Page 29

TWENTY-EIGHT

Josie didn’t even realize she was falling asleep until the sound of Trinity’s nails tapping against the table between them startled her awake. She’d never found the booths in Komorrah’s Koffee to be particularly comfortable until now. Then again, she was running on four hours of fitful sleep, enough caffeine to keep a horse awake for a month, and fear.

Noah had been gone twenty-four hours.

Blinking the grit from her eyes, Josie straightened her body and looked around. There was only one other occupied table. Two college students across from one another, each of them focused on their laptops. They both had earbuds in and yet, occasionally, they’d bark something out to one another without making eye contact. Playing a video game together, Josie guessed. At the front, the barista leaned against the counter, scrolling on her phone.

“You don’t have to be here for this,” Trinity said. “Go back to Gretchen’s and try to sleep.”

“I won’t be able to sleep. Besides, I want to see how he acts with you.”

Trinity rolled her eyes and took a sip of the caramel macchiato she’d ordered. “You’re obsessed.”

Josie didn’t deny it. “I need a distraction. This is a good one.”

Trinity huffed. “I don’t know what you’re expecting to witness.”

“Me neither.”

The jangle of a bell announced that someone had come into the shop. Kyle Turner filled the doorway, pulling up short just inside and searching until he spotted them. With a curt nod to the barista, he strode over and muscled his way into the seat next to Josie. His head swiveled in her direction, looking her over. There was something in his eyes Josie had never seen before, and she didn’t like it one bit. It nearly killed her when she realized she’d rather see his cocky grin than this.

“Don’t,” Josie snapped.

His head reared back. “Don’t what?”

“She doesn’t like pity,” Trinity said.

Turner focused his attention on her. The two of them smiled at one another. Genuine smiles. Maybe this was worse than Turner’s pity. Josie was going to be sick.

“Miss Payne,” he said.

“Kyle, thank you for coming.”

There was something between them, for sure. It wasn’t flirting or even attraction, but it was something. Mutual respect. That was it. Her sister commanded respect in everything she did, but Turner? Josie still didn’t see it and with Noah missing, she didn’t have the inclination to interrogate the two of them about their prior connection or whatever the hell they weren’t telling her.

He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out one of his canned energy drinks. The pop of the tab seemed unusually loud. After guzzling what must have been half of it down, he used the back of his hand to wipe errant piss-yellow drops from his upper lip. “Quinn,” he said. “I’m not supposed to feel bad for you?”

“It’s a cardinal sin,” Trinity explained.

Josie stared straight ahead at her untouched blonde latte. “Pity isn’t going to bring Noah back.”

Turner sighed. “No, it’s not, but you know how much I love to piss you off, and a pissed-off Josie Quinn might be exactly the thing to bring Noah home. So yeah, I feel really fucking bad for you.”

That sounded suspiciously like a compliment. Sort of. Maybe. But for the sake of having some normalcy, she said, “Screw you, douchebag.”

“Josie!” Trinity admonished.

“You’re not getting a dollar for that,” Josie added.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take it out of your jar back at the stationhouse. Now, are you ready to hear what I have to say?”

“Please,” said Trinity.

“For the record, I was already pissed off before you walked in here.”

Ignoring her, Turner started talking. “Wait’ll you hear this crazy shit. The prints on the mug from your guy in Fairfield match the prints found in your house, prints found in two of the armed robberies, and…” He paused, blue eyes sparkling, as if listening to a silent drumroll.

“What?” Josie asked irritably.

“They match prints found on the knife that killed Gina Phelan.”

Josie’s spine snapped straight. “What?”

Her voice was loud enough to draw the attention of the college students. Turner smiled at them and they went back to their laptops.

“That’s right,” said Turner smugly. “This Dylan, or whoever the hell he is, was involved in at least two of the armed robberies—the ones over in Bellewood, not in our jurisdiction—then he went to your friend’s house last week and yesterday, he stabbed Gina Phelan around two in the afternoon before he hit your house in the evening.”

“Were there other prints on the knife used to stab Gina Phelan?” Josie asked.

“One unidentified partial,” Turner answered. “Which may or may not belong to blondie.”

Josie pictured the blonde woman running away, plunging into the crowd, not looking back. Covered in blood. Gina’s or hers? Or both? “When Hummel typed the blood on the blade, how many types did he come up with?”

“Just one,” Turner said. “Same blood type as Gina Phelan’s. Hummel was able to pull DNA from the knife handle but if this guy isn’t in CODIS, that won’t help. And before you ask, I’ve been over everything we’ve got on the Phelan case twenty times trying to shake something loose now that I know it’s connected to the LT. We even managed to grab a couple more videos from some businesses across the street that weren’t cooperating the first time they were canvassed. Unfortunately, they don’t show us anything more than what we’ve already got.”

Josie’s mind labored to slot all of this information into a puzzle that was exponentially bigger than she’d initially thought. From what they knew about the string of armed robberies, there were at least three men involved. The two unlucky residents who had been home when the burglars struck gave statements to that effect. Unfortunately, the perpetrators had worn hoodies and gaiters, making it impossible for those witnesses to give a description that might help locate them. If Dylan was part of the armed robbery crew, that tracked with the theory that more than one person had broken into her home and subdued Noah.

