Vanishing Girls (Detective Josie Quinn #1)(89)

“What did you do?” Holcomb asked.

“I had a jacket in the car so I gave her that. I stood by the side of the road and talked to her. She said she was Isabelle Coleman and someone had taken her but she wasn’t sure who. She kept talking about someone putting a needle in her arm so she wouldn’t remember. She was really freaked out. Like, hysterical.”

“Did she get in the car with you?”

“Well, yeah, eventually. I said I would take her to the police or the hospital. She said she just wanted to go home. I said a lot of people were looking for her but she should really go to a hospital before she went home. To get checked out, you know?’

“But you didn’t make it to a hospital,” Holcomb pointed out.

Misty glanced over at Josie and Noah briefly, and then back at Holcomb. Her tiny dog sighed in its sleep. “She got in the car, and I started driving. All of a sudden she started saying she could smell one of them.”

“One of who?”

Misty held her dog tighter to her body. “One of the men, she said. She said she thought there were a lot of men who, you know, did stuff to her. She said where she was she couldn’t really see because they kept her in the dark, and even when they took her out of the dark, the light dazzled her eyes so much she didn’t get a good look at any of them. But she could smell them. She said she… She said she smelled one of them in my car.”

“Ray said he was never there,” Josie said. Or had he lied about that as well? They hadn’t found him on any of Gosnell’s videos.

Wide-eyed, Misty turned to Josie. “Not Ray,” she said. “Dusty.”

Before Josie could respond, Holcomb said, “Officer Branson?”

Misty turned back to him. “Yeah. He had been in my car that morning. He came by my work, and we went out to the car.”

Holcomb looked perplexed. “For what?”

“It was for sex, wasn’t it?” Josie interjected. “You were sleeping with Dusty too? Ray thought you were in a relationship, Misty.”

Misty was all wide-eyed innocence. “We were in a relationship. We were going to move in together.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “We were going to get married.”

And yet, Ray wouldn’t sign the divorce papers to end things once and for all between him and Josie. Had he had reservations about things with Misty? Or had he just been reluctant to let go of a relationship that had lasted almost all of his life? Josie slapped a palm on the table, making everyone jump. Misty’s little chi-wiener dog popped its sleepy head up to see what the commotion was. “Then why were you fucking Dusty in your car?”

Noah said, “Boss.”

“It wasn’t something we planned,” Misty said. “Ray and I were already together. One night Dusty and I got drunk together and things just kind of happened. We were going to stop once Ray and I got married.”

“Did Ray know?” Josie asked accusingly. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind she wondered why she even cared. But she couldn’t stop herself.

“I don’t know,” Misty said. “I didn’t tell him. I don’t think Dusty did. Look, the stuff that happened with Dusty didn’t really mean anything. I loved Ray. It was just that Dusty was under a lot of stress. He said he needed it.”

Josie said, “Oh my God.”

Noah put a hand on her shoulder. “Boss.”

Holcomb said, “Okay, okay. That’s not really germane to the issue at hand. Officer Branson had been in your car, and Miss Coleman said she could smell him… or, to be more accurate, Miss Coleman advised that she could smell the scent of one of her rapists. You believed it was Officer Branson because he had most recently been in your car?”

“Yes,” Misty said.

“So what did you do at that point?”

She looked down at her dog. Its eyes were trained on her face, alert and tuned to her emotions. “Ray had told me that he thought Nick Gosnell was… taking women and pimping them out and that a lot of guys on the force knew.”

“What?” Josie said. “When did he tell you that?”

“The day before that. He had just told me. He was really rattled over it. He thought maybe Gosnell had Isabelle, but he didn’t know what to do, ’cause he said everyone was in on it. He said guys had been killed over the whole thing. He was worried about what would happen to me if he blew the whistle or whatever. He never specifically said that Dusty knew, just that a lot of guys knew. So when Isabelle said she smelled Dusty, I knew. I knew he was involved. I realized I couldn’t just take her to the police. So I took her home. To my house.”

“Why didn’t you call Ray?” Josie asked.

“I did. I called and asked him if Dusty was involved in the Gosnell thing, and he lied and said he wasn’t. So I thought, why would he lie? Why would he protect Dusty?”

“Because they’ve been best friends since kindergarten,” Josie said.

“Ladies,” Holcomb interjected. He asked Misty, “Did you tell Ray Quinn that you had Coleman?”

“No. I didn’t know what to do. So I called the chief.”

Noah said, “But how did you know the chief wasn’t involved too?”

Misty shifted uncomfortably in her chair. The dog whined. “Well, when Ray’s friends found out that Ray and I were, you know, in a relationship, all of a sudden they all started showing up at the club. It was weird, like they wanted to check me out or something. It got to the point where it was a little creepy with some of them. Anyway, the chief never came to the club. Ever. But I met him a couple of times. I had brought Ray some coffee and food to the station during the Coleman search.”