Page 14 of Find Me

Another Google search. Janice Beale was the killer’s sixth and final victim. Long blond hair parted in the middle. Pretty.

“It’s . . . complicated. I tried getting someone at the Wichita Police Department to talk to me, but no luck, so I’m just reporting what Detective Decker told me. I remember this case vaguely from the news when the guy was arrested. The lead detective’s daughter is NYPD, and it got quite a bit of media attention. She did a big prime-time sit-down with one of the networks and everything. She’s also the reason that the blood sample was in the database to begin with. So, long story short, a detective named Jerry Hatcher was in charge of the College Hill Strangler investigation. The case went cold, but he kept digging. Fast-forward four years after William Summer’s last kill, and Jerry was found dead in his car from what looked to be a self-inflicted gun wound from his own service weapon. His family was adamant that he would never take his own life. For years, they promoted the countertheorythat the College Hill Strangler had killed him because he was close to cracking the case.”

“So where does the blood sample come in?”

“Hang on with me here, okay? So, the detective’s family got into a dispute with the police department about the cause of his death. The police department wanted to label it a suicide. The family said it was in the line of duty. Obviously, no family wants to believe that a husband and father would take his own life, but there was also money on the line. If a cop dies on the job, they get a death benefit, and well, you know the drill.”

Once Lindsay became a lawyer, her dad had insisted on sharing the details of his will, life insurance, and bank accounts in the event anything happened to him, whether on the job or off.

“I’m looking up the case right now,” she said. “It’s like something out of a horror movie. How in the world did Decker tell me this was a dead end?”

“Because the DNA entry they hit on is itself problematic. Honestly, from what I heard, it shouldn’t have even been there.” He began to deliver a lecture about the management of law enforcement databases that was worthy of a law-school classroom.

“What was so unusual about this one?” she prodded, trying to hurry him along.

“Right. Okay. It goes back to the dispute between this detective’s family and the police department about how to label his death, whether he’d get a line-of-duty benefit, and so on. The family eventually reached a settlement with the department, but one of the conditions was that the police department enter any and all trace evidence from the College Hill Strangler case into all available databases, just in case any new leads eventually surfaced.”

“And now we have an actual cold hit,” Lindsay said. She found herself wishing she hadn’t read the details of the College Hill Strangler’s modus operandi. She pictured Hope running for the front door of theStansfields’ house. A masked man grabbing her from behind. A rope. A gag. She took a deep breath. “There must be some process that gets kick-started when you get a match.”

“Except they already have their guy,” her father said. “They caught him four years ago. They matched his DNA to every crime scene. A full confession, the works. And the DNA from that house in East Hampton isn’t his. Trace evidence could be from anyone. If you scratch a mosquito bite a little too much, there’s a spot of blood on the sofa. A paper cut. An accident with a kitchen knife. Someone who left behind a little bit of blood in a house in Kansas did it again on Long Island twenty-three years later. The odds of it having anything to do with Hope are pretty low.”

“But it’s all I’ve got, Dad. Did it sound like the police are even looking for her?”

There was a long pause before he spoke. “This Decker guy put in a missing person report based on the information you gave him, but you got to remember, Hope Miller doesn’t even exist on paper. It’s a missing person report filed under an alias. I did my best to personally vouch for her, explaining the whole situation with her memory and the car accident. But honestly? He sounded skeptical.”

Over the years, Lindsay had researched whether a Jane Doe could establish a legal identity under a new name. She was stunned to learn that it was all but impossible. The scenario wasn’t common enough, and the concerns about fraud were too strong. The federal government didn’t even have a process for tracking unidentified people who were still alive. A few years earlier, New Jersey had introduced such a database. So far, it contained only three entries—Hope, a toddler who was left as a newborn in the parking lot of a Newark fire station, and a mentally ill homeless man. Until there was a way to connect those local cases to data gathered nationwide, the state system was unlikely to provide any answers. Lindsay thought they could try to use Hope’s existence in an official state database, though, as a way to force New Jersey to issuea state identification card. Maybe if she at least had a legal ID, the cops would be taking her disappearance more seriously.

“This is exactly why I didn’t want her to leave Hopewell. At least there, people got to know her.” That wasn’t to say that every town resident believed that Hope was telling the truth about her condition. At least one cop, Sergeant Prescott Hanson, had made his suspicions known on several occasions, but Lindsay knew for a fact that it was because Hope had shot that jerk down when he made the moves on her at a party. As a general matter, though, the people of Hopewell treated Hope as a known quantity.

“You could report the car stolen,” he said. “It’s in your name. It would guarantee that any cop who happened to run the plate would take action.”

“Yeah, but the kind of action that would end with Hope getting arrested.”

“And then you wouldn’t press charges, and at least we’d know where she is. If someone spotted her in the car, it would be a way to have the police make a stop.”

“I’ll think about it.” Lindsay felt like she was running out of options. She still hadn’t been able to get inside Hope’s cottage, and Decker hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to help with that either. She had gotten the cottage owner’s name—Catherine Gondelman—from city property records, but hadn’t been able to reach her yet. She thought of mailing a letter that might get forwarded, but the cottage was on a street without mail service, and the post office had refused to tell her the landlady’s PO box number. Lindsay had sent a Facebook message to the only account she found under that name, but had received no response. She would have gotten into that house four days ago if Hope had gotten a spare key made for her, like she had suggested when they did the move.

“I’m sorry. I know how worried you are.”

She thanked her dad again for his help and went back to readingabout the string of murders in Wichita, Kansas, when she was still a child. Her coffee was long cold by the time Scott emerged from the bedroom, wearing boxer briefs and a Yale T-shirt he kept in one of his drawers.

“I think that second bottle of wine got the best of me last night.” He moved behind her and dropped a kiss on the nape of her neck. “I heard you on the phone. Jimmy K?” Scott’s nickname for her father. It was a mutual lovefest between those two.

“Uh-huh.”

“Any news?”

It took only a few minutes to relay what she had learned, but she realized when she was done how gruesome her description of the Kansas murders had been.

“Well, if the killer guy’s in prison, at least you don’t need to worry about that part. It does kind of sound like a coincidence—two different houses, plus a thousand miles and a couple of decades apart. And it seems like neither bloodstain would have been of any interest to the police if it weren’t for the unusual circumstances. I mean... you basically forced that Long Island cop to go all CSI on a house that had been hosting construction workers and realtors for weeks, because who could say no to you?” He gave her a playful grin.

“And of course you mean because of my mad lawyering skills.”

“Obviously. And it sounds like that Kansas detective’s family did something hinky, forcing blood samples that might not be connected to any crimes into the databases.”

“The daughter apparently followed in her father’s footsteps. She’s an NYPD detective. About my age, I think. Several years ago, before they caught the killer, she did a big media blitz trying to drum up new leads on the case. From the little I’ve read, it sounds like her father killed himself, but she wouldn’t accept it. She comes across as pretty obsessed.”

Scott flashed that goofy, flirty grin again. “Sounds like someone else I know—which could mean that she’s absolutely brilliant.”

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