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“Why am I not surprised?”
“You shouldn’t be,” Bridget teased. “I’m amazing.”
“It would be amazing if you got to the information I need.”
“Pfft,” she snorted. “Spoilsport.”
This girl was going to be the death of me.
“I did a facial match on the current Sheila to the girl in the photo the Senator and his wife provided to the police,” she told me. “Let me tell you. The 1950s sucked. Luckily, most of the precincts nowadays are scanning everything into the system, otherwise I would have had to dig through the newspaper archives, and those archives are so messy, and you can’t really find anything because they don’t—”
“Bridget!”
“Right.” She coughed awkwardly. “Sheila’s real name is Margaret Melozzi, Italian. Born to Greg and Jane Melozzi in 1958 in Portland, Oregon. Went missing when she was three. Police chalked it up to a kidnapping, but the timeline didn’t match up.”
“Where are they now?” I asked.
“Dead. Died in a house fire in 1976.”
“The same year she married Seamus McDonough.”
Bridget nodded.
“Funny thing is,” she clicked over to another screen, “there are more than five dozen cases of missing children, mostly girls, in the last sixty years.”
“That can’t be a coincidence.”
Bridget shook her head. “It isn’t,” she agreed. “Especially since the one thing that links all of those children is the fact that their parents were killed on their eighteenth birthday.”
I cursed under my breath. This was much bigger than anyone thought.
“What else can you tell me?”
Bridget rolled her shoulders. Her fingers flew across the neon keyboard like a rocket. Soon, the screen was filled with images, documents, and video footage. Fuck.
“Now that I know the link, I went searching for the missing children using a combination of an age progression matrix and significant facial structures that remain the same over time, like eye color, hair color, etc.”
“The problem is that even though CCTV was invented in 1929, the ability to record said footage didn’t come around until the 1970s when VCRs were invented,” she rambled. “So anything before that is pretty done for, and honestly, most places don’t store CCTV for longer than a few days after the incident unless a crime was committed or something.”
“Back to the point.” I guided her back toward the topic. Liam warned me she was a bit squirrely with her thoughts and often went off on tangents.
“Right.” She nodded. “I dug through years’ worth of newspaper articles, wedding and death announcements, funeral photos…well, my program did. I just sorted through the possibilities once it made possible matches and found several of the missing children from before the 1980s. Everyone between 1920 and the late 1940s is dead, but damn, they were some popular names.”
“Anyone I would know?”
“One disappeared circumnavigating the globe.”
Blyad’.
“Every heard of the Glastonbury Mountain?” she asked. I nodded. “It was dubbed the Bennington Triangle, and from 1920 to 1950, more than ten people disappeared there. All but two of the pictures of the missing people are a direct match for the missing kids. The two that didn’t match were anomalies. A college student and an eight-year-old boy.”
“Could have come across something you weren’t supposed to.”
“I mean, the list goes on and on all the way up to five days ago when tech billionaire John Rosentry died in a penthouse fire. His daughter went missing when she was ten.”
That was another anomaly.
“Don’t most of the children go missing when they’re toddlers?”
