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TWELVE

Blue and red emergency beacons flashed in front of Josie’s home, so similar to the scene she’d found at the children’s hospital site only hours ago. The entire street was flooded with police vehicles. Cruisers, two marked SUVs used by their Evidence Response Team, and the personal vehicles of Turner, Gretchen, and their Chief, Bob Chitwood. Josie sat in the back seat of Gretchen’s SUV, the door hanging open. The first units to arrive had found blood in the driveway. Josie had been ushered from her own vehicle to the pavement until more of her colleagues arrived.

Trout snoozed in her lap. He was the only thing she’d carried from the house. Finding his leash in the detritus of their home seemed like a herculean task and she hadn’t wanted to risk further damaging the integrity of what was clearly a crime scene. She’d already traipsed through the house once to search for Noah and ensure there were no intruders present. In any other circumstances, she would have been far more careful in clearing a structure.

But this wasn’t just any crime scene. It was the home she shared with her husband. This was her life.

Numbly, she watched uniformed officers go door to door in both directions, canvassing. She wondered if any of her neighbors had lost their Wi-Fi or only them. Had they been targeted? This was a fairly safe neighborhood. Only one or two of the residents on her street had external cameras. On the sidewalk, Gretchen directed things while the Chief paced beside her, his cell phone pressed to his ear. Josie could hear him barking at someone on the other end, dropping more f-bombs than she’d ever heard him use before.

“I don’t fucking care whose ass you have to drag out of bed. Get everyone up. Every person you fucking know. I need your people here an hour ago. Somebody better start breaking some land-speed records right fucking now or I’ll crawl so far up your ass, you’ll need a root canal to get rid of me.”

Josie stroked Trout’s warm back, concentrating hard on the weight of him across her legs. She was aware that from the moment she stepped outside with him in her arms, her mind had begun systematically shutting down. Some protective part of her had emerged, an efficient little housekeeper who lived inside her brain, whose sole purpose was to sweep up all the fear, worry, panic, and creeping devastation, and deposit it into Josie’s mental vault. Her emotions were locked up tight in a titanium box right next to the place where the bad things lived. All she could feel were physical sensations. It was all she could bear right now.

Where was he?

On their front lawn, Officer Hummel, the head of their ERT, was embroiled in a hushed but heated discussion with Turner. Both men gesticulated wildly. Hummel kept motioning toward the street while Turner stabbed a finger in the direction of the house and then tapped against an imaginary wristwatch.

She knew what was happening. Denton PD couldn’t investigate the disappearance of one of their own. They’d had to call the state police. This was their case. In terms of evidence collection, Hummel’s team could give them an assist, process the house alongside them, but they couldn’t enter the premises until a state police evidence tech arrived. That could take anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours—or longer. Time that could be crucial in terms of locating Noah.

Alive. Locating him alive.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

Getting nowhere with Hummel, Turner stalked off. He stopped in front of the open car door and yanked at his beard. It was his nervous tic. Dimly, Josie realized she had worked with him long enough to know his nervous tic. “Quinn,” he said. “Are you sure you saw the LT’s phone in there?”

For the last hour, she had been replaying every inch of her journey through the house, picking through all the things her subconscious had cataloged for her to examine later, the things her rising panic hadn’t allowed her to focus on at the time. “It was in the living room. On the floor.”

Everything was on the floor.

They wouldn’t be able to ping Noah’s location using his cell phone. It had been left behind. The state police would be able to get a geofence warrant to try tracking down whoever had broken into the house.

Turner sighed and yanked at his beard again. “His weapon. Where does he keep it when he’s not on duty? Did you see it?”

“We keep them in lockboxes in our bedroom.” Josie licked her dry lips. Trout shuddered in his sleep. “His was open. He must have retrieved it. I think he?—”

Closing her eyes, she tried to mentally create the scenario as it must have unfolded. Noah was in the nursery, setting up the makeshift mural for her, when he heard something. As a guard dog, Trout was unreliable. If he was sleeping deeply enough, he wouldn’t hear a bomb go off in the next room. Sometimes, if someone came to the front door, he’d charge it, barking up a storm, as he had the first time Turner had come to the house. Other times, he was too lazy to run to the door, instead staying in place and growling to alert Josie and Noah that something was amiss.

But Trout had been inside the nursery, which meant that Noah heard someone in the house and tucked the dog away in the room while he went to check things out. He would have had his phone. She could practically see his path, like she was following him, looking over his shoulder. Emerging from the nursery, whatever he thought he’d heard became clearer. There was definitely someone in the house. Their friend, Misty, and Josie’s sister, Trinity, both had keys to their home, but Trinity was in New York City and Misty would have knocked if she knew one of them was home.

Noah did exactly what Josie had done. Instead of calling dispatch and requesting units, he’d held off, getting his pistol from his lockbox in their bedroom and attempting to clear the house on his own. She had a sudden mental flash of her jewelry box on their bedroom floor. Broken and empty. Perhaps Noah encountered the intruder there first. Something had happened in that room that resulted in the perpetrator fleeing downstairs. Noah retrieved his pistol and gave chase, catching up to him in the living room.

