THE PAST WEEK, Sonja had been too busy to run, and her muscles had come to feel like mud, her mood as edgy as a serrated knife.
She needed to run, felt the pang to work her body hard. She’d planned on, finally, a run this afternoon. But the case demanded she sit in place and pore over lists of hundreds of names from Family Matters, going back twenty-two months. Searching for a single name to stand out. A link. She’d built spreadsheets until her eyes bled.
She leaned back from her desk and gazed out the window of her home office at the fields, shadowed in dusk, tornadoes of snow dancing along the edge of the woods. Claude had recognized she needed space, so he’d taken the kids, home for an in-service day, to the Village Picture Shows for a movie.
She’d gone down through the lists, searching for the names of the missing girls. With her heart sinking into her stomach, she’d found them: Sally, Rebecca, and Fiona, and circled each with a tug of regret. Now, she circled yet another name: Julia Pearl.
The name of each of the missing girls was on the lists. Except Mandy’s. So far. But she’d find it, she would. Whoever had done this to Julia and possibly others would get theirs. It was a matter of time now. Of momentum.
No M. Wilks. No Mandy W. No M.W. Nothing.
The lists were short, five names on average, though the number of attendants did spike to as many as seventeen names for a few dates. She felt a dull ache in the hollow of her belly, the type that followed the annual indignity of her gynecological exam. She shivered.
She drank water and ate a handful of pumpkin seeds as she searched, her fingertips humming with excitement to see the girls’ circled names. But no Mandy. Why?
Sonja laid the lists out on the floor. More than a hundred of them. She walked among them, looking for a Mandy or an M. Wilks or W. The girls were supposed to use their real last names, but that did not mean they did. Certainly, rights to privacy superseded some sort of protocol for tax regulations and grant allocations.
She stepped among the lists, bowed over with her fingers locked behind her back. Her eye caught on a name. Not the name exactly, but the penmanship. She stopped cold. She’d seen it on another list—she swore it. She crouched, her eyes leaping from one list to the next. There. She picked up the list and compared the writing. Yes, it was the same. The graphologist Canaan Police used would confirm it. Her synapses snapped and sizzled, a string of lit firecrackers. The endorphins flowed. There it was again: that same odd handwriting.
In ten minutes, she’d found a dozen lists with the same penmanship. There was no doubt it was from the same person. What was peculiar was that the names appeared on lists not just from all four different locales, but appeared over the course of twenty-two months, about every four months or so. What jolted Sonja most was that on each list where the odd handwriting appeared, the name of one of the missing girls also appeared. Except for Mandy. Mandy, nor anyone with her combination of initials, appeared anywhere.
Sonja’s endorphins screamed through her now, her pulse a frantic staccato throb.
Perhaps there was a better rush than running.