Page 49

FORTY-EIGHT

Josie and Trinity looked one another over briefly. They were both dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. Josie wore her work boots while Trinity had on sneakers. Nothing about either of them screamed attorneys. Except maybe Trinity’s high-gloss hair.

“We’re not lawyers,” Josie said. “And we’ve never met your ex-wife.”

Squinting, Alec appraised them more thoroughly. He flicked his cigarette butt onto the ground where it rolled toward a large pile of its discarded brethren. “Well, I don’t recommend it. She’s got her lawyer on speed dial, and if she thinks you jaywalked in front of her, she’ll call him.”

Josie wondered if his opinion of his wife had been so low before he’d embezzled two hundred grand from a hospital charity. She kept silent though because she needed information from Alec and poking his sore spot wouldn’t go a long way to getting it.

“We’re here to talk to you about Lila Jensen.”

One of his eyebrows kinked. No recognition. “Who?”

Apparently, he hadn’t seen the Dateline episodes which meant that if he had ever met Lila Jensen in person, he would have known her by a different name.

“She wouldn’t have been going by that name,” Josie said. “She would have used an alias.”

Trinity pulled up the side-by-side picture of Lila on her phone and turned it toward him. He stared at the photo until the screen went blank. Another cigarette appeared in his hand. Rolling it in his palm, he said, “You’re showing me two different people.”

“Nope,” said Trinity, pulling up the side-by-side comparison again. “It’s the same woman. The ugly on the inside finally caught up to the ugly on the outside.”

Sighing, Alec looked away and lit his cigarette. In the webbing of his left hand, Josie noticed some kind of mark. Too dark to be a bruise. Ash, maybe.

Ever aware of the ticking clock and Noah’s absence, she got right to the point. “This woman, whose real name was Lila Jensen, had a news article about your embezzlement conviction among her personal items when she was arrested for a very long list of crimes. She may have even had a photo of you. Knowing her as I did, that tells me that she had something to do with the embezzlement.”

His posture stiffened. Smoke flared from his nostrils. No response.

Josie kept going. “You never publicly said what you did with the funds you stole but I’m guessing by the time you were arrested, they were no longer in your possession. Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

He chuckled darkly, puffing out smoke in rapid bursts. “Yeah, it is. With the court costs, attorney fees, restitution, and my ex-wife crawling up my ass, I only have to work here until I’m a hundred and seventy-five to pay it all back. Maybe a hundred and seventy, since I do some website design on the side—do not tell her that.”

“We won’t,” Trinity promised, watching him with fascination.

“Living the fucking dream,” he added, almost to himself.

“You gave the money to Lila, didn’t you?” Josie said. “But you never named her or turned her in which means you were either having an affair with her or she had something on you. Something so bad that you’d rather lose your job and your family and maybe even go to prison than rat her out.”

The cigarette burned down to its nub, and he flicked it onto the ground. Still no meaningful response.

Trinity said, “We’re not interested in making your life harder than it already is. Anything you tell us will be held in the strictest confidence.”

He glanced at her, brow furrowed. Josie wondered if he recognized Trinity from television. “Who are you?”

“Her victims,” Trinity answered.

A smile ghosted over his face. “Right. Was there a news article about you in this lady’s personal effects?”

“A couple, actually,” Josie said. “Some souvenirs, too. She burned our family home to the ground when we were infants. The nanny eventually died from smoke inhalation. Lila Jensen kidnapped me, passed me off as her own. Killed the man I thought was my father. Kept me in the closet for days on end with no food. Year after year. Tried to cut my face off when I was six years old.”

Josie turned her head and ran a finger along her scar. The color drained from Alec’s face.

“When I was fourteen, she burned our trailer down and disfigured her boyfriend at the time, one of the few people in my childhood who gave a shit about me.”

“She came back when we were almost thirty,” Trinity said. “Tried to kill us both.”

“Where is she?” This time, when Alec took out another cigarette, his hands shook. The mark Josie had seen earlier in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger was visible again. Small, black. A tattoo. She wasn’t close enough to see its precise shape but something about it sent up a flare in the recesses of her brain.

“Lila Jensen is dead,” Trinity said.

“But she had associates,” said Josie. “She kept things that she took from people. I’ve had them in storage for years.”

Weakly, Alec joked, “You happen to find two hundred grand in her things?”

Josie shook her head. “No, but there are people out there after something she had. We’re not sure what yet.”

“So what is this? Some kind of treasure hunt?”

“My husband is missing,” Josie said.

The lighter trembled in Alec’s hand as he lit his next smoke. “What’s that got to do with this Jensen person?”

“We’re not sure,” Trinity said.

“Whoever took my husband was looking for something in her personal effects. We think maybe that person was in trouble with someone. The kind of trouble that might get him killed. He was desperate, hoping to find the answer to his problems among the things Lila left behind, and my husband got caught up in a bad situation.”

“So we’re doing the only thing we can think to do,” Trinity added. “Which is to talk to Lila’s other victims and try to trace her movements and crimes in the years before her death.”

“It’s a long shot,” Josie admitted. “But I’ll turn over every rock on this planet if it means finding him.”

Alec held Josie’s gaze for a long moment. “Your husband. He a good guy?”

A swift and unexpected surge of emotion clogged Josie’s throat. She swallowed it. “The best.”

Alec nodded, seeming to consider something.

Josie coughed. “You should know who we are—our names and?—”

He raised a palm to silence her. “No. I don’t want to know. The less I know, the better. I’ve spent the last eight years paying for what happened, not just with my job and my family and my financial security. With my soul. You understand that?”

Josie nodded.

“When you leave here, if anyone comes to me asking about things I told you, I will deny this conversation happened. Deny we ever spoke. You got that?”

“Yes.”

Alec pocketed his lighter and puffed rapidly, his cigarette burning down to a nub in seconds. He flicked the butt onto the ground with the others. Then his head sank into his hands. Several deep breaths later, he hopped off the picnic table and adjusted the waistband of his jeans.

“The alias she used was Bethany Rounds. I wasn’t having an affair with her. She had explicit photos of my eleven-year-old daughter.”