Beneath Blackwater River by Leslie Wolfe (love story books to read txt) 📕

theirs, everyone’s seen that kid’s photo in the media or online. Some of them actually remembered what they saw in the tabloids, unlike any of us. Sheesh.”

“Bill Caldwell, as in Caldwell Farms?” Kay asked, letting his bitter words go unanswered.

“Yeah, him,” Logan replied. “How the heck did it happen? How did the ME screw it up so badly? Get over there and figure it out,” he ordered, looking at her.

“That can’t be possible,” Elliot said. “The doc had DNA, he matched it from the original kidnapping file.”

“You’re working the missing girl for now,” Logan said to Elliot, then turned to Kay. “Have you ever seen a situation like this? We look like idiots, and people are laughing at us. Just what we needed.”

Kay didn’t rush to answer. In her mind, she went quickly over the facts. There was DNA on file for Rose Harrelson. Doc Whitmore had taken a sample from the victim and run it against the sample in the file, and it was a match. A hundred-percent, no-room-for-error match, admissible in court, and considered forensically solid beyond any reasonable doubt.

Then, what could’ve been the explanation?

“I’m wondering… the DNA Dr. Whitmore had on file,” she eventually said, “was it an actual tissue sample stored somewhere at medico-legal? Or was the result of the DNA test attached to the case file?”

Sheriff Logan stared at her as if wondering why she was asking him questions, instead of bringing him some answers.

“I’m thinking,” Kay carried on, “maybe the DNA attached to Rose Harrelson’s case file was from a different case, one involving Alyssa. Maybe the reports got mixed up somehow. Had Alyssa Caldwell ever been reported missing?”

The sheriff pressed his lips into a thin line, his patience visibly running dry. “You figure it out. You find out what the heck happened, and what we’re going to tell the press when they stop laughing long enough to ask us what excuse we have for such ineptitude.”

“You got it,” she replied, then exchanged a quick glance with Elliot before turning to leave.

Until a few moments ago, she believed she knew who the victim was, and that single piece of knowledge was all she had in a kidnapping cold case. Fourteen years cold. Now, even that piece of evidence, Rose Harrelson’s DNA, her identity, was disputed.

As she walked toward her desk, a troublesome thought took shape in her mind. What was it about Rose Harrelson’s kidnapping that made all leads, all evidence, disappear like wisps of fog in the morning sun?

12Undoing

Unlike Rose Harrelson, seventeen-year-old Alyssa Caldwell had a solid social media footprint, going back many years, since she was a preteen. Kay had no problem locating her accounts and sifting through years of photographic evidence of her identity. Alyssa, the only child of William Earnest Caldwell II, was featured prominently in local print news archives, going back to her birth date, a day celebrated by the Caldwell family with the usual flurry of messages, statements, interviews, and articles in the media.

After all, Caldwell Farms was the largest farming business in Franklin County.

Kay stared at a photo of baby Alyssa, held by her mother and with Bill Caldwell smiling by her side, their faces touching. She wasn’t sure what she thought. Maybe, for one split second, she’d clung to the hope that the girl in the morgue was Rose Harrelson. Not because she wanted Rose to be dead, but because she needed a starting point in uncovering what had happened to the little girl all those years ago. That starting point, the thread that could’ve led Kay to her abductor, had vanished.

Because the girl lying on Doc Whitmore’s morgue slab was Alyssa Caldwell. There was no doubt about it. Seventeen years of documented history, in print and online, stood as testimony to that fact.

That meant Rose Harrelson was still missing, absent since the day she’d been taken fourteen years ago, and she could still be alive.

The biggest question was how did Rose’s DNA get mixed up with Alyssa’s? What scenario could possibly account for that? Dr. Whitmore would probably be able to come up with some explanation; she was sure, even without speaking to him, that he was diligently investigating the DNA screwup by now, eager to uncover the truth and restore his unblemished professional reputation. Fourteen years ago, when Rose Harrelson was taken, Dr. Whitmore was the medical examiner for a different county, in San Francisco. Hence, he hadn’t been the one to handle or attach Rose Harrelson’s original DNA to her kidnapping case file. The Franklin County ME at the time had since passed away. Regardless, it was Dr. Whitmore’s reputation at stake now, an undeserved blow to the dedicated professional who came out of retirement whenever his services were needed, helping the cash-stranded county make ends meet without keeping a full-time medical examiner on staff. The stigma of the DNA blunder would end his distinguished career under a cloud of shame so thick it would probably kill him.

But before she could visit with Dr. Whitmore, she had something else to do. She’d just delivered a next-of-kin notification to Shelley Harrelson, informing her that her daughter had been killed. That was no longer true, and that poor woman was mourning a death that could’ve not yet happened. Because, for all Kay knew, Rose could still be alive, out there somewhere.

Mumbling a long oath, she grabbed her keys and rushed out of the office, then drove off the parking lot raising swirls of dust.

The road to Redding seemed to fly by, mile after mile, while Kay’s thoughts whirled, constructing scenario after scenario that could’ve accounted for Alyssa’s DNA to have been filed in the system as Rose Harrelson’s. When was Alyssa’s DNA collected by the county medical examiner, and under which case number? Had it been found at a crime scene, unidentified, and filed erroneously under Rose’s name? A search into the database had not revealed any current or older cases involving the Caldwell daughter.

She’d tried ringing Dr. Whitmore, but it had gone straight