"My money's on it all coming from the same body…same person."
"I told Dr. Sanger this is my suspicion too."
"She called you?"
"Stopped by."
"Then she's in her office?"
"I suspect so by now, yes."
"Thanks, Leonard. I'm going to interface with Missing Persons. See if anything pops there."
"Pops?"
"Matches, makes any connection."
"Ahh, I see…yes. But first you may want to speak with Dr. Purvis, our expert forensic ophthalmologist. She knows a lot more about eyes than I do, so I left the eyes with her."
"Purvis, sure. I'll do that."
"Oh, and by the way, Lucas, Kim and the kids keep asking me to have you over again. You were a big hit with my girls."
"Yeah, I'd like that sometime soon, Leonard. Say hello to the kids and your beautiful wife for me."
Lucas hung up and called Dr. Catrina Purvis. She could only add in a painfully strident voice that the eyes were in need of correcting, that the owner would have worn a serious prescription with more than one prism. "She could not have worn contacts. Somewhere there's a pair of relatively thick, certainly expensive glasses gone missing. She would have worn them everywhere."
"You can tell that from dead eyes?"
"With today's technology, yes."
"Thanks, that helps, Doctor."
Lucas then telephoned Sergeant Stan Kelton at the front desk, asking if Meredyth Sanger's day doorman, Stu, had either called or come into the precinct. Kelton had not heard from the man. Lucas suggested he call Meredyth, get the number, and strongly urge Stu to come down to help with a composite on the delivery person. Kelton, who knew only what was the buzz about the case, agreed to take care of the matter. "And call Jack Tebo to come in and do the same. He spoke to the delivery person who showed up at my place." Lucas gave him Tebo's number.
Lucas hung up and then opened his computer, logging on and going to the MP files. He scanned for recent missing females-recent disappearances, females between the ages of seventeen and thirty, according to Change's estimates of age, gender, and the freshness of the stolen human tissues.
Just then Meredyth came through his door. The Cold Room was open to any and all detectives and personnel who might have a vested interest in a Cold Case, and consequently, the door was opening and closing all the time. Lucas's focus was on his computer, and he assumed whoever had entered would sign for anything they'd come for, be it a hard copy file or a floppy disk. Lucas kept working.
Meredyth reached her hands out to him, taking his shoulders in her grasp, causing him to flinch in surprise. "Hey, Wolf Clan man, it's only me," she said, soothing him, refer-ring to his clan name. "God, you're as tense as I am over this thing, aren't you?" Then seeing the array of photos of young women on his screen, she half-joked, "What're you delving into here, a lonely-hearts-dot-com singles match website?"
"Missing Persons files, Mere. They're on-line now, and I'm trying to match what we know of the body parts to anyone on this list," he said, pointing to the screen. "Look at them, all sizes, shapes, ages-the missing souls of a nation." He typed in Texas, narrowing the field. Houston and vicinity narrowed it. Finally, he called for a fifty-mile radius from downtown Houston. With each new request, the numbers of the missing dwindled, allowing more focus. When he narrowed his search by age, the files and corresponding photos came up fast and furiously. There were nine people missing. He then limited search parameters to only those missing in the last seventy-two hours.
Seven files and photos remained. Lucas had to click on the photo to go into each file.
Lucas began the process, taking each in alphabetical order, unsure what he was looking for beyond those beautiful sea-blue pupils he'd seen on Meredyth's carpet. "We can rule out all but the blue-eyed missing," he said, asking the computer to comply, and this narrowed the number to four. He then narrowed them to girls wearing corrective lenses. "Catrina Purvis tells me whoever belongs to the eyes, she had a serious prescription with prisms."
"Really? She's good."
"Jane Doe was a four-eyes. Wore them everywhere."
This latest entry narrowed his search to three remaining young women. Meredyth looked on with interest. The youngest MP was nineteen, a Helga Muncie, the oldest at twenty-eight, a woman named Mira Lourdes, and the third a girl of twenty-one named Irma Nance. "Any one of them might have once carried those eyes and teeth in her head," said Lucas. "Or else none of them have any connection to the wayward eyes."
"Oh, the wayward eye is a restless eye," sang out Dave Casey as he passed by. "Everybody's heard, Lucas, about your encounter last night."
"That thrills me, Dave. How's the Conroe case going?"
"Plodding along."
Lucas returned his gaze to the screen, staring at the photos of the three remaining possible victims, all of whom had disappeared without a trace. He tried to will himself to recognize the eyes. Helga's looked close, Mira's looked closer, and Irma's looked closest. Then, on a second go- round, they all looked closest. "No way to tell from the photos. For one, the glasses they wear obscure the eyes."
"Stare long enough and all you see are the eyes," Meredyth muttered, still holding his shoulders.
He clicked on the photo of Helga Muncie, opening the first of the three files. "This'11 take some time."
She looked at her watch. "I've got a group session upstairs I've got to be at, and then I've got to get uptown." She looked around, saw no one else at the other desks in the room was watching, and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. "Let me hear from you if anything should click."
"Will do, but it may take some fieldwork. Only so far a computer screen will take you."
"Keep me apprised, will you?"
"Sure thing." He patted her hand on his shoulder, but his eyes remained on the screen as he began reading the first file.
Lucas didn't recall seeing Meredyth leave, and he took each of the MP files in turn, studying them in order with an eye to eliminating his search further, but instead, he had to hold Helga's file in abeyance. Perhaps it had been Helga's eyes.
One by one, he read through the details of each story, the information supplied by family members, friends, coworkers about the missing person, nothing but shining accolades. No one in any of the three cases had the slightest notion how their loved one or friend could simply vanish, but in each case they had.
When he looked up again from the computer files, it was nearing two in the afternoon, and he hadn't eaten. His research had focused in on how much trouble each girl had with her eyes. Unfortunately, all three had serious sight problems and eyewear. Still, he felt good that he'd been able to narrow his search from hundreds to only these three.
Lucas again called Chang. "I've narrowed my search from reported missing persons cases that might match the unusual circumstances of our case down to three, Leonard."
"Fantastic."
"From these three, I'm going to obtain dental records on each, and we'll get your pal Davies to see if any of them are a match with the teeth found at Meredyth's." Dr. Thomas Phillip Davies, the forensic orthodontist Lucas referred to, had already extracted DNA from the teeth for Chang.
"Wonderful idea. Good work. I've already provided the teeth for Dr. Davies, so when time comes, let us know."
"Thanks again." Lucas hung up and then he called upstairs to Meredyth's office, hoping to catch her and update her on his progress, but he was informed that she'd left for her private practice and could be reached there in an hour. He decided to get a bite to eat and call her afterward.
He ran a hard copy of the three files he thought could be a match to the eyes and teeth. He'd spend the afternoon obtaining the dental records he required, knowing it would be tough to get these, as all three files indicated dental records had not been forwarded for any of them. He wondered how common an oversight this was in Missing Persons, and made a mental note to ask Jana North about this.