Page 49 of The Couple’s Secret (Detective Josie Quinn #23)

Forty-Five

Zane looked stricken. His mouth hung open as he went completely still. Then his lips flapped soundlessly. Finally, he swallowed. Then he found his voice. It sounded choked. “Did you say Dad killed someone? Wait, are you saying our dad is a murderer? No, it can’t be. It can’t. I?—”

“Shut up!” Jackson snarled, cutting him off.

Turning back to Josie and Gretchen, he said, “I don’t know what I saw.

I don’t know what the fragments mean but yeah, I remember my mom playing records on this old wooden thing with that big horn.

I never thought about any of it until I was a lot older.

Never wanted to think about it. Dad took every opportunity he could to remind me what a worthless piece of shit Mom was, leaving her three-year-old behind in the hands of a stranger.

He told me she was hooked on drugs and that she chose them over me.

That was always what he said. He never mentioned another guy, not at home, not when he was talking shit about my mom.

The Victor thing came from Olsen and from neighbors who overheard me saying it to him that day. It spread, took on a life of its own.”

The buzzy feeling inside Josie intensified. Her cop brain told her they were on the precipice of something important. “Jackson, Zane, you two need to come back down to the stationhouse with us. Let’s finish this conversation there.”

“No,” Jackson snapped.

“Wait, hold on,” Zane said, completely ignoring Josie’s instructions. His lower lip wobbled. Sporadic raindrops landed on his face, but he didn’t wipe them away.

When no more words came, Josie turned back toward Jackson. “The rain is starting. Unload the rest of this stuff and let’s get down to the stationhouse.”

“No.”

“Why not?” Zane said. “We were already there once.”

“Because I’m not going to be manipulated by a couple of cops.

” He used his forearm to wipe at a few beads of moisture from his cheek.

Tears or rain? Josie was guessing rain. He was wound too tight, vibrating with too much anger, to be crying.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it here. If you have questions, ask them here.”

“I thought you wanted to get out of the rain,” Zane said.

Jackson gave him a dirty look but didn’t respond.

Gretchen sighed. “I’m going to read you both your rights before we go any further.”

“Fine,” the brothers said in unison but in very different tones.

Josie watched them as Gretchen recited their Miranda rights and asked them for verbal confirmation that they understood said rights. Jackson looked pissed but Zane looked curious and a little scared.

There was a moment of silence and Josie knew that Gretchen was giving them each a chance to request an attorney. When neither did, Josie attempted to get things back on track. “Jackson, I want to talk about your mom.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about her. She’s gone. Everyone’s fucking gone.”

There it was—her way past his defenses—he needed to get some things off his chest. How long had he been holding his feelings in, holding back?

Even with Riley, he had clearly been the strong and stoic one, keeping his emotions in check so he could tend to hers.

He needed to let go, to unleash. That was the only way Josie would get what she needed from him.

“You’ve lost so much,” she said softly. “And it must have been terrible, growing up believing that your mom left you. It must have been difficult to hear the things Tobias said about her. Regardless of what she did or didn’t do.

Any person could tell from the photos of the two of you that she loved you—no matter what came after—and it wasn’t right that Tobias tainted that. ”

Jackson’s posture loosened a fraction as he relented, giving in to the opportunity to release some of his long-held frustration.

“I hated it. My grandparents only said good things about her. How much she loved me and how she’d just made a mistake.

I think that they thought she’d come back eventually.

My grandmother, before she died, made some offhand comment about how my mom loved to play records for me because her and I would dance.

That Tobias had this old antique record player and I’d tell Mom, ‘Play the Victor, play the Victor.’”

Zane’s head swiveled toward his brother. “Jacks,” he said, voice cracking.

Jackson laughed brokenly. “The cabinet itself wasn’t even a Victor. I found some pictures of it. I think it was a Pooley. Dad just put the Victor with the metal horn on top. It’s weird, right? The way you get stuck on details that absolutely don’t matter.”

Josie had seen it enough—experienced it enough herself—to know it wasn’t strange. “That’s more common than you think,” she said.

