Patterson Blake FBI Thriller 05-Dark Road From Sunrise by Strong A M-Sargent Sonya

Author:Strong, A M-Sargent, Sonya [Strong, A M-Sargent, Sonya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, American Suspense, Police Procedura, Crime Thriller, FBI, Murder Investigation
Publisher: West Street Publishing
Published: 2023-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

THIRTY-SEVEN

As soon as she got off the phone with Stacy, Patterson had gone to work on her laptop searching the law enforcement databases for any clue to who the girl found in the ditch might be. She started with the obvious. The high school sweatshirt, but just as the investigators before her had discovered, there were no reports of any missing girls who attended William Brady High. And not just in the timeframe that matched when the body was found, but ever. In the entire history of the school, none of their students had vanished. At least, if they had, it wasn’t in any of the databases.

After two hours, she was no closer to uncovering the identity of the Jane Doe in the ditch than she was before, and therefore no closer to uncovering a link between that girl and Julie. But when she expanded her search in NamUs to include all the caucasian women who went missing between 2004 and 2008 and had been last been seen within the vicinity of Bend, Oregon, she got two hits. The first was easily discounted. The woman was forty-eight years old when she went missing. But the second hit made Patterson’s heart race. An eighteen-year-old who had gone missing in 2005.

Her name was Laura Beth Layton. She had left her parents’ house after an argument about her boyfriend and never returned. It wasn’t the first time she had run away. She was a troubled teen who had gone missing on three previous occasions but had always come back. This time, she didn’t.

Patterson scrolled through the rest of the information, noting that her height matched that of the woman found in the ditch. The timeline matched, too. About a year before Julie went missing. It was a long time, but who knew how many months Laura Beth Layton had been out there on her own before she crossed paths with a killer. Certainly, she had traveled a long distance, either voluntarily or under duress. It was over twelve hundred miles from her hometown to Santa Fe. Assuming that she was the same person, of course. The only way to confirm that would be with a DNA test comparing a member of the missing woman’s family to the girl in the ditch.

Patterson wasn’t surprised that she only got two hits despite the number of people who were reported missing each year in the United States. Over six hundred thousand. Most of those were found in short order, which was one reason why they weren’t in the database, but there was still a huge percentage, thousands each year, who were never seen again. But not all those people ended up in the database, especially if they had been missing for a decade or more. Unless new information came to light, most cold cases languished because of time constraints, lack of investigative personnel, or simply that they ended up forgotten about. Many Police Departments simply did not have the manpower or budget to enter all their unsolved cases into the variety of national databases at their disposal.

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