Page 51

FIFTY

A deep sadness took hold in Josie’s gut. What happened to Alec and Erica Slater was tragic. She’d like to believe that if he simply went to the authorities from the beginning, he could have avoided all of this and brought Lila and her merry band of mercenaries to justice, but she knew better than anyone that sometimes, in spite of all of law enforcement’s valiant efforts, the bad guys got away with some of the worst crimes imaginable. Josie certainly couldn’t fault Alec for wanting to protect his child the only way he felt he could at the time.

“Did you get a good look at the men who attacked you?” asked Josie. “Could you describe them?”

“Not going there.” Alec shook his head. “So don’t even bother.”

Trinity said, “Once your sentence was handed down, did you have any more encounters with Lila or the men who jumped you?”

He jammed his hand into his back pocket and pulled out his phone to check the time. One-handed, he used his thumb to punch in his passcode, the small footprint undulating. “Nope.”

A young woman’s smiling face filled the screen, but Josie caught only a fleeting glimpse of her before Alec angled it away from them. A fragment of a thought tumbled through Josie’s mind, too quickly for her to latch onto it. She was too busy staring at the tattoo.

“You never saw Lila on the news?” asked Trinity.

“Nope.”

Josie stepped closer to him, eyes following the motions of his hand as he kept scrolling. Four toes. A paw maybe, except it wasn’t quite the right shape for that. There was no delineation between the metacarpal pad and the toepads. It was all one solid shape. Long digits, round toes. It looked more like a hand.

Trinity kept the conversation going. “Where is your daughter now?”

Alec gave a bitter laugh before stuffing his phone back into his pocket. “She’s supposed to be in college. Lock Haven University—well, I guess it’s Commonwealth U, Lock Haven campus now, with that whole state university consolidation thing. Anyway, it’s about a half hour from here. I figured it would be easier for me to keep an eye on her if she was close.”

“I know where that is,” said Trinity. “She’s not there?”

It’s an ink splotch. Or a hand or something.

It’s missing a finger.

Lots of people had similar or even identical tattoos. It was just a coincidence. Josie thought about the conversation Alec was having when they approached him. What she thought she’d heard. Did it mean anything or was she trying to make connections that weren’t there out of desperation?

Sixty-three hours and forty-two minutes.

“She still has a bit of a lying problem.” Alec sighed and took out another smoke, staring at it as if trying to decide whether he had time for another. Josie wanted to tell him he probably had all day to sit back here given his coworker’s finely honed powers of observation.

“I’ve been paying for her to go to college.” At the way Trinity’s eyes widened, he barked a laugh. “Yeah. I’m paying for that, too. A portion of it anyway. My ex-wife was paying half. All this time I’m paying my half to my ex-wife and sending Erica spending money and turns out she wasn’t even going. That’s what my ex-wife’s after me for now—she wants me to pay her back for the tuition expenses she put out because she thinks it’s my fault Erica blew off school.”

“Why did she blow it off?” asked Trinity.

“Guess.”

“She met a boy,” Josie said.

Alec lit his cigarette. On his first exhale, he said, “Bingo.”

“Have you met him?” asked Trinity.

“Hell, no. Besides, they’re already broken up. I’m gonna have to help clean up this mess now, I’m sure. Another heartbreak. She’s got shit taste in men.”

The idea taking shape in Josie’s head seemed absurd. Maybe she was cracking under the strain of her husband’s abduction. What would Noah say if he were here?

That she should remember that her gut was rarely wrong. He wouldn’t think it was absurd because, like Trinity, he’d follow her off a cliff. His faith in her was unshakable. Maybe her inchoate idea wasn’t so ridiculous.

She flashed to Lila entering her dream last night, beckoning. What was she trying to show Josie?

“Mr. Slater,” said Josie. “Have you watched the news in the last three days? Gone on social media?”

Alec pinched his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, holding it a few inches from his mouth. “What?”

Josie repeated the question.

