Chapter Thirty-Eight
Zach locked the door behind him and turned to Josie. She was already standing, and the look of utter devastation on her face obliterated him.
He closed the distance between them in two heartbeats and took her in his arms. She was shaking, and she clutched at him tightly, allowing him to comfort her.
When he stood back, he saw that she had tears in her eyes but also that same fire he’d seen in her so long ago.
He smoothed back her hair. I love you, he thought.
Maybe I have since the moment I saw you, beaten and bent but unbroken. Just like now.
“It was him,” she said, her voice clogged. “Cooper. He impersonated Marshall, didn’t he?”
“I believe so. That’s what it looks like.”
Her gaze grew distant. “Once I was sure of who he was, I didn’t question the small inconsistencies.”
“It’s what the mind does, Josie. It fills in gaps. You cannot blame yourself for that.”
“He impersonated Marshall, and then he killed him. Made it look like a suicide.”
He cradled her face in his hands, looking in her eyes. “We’ll find him, Josie. We will.”
She nodded, a jerky movement, and he caught a tear with his thumb. “Zach,” she whispered, her expression crumpling, “do you realize what this means? Cooper is the father of my baby. All this time…I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. All this time…”
Zach opened his mouth to speak when a knock came at the door. Josie stepped back, swiping the wetness from her cheeks.
Zach brought his lips to her forehead quickly and then opened the door to Jimmy. “We got his address. He was living in an apartment in Price Hill under C. Cooper Hartsman. The place is cleared out. He’s gone.”
Fuck. “Did you search the whole building?” Zach asked.
“Every nook and cranny. No trace of him, and no sign of anyone else.”
No sign of Reagan.
Zach rubbed at his temple. “So he had to use his legal name to work and rent an apartment, but otherwise went by Cooper Hart.”
“From what we can tell so far.”
Of course, the guy was apparently a brilliant impersonator and a master manipulator. He could appear anywhere as anyone. And in the meantime, Reagan was probably chained up in some dark underground room.
“We have the name of his social worker. She’ll be able to tell us who took him in after the Merricks dumped him.” Dumped him. Accurate enough, though Zach refused to feel empathy for a murdering psychopath.
“Can I come with you?” Josie asked, and when she obviously spotted the doubt in Zach’s face, she hurried on. “Please. I can’t be left out of this now.”
“Everyone’s on this, Cope,” Jimmy said. “We can’t spare anyone to provide her security.”
Josie looked grateful that Jimmy wasn’t going to lobby to cut her loose. And Zach could admit that she knew this case as well as they did at this point. To have to sit at home and wait for information from them would be like a kick to her gut.
“All right, fine,” Zach said, shooting her a concerned glance. “I’ll drive.”
It was nearly five p.m. when they walked into Janelle Gilbert’s office at the Department of Job and Family Services.
The petite woman with short gray hair and large brown eyes stood as they entered.
Jimmy had called her on the way, and she’d waited for their arrival, though it had sounded like she was packing up to leave when they’d spoken.
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?”
“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 clipped 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.
“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.
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.
“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.
“Yeah.” Janelle 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 unsuccessfully to remember hearing a story like that on the news… What would it have been? Eighteen or nineteen years before? “How long were they in prison?” he asked.
“Not long enough. The couple actually ended up being killed in a home invasion. Tied up. Bodies 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 tapped her finger on the edge of her desk.
“You said Charles Hartsman is a suspect in a murder investigation? Was it recent?”
“Yes and no, actually,” Zach said. “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.”