Page 88 of Bourbon Bliss
“Hollis Corner is under the control of the Free Renegades. They confirmed there was no religious cult living in their territory.”
“I don’t even want to know how you confirmed that with a biker gang.”
I waved my hand. “It was fine. George was there. So I already knew her story about the cult was a fabrication.”
“But—” She tilted her head, staring at my computer screen, as if something had caught her attention. “Wait a second.”
“Do you see it too?”
“Are her sleeves rolled up? Can you zoom in?”
I enlarged the photo, centering it on her arms. Cassidy stared for a long moment, shaking her head. “No scars.”
“Precisely.”
“I’ll be right back,” Cassidy said. “Stay here.”
She was gone for a few minutes. I waited, my brain buzzing. She came back with a plain manila envelope and shut the door behind her again.
“These are Callie.” She pulled a set of photos out of the envelope and set them on the table next to my laptop.
A wave of discomfort rolled through me. They were difficult to view. She’d told me about these photos, but I hadn’t seen them for myself. Bloody cuts ran across Callie’s forearms, deep slices that seeped thick, red blood.
“These injuries would scar,” Cassidy said. “You can actually see scars from previous wounds beneath the fresh ones.”
I pointed to the photo on my laptop. “Then I’m right. This can’t be the same person.”
Cassidy took a deep breath, like she was considering the evidence. That was like her. She didn’t jump to conclusions. “Based on this, I’d say there’s reason to question Callie’s identity.”
“Then you need to reopen the investigation.”
“It’s not that simple. She’s not a missing person anymore. Her father positively identified her.”
“I took that into account,” I said, navigating to a different tab. “This kind of thing has happened before. Three years ago, a young man was arrested for impersonating a missing boy from Kansas. The child had disappeared at the age of thirteen. Two years later, he supposedly turned up in Europe. He claimed to have been kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking. He came back to the States and lived with the family for three months before his real identity was discovered. He’d researched the details of the boy’s case and obtained enough information to convince them, at least temporarily.”
“Are you serious?” Cassidy asked, squinting at my screen. “It took them three months to realize he wasn’t their son?”
“He didn’t even have the same hair or eye color, and the family still believed him.”
“I suppose they wanted it to be him pretty badly,” she said.
“Maybe the Kendalls want this woman to be Callie. Maybe they’re willing to overlook the facts so their reality aligns with their fantasy of having their daughter back.”
“It’s possible,” she said. “But why would someone impersonate Callie Kendall?”
“Many reasons. Perhaps greed. Judge and Mrs. Kendall are people of considerable means. Or attention. It’s hard to say. The man who impersonated the missing boy in Kansas had done it multiple times. He’d even served jail time in France for a similar offense.”
“I’ve come across a lot of strange criminal activity, but this is something else,” she said. “But… how can this woman look enough like her that she’s fooled the Kendalls?”
“I researched that aspect as well,” I said, clicking to yet another tab. “This website is calledFind My Twin. There’s a theory that among the seven billion people on the planet, there are always duplicate faces, even without shared genetics.”
I scrolled through some of the matches on the homepage. There were dozens of them—people who appeared identical, but weren’t related to each other.
“Wow, that’s… eerie,” she said. “I wonder if there’s someone else out there with my face.”
“One can only hope,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Why would one hope?”
