Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn Book 6)(58)

“So the mystery woman befriended Jaclyn, manipulated her, got Jaclyn to let her stay there for a while and managed to avoid meeting any of Jaclyn friends. Whoever she is, she’s good,” Josie remarked.

“Yeah,” Noah agreed. “Her job was to gain insight into Lucy and her family.”

“Right—their routines and dynamics, their schedule. Lucy’s likes and dislikes.”

“The mystery woman reports back to this guy. Tells him, among other things, that Lucy is obsessed with butterflies,” Noah said, picking up her line of thought.

“He sees an opportunity to make contact with her at her school by impersonating the bug expert.”

“How did he know Bausch was going to Denton West in the first place?” Noah asked.

“It was on the school website,” Josie said. “The school schedule, including all visitors and special events, is posted there. The public one, not the private one. All he had to do was pull up the site and he would have seen that Bausch was scheduled to come give a presentation there.”

“And either he or his female accomplice could have called the real John Bausch and pretended to be from Denton West, tell him they had to cancel. Wow. This guy is ballsy as hell,” Noah said.

“Yes,” Josie said. “Impersonating Bausch was probably the most ballsy thing he did because he really put himself out in the open, made himself vulnerable. They must have been planning this for a very long time. He might have seen that as his best and maybe only opportunity to gain Lucy’s trust.”

“Cause once she meets him in a safe environment—school—she feels she can trust him.”

“Right. Then when he approaches her outside of school, she already sees him as trustworthy.”

“Then he starts approaching her every chance he gets.”

“Building the rapport, the friendship.”

“But what does he say to her to get her to go with him?” Noah asked.

Josie thought of Lucy’s drawings: herself and a man in a tan suit—like the one the kidnapper had worn to her school when he impersonated John Bausch—both with butterfly nets, chasing the colorful insects. “He’s going to take her to chase butterflies,” Josie said.

“What? That’s absurd.”

“No, it’s not,” Josie said. “Amy told me they took Lucy to the butterfly room at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and that Lucy said it was the best day of her life. The kidnapper would have known about her obsession with butterflies. He would have promised her something magical. Something too magical to resist.”

“What? Like some magical butterfly fairy land or something?” Noah asked. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Lucy is seven. Don’t you remember being seven?”

“I barely remember yesterday,” Noah complained.

“She’s just a child, Noah,” Josie said. “She has a big imagination, a passion for butterflies, and from everything I’ve gathered, she’s both lonely and a people-pleaser. It would be easy for this guy to gain her trust. He paid her special attention. He was her secret friend. She was clearly enamored of him by the way she acted when she saw him. She would have wanted to make him happy. So she did what he said and kept him a secret from her mother.”

“From all the adults in her life.”

“Yes,” Josie agreed. “He probably promised to take her somewhere. Somewhere like the butterfly room at the Academy of Natural Sciences—only he probably made it sound much bigger and more exciting. Not somewhere real because he never intended to take her there. He just wanted to promise her something that would fulfill her seven-year-old heart’s desire. Something that would make her leave with him even though her parents were right there.”

“You think he told her he’d bring her back?”

“Of course he did,” Josie said. “He probably told her they’d go off on their adventure and she’d be back in her own bed that night. Everything this guy has done has been about manipulation.”

“But why?” Noah asked. “Why didn’t he just abduct her? All this preparation—for what? I mean if you’re right, and this guy has a female accomplice who was getting in tight with the nanny six months ago, long before he went to Lucy’s school, that’s a lot of preparation for an abduction. Unnecessary preparation. Especially if all he wants is ransom. If the nanny was on her phone whenever she took Lucy to the playground, he could have taken her from there at any time. Why is he doing all this?”

“He’s playing a game,” Josie said, her mind swirling. “This isn’t about the ransom at all. Not really.”

“Then what’s it about?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know yet, but I need to make a phone call.”





Thirty-Six





He didn’t kill her. But he hurt her worse than he ever had before. For a long time, she lay on the bed, while I sat on the floor, praying for her to move. I licked my fingers and used them to try to get some of the blood off her face, but it was thick and flaky. It smeared and got into her hair and onto the pillow. We only had one pillowcase and he hardly ever let her wash it. I knew she would be mad if I got it dirty, so I stopped trying to clean her. It felt like my whole life before she talked to me again.