Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn Book 6)(94)

Josie softened her tone. “How old were you when she left? Do you even remember her?”

“I remember enough. I remember waking up hungry and looking for her, and she was gone. My father told me she left us. He said she didn’t love us. That she was a liar, and she wasn’t coming back for me. I waited. She never came back.”

“Your father put those marks on you,” Josie said. “Didn’t he?”

He dropped his gaze for a moment. “She might as well have. If she’d stayed, he would have taken his anger out on her, not me. She could have taken me with her, but she didn’t. She went on to live some great, fancy life and left me there in that shithole where my father beat the piss out of me for no other reason than I reminded him of her. The welts, cigarette burns, yeah, those are from him.”

“The others came from foster care?” Josie guessed.

“I wouldn’t have been in foster care if it weren’t for her. You don’t get it, do you? I was tortured. My life was an unending hell. All because she left me behind. She left me there, and she never looked back.”

Josie thought of one of the conversations she had had with Amy when she had told Amy she didn’t care if Amy had killed someone, she just wanted the truth. Amy had said, that’s not the worst thing. Because she had abandoned her own child, effectively sentencing him to a fate worse than death.

“How did you find her?” Josie asked. “How did you even know she was alive?”

“My dad. A couple of years ago, I went back to see him. I stayed away from him mostly after I aged out, but I found out from someone who used to live around us that he was sick, real sick. So I went to see him. The fight had gone out of him by then. He was harmless.”

“He had cancer,” Josie said.

“Bone cancer. Yeah. Real painful. He was at the end. I knew he was going to die, so I asked him about her. I wanted a picture. Something. We never had any photos of her or anything. It was almost like she had never existed, but I knew. I knew she had been there.”

“Did he have any answers for you?” Josie prompted.

“The same ones he always had. She was a lying bitch who abandoned us. I asked him if she was still alive. He said for years he thought she was dead, that’s why he never went looking for her. But then he was at chemo one day, flipping through magazines and stuff, and there was this newsletter thing one of those pharmacy reps had left, all about Quarmark and their groundbreaking new cancer drugs. He was interested in it because they had just released a drug that was supposed to stop bone cancer from spreading or stop bone mets or something. Stop cancer from metastasizing to bones—I don’t know. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t afford the stupid drug anyway. But in that newsletter was a story about the team at Quarmark. They’d had some big, fancy, expensive celebration in New York City, and one of the guys on the pricing team was in the photos.”

“And your father recognized your mother in the photo with him,” Josie filled in.

“Yeah. There she was, looking like some kind of supermodel while my dad was dying in the same shithole she’d left him in—and he was so broke at the end that the bank took everything. There wasn’t even anything left for me.”

“So you decided to go after her,” Josie said.

“I just wanted to mess with her, but then I found out she had a kid. Then I knew what I had to do.”

“Natalie helped you.”

“Yeah but then she lost it, said I wasn’t going along with the plan like we said. All she cared about was the money. I never cared about that. I wanted Tessa to suffer. Nat said I was ruining everything. Said I was too obsessed with Tessa, decided to take her out.”

“So you shot Natalie,” Josie said.

He didn’t answer.

Josie changed tactics. “Was that the only thing you disagreed about?”

“She got pissed when I changed the drop location. We had other places in mind—down by the river—but I changed it at the last minute. She didn’t like that.”

So the disagreement on the day they took Violet Young hadn’t been to do with Lucy. Still, that didn’t mean the little girl was still alive.

Josie felt the familiar roil of nausea in her stomach. “Gideon,” she said. “What did you do with Lucy?”





Sixty-Nine





Gideon leaned forward in his seat, his cuffed hands extended across the table toward her. The smile that spread across his face made Josie’s skin crawl. “Guess,” he said.

Josie said, “You know you’re in a lot of trouble, right? If there is even a chance that Lucy is still alive, now is not the time for you to play games. Give us Lucy, and I’ll talk to the district attorney about some sort of deal—like keeping the death penalty off the table.”

The smile died on his lips.

“Oh,” Josie said. “You didn’t account for that, did you? New York doesn’t have the death penalty anymore, does it? Well, here in Pennsylvania, we do.”

He said nothing, his face hardening. Josie caught a glimpse of what he must have looked like to his victims, up close and personal. Terrifying. She said, “Your one and only chance of avoiding the death penalty is delivering Lucy. What did you do with her?”

A long moment stretched out between them. Josie made sure not to break eye contact first. Finally, she sighed as if she were bored and stood to leave. Her palm was on the door handle when Gideon said, “If you were me, what would you have done with her?”