“A senator with a very large gambling debt.”
Just like Senator Crowe. Except the daughter he tried to sell was not his.
“Sounds like a theme.”
Bridget snickers. “Well, I did say to myself, ‘Bridg, if one disgusting baldheaded Senator sold his daughter for money, how many others did as well?’ And you know what I found?”
“The jackpot?”
“The jackpot,” she confirms.
“Why am I not surprised?”
“You shouldn’t be,” Bridget teases. “I’m amazing.”
“It would be amazing if you got to the information I need.”
“Pfft,” she snorts. “Spoilsport.”
This girl is 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 tells 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 coughs 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 ask.
“Dead. Died in a house fire in 1976.”
“The same year she married Seamus McDonough.”
Bridget nods.
“Funny thing is,” she clicks 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 shakes her head. “It isn’t,” she agrees. “Especially since the one thing that links all of those children is the fact that their parents were killed on their eighteenth birthday.”
I curse under my breath. This is much bigger than anyone thought.
“What else can you tell me?”
Bridget rolls her shoulders. Her fingers fly across the neon keyboard like a rocket. Soon, the screen fills 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 rambles. “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 guide her back toward the topic. Liam warned me she is a bit squirrely with her thoughts and often goes off on tangents.
“Right.” She nods. “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.”