Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
“There’s obviously been a misunderstanding,” Noah said. “Let’s all take a breath, okay? Can I get you some water? Anything?”
The courtesy seemed to take Griffin off guard, but it had the effect Noah had clearly been trying to accomplish. After several deep breaths, the wildness in his eyes dimmed and he shook his head slowly, muttering, “No. Thank you.”
“You’ll let me know if you do, okay?” Noah told him. “Now, let’s go back to Monday night. You went to Dani’s house. Why?”
Griffin’s attention dropped to one of his sleeves. He scratched at a small brown stain on the cuff. It was minuscule and it could have been anything—coffee, tea, dirt—but Josie wondered if it was dried blood.
“I went to talk with her,” Griffin admitted.
“I had seen the news on TV about Maxine and Haven. I was afraid they might be in danger. I only wanted to protect her—them. I didn’t think she would be so unreasonable.
So closed off. We’d had something, shared something.
For years! Much longer than what I shared with Maxine.
I even brought her flowers—her favorite kind—to soften her up. ”
“She wasn’t happy to see you?” asked Noah.
“No,” he said quietly, making Josie lean in to hear him. “I tried talking to her, but nothing went right. I had to resort to drastic measures. They wouldn’t come with me.”
“No shit,” Josie said. “Most women balk at going places with their stalkers.”
“What?” His brow furrowed. “I wasn’t stalking them.”
“A month ago, while Cassidy was still in school, you didn’t follow her around? Hang out in front of Dani’s house?”
Josie hadn’t yet confirmed this via the location history on his phone and car since their priority had been getting into his house, but it wouldn’t take long to do so.
“This would have been in June,” Noah clarified.
“I—” The tips of Griffin’s ears started to turn pink. “I just wanted to see them. Just one time. I was lonely, okay? I missed Dani. Once I saw her, I left. That was it. I wasn’t following anyone around.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Josie said. “Griff, that’s the very definition of stalking. You can dress it up and call it love, but lurking around the home of a woman who dumped you two years ago and following her teenage daughter back and forth to school is not good or welcome under any circumstances.”
“I wasn’t following anyone!”
Having gotten him to admit to lurking outside Dani’s home in June, Noah moved on. “You hadn’t had contact with Dani in months, according to what you told us earlier. Why the sudden need to ‘protect’ her?”
As usual, Noah did his best to match the delusion—lies—of the man they were interviewing.
Although they both knew that Griffin had kidnapped Dani and Cassidy, in his mind, he’d merely been protecting her from the fate that had befallen Maxine and Haven.
Noah went with that, and Josie knew it was to keep Griffin talking, spilling his secrets. Make him comfortable.
Griffin kept digging his nail into the tiny brown splotch on his cuff, but he didn’t answer.
Noah leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table, his face filled with sympathy. “Did you really want to protect them, or was it about something else?”
“I, um…” Griffin’s voice failed him. After another hard swallow, he tried again. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let me tell you then,” Noah said evenly. “After seeing your sister happy, about to start her own family, you felt left behind. Lost. You’d already struggled for years to find your own family.”
Griffin didn’t answer but started nodding his head so slightly, it was almost imperceptible. Josie was pretty sure he had no idea he was doing it.
“You weren’t trying to start any particular family, though,” Josie interjected, toning down her anger, her nearly irrepressible urge to choke him until he told them what he’d done with Turner’s family.
She needed to be slow, steady, methodical, like her very patient husband.
“What you really wanted was to recreate your ideal family. The one you had when your father died. The one that was nearly destroyed by a pedophile con artist. What you were searching for was a woman with a teenage daughter, preferably a woman in a bad marriage, so that you could swoop in and save them both the way you weren’t able to with your mom and Reina. ”
Griffin sucked in a sharp breath. His body jerked as if she’d physically punched him.
“Milo told us about what happened after your dad died,” Noah explained.
“It makes sense that you’d want to rewrite that history a little.
I’m not sure about Dani, but you came very close with Maxine.
You thought she’d come back to you. Still, when you found out your little sister was pregnant, it was a shock to the system, wasn’t it? ”
Griffin didn’t answer. Just kept nodding along in tiny motions.
