Chapter 51
FIFTY-ONE
“You sure about this?”
Josie felt Gretchen’s stare like the sun beating down on her.
A thin sheen of sweat covered her face even though the vents in Gretchen’s SUV had been blasting cold air at her for the past fifteen minutes.
Wrapping her fingers around the handle of the passenger’s side door, she took another look at Dani Schwarber’s house. “I’m sure,” she said.
“I think I should come with you.”
“No.” Josie shook her head. “I need to talk to him alone.”
Gretchen’s warm palm closed over Josie’s forearm. “He’s in bad shape, Josie. I know he’s not as bad a guy as we thought but right now, he’s erratic. Unpredictable.”
Swiveling her head to meet Gretchen’s eyes, Josie said, “He won’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Gretchen gave Josie’s arm a squeeze before letting go. “Fine. I’ll be here if you need me.”
Josie pulled at the handle. A click sounded as the door disengaged. Pausing, she said, “Do you think I’m crazy?”
Gretchen gripped the steering wheel with both hands, staring straight ahead.
A tiny knot of panic formed in Josie’s gut. “Gretchen.”
“Not crazy, just… be careful with him. Giving him false hope could be even more devastating than what he’s already dealing with.”
Gretchen was right but it only made her heart pound harder and faster.
Maybe she was being selfish. Was she pursuing Griffin’s crazy second-person theory because of what she’d found that morning, no matter how thin it was, or because she was selfish and couldn’t bear the prospect of spending the rest of her life feeling responsible for Dani and Cassidy’s deaths?
Selfish or not, she had to try.
Throwing open the door before she lost her nerve, she got out.
In a matter of seconds she was at the front door, peering through the screen and calling out Turner’s name.
There was no answer but the door was open so she went inside.
It was exactly as it had been a few days ago except the smell of spoiled food didn’t linger so heavily and Cassidy’s blood had been successfully scrubbed from the living room carpet.
“Turner?”
She knew he was there because she’d spoken with Annette that morning.
She and Dani’s parents had arrived in Denton.
They were staying at the Eudora Hotel, but they’d spent the night with Turner in his apartment.
After they woke up, he’d been too agitated to sit around so he’d told them he was going back to Dani’s to do a bit more cleaning before they entered the house.
Josie knew it was a lie. The house was tidied up.
Turner just needed to be alone. She didn’t blame him, but she wasn’t going to give him what he needed today.
Josie found him in Cassidy’s room, sitting on the edge of the bed. He was in shorts and a T-shirt again but they were wrinkled like he’d spent the night in them. One side of his hair was flattened and matted from sleep.
“Turner,” Josie said from the doorway.
The house was hauntingly still, or maybe it just felt that way because she knew what had happened to its occupants. She realized that Turner was strangely still as well. His large hands rested in his lap, unmoving. His eyes were fixed straight ahead at Cassidy’s corkboard.
“Turner?”
Had he entered some kind of catatonic state? A fugue of some kind? She took a step inside and nearly jumped out of her skin when the air conditioning whirred to life, shooting cold air from a vent over her head.
“We need to talk,” Josie said.
It wasn’t until she was standing in front of him that Turner spoke. His voice was scratchy and hoarse. “Go away, Quinn.”
“I can’t.” She reached into her back pocket where a folded sheaf of papers stuck out. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
Turner continued to stare straight ahead, eyes blank. “Haven’t you done enough? What’s next? Did you find someone to abduct my dog? Kill him and bury his body where no one will ever find it?”
There was no heat behind his words, but they hit their mark nevertheless.
Josie’s shoulders fell, her limbs going slack under the guilt she’d taken on herself without any help from him.
She opened her mouth to apologize, to say anything that might express how deeply sorry she was for having failed him, but she already knew he wasn’t going to accept anything of the sort from her.
No; pouring all of his grief and anger on her was a coping mechanism and he was short on those to begin with.
She placed the documents next to him on the bed and turned, walking the short distance to Cassidy’s desk.
“The GPS on Griffin Holt’s car and his phone show that in the months after Maxine broke up with him, he didn’t follow her.
He was at her medical office building once but he didn’t drive past her house.
Didn’t sit outside of it. Didn’t follow her back and forth from work.
He didn’t drive past Haven’s school. He never even visited Maxine and Haven’s part of town. ”
“Because he had turned his focus back to my family,” Turner said quietly.
Josie shook her head as she surveyed the sketches scattered across Cassidy’s desk. “I don’t think so. During that time, he drove past here once. Just like he said. He wasn’t following anyone.”
“So?”
Josie thumbed through some of the pages on the desk. “So he wasn’t the person stalking Maxine to the point that everyone who knew her thought she was on drugs.”
“Maybe she just thought he was stalking her,” Turner suggested, voice still flat.
Josie started pulling sketches out, making a pile to her left. Turner must have been more messed up than she thought, letting her touch Cassidy’s things.
