‘That, too,’ agreed Jayne.
‘If she’s been reported missing,’ countered Steelie. ‘And if the person who reported her knew about her surgery or put the cops on to the medical records, and if the records then actually got uploaded into NCIC. And we know that doesn’t always fly.’
Scott looked thoughtful. ‘Was there a scar? Like, from when she had surgery to put the plate in?’
Steelie smacked her forehead lightly and turned to stare at Jayne. ‘Of course! We got so carried away by the plate, we forgot about the scar. Of course there’s a scar.’
‘So,’ Eric concluded. ‘We can do a simple search on “scar, upper right arm” and forget about the person who put in the misper report knowing what kind of surgery or accident led to the scar?’
Jayne commented to Steelie, ‘And you always had a low opinion of these law enforcement types.’
Scott rocked back in his chair and grinned at Eric before saying to Jayne, ‘He just wants the gold star I promised him.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that what they taught you at Quantico? Carrot and stick?’
He paused, locking eyes with her, then said, ‘Well, you’ve been there—’
Steelie cut in. ‘No, we were only there for a week giving our two cents on NCIC Two Thousand. At the time, your main object of study appeared to be a beer bottle.’
Scott dragged his eyes away from Jayne to respond to Steelie. ‘Then you wouldn’t know that the Bureau stalwarts who teach us think the only place for a carrot is in a side salad – shredded.’
‘And even then, it’s suspicious,’ Eric added.
Scott grinned at him. ‘Plenty of stick around, though.’ He stood up. ‘And we should escort you out before our boss comes in here wielding his.’
EIGHT
Jayne went into the Agency’s laboratory to put away the biometric equipment they’d used to measure the X-ray images Tony Lee had printed at Critter Central. Steelie was booting up the lab computer. After it whirred to life and executed a few beeps, she said, ‘Check it out. Our first message via the All Coroners Bulletin. From a coroner in Anchorage about Thomas Cullen.’
Jayne pulled up a stool and read the couple of paragraphs, whose font was all capitals. Then she translated, ‘The coroner’s saying that they have a John Doe with a projectile in the sphenoid but they have his cause of death down as GSW with that bullet as the projectile that caused death? So . . . they don’t think it’s Cullen but they’re notifying us as a courtesy?’
Steelie nodded. ‘Looks like they ascribed the bullet to a more recent gunshot, not an old bullet that was sitting in his head for years.’
Jayne pushed back from the desk and frowned. ‘But how could they confuse the two?’
Steelie shrugged. ‘Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it’s not Thomas Cullen but rather some guy who actually died from shooting himself the same way.’
Jayne looked back at the coroner’s message. ‘It’s a decent match on the identifiers though . . . Caucasoid male, forty years plus or minus five, five-foot-nine plus or minus two, dark brown head hair, eyes brown, picked up in nineteen ninety-eight . . .’
‘So he’s a forty-year-old white guy with brown hair and eyes, no known scars, marks or tattoos. No wonder they’ve never had any hits in NCIC; there’s almost nothing there to discriminate between him and thousands of other missing men. Doesn’t mean it’s Cullen, that’s all I’m saying. They could be right and it’s a different guy.’
‘Send them another message.’
‘I’m going to. I will encourage them, in polite language, to compare any X-rays they’ve got with the one we digitized. They haven’t done that yet.’
Jayne got up. ‘OK, I’m going to write up the report on the BP’s for Scott and Eric. Let me know if you hear anything.’
By the time Steelie came to Jayne’s office, she was tidying the papers on her desk at the end of the day.
‘Did you get an acknowledgment from Tony on our report?’
‘Yes and he said he’d make sure Scott and Eric saw it when they got back.’
‘Which was when?’
‘God knows.’
Steelie perched on the edge of the desk. ‘So where are you meeting Gene tonight?’
‘They put him up at the Omni—’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘His company, I guess. So I’m picking him up—’
‘He doesn’t have a rental?’
‘No . . .’ She waited for Steelie to interrupt again but she didn’t. ‘And we’re going to eat in Little Tokyo.’
‘Which restaurant?’
Jayne stopped pulling the papers together. ‘I don’t know. We agreed to walk around, see what takes our fancy. If you’re so curious, why don’t you come too?’
Steelie gave a little shudder. ‘I hear your cry for help and yet I am not moved.’ She went out the door, then stuck her head back around it. ‘But call me when you get home afterwards.’
Jayne nodded. She finished at her desk, closed up the building, and left. At home, she changed clothes and put on mascara and lip gloss, realizing that the last time she’d seen Gene, they’d been at Kigali Airport in Rwanda almost a decade earlier. She’d still had a pair of well-used leather gloves sticking out of the back pocket of her cargo pants even though she and Steelie were leaving the mission in a matter of hours. He’d been wearing dusty boots, on his way to UN HQ, staying in the mission for another six months as he’d joined the team late, on loan from the FBI Lab. She belatedly wondered if she’d recognize him now and was glad he’d suggested the rear entrance of the hotel, which was quieter and he’d be easier to spot. Glancing at her watch, she picked up her bag and went out to her truck, making a mental note to stop by the Home Depot eventually to purchase new plants for her porch. She would have to do more than just sweep up the mess of broken pottery left by bumbling critters the night before.
The traffic on Sunset was still heavy but the evening’s milder temperatures were layering in and Jayne drove with the windows down, listening to an Oscar Peterson compilation but not minding hearing music from nearby cars as they idled next to each other along the boulevard. Keeping to surface streets, she turned right on Grand, passed the new cathedral, and made her way to Olive, starting the descent toward the heart of Downtown.
She pulled into the Omni Hotel’s curved driveway, its facade looming skyward, dwarfing the people gathered at the curb. A young valet made eye contact with her, raising his hand interrogatively but she shook her head as she drove past him slowly, scanning faces. When she had made the full circuit of the driveway, she pulled to the curb in front of a taxi and twisted in her seat to look for Gene out the back window. Just then, her passenger door swung open and a man dressed entirely in beige leapt in beside her as she pulled her bag to safety.
‘Christ, Gene, you gave me a fright!’
‘Sorry, I was afraid you were going to drive off without me.’
He leaned over the bench seat and gave her an awkward sideways hug, the zipper of his windbreaker scraping against her cheek. When they released each other, she looked at him and was glad he’d spotted her because she might not have recognized him after all. His blond hair was turning white and his cheeks seemed to droop, which changed the shape of his face altogether. His long body was still lanky, which gave him a certain youthfulness but his pale eyes were as penetrating as ever, their dot-like pupils making it seem as though he were focused on and displeased with whatever he was looking at. But his smile transformed everything, as it always had.