“Not just a shock,” Josie said, “the rug was pulled out from under you. You’d spent so long ‘protecting’ Reina that you didn’t know how to live any other way.
Suddenly, everything about your life was different and wrong.
You were in agony and the only way to get that pain to stop was to get someone to take Reina’s place.
Fill that void as soon as you could so you wouldn’t be alone. ”
“I want Reina to be happy,” Griffin whispered.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I just didn’t think about what it would be like when she found someone.
We didn’t see each other often, but she was always there.
I was always watching over her. You’re right, it was difficult and I acted rashly. I handled things poorly.”
Josie almost laughed. Committing a double homicide and abducting two women twenty-four hours later was a little more than handling things poorly.
“Is that what happened?” she asked. “You didn’t handle it well when you tried to get back together with Maxine and she rejected you? Is that why you killed her and Haven?”
“W-what?” Griffin spluttered, his body freezing as he stared at her in horror. “No. I didn’t kill anyone!”
Patiently, Noah said, “The location history on your phone and car put you at the festival most of the afternoon and early evening on Saturday. You went home and returned in the early hours of Sunday morning, which is when they were killed.”
“That left you with no ready-made family of your own,” Josie mused. “So you went after Dani. She was your second choice.”
All the blood drained from his face. He threw his hands up as if to ward off an attack.
“N-no, that’s not… that’s not right. Yes, I did try to get back together with Maxine, but I didn’t kill anyone.
Dani wasn’t my second choice. It wasn’t about that.
When I went there, I just wanted to protect them. I-I…”
“Spit it out, Griff,” Josie said. “Every minute I’m in here with you is time I could be spending finding Dani and Cassidy.”
“Just listen. Listen. Please.” He took a deep breath, lowering his hands.
The salesman took over. “You’re right, okay?
I did track Maxine down and discovered she was at the festival with Haven.
I followed them but only for a bit. There wasn’t a good time to approach her, so I had to regroup.
I went home and gathered some of the flowers. The Crimson Brides were her favorite.”
“Just like Dani,” Noah said.
For a moment Griffin looked sheepish. Then he said, “What matters is that I knew Maxine loved them, so I went back to her tent early the next morning hoping to talk some sense into her.”
“Because stalking her for months didn’t work?” Josie asked. “Putting her so on edge that everyone who knew her thought she was on drugs didn’t make her see sense?”
Deep lines creased his forehead. “What? I didn’t— What are you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” said Josie.
He shook his head. “No, no. She broke things off. I left it at that. I was devastated, that’s true. You think I stalked her?”
“I know you did,” Josie said.
“No! I told you I didn’t. She ended things. She needed her space. I gave it to her. When I went to the festival to try to win her back, I hadn’t seen her in months. I’m not a stalker!”
Noah’s quiet voice cut through the tension in the air. “After Dani Turner broke things off and moved here to reconcile with her husband, you followed her. Got your territory at work changed. Bought a house. You only moved on from Dani because you met Maxine.”
“Fine, fine,” Griffin said. “You’re right. I did follow Dani here. I knew her marriage was never going to work out and if I just bided my time, I could get her back. Then yes, I met Maxine and she was different, but I never stalked either of them.”
Josie’s hands twitched to reach across the table and do something insane like start snapping his fingers, one by one, until he finally told them what they needed to know. She should have been grateful that with each exchange, he admitted to a little more, but this crawling pace was excruciating.
“That’s enough,” Josie said, slamming a palm onto the table.
Griffin jumped.
“Let’s just get to the most pressing part of all this,” Josie went on. “After you killed Maxine and Haven, you kidnapped Dani and Cassidy.”
“I didn’t kill them!” Griffin insisted. “I didn’t! They were dead when I got there.”
I didn’t do it. The credo of murderers everywhere.
“If they were already dead when you got there,” Noah asked, “why didn’t you call 911?”
“I panicked!” he said, voice going up an octave.
“No one would believe me. I’d already gone inside the tent.
Who would believe that I hadn’t killed them?
It wouldn’t take much to discover my prior relationship with Maxine.
I knew I’d be under scrutiny just like I am right now.
I freaked out. I know I screwed up, but I didn’t kill them. ”
“You left flowers on their chests,” Noah said. “That doesn’t seem like the behavior of someone in a panic.”
