Where the Blame Lies(81)

“He can’t have anything to do with this,” she whispered, shaking her head as if to deny it further to herself if not to him. She turned to face him as he drove toward Professor Merrick’s house. “He can’t have hurt me, Zach. I . . . I would have known him, wouldn’t I? I can’t understand this. No. There’s some other reason he lied. Something . . .” She sat up straighter as though something had just occurred to her. “Also, Cooper’s gay.”

That stopped Zach up. He hadn’t had that impression. The way he’d looked at Josie . . . Zach had the notion Cooper was a man who’d long carried a torch for her. Hell, Zach had been jealous. Christ. “Yeah?” he said.

“Zach, the man in the warehouse, raped me. Repeatedly.”

His shoulders tensed as he glanced at her. Her eyes were slightly wild. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to bring her along. Maybe he should drop her off at the station while he worked. But fuck it all, he wanted her directly in his line of sight. Especially now. “Josie,” Zach said evenly. “Rape is a crime of violence, not of sex.”

She stared at him for a moment. His every nerve was stretched taut at the picture their conversation evoked, the fact that he could do nothing to make what happened to her go away.

Josie let out a stilted breath. “Yes . . . I, I know.”

“What about his eyes? What color are Cooper’s eyes?”

“Brown. Dark brown.” She looked at him, something dawning in her gaze. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “It’s why there was that unusual ring of brown around the outside of Marshall’s—my captor’s—eyes.” She looked back to the road, her expression dull. “He was wearing contacts.”

Contacts. Okay, but how had the man who held Josie sounded just like Landish? Smelled like him? Moved like him? Zach’s mind was reaching in all directions, arranging and rearranging the puzzle pieces that were being thrown at him by the moment. Cooper . . . Charlie had known about the woman in Tennessee, Deanna Breene, because he’d run into Nia Parsons. Had he taken a day trip there? Would they find her bones sooner or later, wrists still shackled to a basement wall?

Vaughn Merrick was a prolific cheater. Cooper . . . Charlie, if it was him, couldn’t have known about every single woman the man had cheated with unless he’d tailed him twenty-four/seven. He must have considered what Nia told him opportune information.

But why? Why did he go after the girls that Merrick slept with? Why was that so important to him?

It suddenly occurred to Zach that Reagan had sat in front of Cooper in Josie’s living room and confessed her own affair with the man. Jesus. Had she delivered her own death sentence in that very moment as Cooper sat listening innocuously, a chocolate-chip cookie hiding his expression?

Something else dawned on him “The call, Josie. It came right after Cooper left your house, right?”

She nodded, swallowed. “The background noise.” Her eyes widened. “Was it . . . could it have been an . . . engine? His car?”

Possible, yes. Zach’s jaw tightened, his mind continuing to whirl. The profile. Cooper/Charlie matched Pickering’s profile. White, late twenties, smart . . . although they didn’t know any of his past to determine if he’d been abused. Still so many damn questions, and not enough answers.

They pulled up to the curb on Vaughn Merrick’s street and Zach spotted the officer sitting in his car across from the professor’s house. He turned to Josie. “Stay here. Your presence could keep the professor from talking to me, and I need him to talk.”

Josie looked like she was about to argue but then closed her mouth, nodding. Zach got out of the car and jogged over to the unmarked vehicle, asking the officer to keep an eye on Josie while he went to talk to the professor for a few minutes. The officer agreed, and Zach walked to the house and quickly up the steps to the front door, rapping loudly. When there was no answer, he rapped again, even more loudly. He knew the bastard was home. The officer surveilling his house would have known if he’d left. Zach saw the curtain shift slightly and moved to the window. “Professor, I need to talk to you,” he yelled through the glass.

“Set up an interview with my lawyer, Detective,” he yelled back. “I refuse to talk to you without counsel present.”

Motherfucker. “I just have a couple of quick questions about—”

“Talk to my lawyer,” he said again. “Or bring a warrant.” The curtain shifted again and Zach saw his form moving away, back into the recesses of his house. Zach splayed his hands and beat once on the wooden front door.

“Bastard!” he yelled.

When he got back in the car, his muscles were tense. Josie didn’t say anything, obviously surmising what had happened. He picked up his cell phone and dialed Alicia Merrick’s number next. She didn’t answer and when Zach called the police detail who was watching her, they told him she was in the grocery store. “Go in and get her for me, would you?”

The officer told Zach he’d have Ms. Merrick call him back as soon as possible and Zach thanked him, clicking over to the other line when he saw that Jimmy was calling. “Called every firm on the list and not one of them has a Cooper Hart or a Charlie Hart working there,” he said. “I also called the UC admissions office and there is no record of anyone by either name ever having attended their school.”