Page 57

FIFTY-SIX

Drake leaned back, stretching an arm across the top of the bench. “Maybe Gina saw Erica while she was out for lunch, realized Erica was being abused, and decided to come back and help her get away from this guy. Get her into the car and drive her somewhere.”

“Maybe,” Josie said. “It probably would have been safer to bring Erica inside the site—at least until she figured out her next steps—instead of coming up with some elaborate plan to rescue her.”

“If Erica was as scared as you say, she probably wouldn’t have gone to the site with Gina.”

Drake managed to find a place for every piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit. But there were two things that still bothered Josie. An hour before she was stabbed shielding Erica with her body, Gina made two calls to her DA friend in Montgomery County. Not one but two. It was doubtful that any criminal charges would be brought against the company or the Phelans themselves in connection with the quarterback who had died at the build. Even if Gina was concerned about that, discussing it with her prosecutor friend would not have been urgent. Certainly not pressing enough to make two calls in a short span of time.

Drake took his phone from his running armband and checked it. “We should get back.”

The second thing that nagged at Josie was the obviously long-standing tension among the Phelans that revolved around some kind of sibling rivalry between Gina and Mace. It was clear that Tilly and Clint Phelan found their son lacking compared to their daughter. What had Clint said to Mace in the trailer when they were being questioned by Josie and Turner?

If she wasn’t always cleaning up your messes.

What messes? Was Clint talking about the football player who had died after sneaking onto the site? That was only one mess. Clint’s comment implied that his son had been screwing up for a long time. Josie wasn’t well-acquainted with the Phelan company’s overall safety record, but she’d never heard of any other builds having problems or “messes” to clean up. Mace himself had said they’d never had any prior issues.

Maybe Josie was grasping at straws because it was the only thing left for her to do, but she felt like she was missing something. Possibly a history in which Mace did stupid things and then Gina swooped in to do damage control, brushing things under the carpet so they never came to light. Protecting both the family and company reputations. If that was the case, did those past incidents have anything to do with why Gina had acted so strangely that day? Anything to do with Erica?

“It’s getting late,” Drake said. “I’m not going to tell you what you should do, but sleep is your friend.”

What if they were wrong about Erica’s movements that day? Had she initially shown up at the rear entrance of the site seeking help? Or in an attempt to hide from her boyfriend? If she had, Gina likely wouldn’t have wanted to call the police to come there. It would have brought more negative attention than the company was already receiving. Driving Erica to the police station made more sense. But none of the workers that Josie and Turner had interviewed saw her. Then again, any of them could have lied.

“Josie?”

If Gina’s intention was to get Erica off the site and somewhere safe, why didn’t she notify her brother? Mace ran the company. At the very least, she should have made him aware that someone else had illegally entered the site and that she was handling it. She hadn’t told anyone, not even Shirley Swenson, the field administrator. If Gina was just trying to smuggle Erica off-site to avoid bad press, why had she called her friend the district attorney? Why park her car blocks away so they had to walk to it? Why not leave it by the trailer, hidden from the public, and then drive Erica wherever she needed to go?

Because it wasn’t the public they were hiding from.

Drake moved to stand up, but Josie gripped his forearm. The sweat on the back of her neck suddenly felt cold. “Gina wasn’t just helping Erica escape her abusive boyfriend. She was cleaning up a mess.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been assuming the only possibility is that Gina encountered Erica outside the site, but what if she didn’t? What if Gina found her inside? Clint Phelan said Gina was always cleaning up Mace’s messes. I thought he meant OSHA violations or something, but what if he was talking about Mace’s personal life? We never even checked to see if Mace has a criminal record.”

Drake stroked his goatee. “Are you trying to say that Mace Phelan—the owner and CEO of Phelan Construction—was holding Erica Slater against her will on an active construction site with hundreds of workers on the premises and angry protestors just outside the gates?”

When he said it like that, it did sound absurd. Josie forged ahead anyway. “Maybe not him specifically. What if Erica’s boyfriend was a Phelan employee? What if he wasn’t her boyfriend at all but he abducted her?”

“And he thought bringing her to work was a good idea?”

“I don’t know.” Josie blew out a frustrated breath. It was far-fetched and she knew it.

“Weren’t there still photos of the guy who stabbed Gina Phelan? Wouldn’t the inquiry into the employees and subcontractors on the site that day have turned him up?”

“We never got really good photos of him,” said Josie. “But Turner would have looked into every employee on shift that day, every subcontractor, everyone who set foot in the place, and he didn’t find anyone he thought matched the description. I mean, I assume he didn’t. We didn’t actually talk about it.”

Normally, she would worry that Turner had not done his job but with Noah’s abduction, he’d proven himself to be more reliable than ever.

