Wendy Hornsby - Midnight Baby

“Whatever you say,” I said, and put his desk back in order.

We spent about an hour poring through a registry of copyrighted jewelers’ symbols, comparing each one to the sketch Mike had made of the stamp inside Pisces’ ring.

“What does the symbol look like to you?” he asked.

“Could be an R or a G,” I said. “Or maybe a Greek omega. What do you think?”

“Just keep looking. If the ring came from a large chain store or wholesaler, figuring out who made it probably isn’t going to lead us anywhere.”

My eyes got tired from using a big, scratched magnifying glass. I wasn’t very hopeful.

Mike was far more patient, meticulously looking back and forth between possibilities in the book and the sketch, and back to the ring. He made notes of a few of the more likely candidates. Finally, he handed the ring to me and pointed to a listing in the book.

“Got it,” he said. “It’s no Greek whatsis. It’s a rainbow.” The listing he showed me was for a custom jeweler down in Long Beach, Rainbows.

“Custom jeweler,” I said. “That’s a break.”

“We’ll check it out.”

“What happens when we identify her, Mike? We still won’t know who killed her.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “It’s just part of the drill, Maggie. Don’t you want to know who she is?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “But it seems to me that we’re looking for two different girls. One of them was a middle-class teenager who took music and learned how to set the table. The other was Pisces, the street urchin. Which one of them was murdered?”

“Good question.” The pager on Mike’s belt sounded, and he unclipped it from his belt. “The thing is, they’re both gone.” He put his reading glasses back on, held the pager against the light, and flashed the readout of the caller’s number. “Coroner,” he said, frowning. “Wonder what, huh?” He reached for the telephone and dialed.

“Mike Flint returning your call,” he said. He listened, gave me a look of absolute puzzlement. “Thanks for alerting me. I’ll be right there.”

Mike grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair.

“What is it?” I asked, following close on his heels.

“Someone has come to the morgue to claim the kid’s body.”

“Who?”

“Get to steppin’ and we’ll find out.”

Officially, Mike’s city car was on a salvage list. When it reached ninety-six thousand miles or so, it was supposed to be scrapped. But because there was no budget for a replacement, he had never turned it over. Most of the cars in the police lot were on the same list.

Even though on that day Mike’s heap was forty thousand miles beyond the city’s definition of junk, Mike made it move. We blasted out of the Civic Center with all eight geriatric cylinders pinging, and roared down Mission Road toward the county morgue in Lincoln Heights.

I rolled down my window and took in all the fresh air I could, wishing I could save it up somehow. This would be my second trip to the morgue with Mike. What I remembered most vividly was the smell. Once you have been there, you never forget the smell.

Mike bounced through the potholes in the asphalt drive of the massive County – USC Medical Center campus and jerked to a stop in a no-parking zone right beside the front steps of the morgue. He bounded out of the car, his jacket flying out, his holstered automatic bouncing on his hip. I was right beside him.

To my great relief, we were headed for the front door. Last time I had gone in through the back way, through guest reception. That had been surreal, a charnel house. The front was mauve marble and mahogany office doors. The only stiff was a bureaucrat snoring at his desk.

Inside one of the offices that opened off the lobby, I could see a man and a woman sitting together. He was grim-faced and pale, she wept softly against his chest. They were in their early forties, I guessed. Except for their grief, there was nothing remarkable about them, a couple in ordinary Saturday clothes: jeans, sneakers, windbreakers. The woman was thin and blond, probably pretty under better circumstances. The man had a fair-sized sports-fan gut; a big man who worked with his hands.

They looked like nice, careful people. Not the sort who might mislay a daughter.

“Mike?” A small Oriental woman came out of the office where the couple sat. She wore business attire, a lightweight wool suit and low-heeled shoes. Clipped to her lapel was a coroner’s investigator badge.

As we walked to meet her, Mike whispered in my ear. “Act like a cop. You’re probably not supposed to be here.”

“How does a cop act?” I asked.

“You know.” He grinned. “Pushy, like you own the place. Just let me do the talking.”

He offered his hand to the investigator.

“Sharon Yamasaki,” he said, “this is MacGowen.”

She smiled at me and reached for my hand. Her eyes lit up, as if a light bulb had come on inside. “You’re Maggie MacGowen.”

“Guilty,” I said, and nudged Mike with my toe.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said. “I saw you interviewed on PBS last week. Program about reporting from a war zone. It was very interesting.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

“Is Mike helping you with research for a project?”

“In a way,” I said, and smiled at him.

“When you two are finished?” Mike tugged on my arm.

I pulled away from him and moved closer to Sharon Yamasaki. “Who are those people?”

She glanced at the couple inside. “Mr. and Mrs. Metrano. They say that someone called and told them that our young Jane Doe is their missing daughter.”

“Did you call them?”

“No.”

“Have they viewed the body?” Mike asked.

“Yes. On video.”

“They ID her?”

Yamasaki held up her hands. “People sometimes see what they want to see. Why don’t you talk to them. I promise you, it’s a puzzler.”

We walked into the office, and Yamasaki did introductions all around. “George and Leslie Metrano, Detective Flint, Maggie MacGowen.”

I rolled their names over in my mental Rolodex a couple of times. Nothing came up right away, but I knew the card was there.

Then I looked at them both closely, rudely I guess, trying to match their features to Pisces. I saw no obvious likeness, but they seemed to be within the range of possibility.

“How long has your daughter been missing?” Mike asked them.

“Ten years, five months, twelve days,” Leslie Metrano said, her voice breaking.

“Ten years is a long time,” Mike said. “Kids change pretty fast when they’re growing up. What makes you think this girl is your daughter?”

“A mother knows.”

“Possibly.” Mike looked very uncomfortable. “But we’ll need something more concrete before we can release the body to you. Do you have dental records?”

“She was only four years old when she was taken from us,” George Metrano said. “She had never been to the dentist.”

Mike nodded. “We can draw samples from you and run a DNA match. The results from that are damned near hundred-percent. Problem is, results will take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Is there anything you can offer in the meantime, fingerprints we might match with Jane Doe?”

“She has a name,” Leslie cried out. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”

“Jesus Christ.” Mike sat down on the closest chair and stared at them. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”

I remembered the little blond with big brown eyes. There had been-posters with her pretty round face everywhere for over a year. As I recalled the story, little Amy had disappeared during a family picnic in the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. I couldn’t remember all of the details. She had been playing hide and seek in the woods with older siblings and various other children. She hid and they never found her again.