Page 28

TWENTY-SEVEN

Josie hadn’t been inside Dex’s house the last time she visited. The furniture was mismatched, some of it new and some so old it looked antique. It gave the home a quirky, cozy feel, like the aesthetic was a choice, not the result of a single male purchasing things out of practicality with no thought to anything else. What marked the place as unmistakably belonging to Dex were the miniature wood carvings in various stages of completion on every surface. Most were animals or mythical creatures, just like his larger pieces.

There was evidence of someone else living in the house as well. A pair of sneakers too small to belong to him were discarded just inside the door. Scattered across the coffee table was a lip gloss, a paperback book called Boss Girl by Emma Tallon, and a pair of silver hoop earrings. Josie was seated next to Trinity on the couch, looking around, wondering if he had a girlfriend and hoping that if he did, she was good to him, when she noticed a mug half-filled with coffee on one of the end tables. It was blue with a picture of a golden trophy on it. Below that were the words: World’s Greatest Dad .

“You have kids?” Josie blurted out.

Dex took a seat in a wingback chair next to the couch, angling his body so he faced them. He smiled, only the unharmed side of his mouth lifting. “I do. A daughter. She’s out with a friend.”

“You didn’t say anything the last time I was here. I didn’t even know you were with someone.” She hadn’t asked. Too wrapped up in Lila to think about anything or anyone else. Shame poked at the armor around her heart.

“I wasn’t,” Dex said. “I haven’t had a girlfriend in years. In fact, her mother was a one-night stand. She never even told me that she was pregnant or anything. I only found out I had a little girl five years ago. Her mom died in a car accident, and I got a call from the department of health and human services telling me this nine-year-old kid was mine. Paternity test confirmed it.”

“Wow,” said Trinity. “That must have been a shock.”

Dex laughed. “I’ll say. It’s been an adjustment, but we do okay. Seems all she does is complain about me now that she’s a teenager but God, I love her big. Best thing that ever happened to me.”

The pride in his eyes was unmistakable. This was exactly the kind of happiness Josie had always wished for him. The kind only love could bring. Love that was steadfast and uncomplicated in its purity and ferocity, in the certainty it brought to every facet of your life. The kind of love that fulfilled you and made you whole, knitting together all the damaged pieces that trauma and loss had ripped from the fabric of your soul. It was exactly what Noah had given her. Exactly what they hoped to give a child one day.

Another rogue wave of emotion washed over Josie, disconcerting her, batting at her mental shields. “I’m happy for you, Dex.”

“Thank you.”

Trinity must have sensed Josie’s internal struggle, the way she was barely hanging onto her composure, because she took charge, trying to move things along. “You said something happened a week ago that made you think of calling Josie?”

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “This guy showed up out of the blue asking me about Lila.”

Josie’s spine straightened. “What was his name?”

“He only gave me a first name. Dylan.”

It could be a fake name. “How old was he?”

“Not sure. Mid- to late twenties.”

Trinity’s heel tapped along the floor. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to know if I knew Lila Jensen. I told him if he was here asking me then he knew the answer. I mentioned that she’d passed on years ago but he didn’t seem too concerned with that. He asked me when was the last time I saw her. At that point, I wanted to know who the hell he was ’cause he wasn’t a cop.”

“What did he say?” asked Josie.

“He gave me some story about Lila screwing his dad over when he was a kid. Said she scammed him out of a bunch of money and then took off. He also said she’d stolen his grandmother’s jewelry. I think that’s what he was after. He told me his dad died recently. When I asked him for a name, he refused to give me one. I asked why he came to me, and he said he thought maybe I might have kept something of Lila’s.”

The box. The kid, Dylan, was looking for the box. That had to be it. Which made it more likely that he had used a fake name.

Was it Dylan who broke into their home and threatened Noah? Was he the man her neighbor had seen walking up and down the street? Was he Mr. O Negative? Is that why he’d taken the jewelry from Lila’s box? Because it belonged to his grandmother? If that was the case, why take the photos? Maybe his father had been in one of the photos but if that was the case, why take them all and not just the one of his dad?

Her thought process snagged on something else. “How did he know about you?”

