From Darkness (Hearts & Arrows Book 3)(19)
He looked up at her with yellow eyes, and she walked into the kitchen where she deposited him on the counter.
She held up two cans of Fancy Feast. “Chicken Florentine or Salmon Tuscany?”
He tilted his head.
“I know. It’s ridiculous. You eat better than I do.”
Josie popped open the Florentine and dumped it into Ricochet’s dish, hit the button on her coffeemaker, which was already prepped and ready, and made her way back into her room to throw on running shorts and a sports bra. She grabbed her fat rubber watch off the counter and put it on, giving Rick a pat on the head before pulling on her running shoes in the almost silent apartment.
It was the one thing she could never get used to—the quiet. She almost always had music going to fill the silence that had once been occupied by Anne, and she missed that feeling, that presence of another person. Sensing them in the other room, knowing they were there. Josie shook her head as she closed her door and descended the stairs, trying to stop her memories as they crawled through her mind.
She glanced at her watch. It was almost seven, and the sun was golden, full of promise, the first days of spring. It was one of those days that was a glimpse past the cold winter and into the future, though it was fleeting; the chill would swing back in and wipe away the traces of warmth. But she reveled in the moment as she took off running toward the Hudson.
Leave the past where it is.
Josie’s arms pumped harder as she picked up her pace.
Josie had met Anne her junior year of high school. Anne had been sitting at a lunch table alone, glossy, thick auburn hair tumbling over her shoulder, reading manga and wearing a T-shirt with a K-Pop star on it. Her purple cat-eye glasses had slipped down her nose as she polished off a Rice Krispies Treat, and her fingers had stuck to her comic when she tried to turn the page.
Josie had never seen her before and was curious about the quirky girl engaged in a sticky-fingered ninja fight with a comic book, so she’d joined Anne. The minute Anne had made a joke that relied heavily on a Star Trek reference, Josie had known they were meant to be.
They’d become instant friends and were inseparable through high school, but Josie hadn’t fully understood how much she needed Anne until she was rejected from the police academy. When the X-rays from her physical had shown the slightest of abnormal curves in her spine, it had been enough to have her permanently disqualified. It had been her darkest time—to realize she could never have her dream, never have what she’d wanted ever since she was a little girl.
But then Anne had swooped in with the brilliant idea to become PIs. Investigating was the next best thing, if not better. Josie was independent, with avenues and resources the police didn’t have, and she and Anne had both been good at their job. Very good.
So, at eighteen, the girls had moved into their apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, one of a few properties that had been in Josie’s family for decades. They had taken their classes and put in apprentice hours, which was made easy by Josie’s dad’s connections. Before long at all, they’d had steady work, doing something they both loved and excelled at. Anne had been the researcher, the coordinator, and Josie was the face, the muscle.
They’d worked that way for ten years until the day that Hannah Mills’s parents asked them to find their daughter, and everything had changed.
Josie and Anne had been sitting at their desks for hours, all day and into the night. The room was dark, though their faces were illuminated by their laptop screens as they searched the internet in tank tops and panties, neither willing to break away long enough to get dressed. Chinese take-out boxes littered their desks that stood facing each other in the living room.
Josie’s eyes never left the screen as she typed in another search term, fished around in the lo mein with her chopsticks, and brought a bite to her lips.
Hannah Mills, a sixteen-year-old cheerleader from just across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey, had gone missing two weeks before, and her tearful parents had come to Josie and Anne when the police hit a dead end. Hannah never made it home from cheerleading practice, and there had been no sign of her since she walked out of the school doors. The Mills only wanted to know what had happened to their child and said they understood the chances of finding her alive were slim.
Josie wondered if anyone could really understand something so grim.
She’d been working with the detective on Hannah’s case, her father’s friend from the academy. She and Dennis had been sharing information from the start, though neither of them had much to go on.
In the first few days after they had been hired, Josie had canvassed the Mills’ neighborhood via the pathway that Hannah had walked home. It was October, and the days were getting shorter, so by the time Hannah had passed through the neighborhood, it would have been dark outside. No one had seen anything.
There was one resident though, Corey Rhodes, who had thrown her red flags. Josie couldn’t put her finger on why—he’d seemed perfectly normal. He was in his mid-forties, built in that bulldoggish, barrel-chested way, and was charming but with an air of superiority. Really, there was just something in his mannerisms, in his choice of words, something in his smile that had set off alarms.
That was two days before, and she and Anne had been researching him ever since.
His criminal history was nonexistent. The man didn’t even have so much as a parking ticket, never mind something they could connect to Hannah. He had grown up in Deer Lodge, Montana, but went to college in Boston before moving to the city where he’d been working in advertising for the last twenty-some-odd years. His credit was in the seven hundreds. He’d never been married. On paper, nothing stood out about him at all, but her gut had never steered her wrong, so they were still digging.