Page 37 of In the Bones
Tim set down his phone to give her his full attention. “I’dlike to spend a few minutes with the missing persons database.”
“Think you’ve got enough to go on?” she asked.
“We’ll see. Until we get an ID, though, this case is going nowhere.”
Half an hour later, he regretted the words, feeling like he’d jinxed himself. Details about the victim were, indeed, scant. All Tim knew for sure was that she wasn’t local. Had a woman gone missing from Cape Vincent, or any other small community along the river, he would have heard about it.
Broadening the search to women who’d disappeared from Jefferson County within the last year yielded a few results, but without more information, there was no way he’d be able to narrow the lens. Then he remembered the ring the victim had been wearing when she disappeared. If someone close to her knew about it, it might have been included in the missing person report. He added the ring, and the angel wing detail, to his search.
Still nothing.
Tim sat idle for a while, swiveling in his chair, before his memory fixed on something Stacy Peel had told him about the sale of the house. It had changed hands right before Labor Day, one of busiest summer holidays for tourists to visit the area. If the victim was a vacationer, she could have been from a different state or even a different country, but a good chunk of area visitors came from elsewhere in New York. Tim refined the search, and tried again.
This time, he got a hit. He stared at the data on his screen in confusion and awe. The angel wing ring was associated with a missing person case from Syracuse, New York.
The woman’s name was Angelica Patten.
“Hey Shana?” Tim called, already rising from his desk. “OK with you if I take a field trip?”
THIRTY-TWO
Tim
The Patten family home looked more like it belonged in Italy than a quiet residential street in Syracuse. A villa-style house of gray brick and stone, it was located in the Sedgwick Farm Historic District and had once belonged to a salt manufacturer who, apparently, had also been the mayor. Up until last year, Claudia Patten had lived there with her husband. Then Bill had died after a long battle with colon cancer, and their daughter, Angelica, had moved back home, only to vanish a mere two months later. Claudia had been alone ever since.
“Angelica,” Shana had repeated when, in her office, Tim had explained what he’d found. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“Does it? She lived in Syracuse,” Tim said, “but given the timing of her death I’m guessing she was a summer renter. A weekend visitor, maybe. I’d like to go down there to connect with the detective who worked her missing person case, assuming there was one.”
Tim had arrived at Claudia’s door with Kenneth Strada, the Syracuse PD detective with slicked-back raven hair whom he’d talked with by phone on the ninety-minute drive downstate. The missing person report for Angelica Patten had been filed the previous September, right after the Labor Day long weekend. The timing fit.
Kenneth, who had a dimple in his boxy chin, had been very interested to hear the news about the discovered remains. His investigation into Angelica’s disappearance had stalled out, and both men now knew why. The Syracuse detective had been looking for the girl in the wrong place.
For almost nine months, Angelica had been ninety miles north in a Cape Vincent basement.
Claudia Patten wept when Tim showed her photographs of the ring. It had been a high school graduation gift from her parents, and Angelica never took it off. Tim would get Angelica’s dental records sent to the Crime Lab to check for a match, but he knew with a grim sense of certainty what the results would be.
Kenneth had filled him in on the case, but it had been cold for so long that they agreed Tim, with his fresh information, should take the lead.
“Were you aware that she was going up to the Thousand Islands that weekend?” he asked as he and Kenneth faced the woman where she sat, each of them perched on the edge of a spindly upholstered chair. The room reminded Tim of an ostentatious parlor in a wealthy family’s island home at which he’d once spent time while working a case, and he felt a familiar ripple of discomfort, like he’d been set loose in a period room at a museum.
“I didn’t know she was going anywhere,” Claudia said. “I was out of town that weekend, visiting my sister in Ithaca. Angelica said she needed to work. When I got home on Monday, she wasn’t here.”
“Any idea why she chose the Thousand Islands?”
The woman nodded. “She’d been there before. We took several trips up north when she was little. Bill loved it. When he died last summer,” Claudia said, pressing a tissue against her pink eyes, “Angelica took it hard. We both did.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Patten. Was that unusual for her?” Tim asked. “Being that spontaneous? Not checking in with you?”
“Not really. Angelica was always a free spirit, ever since she was little. It’s why we didn’t have more kids, if I’m honest. That girl was a handful.” A soft laugh escaped her lips and then she was crying again, her shoulders heaving in time with her sobs. “She was twenty-four. She lived here, with me, but she was an adult with her own life.”
Tim asked Claudia Patten about Angelica’s work, and learned that—while she held a degree in sports marketing from Pace University—her first job out of college hadn’t workedout. She’d started taking shifts at a Lakeland sporting goods retailer called Wins while on the hunt for something new. To Tim’s questions about whether she had trouble with anyone at the store, Claudia shook her head. She did the same when asked whether Angelica had a boyfriend. “Nothing serious. She had a big friend group, though. Everyone loved her. She was fun. A free spirit, you know?”
With a nod, Tim said, “I can imagine. This trip she took. Do you think she went alone, or would she have brought a friend?” He was fishing for details about Jenny Smith. Trying to gauge whether Angelica knew the phrogger. It was the kind of question that should have come up in the missing person investigation, only Angelica’s mother and Detective Strada hadn’t known about Angelica’s travels. She’d owned a car, but it had still been in the driveway when Claudia Patten got home from Ithaca.
“I really don’t know,” the woman said, “but I don’t think she would have gone solo. Angelica didn’t like to be alone.”
Tim pictured the skeleton, curled up in the cold, empty room beneath Mikko’s cellar floor, and felt his heart kink in his chest.