One of the newspaper clippings in Lila’s box of horrors was about the fire at their trailer that had left Dex disfigured but back then, Lila had been going by a completely different name: Belinda Rose. Then again, the kid could have found out her alias from the Dateline episodes and investigated from there. Still, Dex’s connection to Lila had never been made public.

Dex picked up a small, unfinished wooden owl and ran his fingers over the unsculpted portion. “He claimed he heard her brag about me—what she’d done to me.”

“Psycho bitch,” Trinity muttered under her breath.

Something about that still didn’t sit right with Josie. Lila bragging wasn’t implausible but her giving this kid a full name to go by seemed out of character. It was an admission of guilt, her actually explicitly confessing to one of her crimes. Then again, if Dylan was only a child when she said it, he wouldn’t understand the legal ramifications. Josie could definitely see Lila telling the story to a young boy with the implication that she might do the same to his father. She always loved to threaten children. It was one of her favorite hobbies.

What made the most sense was that Dylan had seen the box at some point. Maybe Lila showed him the clippings, hinting that she’d been behind the fire.

“Did he say where he was from?” asked Trinity.

“Nah. Didn’t answer many of my questions. Something was off about him. My opinion? He was in trouble.”

Trinity watched, fascinated, as a small woodworking tool appeared in Dex’s hand, and he started whittling at the owl. “What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that makes you desperate,” Dex said.

“Someone was coming after him,” Josie suggested. “Maybe he was in debt. It makes sense if he was grasping at straws, trying to track down Lila’s personal effects to reclaim his grandmother’s jewelry.”

It also explained why he’d taken her jewelry. Bad people coming after the kid over his debt also lined up with the theory that more than one person had been inside Josie’s home and taken Noah. Whoever Dylan had pissed off or owed money to was likely following him. Her heart did a double-tap. “Dex, you need to be careful.”

“I always am,” he said without looking up from his owl.

Trinity said, “If he wanted something from the box, why didn’t he just ask you, Josie? He asked Dex. You probably would have shown him if he’d just been honest with you, right?”

It was a valid question. Had anyone shown up on Josie’s doorstep claiming to be a victim of Lila Jensen looking for personal items she’d stolen, Josie would have shared the contents of the box freely. Why would he approach Dex but not her? Why break in and harm her husband?

“I wouldn’t have turned him away,” Josie answered. “But if he was as squirrely as Dex says, I might have demanded a lot more information from him.”

“You’re a police officer,” Dex said. “That’s why he didn’t just approach you. Whatever he’s got himself into, it ain’t legal. He wouldn’t want to risk you asking too many questions, given your position.”

Or maybe the people he was running from were closing in too quickly for him to try to finesse his way to accessing the box.

“What was he driving?” Josie asked.

Under Dex’s quick strokes, the face of a second owl appeared, emerging from the wood, startlingly lifelike. “A beat-up sedan. Blue. When he left, I wrote down the plate number. Pennsylvania tags.”

Trinity looked from his hands to his face. “Really?”

He chuckled. “Yeah, really. Kid creeped me the hell out and I learned my lesson when it comes to Lila Jensen. Pay the hell attention to everything, even if it seems like nothing.”

Adrenaline shot through Josie’s veins. “You gave it to the state police?”

“Of course. Don’t know if anything will come of it.”

It wouldn’t surprise her at all if the car had been stolen.

Dex kept talking while he carved out the body of the second owl. “He was sitting right here in this room, telling his tall tales, looking as nervous as could be, and you know what I kept thinking about, Josie?”

Her palms were sweaty. “What’s that?”

“That old fingerprint kit you used to mess around with when you were a kid.”

Josie inched forward in her seat, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Dex, if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I’m going to kiss you.”

He laughed, hands working at warp speed now, the second owl’s talons appearing, as if by magic. “He was a coffee drinker. Put the mug into a paper lunch bag after he left and hid it in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. That state police detective was just tickled when I handed it over to her this morning.”

“Holy shit,” said Trinity.

Dex brushed off the sculpture and held it out to Trinity. “Twins.”

Josie watched her sister accept it with a look of reverence. The owls were identical, sitting side by side on a branch, majestic and beautiful, their eyes expressive, almost hypnotic. “I can keep this?” Trinity asked.

Dex’s half-smile appeared. “Sure can. Josie, you don’t have to kiss me. Just find your husband.”