Where the Blame Lies(85)

Introductions were made and after they’d sat, Zach got straight to the point, telling Janelle that one of the foster kids for whom she’d been an advocate was a suspect in a murder investigation.

“Charlie Hartsman?” she repeated, her face going pale.

“He was placed with a family for a short period of time and then returned. Do you remember?”

She nodded, visibly shaken. “Yes, yes, of course I remember.”

“What happened to him afterward, Ms. Gilbert?”

“Janelle,” she murmured, casting her eyes to the side. “What happened to Charlie was terrible. I . . . I’ve never been able to forget it.”

“Tell us, please. A woman’s life could be at stake,” Jimmy said, his tone gentle.

Janelle looked at Jimmy, seeming to be comforted by his voice and his craggy face the way many victims and interviewees were.

She stood, moving to a file cabinet behind her desk. She opened the top drawer and after rifling through it for a moment, pulled out a manila folder. She returned to her chair, placed the file on the desk in front of her and opened it. Zach saw the picture of a little boy paperclipped to the inside cover. Janelle’s eyes lingered on it for a moment before she looked up. Zach saw guilt in her gaze. Did she feel responsible for not finding him a permanent home with the Merricks? “He’d been with a couple before he went to live with the Merricks,” she said. “It . . . didn’t work out with them either. Charlie kept running away. They said he was troubled, too hard to handle. I thought the Merricks would be a better fit. They seemed so stable—a professor and his pretty wife. I was hopeful it would work out. Charlie had been tossed around for most of his life at that point, born to two addicts who had no business having children and surrendered him to the system.”

She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling. “When Charlie came back to us, I reached out to the couple who had had him previously and they agreed to foster him again. Charlie he . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment Zach thought she might cry, but she seemed to gather herself, looking to Jimmy again. “He begged me not to send him back to them. Started telling me what I thought were lies about them locking him in the closet, starving him as punishment. I didn’t believe him. Charlie was wildly intelligent, but he was also manipulative, a chronic liar.” She paused. “Much to my everlasting regret, I sent him back to them anyway. They tortured him, there’s no other way to say it. They used a dog chain to tie him up in a room in the basement, starved him, and left him alone for days at a time with barely enough water to keep him alive.” She swallowed and Zach glanced at Josie, who was listening to Janelle with rapt attention, her hands fisted in her lap, lips trembling. “A neighbor finally called in, reported that he’d heard a kid yelling, that he’d seen the adults leave the house the day before and they still weren’t back. They’d gone on a trip to Indiana for the weekend and left him chained up there. When they found him, he was emaciated, he’d been bitten by rats . . .”

“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy muttered.

Janelle looked at him again, nodded. “Yeah.” She paused, her fingers tapping unconsciously on the open folder in front of her. “They were arrested. It was on the news, though because he was a minor, Charlie’s name wasn’t mentioned.” Zach tried to remember hearing a story like that on the news . . . what would it have been? Eighteen or nineteen years before? He couldn’t. “The couple actually ended up being killed in a home invasion later. Tied up. They were found a week later. Police seemed to think it was drug related, from what I recall.” She closed the folder, pushed it across the desk. “Anyway, it’s all in here.” She tilted her head. “You said Charles Hartsman is a suspect in a murder investigation? Was it recent?”

“Yes and no, actually,” Zach said, not glancing at Josie. “He may have been involved in crimes dating back many years.”

“I . . . I see.” Her gaze moved to Josie, held, before she looked away.

“What happened to Charlie after he was saved from that house?” Josie asked, bringing Janelle’s gaze back to her. Zach’s heart swelled when he heard the clarity in her voice, the strength. This was shaking her to the core, but she was holding it together like the warrior she was.

Janelle’s lips turned up in a small smile. “An older woman took him in. I visited him often there to make sure he was doing well. After all, I owed him, you know? Part of the blame for what happened to him was mine.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE


Zach’s apartment smelled of old food and musty air. He grimaced as he shut the door behind them and punched in the alarm code. He shot Josie an apologetic look. “Guess I forgot to take the trash out,” he said. “Go ahead and make yourself at home in the living room and I’ll be right in.”

She wandered in the direction he had pointed her, still feeling dazed. She’d barely spoken on the drive from Janelle Gilbert’s office to Zach’s apartment, and he’d—thankfully—left her to her thoughts, seeming to understand that there was a war being waged inside of her. A mighty attempt to catalogue everything she’d learned since that morning. Had it only been a day? Had she woken in a cabin in Tennessee, just beginning to get a fingerhold on the fact that Marshall Landish might not be the man who’d abducted her?