Bones of the Lost

I’d no idea who was who.
    An Exercise After Forty newsletter.
    Nothing from Katy. Good. No cancellation.
    Unable to sit still, I raced up the stairs two at a time. Exercise after forty.
    Returning to the bathroom mirror, I dabbed on mascara and blush.
    As though Katy would notice.
    More after-forty exercise down to the kitchen. A refill on coffee, then I rechecked Skype.
    No change. 8:42 here. 5:12 there.
    I rolled my chair sideways and plucked an issue of
JFS
from the shelf above the desk. Scanned the table of contents.
    Crossover immunoelectrophoresis for discovery of blood proteins in soil. Confocal microscopy for examination of fired cartridges. STR melting curve analysis for genetic screening. Detection of meglumine and diatrizoate from bacillus spore samples.
    Though scintillating topics, nothing held my attention.
    Time check. Nine twenty. Still no Katy.
    Easy, Brennan
.
Bagram Air Force Base is the safest location in Afghanistan
.
    So Katy had assured me. Ditto Pete.
    I sipped my tepid coffee and stared at the unchanging screen. Willing my daughter to appear.
    9:40.
    10:05.
    Stomach knotted, I thought about the Jane Doe in the MCME cooler.
    Maybe the girl’s mother was drinking coffee as I was, trusting that her daughter was somewhere safe.
    Easy
.
    Back to the journal.
    No go.
    For the millionth time I wondered about Slidell. I knew he’d go allDirty Harry about a kid being killed on his patch. That he’d pursue every lead. But he had his priorities.
    The disappearance of a hard-working single mother who was locally known forced the death of an unknown probable illegal and possible hooker onto the back burner.
    On screen, the digits in the upper corner changed to 10:22.
    She’s calling from a USO center, I told myself. Dozens lined up for the Internet. Troops talking to their wives, their husbands, their kids, their mothers. Lingering over good-byes.
    Keep busy. Do your job
.
    I reduced Skype to the dock and entered a series of keystrokes.
    In 2005, recognizing a need to address the dual problems of missing persons and unidentified remains, the National Institute of Justice held a giant meeting in Philadelphia called the Identifying the Missing Summit. Later, a deputy attorney general created the National Missing Persons Task Force and charged the U.S. Department of Justice with identifying and developing tools to solve missing-person and unidentified-decedent cases. The task force recommended the creation of a centralized data bank.
    The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, NamUs, resulted from that recommendation. NamUs is free, online, and available to everyone.
    The NamUs home page appeared on my screen, with links to three databases: Missing Persons, Unidentified Persons, Unclaimed Persons. Hoping someone had reported my Jane Doe missing, I chose the first.
    Search parameters appeared. I entered sex as female, race as white, age as adolescent. Leaving the category “ethnicity” blank, I filled in Date Last Known Alive, Age Last Known Alive, and State Last Known Alive. Then I hit search.
    And got zero matches.
    I changed the age descriptor to late teen/young adult.
    Still no matches.
    I entered Hispanic/Latino for ethnicity.
    Nada.
    Changed the age descriptor back to adolescent.
    Nothing.
    Disappointed but not surprised, I did the only thing I could. Taking information from my copy of the girl’s ME file, I entered her intothe Unidentified Persons database. Physical, medical, and personal descriptors. Clothing. Accessories. A brief summary of the circumstances surrounding her discovery.
    There was so little to enter. No scars. No tattoos or piercings. No dental work. No implants. No deformities.
    Just a normal, healthy teenager. Dead.
    10:40. Still no ring from Skype.
    Head to the office and get on with the mummy bundles?
    I decided to give Katy a few more minutes.
    I logged in to the Doe Network, the International Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons.
    Same result.
    I was finishing up when my iPhone sounded.
    “Yo. Doc.” Slidell was chewing on something.
    “Yes.” Staring at a picture of Katy taken two summers back at the Outer Banks. Wind-tossed and caught by late-afternoon sun, her long blond hair shimmered like gold.
    “Spent some time with the brain trust out on Old Pineville Road. These dipshits couldn’t find their own assholes if—”
    “Did you learn anything useful?”
    “You kiddin’ me? Checked out a party junk store, a U-store facility, a garden center