Page 79 of My Child is Missing

Gretchen said, “What are you doing?”

“Mettner handled Henry Thomas’s case. The one that got him time in prison.”

“Yeah,” Gretchen said. “What are you looking for?”

Josie leaned down and opened his bottom-left desk drawer, which held rows of neatly labeled files. “Mett kept his own notes about cases he handled. He typed everything into the notes app in his phone and then he’d email those to himself.”

“I know,” Gretchen said. “Then he’d use them to write up his reports.”

Josie began riffling through the file folders. Luckily, they were arranged alphabetically. “But he always kept his original notes, which included his impressions and theories, things that didn’t make it to his final reports or to court testimony. He printed them out and filed them away here.”

Gretchen’s chair creaked once more, and seconds later, she was beside Josie, looking over her shoulder as she pulled Mettner’s Henry Thomas file from the drawer. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Josie said. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

As she paged through the file, the carousel in her mind started again. The thought she’d been trying to pin down had become a little clearer, now a ghostly outline in her head, but it still eluded her.

Finally, she came to a page describing Mettner’s interview with Henry Thomas’s nineteen-year-old victim. Gretchen read along over Josie’s shoulder. The victim had described Thomas as creepy. She’d said that he’d been at the house before on multiple occasions and approached her, wanting to talk to her because the year before, a man had broken into her home with intentions of raping her and she’d not only fought him off but killed him. The case was ruled self-defense. Mettner’s notes indicated that the incident had taken place outside of their jurisdiction. The victim had moved to Denton for a fresh start. Except that Thomas found out about her history and became “obsessed” with her, wanting to know the details and whether or not it had felt good to kill a man. She related that hearing the details of her ordeal seemed to turn him on. He’d eventually made a sexual advance, which she had rejected. The day he forced her into the basement, he’d offered to forgive her boyfriend’s debt to him if she dumped said boyfriend and went out with Thomas. Mettner’s notes read: “Become his.”

“What the hell?” said Gretchen. “This is disgusting. Is this what you were looking for?”

“Sort of,” Josie said.

“Well, if this guy is wandering around the woods, trapping and killing teenage girls, this isn’t really surprising information.”

“No, it’s not.”

Josie left the file open on Mettner’s desk and stood, moving back to her own desk and firing up her computer. Gretchen watched her with narrowed eyes. “You’re on to something, aren’t you?”

“Chan took photos of the remnants of the trap we found where Kayleigh was abducted,” Josie muttered. “She never could reconfigure it.”

Gretchen joined her at her desk, pulling her chair along with her. She plopped into it and watched as Josie pulled up the photos that Chan had uploaded to the file. Josie clicked through them.

Gretchen said, “What are we looking for?”

Josie stopped at the photo of the pointed sticks that had been bound together with vine. “I’m not sure. I just know that we’ve been missing something big all along.”

She clicked out of those photos and brought up a new set.

“What are these?” asked Gretchen.

“The crime scene photos from the cases in Montour and Lenore Counties. Heather Loughlin sent them to me, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them.”

She started clicking through them, stunned at how similar each one looked to the Felicia Evans scene. The bodies of Amanda Chavez and Sarah McArthur were laid out, legs straight, as if they had simply laid down to take a nap. Except that their heads had been smashed in. Josie studied their clothes and shoes and then she scanned the area around the bodies in both sets of photos, looking for some evidence of the traps. All she saw was mud, leaves, brush, twigs, and crushed purple wildflowers.

The thought she’d been chasing since reading Kayleigh’s stories stopped squirming away from her, coming into focus finally.

“Holy shit,” she said. She lunged across her desk and picked up her phone, pulling up the StoryJot app and locating Kayleigh’s profile. Once she found what she was looking for, she returned to her computer screen, minimizing the crime scene photos and pulling up Google. In seconds, she had her answer. Her heart thrummed in her chest. Every cell in her body felt abuzz.

Gretchen said, “I’d really love to know what’s going on right now.”

“The missing piece,” Josie said. “It’s Kayleigh.”

“I don’t understand.”

Josie pulled up the photos from Heather again. She sent one from the Chavez scene and one from the McArthur scene to the printer. As it lurched to life in the corner of the room, she went into the Denton PD files and found photos from the scene of Kayleigh’s abduction and Felicia Evans’s crime scene. She printed those as well. Grabbing them from the printer, she spread them across her desk. “What do you see?” Josie asked. “What’s the same in every photo?”

Gretchen put her reading glasses on and peered at them. “Dead girls.”

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