Free Cold Case Cop by Mary Burton

family for six generations. The article quoted a local jeweler, Frederick Robinson, who said the pieces were valued conservatively at fifteen million dollars. Even the pearls on her dress had been worth over one hundred thousand dollars.
    The estate’s greenhouse had been soaked in the socialite’s blood, but her body was never found. Kit’s dress was discovered by the river one week later, but the pearls sewn into it and the diamonds had never surfaced.
    Tara glanced at Brenda’s mug shot. She picked up the phone and called a colleague at the newspaper, who gave her a contact in the New York Police Department. A few phone calls later and she’d gotten ahold of a woman in the records department who had promised to do some digging for her.
    She then called a friend of hers who was a male nurse at Boston General. It took a few minutes for her call to get transferred, but finally she heard a familiar, “Tara.”
    “David, how are you doing?” She’d known David since college. Her friend wore his ink-black hair short, and he generally dressed in jeans and flannel shirts. He was a talented surgical nurse who also taught at the university. And David saw conspiracy theories everywhere. His was the perfect brain to pick about Kit’s disappearance.
    “Good!” David said. “I haven’t talked to you in months.”
    “Sorry about that. Work has been insane.”
    His deep voice dropped a notch. “When are we going to catch another concert?”
    She hoped David had figured out that friendship was all Tara could give. “Name the time, and I’ll be there.”
    “As a matter of fact, I’ve two tickets to a jazz festival in two weeks.”
    “Count me in.”
    “I’m going to hold you to that one. So, what can I do for you?”
    “I’m working on an article about an unsolved case.” She ran down the details of Kit’s story. “So is there any way someone could survive losing five pints of blood?”
    “No. Not a chance. That’s over half the body’s blood volume. Brain function would cease.”
    Her shoulders slumped. “Are you sure?”
    “Very.”
    Tara sighed. “That shoots down my theory. I had this half-baked idea that somehow Kit survived all that blood loss.”
    “Ah, a conspiracy theory. Now you’re talking my language. Give me a second to think.” After a moment’s pause he said, “Actually, the blood thing wouldn’t be hard to fake.”
    Tara sat straighter. “The blood was Kit’s. DNA was a perfect match.”
    “I’ve no doubt the blood was hers. But, what if she started banking her blood months before she vanished?”
    “It would keep that long?”
    “Sure, as long as it was frozen. All she’d need is access to a freezer.”
    “Wow, I hadn’t thought about that. Outlandish.”
    “But possible.” David sounded pleased with himself.
    “Hey, thanks. You’ve earned yourself a steak dinner.”
    “Excellent. You can feed me before the concert.”
    “Done.”
    Tara hung up the phone. It was a crazy theory, but not an impossible one.
    Five minutes later the phone rang. The woman on the other end from the New York Police Department’s records office gave Tara Brenda Latimer’s basic stats, including her year and place of birth and the list of charges.
    Excited, Tara thanked the woman and hung up. Brenda and Kit’s birth years matched. And one of the charges leveled against Brenda had been fraud.
    For the sake of argument, Tara decided to assume that Brenda had created Kit and that she had vanished with the gems intentionally on her wedding day.
    If Kit/Brenda had done all that, she’d have to have found a buyer for the jewels. The likely place to start was the jeweler who had appraised the gems, Frederick Robinson. He could give Tara a full description of what went missing so that she knew what to look for. He could also help her figure out how such unusual pieces could be fenced.
    After she spoke with Robinson’s Jewelers, she’d track down more details about Brenda.
    Two hours later, Tara had