see him.
Straightening her shoulders, she moved toward him, and as her heels clicked on the tiled floor, he looked up, pushed away from the wall, and ended his call. He looked tired, but a small grin appeared as she approached.
“Everything turned in to the lab?” Hayden asked.
“Yes.”
“Great. We could use some good news.” He nodded toward the evidence-testing lab down the hallway. “The forensic tech has examined the two magazines,” he said. “She said she’d like to go over some of the results. Thought you would like to hear.”
“Thanks. I would.”
“What did Mrs. Stapleton say about her sister?”
“She said Josie had a line on a nanny job and she was set to interview with both parents the day she vanished.”
“When was that?”
“September of 1987. Nine months before I was born.”
She felt his hand on the small of her back as they walked toward the lab room. They crossed the large room filled with workstations to a tech with salt-and-pepper hair wearing thick dark-rimmed glasses. His name was Doug Turner, and they’d met before. Turner looked up from his microscope. “Dr. McIntyre, I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I wanted to hear what you had to say,” she said.
“Sure.” He rose and crossed the room to a large computer screen. He pressed a couple of buttons, and the title page of one of the magazines appeared. “To save possible evidence and the integrity of the pages, I have photographed the magazine, and it’s now in storage.” He selected another file on his computer, and the next page in the magazine appeared, along with a fingerprint highlighted by black powder. “I pulled several prints from the magazine’s cover as well as the interior. The large thumbprint you see on the right came from the magazine’s cover.?
?
“It’s too big to be a young girl’s,” Faith said.
“Correct,” the technician said. “I’ve already run the fingerprints against the AFIS database, and it’s a match for Danny Garnet.”
Hayden shook his head. “I’ve been on the phone the last half hour trying to light a fire under the judge. His clerk promises I’ll have a warrant for Second Chances in the hour.”
“This fingerprint should seal the deal,” Turner said.
“Brogan and I were at Second Chances earlier, and from what we could determine from the outside, there was no one at the bar.”
“I was also there last night,” Faith said. And when she looked up at his hardening features, she said, “I can make all your logical arguments, Captain Hayden, so save the lectures. I wanted to see the place for myself. Unlike you, I went during business hours and got in.”
“And?”
“The bar was packed, and Garnet was working hard to fill drink orders.”
“When did you see him?” Hayden asked.
“About seven thirty last night.”
A muscle pulsed in Hayden’s jaw. “That was an unnecessary risk.”
“Maybe.” She deflected his ire back to the technician. “Garnet was taken aback when he saw me. I think he thought I was Macy at first. What else did you find, Mr. Turner?”
“I found more fingerprints on the inside of the magazines. Since all the missing girls had arrest records, I was able to match prints to Josie Jones, Olivia Martin, and Kathy Saunders. They were all there, and it appears each wrote notes in the magazine.”
Faith watched as the technician slowly clicked through the photos of the different pages of the magazines. What I like. What I hate. Josie had started the trend, and each girl had followed suit.
She read through the notes, her throat tightening. The sets of bones all had faces and identities now. They all had stories.
“We also found several hair strands on various pages. I’ve bagged them and will run DNA against them.” Easy to assume the hair found would just belong to the girls or Garnet, but there was no telling if evidence of another suspect was involved.