Chapter 20

TWENTY

FEbrUARY 2023

Whatcom County

Lucas's phone buzzed with an email notification as he got into the passenger seat of Longbow's car. As promised, Cooney had sent through the missing person's report for the Ohio woman. Lucas stretched the screen to zoom in on the photo at the top and whistled. The picture looked as though it had been taken in a restaurant. It showed a woman smiling, sitting at a table in front of a candle. Her shining green eyes and blonde hair reflected the candlelight. She was a dead ringer for the woman in the creek.

"Looking good?" Longbow asked as he steered the car out of the lot.

Lucas waited for him to check both directions and pull out onto the road before he showed him—he didn't fancy being T-boned by a truck because his boss was distracted.

"Looking real good," he said, holding the phone up so Longbow could look at the image.

A glance was all Longbow needed. He took it in and looked back at the road.

"That's her, isn't it?"

Lucas nodded. The blonde hair, the blue eyes, the cheekbones, even the hair style, was all a match for the woman they had pulled out of the creek this morning and watched the coroner cut up this afternoon.

"Name's Olivia Greenwood," Lucas said. "She's an interior design consultant from Cincinnati."

Longbow raised an eyebrow. " Interior design consultant. What's her husband do?"

Lucas smiled. He had had the same thought. Hobby job for the trophy wife. "Investment banker. He was the one who reported her missing…and then unreported her missing."

"Huh?"

"Let's get back to the station and we'll take a proper look at it. I hate squinting at a phone screen."

It didn't make a whole lot more sense back at the station, with the missing person's report and associated documents up on the big screen in the briefing room.

Olivia Greenwood was either their victim or her identical twin, and according to the record, she was an only child. She was a thirty-seven-year-old housewife who lived in a tiny suburb of Cincinnati; almost two and a half thousand miles east of Whatcom County. She had checked into a luxury hotel just over a week ago but didn't show up when her husband showed up to pick her up at the appointed time. She wasn't answering her phone, and the hotel staff hadn't seen her since the previous evening.

The husband, a sixty-two-year-old investment banker whose DMV photo made him look like the Republican senatorial candidate for Stepford, had called their mutual friends first. Then he had called other local hotels of a standard acceptable to Mrs. Greenwood. Then, with slowly mounting panic, he had called the local emergency rooms. Finally, he had called the Cincinnati Police Department to say he thought his wife was missing.

The officer in charge had initially tried to fob Edward Greenwood off with the usual policy that a person had to be out of touch for forty-eight hours before they could be reported as missing, in the absence of any suspicious circumstances. Edward Greenwood, unsurprisingly, had picked up his phone to a buddy in the mayor's office. Okay, the mayor. Five seconds after that, the CPD had started looking for Mrs. Greenwood.

The report, unsurprisingly, given the pressure that had been brought to bear, was unusually detailed. Officers had questioned staff at the hotel, contacted Olivia Greenwood's known associates, and put an APB out on a pickup truck seen by security video leaving the hotel in the dead of night after someone was seen bundling a woman who might have been OliviaGreenwood into the elevator down to the parking lot.

That's when it got interesting.

Less than twelve hours after Edward Greenwood had made his first call to report his wife missing, he got back in touch to say that it was all a misunderstanding. There had been a miscommunication and his wife had taken a room at another hotel. She had left her phone in a taxi. Greenwood was very apologetic and embarrassed, and Lucas detected a slightly smug tone in the report conclusion. The officer who had been raked over the coals by city hall had taken great satisfaction in being proved right: ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a supposedly missing person will show up again all by themself, given time.

But there was something the police hadn't done. Or if they had, it was nowhere in the report.

They hadn't conducted a follow-up interview with Olivia Greenwood.

So it seemed as though Olivia Greenwood had disappeared a week ago only to reappear almost immediately safe and well. If they were right about the identity of the body in the morgue, why had she turned up dead, having been held in captivity for a period of time that seemed to match the period since she had been reported missing?

Lucas sat down at his desk and picked up the phone. He punched in the number for the CPD Homicide Department and asked to speak to an available detective.

A gruff-sounding male voice came on the line after a minute, introducing himself as Detective Frank MacDonald. "To what do we owe this honor?"

"Well, Detective MacDonald…can I call you Frank?"

"You can but it would make you the only one. Everybody else calls me Mac."

"Mac, great. If I say the name Olivia Greenwood to you, what comes to mind?"

There was a chuckle. "A great, big, fiery pain in the ass. And that's just her husband." He paused and Lucas waited for the penny to drop. "Wait a minute, how do you know that name? Whatcom County is a long way from the Buckeye State. What's happened?"

"I've got your report in front of me," Lucas said. "All about Edward Greenwood reporting his wife missing and then unreporting her missing after you fellas had wasted a day looking for her."

"Yeah. Like I said, a pain in the ass. Probably cost us a collar on a real case we were working. Are you going to tell me what this is about, friend? If I want to play guessing games, I have a pimp down in the box who's acting less cagey about the murder he just committed than you are about this."

"I'm sorry, Detective. We just found the body of a woman dumped in a creek out here. And we think it might be Olivia Greenwood."

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Lucas was about to prompt the other man when he heard the sound of a long sigh. It was the sigh of a man who had realized he suddenly had a lot more to worry about.

"I knew there was something off about that. I fuckin' knew it."

Mac asked for the details, and Lucas gave them. Viewing the body dump site, his initial impressions, speculation about who and why.

Then he went over the autopsy report. The details of how the victim had died, and how she had been treated before she died. The dehydration, the bruising from multiple beatings, the finger that had been cut off.

"So what I want to know is, do you have any idea how she came to be all the way out here?"

"You got me, son," Mac said. "And now we get all the fun of working it out."

Mac gave him the brief background of what he knew of the report by Olivia Greenwood's husband, though he said he would need to talk to one of the other detectives to get some of the details. It matched up with what Lucas had already gathered, plus a few extra details. The husband had seemed panicked, like he knew something bad had happened to her. But then he had dropped the whole thing after pulling strings to get damn near the whole department involved in the hunt for his wife.

"And nobody spoke to Mrs. Greenwood after he called off the hunt," Lucas said, careful not to allow any hint of judgment into his voice.

"Not my call, man, but you know what it's like. We got enough work to do—especially after chasing our tails for hours— without going looking for more work. The husband was happy, the mayor was happy. That means we were happy to close the book and get back to work."

"I get it," Lucas said. "But we have to open that book again now."

Mac let out another sigh. "Send me everything you got. I guess we need to go and tell Mr.Greenwood the bad news. I'll be interested to hear his explanation for why his wife is dead in Washington State after he said she wasn't missing anymore. And I guess you and me'll be having the next conversation in person."