She couldn’t bear to imagine what happened next. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense.

“Quinn.” Turner’s voice drew her out of her thoughts. “Talk to me.”

“His Glock is in the living room,” she said. “With the phone. Among the…debris. I saw it.”

“All right,” Turner said. “Good, that’s good, but I need to know what else you’re working on. I can see your wheels turning.”

On any other day, she would have taken a jab at him, telling him she wasn’t going to do all of his thinking for him, but he hadn’t seen the inside of the house. He had even less context than she did. Trout stretched, his little legs locking and then relaxing. She soothed him back to sleep while she recounted her thought process for Turner.

His eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. Did you say nursery? Quinn, are you pregnant?”

They knew virtually nothing about one another’s personal lives. Josie had never asked him about his and as far as she was concerned, he hadn’t earned access to hers. Turner was the only one on the team who didn’t know she and Noah were trying to adopt a baby. “No,” she said. “We’re, um, adopting. Just waiting for a match.”

“Huh,” Turner said, regarding her with a look she couldn’t decipher.

The last thing she wanted to discuss was their adoption plans. “The coffee table in the living room was cracked, broken. There was blood. That’s where I saw Noah’s phone and his Glock. The foyer—” Her voice nearly cracked as the detail came back to her. She hadn’t been able to process it while still inside, searching for Noah. “There’s a bullet hole in the foyer wall. The direction…the bullet would have had to come from the living room.”

“Which means he confronted someone there,” Turner said, picking up her train of thought. “Assuming the bullet came from Noah’s weapon. I know you think things started in your bedroom but there was no blood there, right?”

“I don’t think so. No. I don’t remember seeing any.”

Turner nodded rapidly, looking like a bobblehead. His fingers drummed against the side of his leg. “Maybe Noah retrieved his weapon, went downstairs, shit went sideways and then the house got tossed after the fact.”

It could have gone either way, but it really didn’t matter. Her husband was gone.

One of Turner’s feet tapped against the asphalt. She’d never seen him this twitchy. “Whatever happened—the real shit went down in your living room. Noah’s a big guy and he was armed but clearly, he wasn’t able to subdue the person who broke in.”

They wouldn’t know if the shot had come from his gun until the evidence was collected and processed. If it had, that meant that Noah had missed, which was unusual for him. He was an excellent shot, cool under pressure. Unless he’d fired more than one and the others had found their mark. If that was the case, where was the wounded intruder? What the hell had happened in there?

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

“There was more than one guy,” Turner said. “Had to be.”

That might explain why Noah had missed or only been able to fire a single bullet. She was also fairly certain it took more than one person to cause the unholy mess inside her house. But why had they taken him? It didn’t make sense. Assuming he was still alive, holding onto him for any length of time would be dangerous for them. There was no point in that. It wasn’t as if they’d try to get a ransom for him. Doing so would be reckless and just plain stupid. Law enforcement didn’t make enough money to be targeted for ransom. The most logical explanation was that they’d killed him, in which case the smartest thing would be to remove his body and bury it somewhere no one would ever find him.

No. Josie didn’t accept that. She couldn’t. Maybe that made her naive since she’d been on the job long enough to know just how slim the odds were that Noah was still alive, but she refused to entertain the thought. Until she knew otherwise, she was going to operate under the assumption—no, the certainty—that her husband was still alive.

“What do you think this was, Quinn?” asked Turner. “A robbery?”

“They didn’t take any electronics.” She flashed to their bedroom again. Her jewelry box had been looted. “But I had some jewelry. They took all of that. Most of it wasn’t valuable but there were some rings and a necklace that were worth a lot.”

There was the engagement ring from her first husband, Ray, with its matching wedding band, the diamond pendant he had bought for her, the ring from her failed engagement with Luke Creighton, and the ring Noah had proposed with, which she didn’t wear on duty. Those items alone were worth thousands.

“Okay, okay,” Turner said, starting to pace before her. One hand continued beating rapidly against his leg while the other tore at his beard. “The string of armed robberies. There was one in Bellewood where they managed to knock out the Wi-Fi. That’s what I heard, anyway. The ones here, well, they made a mess, took the jewelry but they also took the electronics.”

Josie scratched between Trout’s ears. He sighed in his sleep. “Turner,” she said softly.

Something about the tone of her voice made him stop pacing, stop moving altogether. It was the weakness. She just knew it. The vulnerability in her tone. She hated it. Turner took a step toward her, hands slack at his sides, and leaned in, bringing his face level with hers. His blue eyes were void of mischief, impatience, of everything. This was him listening. Truly listening.

Josie tried to make her voice stronger, but it still came out a little raspy. “They were looking for something.”

Turner glanced at the front lawn where Hummel still waited for his state police counterpart. When he brought his focus back to her, she knew he believed her. Still, he had to ask, “Looking for what? What do you two have, besides your jewelry, that someone wants badly enough to break in, trash everything, and kidnap a grown man? A cop, no less. What do you have that’s worth that kind of risk?”

“Nothing,” Josie replied. “Absolutely nothing.”