Free Twisted Reason by Diane Fanning Page B

you. I really appreciate that. I hadn’t gotten around to making a request yet for a subpoena – this is really a time saver. Can I come by and pick them up this evening? Will you be home?”
    “Yes, Lieutenant. That would be fine. I’ll see you then.”
    She hung up and walked down to the Missing Persons division. “Hey, Butler. What’s up?” she called out as she stepped through the door.
    “Back here, Lieutenant,” Jumbo shouted.
    Unlike the new cubicle layout in her work area, the city hadn’t gotten around to redesigning this department. New desks and file cabinets had just been set up in any space available making the path to anywhere full of more twists and turns than a rabbit warren.
    She maneuvered through the maze, reaching Jumbo’s office at last. He introduced her to Karla Dunbar, the administrative staff who’d assisted him with his file by file search. With her wire-rimmed glasses, short skirt and wide Afro, the young woman seemed as if she’d escaped from an earlier decade.
    “I was right, Lieutenant. We went through five years of files. There’s been a real uptick in missing elderly in the last 18 months that’s disproportionate to the increase in population in that age group,” Jumbo said.
    “Okay. And?”
    “And?” Jumbo asked.
     “And, Butler, you said you had new developments – with an s.”
    “Oh right. I forgot I hadn’t told you yet. Early today, I called the Missing Persons division at the state police. I told them about my concerns. They said that they’d already been a bit alarmed by the numbers coming out of my office recently and said they’d red flagged us to do a follow-up investigation but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Anyway, the captain there told me to keep her informed on what me and Karla found in our file search.
    “Then about an hour and a half ago, she called me back and said that two unidentified bodies of elderly folks were found in Dinwiddie County that morning. No missing people in the county matched the descriptions but since we were the nearest major city, they just might belong to us.”
    “Really? Are the bodies here?”
    “Nope. They’re in Norfolk.”
    “Why’s that? We’re a lot closer – and Dinwiddie is in our district, isn’t it?”
    “Ah, I guess you didn’t hear the news. There was a massive explosion followed by a fire at a large apartment complex in the south of town just minutes before noon. Doc Sam’s not accepting any out of town bodies until he can deal with the fatalities that are pouring in to the morgue as we speak. So they transported the two Dinwiddie bodies down to the Tidewater district. Can’t ever make it easy for the investigators, can they?”
    “Doubt if they give us a thought.”
    “Anyway,” Jumbo continued, “me and Karla have been going through the files of the last year and a half. Here’s how we’ve divided them up. This bin –” he said, laying a hand on a blue plastic crate – “has all the files of missing elderly where there is no report of dementia.” Moving on to the red container, he said, “And this one has all the files with dementia.” He moved over to the third crate. “Here we separated out the files from this past month – most of the files are from the past few days, probably folks that are just lost and will be found any minute now.
    “The captain said that if we can bring down dental records for any possible matches, they can have a forensic odontologist there this evening.”
    “So what are you waiting for?” Lucinda asked.
    “We were just getting ready to cull the herd a bit. We know the dead woman is 5223 and the dead guy is 52113. Figured we’d pull out any folks that aren’t within an inch or two of those heights and I’d take the rest down to Norfolk.”
    “I’ll help and drive you down there if you like.”
    “You sure? We’ll probably hit some dense drive time traffic.”
    “I’ve got lights in the grille of my car. And I’m not afraid to use