Jayne and Steelie - 01 - Freezing Read Online Free PDF Page B

haven’t been able to find their daughter.’
    â€˜Well, you’ll be interested in what Solana said, then. She started working for the Alstons as a housekeeper a few months ago. At some point, they asked her to live in. She said she couldn’t and then broke down. They were busy reassuring her that she wouldn’t lose her job but then she explained about Roberto and how she didn’t want to be away from home for any twenty-four hour period in case he came back and she wasn’t there.’
    Jayne nodded.
    â€˜That’s when they told her about how Kate had disappeared and how the Agency had helped them focus their energies and given them hope of some sort of answer. She agreed to pay us a visit but, as you would have heard, it took a lot out of her.’
    â€˜Do you think she’ll come back?’
    Carol considered this as she stood up. ‘I don’t know. It’s taken her weeks just to come inside, having driven past a few times. But I gave her one of our brochures to take home.’
    Jayne could hear her humming quietly as she returned to her desk.
    Scott walked into the office he and Eric shared on the fourth floor of the FBI building and saw his partner on the phone. He wondered if information was coming in from a law enforcement officer who’d seen their Be On the Look Out notice for a van matching the description of the one hit by the drunk on the 101 Freeway. He set one of the cups he was carrying down on Eric’s desk.
    Eric hung up the phone and turned to face him. ‘That was Detective Schrader over in LAPD Robbery Homicide.’
    â€˜He call you?’ Scott winced as he scalded the roof of his mouth on the coffee.
    â€˜She, and I called ’cause I got to thinking: we’ve got the BOLO out for the van but if the perp’s decided to stop so he can disguise it, we don’t just have to wait for a hit on the BOLO. We can go out and track him down.’
    â€˜Body shops?’
    â€˜The right body shops.’
    â€˜Did the D give you their watch list?’
    â€˜Yeah. She gave me eighteen shops that have come to their attention for handling stolen vehicles.’
    â€˜What radius from the body parts?’
    â€˜I asked for a five-mile radius from the nearest freeway exit to the north, which was . . . uh, Van Nuys Boulevard. We can expand it if we have to.’
    â€˜Chances are the perp wasn’t driving too far once he realized he lost his load out the back door.’ Scott was already getting up and he grinned at Eric, who was trying to get some coffee down and fast. ‘You ready?’
    Eric swallowed. ‘Just remember whose brilliant idea this was.’
    â€˜You want a gold star? I’ll give you one if we get a lead on the van.’
    â€˜Yeah, I’ve heard that before,’ Eric grumbled but he was getting up with alacrity and the two agents left the office.
    Steelie didn’t leave the lab all afternoon. Carol did crossword puzzles at her desk until 4 p.m. when she watered Fitzgerald and then made tea for everyone else. Jayne pulled together the material they’d take to the FBI office: biometric forms, sliding calipers, rulers. Then she checked the Agency email account.
    There were seven new messages in the Inbox since she’d last checked: three were spam, two were lurid spam, one was from the server warning account-holders that old messages would be deleted, and one was from a family looking for a missing relative they believed was alive.
    The last email was of a type that the Agency received with regularity: relatives of missing persons had learned about 32/1’s forensic profiles, saw no point in having coroners’ freezers scoured for their relatives, but still got in contact for any scrap of information that might lead them down a new path to find that relative.
    The standard Agency response would include a list of resources and links for organizations like People Search and the