Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn Book 6)(45)

Unless they found him first.

When Gretchen showed up late in the afternoon the sight of her was so soothing that Josie wanted to jump into her arms. She brought coffees and pastries for everyone with a special bag for Josie filled with three cheese Danishes. Because the press was camped out front—and growing in number with each hour, it seemed—Josie and Gretchen snuck into the yard.

“I thought you could use a break,” Gretchen told her.

Josie took the coffee from her and set it on the table in the center of the Rosses’ back patio. The smell of it still made her a little queasy, but the Danishes went down without any issues. “Thanks,” Josie said. “Did you guys track down the guy in the tweed jacket? From the WYEP footage?”

“Not yet. We know he’s not a professor at the college though. I’ve got a couple of people working on that.”

“Did you get in touch with Bausch?”

Gretchen nodded. “He was in Allentown doing a school presentation today, but he said he would drive up tomorrow. He was very cooperative.”

“Good,” Josie said.

“You want to sit in?”

“Yeah. I’ll come over when he gets there.”

A few moments passed in companionable silence. Gretchen sipped her own coffee while Josie polished off her third cheese Danish.

Gretchen said, “What do you think this guy’s endgame is?”

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “He’s not operating like a pedophile. They try not to draw any attention to themselves. They will usually either keep the child or they’ll act out their fantasy and kill the child within the first few hours.”

Gretchen nodded. “A pedophile would be pretty unlikely to be taunting the parents like this.”

“Which is not to say this guy doesn’t have perversions, but I don’t think that’s why he took Lucy.”

What Josie didn’t say, what she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud, but what they both knew was that even if the kidnapper was after money or something personal to Lucy’s parents, that didn’t mean that Lucy would come home alive.





By dinnertime, when there had been no more calls, Oaks sent Josie home. Noah, having had someone drop him off at her house, was already at her dinner table with Misty and little Harris. “Hope you don’t mind pasta,” Misty said.

“It’s delicious,” Noah informed her around a mouthful of spaghetti noodles.

“Jojo!” Harris called as Josie took a seat at the kitchen table between Noah and Harris’s high chair. She smiled and kissed the top of his head, inhaling the scent of his shampoo, the smell more soothing than a hot bath after a long day.

His pudgy hand reached into the plastic bowl before him and pulled out a sauce-covered noodle. “Sketties!” he exclaimed.

Misty set a plate of steaming spaghetti in front of Josie and sat on the other side of Harris. “Spaghetti,” she enunciated.

He ignored her, thrusting the noodle at Josie’s face. “You eat,” he said.

Josie let him feed her the noodle, slurping it out of his hand at the last second, unleashing a torrent of giggles. “Again, again!” he said, digging into his bowl for more noodles.

Josie repeated the noodle slurp three more times until everyone at the table was laughing. Harris’s giggles had always been contagious.

Finally, Misty said, “Harris. You eat your own food. Let Jojo eat her dinner.”

Josie took a noodle off her own plate and held it out to Harris who tried to imitate her without success, finally just snatching the noodle from her and jamming it into his mouth with his fingers.

They kept the conversation light, with no talk of Josie or Noah’s work, of Lucy Ross or missing children. Immediately after dinner, Josie and Noah collapsed into her bed again, too tired to even talk. Nausea woke her at five-thirty in the morning, while the rest of the house was still quiet. As she emptied the contents of her stomach into the toilet, she prayed Noah wouldn’t wake up and find her ill. Luckily, no one came to the door. She propped herself up against the edge of the bathtub and covered her stomach with both hands. The voice in the back of her head goaded her again. Why was she still sick? Was it really just stress? Or was it something more? Just as the question: what if I’m pregnant? floated to the surface of her mind, she heard footsteps outside the door. Then, from beneath the crack in the door, she heard Harris’s voice, a loud whisper: “JoJo?”

Smiling, Josie hefted herself up and opened the door. Harris squinted up at her, blinking against the light. She lifted him into her arms. “Does your mom know you’re awake?”

He wrapped his arms around her neck. “Jojo, drink,” he said.

Josie smiled. “You’re thirsty? We’ll let Mommy sleep then. Let’s go down to the kitchen.”





Josie was at the Ross household bright and early once more. Oaks was there with a new shift of agents to man the phones and laptops.

“Have you even slept?” Josie asked.

Oaks smiled. “A few hours here and there.”

She didn’t bother to tell him to get some rest. The only reason she was able to sleep at night was because she knew his team was able to work around the clock and that the Ross family was in good hands.

“We got the DNA processed from the Jaclyn Underwood scene,” Oaks told her. “We found one hair with the root attached on the pillow in the closet which we believe may belong to whomever was staying with Jaclyn, and we found trace amounts of skin beneath two of Jaclyn’s fingernails, which we believe may have come from the killer. No hits though.”