Heather would definitely be focusing more heavily on the armed robbery angle now.

Josie would be taken off the Gina Phelan case. Burglary would be one of the charges filed against the perpetrators in Noah’s abduction case which made Josie a victim as well since she lived with him. It put her too close to Gina’s murder case and risked tainting that investigation.

Josie mumbled a curse.

Turner must have figured out what she was thinking. He smiled, stoking her irritation. “Looks like you’ll have to rely on my exceptional detecting skills to solve Gina Phelan’s case ’cause the Chief is going to take you off it.”

Josie gave him her best death glare. It wasn’t official. Not yet.

“Did you call Tilly Phelan at least?”

Turner drained the rest of his energy drink. “Of course. Couldn’t tell her much though. We’re not releasing the stuff about the prints. Not yet. I don’t think she likes me.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Josie said.

Trinity’s nails clicked against the sides of her cup. She changed the subject. “So this Dylan and his friends are on some kind of crime spree? Also, did you say Gina Phelan? As in Phelan Construction?”

“Her name hasn’t been released, Trin.”

Her sister rolled her eyes. “No shit. I would have heard about it by now.”

Without hesitation, Turner launched into a description of what had happened outside of the children’s hospital site yesterday afternoon. Josie watched in wonder. He really did trust Trinity. As much as Josie did, evidently. It would be both their jobs if anyone found out they’d talked to her about an open investigation.

“This kid really is in trouble,” Trinity said. “He’s escalating. I read about the armed robberies. They started by targeting houses where no one was home. From what I gleaned, they stopped caring whether the residences were empty and just assaulted anyone who was inside. Now one of them—this Dylan—killed a woman for…what did you say? A necklace?”

“Seems that way,” Turner said.

“Then he broke into the home of a couple of police officers. He’s desperate, like Dex said.”

Josie wasn’t sure where the accomplices fit in. Were they just as desperate as Dylan? Had they all gotten into trouble together? Was someone after them? Had they all found themselves so deeply in debt to someone higher on the criminal food chain that they’d started breaking into homes to try and pay it off? Or was Dylan in debt to the rest of his crew? Whatever the reality, he’d been desperate enough to try to exploit his childhood connection to Lila.

“But his prints aren’t in AFIS,” Josie blurted out. Dylan had never been arrested or convicted of a crime, so his prints weren’t saved in that database, which meant they couldn’t locate him that way. He could leave his prints on every damn surface in Denton but without something more, they wouldn’t be able to find him.

“What about the tag number Dex gave the state police?” Trinity asked.

Turner said, “Stolen from some accountant in Bellewood. At gunpoint.”

Bellewood was the Alcott County seat, located about forty miles south of Denton. There was no way to know where Dylan had come from or where he lived at this point. Josie wondered if he’d stolen the car from Bellewood because he lived there or if he lived somewhere else and drove there to steal a car in order to throw police off. Criminals often started close to home because it was where they were most comfortable. The armed robberies had started in Bellewood.

Turner gripped the empty can in front of him. “There’s a statewide BOLO for the car. They tried tracking it through the infotainment system but evidently that was disabled. Loughlin’s doing the usual checks to see if it was flagged going through any tolls or anywhere else between there and Fairfield where he might have been caught on camera.”

Josie wondered how he was getting this information, who in the state police CID trusted him enough or owed him something that they’d risk their job to pass things along. Then she decided she didn’t want to know. She shifted her body so she could really look at him. Fatigue was sapping her ability to control the words that came out of her mouth. “Why are you helping me?”

Turner smirked. “’Cause your sister asked me to and I actually like her .”

Josie could count on one hand the number of times Turner had ever answered a question seriously. “It’s one thing to update me as your colleague, even if it’s frowned upon, but you’re sitting across from a journalist, giving out information that she asked you to find out and I’m guessing not all of your inquiries were through official channels.”

“So?”

“You could get in trouble.”

Turner laughed, long and loud, drawing the attention of the college students again. “Quinn, do I seem like the kind of guy who cares about trouble?”

“You don’t seem like you care about anything, actually.”

Something flared in his eyes. A momentary blip, gone in a heartbeat. Vulnerability. If Josie hadn’t been peering so intently at him, she would have missed it. It was the first chink in Turner’s armor she’d ever seen. She let it go.

He said, “Not that I don’t trust the powers that be to do their jobs. Loughlin is a fine investigator. If I was missing, I’d be damn happy to have her looking for me. But if whatever you two are cooking up is going to help get the LT back, I don’t really care if what I’m doing costs me my job.”

Josie’s mouth dropped open. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said. He probably realized it because he immediately winked and added, “Because I feel so bad for you, it’s keeping me up at night…sweetheart.”

Josie rolled her eyes. “We’re even. Keep your hands out of my jar. Let’s get on with this.”