“Is this missing family related to the bones found at the road on March Mountain?”
“We don’t know yet. It’s possible. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.” Mercy checked the time. “Do you need a ride home?”
“No, Dad is at the feed store. He said he’d drive me when I was ready.”
Mercy pictured her father exchanging gossip and shooting the breeze with the other men who tended to congregate at the feed store. The constantly brewing free coffee probably had a lot to do with the frequent gatherings. How many times did I wait for him to finish his conversations when I was little? As a kid she had explored every inch of the feed store to fight her boredom. Sometimes there had been baby chickens to hold. Mercy could still feel the yellow fluff under her fingertips. Those had been the best days.
Mercy hugged and kissed her sister goodbye and headed toward her vehicle. She was tempted to wait and see her father, but it wasn’t the right time yet. He’ll let me know when he’s ready to accept me back into the fold. It’d already been six months. It’d been fifteen years and six months since they’d parted ways because she’d refused to live under her father’s iron fist. Hopefully it wouldn’t take much longer.
Truman called as she drove back to her office. “How’s your day?” she asked.
“Good. Only one bar fight so far.”
“Already?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere. Say, I wanted to ask you if you’ve ever received a letter from a sovereign citizen claiming you owe them money for trampling on their rights.”
Mercy grinned. “Not me personally, but I saw a few when I worked in the Portland office. We had a few judges get them.”
“I got one from the guy I pulled over with the fake ID and plates yesterday.”
“Awesome! How much money does he want?”
“Three million.”
“You just made my day,” she stated. The letters had been a big source of amusement at her old office. “Did he use a funky signature?”
“Yep.”
“The lure of never paying taxes is very strong. People will subscribe to any scheme, no matter how convoluted it is.”
“Do I need to do anything about this?”
“No, but email me a copy. I’ll file a report and check the FBI’s records to see if your guy has done anything else. SCs love to create stacks of paperwork and bog down the legal systems, but they rarely take physical action.”
“According to your brother Owen, this guy is also creating and selling diplomatic licenses.”
“Isn’t that like Owen, to keep that little piece of illegal activity to himself?” Mercy wasn’t surprised. Her older brother wouldn’t report someone unless physical harm had happened. “Sounds like I need to open an investigation. Get that letter to me, and I’ll go from there.”
“He’s being arraigned tomorrow. I plan to be there.”
“Let me know if anything else crops up about him.”
“Will do.” He sounded relieved. “I love you. I’ll miss you tonight,” he said in a husky tone.
His voice sent good shivers up her spine, and she ended the call. She blew out a breath and leaned back in her seat.
What was my life like before Truman Daly?
She barely remembered. She recalled faint memories of quiet evenings in front of the TV and weekends full of work on her cabin. Now he was an element of her life as routine as breathing and eating. She’d been comfortably independent and alone for a long time until Truman showed up and disrupted her normal. She’d fought her growing need for commitment for months, worried that loving him would mean losing herself.
How wrong she had been.
Thank God he was persistent.
ELEVEN
“You found the Hartlage girls’ dental X-rays but not the parents’?”
That evening Mercy questioned Dr. Harper, the forensic odontologist, in the room where the remains were being studied. The dentist had two skulls sitting near the computer screen where she was talking to Mercy. One was the tiny skull. Mercy tried not to look at the destroyed teeth; she’d seen them enough. The skulls had haunted her dreams.
“We got lucky when we called a pediatric dentist,” said Dr. Harper. “Hopefully we’ll find out that the parents were patients at one of the dental offices where I left a message. The adult skulls had dental work done, so somewhere there are records. I was happy to have found the kids’ dentist on the eighth phone call.”
“What about patient privacy laws?”
“The dentist hesitated because of those. I had your boss give him a call. He convinced him.”
Jeff could talk anyone into anything.
Mercy looked at the computer screen in front of Dr. Harper. To her eye, it showed a jumbled mess of small gray films that had no rhyme or reason. “How did you take those precise X-rays of the teeth? You don’t have that kind of dental equipment at this location, do you?”
“I called in a favor,” said Dr. Harper with a sparkle in her brown eyes. “A local dentist I graduated with from dental school let me use her machine. Saved me from driving back to Portland just to take films.”
“Smart.”
“Always.” Dr. Harper turned back to the screen. “Now,” she said in a teaching tone of voice. “Across the top of my screen are Alison Hartlage’s films I received from her dentist’s office.”
“Tiny little films,” remarked Mercy. The images showed white-and-gray shapes that she knew were teeth. How does Dr. Harper know which teeth they are?
“Normal for a child of this age. Below those are the films that I took on the smallest skull.”
“You took a lot more films.”
“It’s typical for pediatric offices to only take two or four films of the molars at Alison’s age. I shot a lot of views of the skull’s teeth for our records.”
Even Mercy’s unpracticed eye could see the broken and jagged teeth on Dr. Harper’s recent films. Anger tightened her throat. “Fucking asshole,” she whispered.
“Breaks my heart,” said Dr. Harper. She cleared her throat and touched the screen. “If you look here at the film I took, there is a whiter mark on this tooth. It’s a composite filling—a white filling—on her six-year molar.” Her cursor dragged the film next to one of Alison Hartlage’s films. “This film from Alison’s dentist has the exact same-shaped filling.”
Mercy held her breath. “Is that the only thing that matches?”
“No. There are two other composite fillings that match.” The dentist touched the screen again, pointing out the similarities. “And even if there weren’t any fillings, the shape of her first molars is distinctive. It’s clear to me that this is positively Alison Hartlage.”
“Even though he broke her front teeth?”
“Oh yes. In a child this age, the front teeth change the fastest anyway . . . the kids are constantly losing baby teeth, and the adult teeth are growing in. She wouldn’t have lost her deciduous molars for a few more years. Right here, you can see the adult premolars below the baby teeth. They wouldn’t have grown in until she was much older.”
“Can you tell how old she was?”
“Kids lose and grow teeth at different rates. Looking at the films, I can make an educated guess of her age.” Lacey smiled. “But her dentist gave me her date of birth. She’s six and a half.”
A sense of finality washed over Mercy. This was Alison. No question.