“Or maybe it was her husband fucking with her,” he added.
“Nope. Charles checks out. We spoke with the woman he was seeing when he and Maxine separated. We took another look at his phone records. The GPS on his vehicle. There’s nothing to support the idea he was stalking his own wife.”
A rustle of fabric made Josie glance over her shoulder. Turner lifted the hem of his T-shirt and used it to wipe his face. The air conditioning was working just fine in here, which meant he was wiping away his tears. She did her best to ignore the hot spear of guilt that pierced her insides.
“Jesus, Quinn,” he said. “Who cares? Can’t you just—can’t you just leave, like I asked you to? Christ. You’re like fleas. Like lice. No, no. You’re like herpes. Can’t get rid of you.”
On any other day, under any other circumstances, that statement would have caused a fight between them. Today, she had more pressing things on her mind.
She snatched up the stack of sketches she’d gathered and turned, holding the first one up for him to see. “It’s you.”
With a groan, Turner pushed his hands into his hair and pulled at the roots. “Quinn, I swear to God. I can’t be held responsible—”
“This is Dani.” She held up another one. Then another. “This is Spot.” Another. “This is Annette.”
Cassidy hadn’t just been skilled at drawing owls. Like Wren, she was extremely good with faces. Better than Wren. Composite-sketch good.
She showed him a sketch of an older woman. She already knew who it was because Cassidy had written “Grandmom Schwarbs” on the back, but she was making a point so she asked, “Who’s this?”
For a long moment, he refused to look at it, glaring at Josie with such hatred she nearly gave up and left the house with her tail between her legs. When she didn’t, his gaze flicked over the drawing. “That’s my mother-in-law. Cass’s grandma.”
“This?” Again, Cass had noted the identity of her subject on the back of the sketch.
“My father-in-law. Her grandpa.”
Josie kept going, letting Turner identify each person despite Cassidy’s notes. She discarded each one onto the desk as they went. “This?”
“Her art teacher from her old school? Quinn, is there some reason why you’re doing this? Or have I actually descended to some new level of hell?”
“Just a few more,” she said.
“Then you’ll leave?”
“Then I’ll leave.”
Every drawing seemed to sap his energy more until his body slid from the edge of the bed onto the floor and stayed there, unmoving.
Cassidy had drawn a few of her friends and two other teachers from Alden.
She’d drawn her new friend in Denton, Toni, and their new neighbor, Earl Craig.
Turner knew them all. There were about four sketches left when Josie came to someone Turner couldn’t identify.
The man on the page was older and balding.
His face hard and wizened. Patchy stubble dotted his cheeks.
The detail Cassidy had given the others wasn’t there in this one, which made Josie think she didn’t know him as well or she’d only seen him from a distance, too far to gather the kinds of particulars she would have noted up close.
And yet, she’d captured a predatory gleam to his eyes that had Josie’s perv-o-meter going haywire.
It was what was on the back of the sketch, though that made Josie’s heart stutter.
“I’ve never seen that guy before,” said Turner. “I don’t know who he is. Maybe someone Dani knows. Fuck. Knew. Knows. I don’t know. She’s fucking gone, so I guess I have to talk about her in the past tense now.”
Josie would have had more sympathy for him if it didn’t feel like her chest was about to explode.
Because she needed to be sure, she took him through the remaining four sketches, all of which he was able to identify.
Hanging onto the John Doe sketch, she walked over until the toes of her boots almost touched the toes of his sneakers.
Squatting down, she flipped the page so the back of the drawing faced him.
“Read it.”
Again, he gave her a mutinous look that would have put a lesser woman in her grave before he finally glanced at Cassidy’s handwritten note. She watched the change in Turner’s face, his pallor deepening, eyes bulging, mouth dropping open.
Softly, she told him, “She didn’t want to tell you or Dani because she thought it would cause drama. Didn’t want you two to fight more than you already were. She told Toni she could handle him on her own but then he disappeared.”
Turner’s mouth closed, opened, closed again.
“She drew him, though,” Josie continued. “Because her dad’s law enforcement and she’s heard enough horror stories to know to document it somehow. In case something happened.”
Turner took the page from her gently, riveted to his daughter’s words. “How did you know this was here?”
“I didn’t. It was a hunch. I came to talk to you about it.
To get your permission to look through Cassidy’s stuff.
Wren’s always drawing. We haven’t officially seen anything, but I know she draws everyone she sees.
I remembered seeing a lot of portraits the last time we were here. It was a long shot.”
“This could be nothing,” he said hoarsely.
“Or it could be something.”
He traced his fingers over his daughter’s words. The smallest smile tugged at the corners of his lips, unbearably sad. Shaking his head, he muttered, “This kid.”
“Yeah,” Josie agreed, voice cracking.
Then he made a strangled noise halfway between a sob and a bitter laugh before he read the words out loud: “Dirty Lurker.”