Chapter 2

The bride gave her 'witness' an accusing glare, but only got a cherubic smile in return.

Everyone adjourned to Max's bar after the ceremony. It was not fashionable or 'wedding reception' like, but it had food and booze all of which was on the house in honor of his daughter's wedding.

"Can you believe that after extensive testing of the plane crash victims, none of the dental records matched Clark Palmer?!" Woody asked the group around the table, each one of which would know just what that meant.

Jordan was the one to say it out loud, "So that means he wasn't on the plane…he's not dead after all."

Lily reached over to pat her friends hand as her voice became more agitated, "That means he's still out there somewhere! Damn it! I was so glad when I thought he was dead! Now what do we do?" Jordan asked.

"I will renew the APB on him to every police station in the country, but with the time he has had to disappear and his disguise abilities, I don't hold out much hope unless he gets careless and Palmer didn't strike me as the careless type," Woody answered his wife of less than an hour. He wanted to assure Jordan that they would get Palmer and put his conniving, manipulative, lying, evil ass behind bars for the rest of his life. But, Woody was all too personally aware of just how superlative Palmer was at getting away with things and he was afraid that the bastard was long gone.

Harmon Rabb Jr. found himself in one hell of a situation because of the stunt that Clark Palmer had pulled. Because he had been in contact with his mother over another lie Palmer had perpetuated, she and Harm's step-father were aware that the news of his death in a plane crash was false. However, there were many friends who thought it was real, so his family received many sympathy calls they had to correct.

That actually turned out to be the easiest part of the whole nightmare. Because he had been declared dead, his bank account had been frozen, the Navy was no longer sending him pay checks, and because a dead man can't try cases, he couldn't even work!

The Admiral, Mac, Bud, and even Coates had all signed affidavits saying that Harmon Rabb Jr. was indeed alive, but each one of them had either taunted him, ribbed him, or at least grinned, when they signed the document. As if all that were not enough, his driver's license was also invalid, so someone had to chauffer him around to all the appointments he had made to get it established that he was really still alive!

It took two days short of a month to get everything sorted out and allow him to return to work!

Jordan continued to work so saw Garret and Lily everyday. They were continuing to date, but Lily was wondering if it wasn't time they were progressing to the next level of their relationship. Privately, Jordan wondered if Garret ever would be ready for that.

The weekend after their wedding Boston was hit with a late season snow storm. Saturday morning the city woke to find seventeen inches of snow had fallen overnight and it was still coming down throughout the day. By the time Monday morning rolled around twenty eight inches of the white stuff was on the ground and the city's inhabitants were struggling to dig themselves out.

Woody had been working most of the weekend to keep his car from being buried by the falling snow as well as the ever present snow plows. He insisted on driving Jordan to work that morning and she shocked everyone she came into contact with that she was there on time.

Jordan had just finished an autopsy on a homeless man that had frozen to death in the weekend blizzard. Lily was still working on trying to identify the man they only knew as Little Fred by gently questioning the elderly homeless man the police had brought in with the body.

Little Fred was just that. He wasn't even five feet tall and weighed slightly over one hundred pounds. He clearly was malnourished as well as being almost skeletal. The team was busy running all the usual tests on the body. Jordan had taken dental impressions and sighed to discover that Little Fred only had seven teeth left in his mouth. Bug had taken his fingerprints, but thought that there wasn't much hope on that front due to the condition of the body by the time they had gotten it. Nigel was off with Little Fred's clothes to see what clues he could get from them.

To be continued…