Drake looked at his phone again. Josie was close enough to see that Trinity had sent him a text asking if Josie was still with him. He had changed her name in his contacts to “My Future Wife.” It warmed Josie. Those three little words were so adorable and so achingly sweet that she wanted to hug him. She loved how head over heels Drake was for her sister. Trinity deserved it.

Then Josie felt like the worst person ever when a stab of jealousy pierced her heart. It made her think of Noah. If she didn’t get him back, would she be destroyed by this feeling every time she saw a couple in love? There wouldn’t be anyone else for her after Noah. There couldn’t be. She twirled her wedding band around her finger. The vow he’d made to her on their wedding day was engraved inside. To always run toward the danger with her. He’d had to shorten it so it would fit the ring but that was his forever promise to her, and he’d kept it time and again. His ring was inscribed with her vow: that she would always come home to him.

Now everything was turned upside down. She needed him to come home to her.

“Hey.”

Josie blinked.

Drake was peering at her, concern etched into his face. “Come back,” he said quietly. “Wherever you are in your mind right now, come back.”

She blinked again and fisted her left hand in her lap.

“Let’s explore this idea of yours,” he said. “Erica was inside the site. Since she was in bad shape, we can theorize she was being held against her will. I don’t think we have enough information to guess why. Maybe you’re right. This kid we thought was her boyfriend wasn’t her boyfriend. He runs with a crew that commits robberies, home invasions, and assaults. I doubt they’d turn their noses up at kidnapping women. Hell, maybe this was some attempt at trafficking her. If you want to go really big, maybe they traffic women all the time and Mace Phelan is the mastermind.”

Josie arched a brow. “Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not,” Drake said. “Just throwing out possibilities but for right now, we’ll put aside the how and why Erica came to be on that site. Let’s just start with the basic premise that she was there. Hidden away someplace. That seems like a hell of a ballsy thing for someone to do but we’ll go with it anyway.”

“It’s a big site,” Josie said, grateful to get back to a topic that wasn’t going to send her off the deep end. “If you knew it well and knew the timing of everything, like which areas were going to be active and when, then I’m sure you could find a place to hide a person. Plus, it’s loud as hell. Even if Erica was able to make noise, who’s to say anyone would have heard it?”

“Okay,” Drake said. “I’ll buy that for now but why hide her at an active construction site that’s the focus of a huge local scandal? If it’s someone who works there, that’s pretty risky. Sure, some assholes are dumb enough to do it, but there are a ton of variables that would be impossible to control. Although I suppose if he’s there all day, it’s easier to keep an eye on things. Logistically, though, it’s not a long-term solution to keeping a kidnap victim. She’s got to eat and use the bathroom.”

“I don’t think she was there for any length of time,” Josie said. “It makes more sense that she was being held somewhere else and then brought to the site. Maybe even that day. What if Erica Slater was brought there that day so she could be disposed of? If they’d kidnapped her or tried to traffic her, they couldn’t let her live. I’m sure there are lots of places to hide a body on a construction site so that it’s never found again.”

Nausea rocked her stomach as thoughts of Noah broke through. Images of her sweet, gorgeous husband flashed through her mind. This time it wasn’t his smile or what waited for her beneath his clothes. It was his lifeless body being dumped into a hole and covered over with dirt. Before she could wonder exactly how that would work with all the excavating and grading that needed to be done on building sites, Drake nudged her ribs with his elbow, bringing her back to the present again. “Keep going.”

Josie took a deep breath. “It would have had to happen after hours, so he just had to keep her hidden until then. Gina was inspecting the site. What if when she came back from lunch, she stumbled upon Erica and decided to get her out? Whatever Erica told her made her believe it was too dangerous for her to call the police or to parade Erica around the site. She decided to sneak her out.”

Drake nodded along. “She had to get Erica out to her car but to do that, it had to be parked where no one on the site would see them get inside it.”

“So she moved her car,” said Josie. “Then came back for Erica. They both ran toward the protestors after the attack, but Gina’s car was in the opposite direction which makes me think she snuck Erica out along the fence rather than walking her out the back entrance.”

“Was there a gap in the fencing when you showed up to the scene?”

Josie shook her head. Someone had covered it up, put everything back into place.

“But that guy caught up with them,” Drake said. “Where did he come from? He had to be either working at the site or visiting it for some reason—like independent contractors or truck drivers making deliveries.”

Drake was right. How had they missed it though? Josie and Turner had interviewed every employee present when Gina was killed. Just in case some of them had already gone home, they’d been given a list of every person who had set foot on the site that day.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, realization dawning.

Mace had given them the list. He’d sent Shirley home. Josie and Turner had taken a cursory look around the site while Mace compiled the list for them and instructed all employees to come to the trailer so they could be interviewed.

Drake arched a brow at her.

“It’s Mace,” she said. “I’m telling you, he’s involved in this somehow.”