Gretchen’s pen and notepad were in her hands. A few raindrops splattered against the page she’d opened to. “When did you start to suspect that your dad had killed her?”

Horror stretched across Zane’s face. “Jacks, is this for real? Do you really think that Dad killed your mom?”

Jackson ignored his brother. “Not for a long time. It was right before I moved out. I was twenty. I found all these pictures of my mom and from when I was a toddler and there was the cabinet with the Victor on top. It wasn’t a…

sudden thing. It was weeks of examining my fragments and things coming back to me in nightmares. ”

“Then you started thinking about how you heard your dad arguing with Gabrielle right before she died,” Josie prompted. “Did you think that he’d killed her?”

“It was just a suspicion. I had no proof. Couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. But yeah, I thought he had.”

Zane was still standing on the opposite side of the cabinet from his brother, pale and stunned, hands slack at his sides. Gretchen leaned toward him, getting into his personal space. “Zane?” she asked. “Did Jackson ever share these suspicions with you?”

He flinched as more rain hit his forehead. “No, no. He never said anything. I don’t understand. Jacks? Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jackson shook his head and muscled the cabinet off to the side and into the bay on his own. Climbing back into the truck bed, he said, “What would be the point, Zane? You were just a kid still. I was an adult. I wasn’t putting that kind of shit on you.”

Zane watched as he stripped off his utility gloves and unstrapped a dolly from the back of the truck bed. “You weren’t putting that kind of shit on me, but you left me in the house with a goddamn murderer? Cora? Jesus, you left Riley with him?”

Jackson wrenched the dolly from its tethers. It clanged against the glass of the cab and then the metal wheel cover. “Leave my wife out of this.”

“I can’t,” Zane said, voice high. “I loved her. I was in love?—”

“Shut up!” Jackson shouted at him.

“You left her there, unprotected!”

“I had no proof!” Jackson roared.

“You could have told me. You should have told me.”

A dump truck approached. It was filled with trash, probably headed toward the compactors.

The driver stopped when he saw them gathered there.

Jackson glared at him and then shook his head.

Apparently, that was all the signal the guy needed to throw the truck in reverse.

The back-up alarm shrieked. As soon as it stopped and the truck began driving away, Jackson pointed at Zane.

“You loved Dad. Worshiped him. Do you honestly think if I had told you, ‘Hey, I think our dad killed both of our moms,’ that you would have reacted with anything but disbelief and horror? You were a kid, Zane. You would have hated me for thinking it and gone running straight to him to tattle on me.”

“No,” Zane choked.

Jackson laughed bitterly. Abandoning the dolly, he gripped the Coke machine on both sides and tried to shimmy it toward the center of the truck bed.

His forearms, now slick with rain, strained with the effort.

“You know,” he said over his shoulder. “I hated you for a long time. I should have been happy for you that you never had to bear the burden of that knowledge. You didn’t have to live with it.

To look at the man you loved and admired your entire life, who gave you everything, and realize that every single thing you thought you knew about him was a lie. ”

“Jacks,” Zane said but his brother didn’t even look at him.

The rain started coming down harder. Jackson continued to struggle with the Coke machine, rocking it from side to side, moving it in small increments.

“You never had to live with the fact that Dad was a piece of shit. Maybe he didn’t hit women like Dalton did but in his own way, he was abusive.

Sneaky, manipulative, ruthless. You didn’t see that side of him.

It was almost worse because you never knew what he’d do or what would set him off.

You didn’t have to smile at him and act like a loving son knowing the entire time that he had taken the one person who had truly loved you. ”

Josie felt a prickle along the nape of her neck that had nothing to do with the rain sluicing down into her shirt. It was that familiar goading of her subconscious, teasing her, daring her to put the pieces of the puzzle together when she still couldn’t work out the larger picture.

“You should have told me,” Zane repeated.

“Drop it, Zane,” Jackson said flatly. “It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

Josie watched Zane swallow, his throat working. Water rolled down his forehead and dripped from his battered nose. His pallor was starting to look unnatural.

“I saw Hollis’s insulin pens in the trash the day my mom died,” he said quietly. “In our kitchen.”