Minot Hacker: Mystery Series (My Murder Mysteries #1) by H. B. Rae

before, we would have had perhaps half a chance of identifying this woman. Since the door-to-door enquiries did no good at all, I decided to return to the station, to wait for the post-mortem.
    Later that day, the post-mortem came back, and inside it, it revealed that the woman probably died somewhere between the years of 1980 and 1990. That was useful to a certain extent, because if I were to find a lead, I could relate back to this to help identify the woman. However, it did not help me get any closer to identifying the woman at the moment, which was the most important thing. All I needed was one person to come forward and say that they knew this mystery woman. Someone did. I was certain of that. Someone had to know the details about this woman's disappearance. The report also said that she was probably between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. That narrowed it down slightly, but it still did not help much. I was going to go and use the missing person's database to see if I could get a lead on this, but I asked Mitchell (not the boss, the other Mitchell) to go instead, as I was too busy analyzing the report.
    The report also contained the grisly details of the woman's death: where on the body she was stabbed, how deep the wounds were, what type of instrument was used, and so on. It proved to be of little use, even though I now knew exactly how she died. I had previously deduced that the person who killed her was a psychopath, though a very clever one, as they had gotten away with it – up until now, at least. I hoped this person was still alive so that they could be punished for what they did. No-one at all deserved to die that way.
    Mitchell returned with several files full of details of women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who went missing between the years of 1980 and 1990 in North Dakota. Finally things were narrowed down a bit, as there were only thirteen reported missing people. For the first time I was beginning to get quite excited, since I now had pictures of people and different pieces of information to go on. Sadly, none of the files gave any details about a woman in a pink dress – some had been out at parties the night they vanished, and others were at home, so I was able to narrow things down even further, but I still had seven women who were on the suspect list for being this woman. I was close, but sadly, not close enough, as I could not come up with a convincing argument, with evidence, that any of the women in the files was actually the dead woman. I assumed that most of these women were dead themselves, but I knew deep down that one of these women was the woman we had found. Although it was possible that the woman was not reported missing, it was improbable, as there was likely to be someone who noticed her disappearance and reported it.
    Seeing nowhere else to go, I decided to launch a public appeal in order to see if anyone knew this woman. This was probably (and hopefully) going to be the most challenging part of the case. The television and radio companies stormed in with this story, and they were eager to report the discovery of this mystery woman. They gave details of where she was found, and the pink dress that she was wearing. I was hoping that someone would be able to recall the pink dress, even though there was no mention of it in any of the missing person's files. I knew that it was a long shot, but worth a try, as I had nothing at all to lose.
    I was extremely lucky, because the very next day a visitor arrived at the station wanting to talk to me about the missing woman.
    "Hello," I said to her as she walked in.
    She was a small woman, aged around fifty, and she wore cheap clothes and she was quite plump. Her hair was greasy, her face full of spots, but she approached me in a friendly manner.
    "My name is Lesley Kurtis," she said, quite nervous about talking to me.
    "I'm Tammy Williams," I said, eager to see what this woman knew. "I understand that you have some information