Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(63)

There was a long silence. Probably while he catalogued the vast number of lies he had told in the last several years. Then, quietly, he said, “Are you fucking Noah Fraley?”

She let out a short, uncontrolled burst of laughter. She couldn’t help it. The thought was so absurd. Then the implication of what he was asking sunk in. Was he really implying that she could not possibly accomplish anything unless she used sex to do it? “Maybe your little stripper girlfriend needs to use her vagina to get things done, but I do not.”

“Jo,” he said, voice softening for a moment.

“Why would you even go there?”

“Noah erased the security footage. He left a goddamn trail of blood from holding to the CCTV room. He erased it all—from the outside and the inside.”

Her heart leapt. “Security footage of what?”

Again, he sighed. “You know goddamn well what.”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

She could hear that he was speaking through gritted teeth. “This is not a game, Josie. I can’t protect you if you take this much further. Tell me where June is. I’ll go get her and take her back. They’ll never have to know for sure that it was you.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. It’s for your own good. Please, Jo. This is serious. I know you’re not good at backing off, but I’m telling you that your life depends on it.”

A chill enveloped her entire body. The hand holding the phone to her ear trembled. “You think I can just forget about this? Stop asking questions and go back to my life like normal? What about the next time a teenage girl goes missing, Ray? I’m not backing away from this. I remembered where the Standing Man is, and I’m going there.”

“Josie, don’t. Jesus. Don’t go there. You don’t understand. They’ll kill you.”

She thought about the woman she elbowed for selling her four-year-old for drugs. She thought about Noah Fraley lying on the tile floor, blood blooming from his shoulder. About Luke in the hospital bed, and June curled up under her prison cot like a child. She had a sudden flash of memory of her mother, of all people. “You can’t always be all roses and sweetness,” she had always told Josie. “That don’t get shit done.”

“Maybe,” she said to Ray. “Or maybe I’ll kill them.”





Chapter Fifty-Three





In the long, endless hours that followed she tried to move twice, but the pain in her chest was too great. She drifted in and out of a sleep filled with dreams of her sister; sneaking into her bed in the middle of the night, as she often did, snuggling and laughing all night until the daylight crept through the window. Each time she woke, she was devastated anew to find herself in this black nightmare, pain coursing through her body with every breath. She prayed for the boy. Surely the boy would find her and get help.

The next time the door slid open, the dull gray light of either dawn or dusk leaked into the chamber. From where she lay, curled towards the wall, she heard two sets of footsteps draw closer. One set heavy, the other set light. The boy. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder as hope surged inside her again in the warm glow of the flashlight that shone down on her.

“I—I don’t understand,” the boy whispered.

The fear in his voice told her that he would not save her.

“This one’s mine,” said the man. “One day, you’ll get your own.”

Hot tears streaked her face and a large hand reached down and wiped one of them away. “Shhh, hush now,” he whispered. “Hush now, my sweet Ramona.”





Chapter Fifty-Four





Back in her own vehicle, Josie drove for an hour and a half in darkness, staying off the interstate, using only the rural roads to get to the turn-off to her great-grandparents’ old house. They had owned twenty acres of land which they had sold to Alton Gosnell when Josie was five years old. Alton, and Alton’s father before him, had owned roughly ten acres abutting the twenty acres that Josie’s great-grandparents lived on. The property was near the top of one of the mountains on Denton’s outskirts. It was remote and about thirteen miles from the center of Denton, but still considered part of the city.

Like the Colemans’ place, her great-grandparents’ old house was high off the road, at the end of a long, rutted driveway overgrown with grass and brush. She drove past the entrance to it three times before she found it. The Gosnells had erected two steel bars with a chain between them on which hung a “No Trespassing” sign. Once she saw it, she drove a half mile down the road to a wide area of shoulder. She pulled off the gravel and into the trees, her shocks protesting as she rode over a downed fence and a few small logs. She couldn’t risk being seen from the road. Once her vehicle was safely nestled behind a grove of trees, she turned off the engine and climbed into the backseat. She had an emergency kit that had a blanket inside it. She retrieved the blanket and stretched out beneath it, Carrieann’s Marlin in her hands.

She woke a few hours later to the thin light of day pouring through the windows. Slowly, she sat up and glanced outside. There was no movement near her car, no sounds except the insistent chirp of birds in the trees all around her. Her cell phone revealed six missed calls from Ray, three from what she knew was Misty’s cell phone, and two from Trinity Payne. None from Carrieann, which was good. They had agreed to have no contact unless Luke took a turn for the worse. Josie didn’t want to leave a trail back to her and June.