Page 29 of Lone Star Rescue

The toast popped up just as her phone rang, and when she saw Ollie’s name on the screen, she put the call on speaker. “Please tell me you have good news,” Bree greeted.

“I’ve got an ID on our dead woman,” he was quick to say. “Dani Dawson.” He spelled that out for them, and Rafe immediately began typing something on his phone.

“The name doesn’t sound familiar,” Bree said to Ollie. “How were you able to ID her?”

“Fingerprints. She was in the system for a DUI from two years ago. And that’s all I have on her for now. I just got the ID a couple of minutes ago and figured you’d want to know.”

“You figured right,” she assured him just as Rafe lifted his phone and showed her the photo of an attractive blonde woman. The man was fast.

“She’s thirty-nine,” Rafe provided, turning his phone back so he could read off what he’d accessed. “She’s a waitress at the Tip Top Café in San Antonio. Her address is in San Antonio, too, and her next of kin is her stepfather, Barney Salvetti.” He looked at Bree. “I have his address and contact info if you’re doing the death notification.”

“I am,” she said. Then, she amended that to, “We are.”

They’d want to question the stepfather to get any info that would explain why Dani had ended up dead and dumped at the inn.

“Ollie, do you have any idea yet how she died?” Bree continued.

“A blow to the temple,” he was quick to say. “I’m guessing with some kind of blunt object. All the other trauma to the body was post-mortem.”

“The temple,” Rafe said, and even though he’d practically muttered it, Ollie must have heard.

“Yeah,” Ollie responded. “And it’s in the nearly identical spot to the victim in the grave. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that since the best I can do is speculate that it’s possible a person of the same height and strength killed both women, but of course, there’s no way to know.”

“No way,” she muttered. “Not without more evidence.”

She heard Ollie draw in a long breath. “I had a conversation with the forensic anthropologist about that late last night, and she couldn’t do more than agree with my speculation about the similarity of the two wounds,” he went on. “By the way, she said she should have the DNA results back on those bones this morning so she will be calling you soon.”

Good. Then, maybe they’d have both women positively identified, and they could start threading together any connections.

“The only other things I can tell you on Dani Dawson is she’s never had a child and was in reasonably good health before someone ended her life,” Ollie went on. “Her last meal was nachos and beer. She wasn’t drunk,” he added. “Since she’d been dead in my estimation for less than forty-eight hours, I was able to test…” He stopped. “You really don’t want to hear about femoral veins, do you?”

“I don’t,” Bree verified. She didn’t get queasy by such things, but she trusted Ollie to know what he was doing. “If she wasn’t over the legal limit, that’s all I need to know about blood alcohol levels. Anything else?”

“Not unless some of the lab work comes back with surprises, but I really don’t expect any. Everything I saw in the autopsy pointed to a woman who’d been killed with a single blow to the head. No defensive bruises, no broken bones.”

“So, someone walked up to her and clubbed her,” Bree concluded. She could guess that meant Dani had known her attacker, but it was possible she’d been bashed while sleeping. “Face to face or from the side?”

“I’d say face to face from someone who’s right-handed. If it’d been an accidental fall with her hitting her head, I’d expect a different angle,” Ollie spelled out to her. “Any other questions?”

“No, that should do it for now.”

“All right. Then, I’ll put all of this in a report and fire it off to you.” Ollie paused a heartbeat. “You’ll let me know if the other victim is Tessa?”

“I will,” she assured him. She thanked him and ended the call. The moment she turned back to Rafe, she realized he’d already discovered something. “What?” she couldn’t ask fast enough.

“Dani used to work as a cocktail waitress at the San Antonio bar that Buckner owns,” Rafe spelled out.

“Holy crap,” she muttered. She sank down onto one of the counter stools next to him so she could read the report on his phone.

“She stopped working there about a month ago,” Rafe pointed out, “but before that, she’d worked for him since the bar opened. That would have been less than a year after Tessa disappeared.”

Bree tried to process that. “So, she was a long-term employee. I don’t guess you know why she quit or was fired?”

“Not yet, but Jericho’s on it, so we should have something soon.”

“Good,” she muttered, taking out her phone again. Like Ollie, she already had plenty of faith in Jericho’s abilities to do his job. And apparently part of his job was digging up info fast.

She called Detective Malley at SAPD. He didn’t answer, but she left him a message, asking him to help her find Buckner, that the man could be linked to at least one of the dead women. Possibly to both if Davy had been right in thinking the man he’d seen with Tessa all those years ago could have been Buckner.

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