Save Her Soul (Detective Josie Quinn #9)(30)
“I can’t meet you there. It’s not safe.”
“Alice, I can assure you that there is no safer place in this city than the police station. I’ll be there at nine a.m. You’ll have to come in through the back. I can wait for you outside if you’d like, in the parking lot.”
Alice’s voice lowered to a whisper. “If you think the police station is safe, you’re not as smart as I thought.”
Before Josie could respond, the line went dead. Josie found the text from dispatch with the number and tried calling it back. It rang seven times before going to voicemail, but the outgoing message was an automated voice that read off the number she’d just called and told her to leave a message. “Alice,” Josie said after the beep. “This is Josie Quinn. It’s extremely important that you call me back. I need to talk to you. Please call me at this number as soon as you can. I’ll meet you wherever you’d like.” Josie rattled off her number and hung up.
She waited ten minutes but there was no return call. There was no way she was going back to sleep now. Questions whirled through her mind. Who was Alice? How did she know about Beverly’s murder? Why had she kept it a secret for sixteen years? Had she murdered Beverly?
Josie went upstairs to get dressed.
Fourteen
Although two news vans sat in the municipal parking lot, no reporters waited near the entrance to the stationhouse. The rain was still coming down in a light drizzle. Josie was able to slip inside under the cover of darkness unnoticed. She checked in with the night desk sergeant and went up to her desk. She searched various databases, but the number that Alice had called from was a prepaid burner phone. Josie wrote up a warrant that would allow her to contact the major cellular networks and attempt to locate Alice’s phone. Even burner phones had to use existing cellular networks to make calls. If Josie could figure out which network the number was using, she would be able to triangulate the phone’s location. It would only bring her within a few miles, and she might not get the information for a few days, depending on the speed of the network’s legal department, but it was better than nothing. She’d wait until regular working hours to ask a judge to sign it.
She tried calling Alice again but got only the voicemail. Next, she went through Calvin Plummer’s files and her high school yearbook but found no one named Alice. Her eyes burned with fatigue as daylight crept through the windows. Rain spattered against the glass and Josie suppressed a groan. It seemed as though the rain would never end. The flooding was reaching doomsday proportions, and the river hadn’t even crested yet. She heard the stairwell door swing open and a moment later, a steaming cup of coffee and a box of baked goods appeared in front of her.
Noah said, “The pastries are from Misty. You didn’t even leave me a note. Everything okay?”
Josie sipped the coffee gratefully and leaned back in her chair. Noah took a seat across from her at his own desk. She told him about the call.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he said.
“Then you wouldn’t have had any sleep at all. Besides, it’s a dead end right now. Unless she calls back.”
Gretchen and Mettner banged through the stairwell door, both shaking water from their hair. They attacked Misty’s box of goodies and settled in at their desks, ready to catch up. Gretchen booted up her computer, checked her email, and started printing documents out. Before Josie could brief them on the Beverly Urban case or the mysterious female night caller, Amber arrived, dressed in another form-fitting skirt and blouse, this time in darker tones. Instead of a briefcase, she carried a cup-holder filled with paper coffee cups. She set them down on Mettner’s desk. “Hi, everyone,” she said with a smile. “I thought you might need these.” Her face fell as she saw the cup in Josie’s hand, but she quickly covered it with a smile. “Now you’ll have two,” she told Josie, setting a cup in front of her. “Detective Quinn,” she said. “Detective Mettner told me you like your coffee with two sugars and lots of half and half.”
“Mett,” Josie said. “We just call him Mett. Thank you.”
Josie sipped the cup Noah had brought her as she watched Amber hand out the rest of them, each one made to the person’s liking as per Mett’s instructions.
Mettner said, “I told her we usually like Komorrah’s, but they’re flooded now.”
Gamely, Noah said, “This was very thoughtful. Thank you.”
When she had finished dispensing the drinks, Amber pulled a chair over from one of the unoccupied desks. She produced a tablet with keyboard which she opened on her lap. Then she looked at them expectantly.
Gretchen said, “Miss Watts, you’ll be joining us for all of our briefings from now on?”
Amber smiled. “Please, call me Amber. Well, not every briefing but I thought for now, to get myself acclimated, I’d sit in on as many as I can. This will give me an idea of what types of cases you’re working on and any press issues you might be up against.”
Josie wanted to tell her that they’d handled the press just fine as long as she’d been with the department, but it was obvious that in spite of the Chief’s protests, Amber was there to stay. When no one spoke, Amber said, “Look, detectives, I’m not the Mayor’s plant, okay?”
“No one said that,” Mettner told her.