Chapter Thirty-Six
As it turned out, there were thirty architectural firms in downtown Cincinnati.
Zach called in to the station and put out an APB on Cooper Hart.
Jimmy was calling the firms Cooper might work at in an effort to locate him.
Josie tried his cell phone number again and shook her head when Zach looked at her, indicating his voicemail had picked up once again. She appeared shell-shocked, distant.
“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. “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?”
“The background noise,” she murmured as 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 and asked 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 and rapped loudly.
When there was no answer, he rapped again, with even more force.
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 called 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 repeated. “Or bring a warrant.” The curtain shifted again, and Zach saw the man’s form moving away, back into the recesses of his house.
Zach splayed his hands and beat once on the wooden front door. “Bastard!”
When he got back behind the wheel, 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.”
Zach hung up. “Fuck,” he murmured. He told Josie what Jimmy had said.
“He never went to UC? Why…why would he say he did?”
“Josie, I don’t know, but something is very wrong here.”
Her eyes were so haunted, and Zach was tempted to pull over and comfort her, but they didn’t have time. They needed to figure out what the fuck was going on and hopefully save Reagan from the same fate as the other girls they’d found shackled and starved.
“You said Cooper worked at a coffee shop nine years ago?”
Josie seemed to come back to the present. “Yeah. Right near campus. Reagan and I used to go in there a lot.”
“Why don’t we go talk to them, see if anyone there still talks to him? It’s better than waiting.”
They drove to the area near the campus that had restaurants, a few clothing shops and other businesses college students frequented.
The coffee shop buzzed with activity on a weekday at three p.m., and when they entered, Zach moved to the front of the line as college students in need of caffeine gave him dirty looks.
He showed his badge to the young barista and requested a manager.
She nodded, eyes wide as she walked quickly to the back and then came out a moment later, telling Zach the manager would be right with them.
They took a seat at the one empty high-top table near the back, and a few minutes later, an older black woman emerged.
Josie recognized her. “She used to work here when Cooper did,” she told Zach.
The woman approached them, holding out her hand to Zach first and then to Josie. “Detective? I’m Susannah Washington. What can I do for you?”
Susannah sat down at the third seat, and Zach explained what they wanted.
She looked pensive. “I do remember him. Real handsome guy. All the girls giggled and flirted with him, and he flirted right back, even though I think he dated the guy next door. I’d have to contact the owner to forward employee records from nine years ago.
We don’t keep that kind of information in the store, and we got a new computer system five years ago. But I can do that right away.”
“That’d be great,” Zach said. “The sooner the better. You did know him as Cooper, though?”
“Yeah. But I think that was his middle name. First name was just an initial. C, I think? Maybe R? I don’t remember, exactly, and I just don’t remember his last name.
Hart doesn’t sound right, but I can’t say why.
But the guy he dated? Ron? He still works at the sandwich shop next door.
He owns the place now. If I were you, I’d go talk to him.
” Zach thanked her, handing over his card so the records could be emailed to him.
When Zach and Josie entered the sandwich shop next door, a bell tinkled over the door. The place wasn’t quite as crowded as the coffee shop, but it still hummed with activity, kids with laptops taking up the round tables, the looks on their faces focused, intense.
A good-looking brown-haired man was talking to an employee, and when Zach and Josie approached, the kid walked away, and the man turned to them with a smile.
Josie felt herself wheeling back in time, snatches of music filling her head as a guy had looked at her and Cooper across a crowded bar, his eyes filling with pleasure as Cooper approached.
He gave Josie a slightly perplexed look as though he recognized her too but couldn’t place her.
“We’re here to see the owner? Ron?”
“That’s me. What can I do for you?”
Zach flashed his badge and introduced them. “I’m trying to find some information on a man I believe you dated about nine years ago? Cooper Hart?”
Ron’s face morphed into surprise. He signaled them to a table, and they all sat down. “Yeah, I knew Cooper.”
“And you knew him as Cooper Hart?”
“Yes. What is this about if I may ask?”
“He might have some information about a crime we’re investigating.”
Ron’s brow furrowed.
“You did date him, right?”
“Nah, hardly. Truthfully? He was a tease.” He let out a small, uncomfortable laugh.
“He’d flirt in public, but then when I tried to get him alone, he turned all cold.
” He glanced at Josie and then back at Zach.
“You wanna know the truth? I suspected he didn’t like guys at all.
Like it was all a great big act. Why he’d pretend, though? It’s beyond me.”