Chapter Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
Tim
“Five hours.”
Where he sat at his desk in the state police barracks, Tim looked up from his phone to see Shana.
“Huh?”
“Five hours,” she repeated, “until we see her again.”
Tim knew that saying goodbye to Darcy every day was hard for Shana, but for him the pain felt visceral, as real and debilitating as a broken limb.
Shana often caught him like this, staring vacantly at his phone or out the window.
Distracted. Glum. Separation anxiety, she’d called it, though Tim wasn’t a fan of the phrase.
Wasn’t that something reserved for preschoolers?
He was a grown-ass man, a cop. With each new day, though, he was tormented all over again, those troublesome fears digging their stiletto nails into his skin.
“Why can’t I just stay home with her?” he’d said more than once.
“You handle the caseload, I’ll handle the kid.
” He wasn’t serious—not entirely, anyway—but now that Darcy could walk and talk, leaving her was even more brutal.
They were lucky that Tim had not one but two moms who were thrilled to help with childcare, Dori handling daytimes, while Courtney, who worked at the school, tagged in when she got home.
Darcy wasn’t the first grandchild on the Wellington side, but Tim’s sister lived in New Hampshire, whereas Darcy was right up the street, and Tim’s mother and stepmom doted like she was their own. So yeah, Tim and Shana had it good.
Didn’t make it any easier to leave his baby girl behind.
Shana planted a kiss on the top of his head and propped herself on the edge of his desk.
“What’s the latest?”
Tim set down his phone to give her his full attention. “I’d like 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?”