Free Strangers by Mary Anna Evans Page A

expression, and receding hairline, Detective Overstreet could have been a television policeman, acting out the role of competent supporting cop to the dashing and glamorous star. Only there was no dashing and glamorous star at his side. Glynis’ safety depended on this calm, deliberate man who couldn’t have been less dynamic.
    Faye couldn’t make sense of his confident statement that she was among the last people to talk to Glynis. “But I told you this morning that I hadn’t seen her since yesterday evening.”
    She realized the omission in her statement and hurried to fill it. “Even then, I didn’t talk to her, and I haven’t talked with her since. Or emailed or texted or twittered. I wish I had talked to her, so that I could help you find her, but there’s been no contact of any kind since yesterday. She must have seen and spoken to people since then. Her boyfriend, for sure. Didn’t they live together? And the rumor mill says that she spoke to a convenience store clerk right before she disappeared. I can’t possibly have been the last.”
    Now she was talking too much. It sure was easy to look guilty.
    “Oh, I believe that you haven’t communicated with Ms. Smithson.” He gave her a “Trust me,” smile. “It’s just that I know something you don’t. She communicated with you.”
    “Come again?”
    He used the touch-screen on his phone to pull up a document and read aloud. “Dear Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth—”
    “Are you saying she wrote me a letter?”
    He nodded and kept reading. “Dear Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth,” he began again. “I’ve been up all night, wondering what’s the right thing to do. I really don’t know, so I’m asking you. Can you look at these things and tell me whether they’re as important as I think they are? I don’t want to get anybody in trouble, but it’s wrong to destroy history, just because somebody wants to build something. I’ve looked all over the Internet, trying to figure out what’s legal, but I just don’t understand the laws well enough. Can you help me? I want to do the right thing.”
    Detective Cole looked up at Faye and said, “It’s signed Glynis Smithson.” Then he laid a damaged crucifix, and a handful of beads on the table. Beside them, he placed a bone, three musket balls, the bottom half of a broken stone blade that had once been very large, and a piece of a broken battle club. Then he handed her a photo. The photo showed another piece of a damaged battle club, probably the same one. From the looks of it, the two pieces, when fitted together, would be a complete reconstruction of the original club. It hadn’t been shattered in a million pieces. Sometime in the past few hundred years, it had simply been broken in two.
    Overstreet said nothing, letting the artifacts speak for themselves.
    Faye picked up the crucifix and the musket balls, one by one. They were all Spanish, she’d guess, and really old. She’d also guess that the filigreed beads had once dangled from this crucifix as a rosary.
    The bone bothered her. She picked it up and rubbed her fingertips over it. It was a phalange, one of the small bones in the hands and feet of humans and other mammals. It was old and worn and one end was broken off. It might have been part of a pig or a deer, but she was more concerned about the possibility that it was part of a human being. Humans were more like pigs and deer than most people would like to admit. Sometimes and with some bones, only lab work could distinguish the species.
    Faye wasn’t a walking analytical lab, but she had handled a lot of bones. She’d want lab data or detailed taxonomy before she’d sit on the witness stand and say for certain that this bone was human. But her experience and the tactile memory in her hands said that it was. “Have you reported this?”
    “The medical examiner’s office said we should.”
    If anybody should have developed the ability to recognize a human bone on sight, it would have been a medical