Griffin’s face crumpled. A sob shook his body.
This time, when his eyes glistened with moisture, he let his tears stream down his cheeks.
“I knew I would not get a chance to say goodbye to them properly, so yes, I took a moment with them. Left the flowers there for them. I know how it looks but I wasn’t in my right mind. ”
Josie said, “Sure, okay. Let’s go with that then for a minute. Let’s say you didn’t kill Maxine and Haven but you still kidnapped Dani and Cassidy. So where are they?”
“I don’t know!”
“When you realized that things with them weren’t going to work out any better than they had with Maxine and Haven, you decided to get rid of them.
You couldn’t keep them in your basement forever.
Tell me, Griff. Do you have them stashed somewhere else hoping that Dani will come around, or did you kill them and hide their bodies? ”
“What?” He used his sleeve to scrub the tears from his face. “No, I would never do that. I didn’t do that. I would never kill anyone. Not Maxine and Haven and not Dani and Cassidy. How many times do I have to say it? When I left this morning, they were fine.”
“Well, they didn’t escape.” Noah’s voice stayed quiet, with just a hint of skepticism. “You expect us to believe that while you were at work, someone broke into your home and took them?”
Griffin sniffled. “You think that’s what happened?”
It was very difficult not to roll her eyes, but Josie managed. “What I think happened is that you did something with them before you left for work this morning, and since you didn’t think anyone would be inside your house, you decided to clean up the mess later.”
Dropping his head into his hands, Griffin sobbed again. “You’re not listening to me.”
“Who would break into your house and take Dani and Cassidy from right under your nose?” Noah asked, the idea sounding more ridiculous the more they discussed it.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled from behind his hands. “Maybe Maxine’s husband, Charles. He killed Maxine and Haven.”
“Did you see him there at Maxine and Haven’s tent?” asked Josie.
Looking back up at them, he said, “No, no. It’s just the only thing that makes sense. He must have found out about us. He treated Maxine horribly but he was never going to let her go without a fight.”
Josie said, “Why would Charles kill them months after you and Maxine had already broken up?”
Griffin shrugged, the movement jerky. “How should I know? Because he’s a domestic abuser who gets off on screwing with people, on making them afraid.
He needs to have power over everyone. He likes hurting people.
Maybe he wanted to hurt me, too, and he did something with Dani and Cassidy.
He could have been following me. Watching me.
Today was the first time I left the house since I brought them home with me.
He could have taken them after I left for the office. ”
It certainly wasn’t implausible that Charles had done exactly that, or that he’d killed his family.
Maybe he hadn’t physically harmed Maxine during their marriage but everything they’d learned about him pointed to him being a master of coercive control.
It wasn’t always a huge leap for someone like that to go from emotional abuse to physical violence.
It wasn’t even that unthinkable that a man like Charles could go from never laying a hand on his wife and daughter to killing them.
Josie had seen cases like that before. Charles had some impulse control issues, but he wasn’t stupid.
It would be easy to come to that conclusion seeing him on his worst day—quick to anger, soulless, and bitter.
Hung up on petty squabbles with a wife whose battered body was on its way to the morgue.
In truth, Charles was more intelligent and calculating than most people gave him credit for.
It was possible that he’d thought through a plan to kill his family and get away with it and then executed it flawlessly.
Was he vindictive and angry enough to go after Dani and Cassidy just to ruin Griffin’s life?
Josie said, “Okay, let’s say you’re right about Charles and how all of that went down. How would Charles figure out your connection to Dani?”
“I don’t know! Isn’t that your job to find out? Have you even talked to him? He could have them right now! You should be out there looking for them instead of here with me!”
“Is that right?” asked Josie.
The air in the room seemed to still, the moment suspended, only the ticking of the clock high on the wall reminding them that time was still passing.
Another moment ticked by. Then Josie said, “Are you ready to tell us the truth now, Griffin?”
“Oh God,” he moaned, tipping his head back toward the ceiling. “I’ve been telling you the truth. You have to believe me.”
“Just tell me this,” Josie tried. “Are they still alive?”
Griffin’s chin dropped to his chest. “I don’t know.”