He laughed humorlessly and gestured toward the building with his cigarette. Ash broke off and fluttered to the ground. “I work at this dump almost seventy hours a week and when I’m not here, I’m trying to earn a little extra designing websites, like I said. What do you think?”

Trinity glanced at Josie briefly. Their eyes met for a heartbeat but it was enough to activate their twin telepathy. Her sister didn’t know where Josie was going with her questions, but she played along anyway. “Are you telling me you don’t scroll social media when you’re on the toilet like a normal person?” she asked Alec.

This time his laughter was deep and genuine. “Not since the trial. Reading all the negative comments about myself put me off social media for life.”

Josie pointed toward his hand. “Is that a tattoo?”

Alec took one final exhale before discarding his cigarette butt. Turning his hand over, he rubbed at the tattoo. “Oh yeah. Manly, right?”

Trinity stepped closer, peering at it. “It looks like one of those sticky hand toys.”

“I guess it does.”

Her sister was right. Except it still only had four fingers. Four points. Round. Sticky. Josie was convinced it was an animal print though, just not a paw. She thought about driving into Williamsport today on Route 15, passing Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland. She and Noah had taken little Harris there three times. He loved it.

“It’s a frog footprint,” Josie blurted out. “A tree frog.”

Harris had wanted a tree frog for a pet after the first time they went. Misty was making him wait until he was a little older although Josie suspected she just didn’t want live crickets in her house.

Alec stared down at the tattoo, eyes going hazy. “That’s right. When we first adopted Erica, she was in bad shape emotionally. I started taking her to Clyde Peeling’s, just the two of us. She loved it. Over and over we went until she started talking to me. Really talking. Being herself. Smiling, laughing.”

“That’s lovely,” Trinity whispered.

“The frogs were her favorite. The first time she called me dad—” his voice broke, “we were watching the orange-eyed tree frogs, and she said it. I almost cried right then and there. Later, when she got older, she told me that was the first time she felt like she had a real dad. Then for her eighteenth birthday, she wanted…”

The words got stuck in his throat. He pressed his palms against his eyes, trying to compose himself, and knocking his red paper hat off in the process. It fluttered to the ground.

“You got matching tattoos.” Josie’s heart galloped. She felt its heavy beats all the way to her fingertips. “Hers is behind her ear. Her left ear.”

Trinity’s eyes snapped toward Josie.

Alec dropped his hands, glassy eyes staring at her in shock.

Josie forged ahead, barely able to hear her own words over the blood roaring in her ears. “Was that Erica you were talking on the phone with when we got here?”

His shock turned to suspicion, lines creasing his forehead. “Yeah. Why?”

Josie decided to test out whether she’d heard him right when he muttered under his breath. “She’s at the Patio Motel, isn’t she? In Denton?”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Erica might be in danger.”

He turned away from her and shouted a curse as he stomped his feet on the ground. Josie took that as a yes.

“You didn’t want to know our names, but I have to advise you that I’m a detective for the Denton Police Department.”

“Shit,” he said, keeping his back to her. “Is this about Bethany Rounds—I mean, Lila Jensen?”

“No,” Josie said. “It’s something else.”

Facing them once more, he said, “I don’t understand.”

“I’m here as a private citizen. This is my sister, Trinity Payne. She’s a television journalist.”

The stream of expletives that poured from Alec’s mouth was lengthy and impressive, even by a police officer’s standards.

Trinity stayed silent, watching their exchange like it was a tennis match.

While Josie explained what had happened in Denton only hours before Noah was abducted, Alec stumbled back to the picnic table and plopped onto the bench. Sweat beaded along his forehead as Josie used her phone to show him the still photos of the mystery blonde. She could tell by the way he fumbled to light his next cigarette that he recognized his daughter.

Smoke shot out of his nostrils. “What happens now?”

“I have to call my colleagues. They’ll go get her, bring her to the police station and interview her,” said Josie. “Now.”

“I’ll call her,” Alec said.

“No,” Josie said. “She might run again. It’s better if one of my colleagues just shows up.”

“I want to be there. She might not talk to you otherwise.”