“If you had gone to the police, then you wouldn’t have been able to get the revenge you were plotting,” Josie pointed out. “Or the business, which is what you were after in the first place.”
Even as she said the words, she knew they weren’t entirely true. Not given what he’d done to Reina. Saul had wanted the business, but only so he could live a cushier life. He could have taken the place of Liora’s husband and basked in the profits the garden center brought in each year without having to do much at all. It was already a well-managed operation by that time. What he really wanted was access to Liora’s teenage daughter.
She had a sudden flash of Haven Barnes’s injuries. The bruises, the broken finger, its bone slashing through skin. He’d killed her mother first to have more time with her. Haven’s body showed no signs of sexual assault but that didn’t mean he hadn’t tried. The girl had fought hard enough to stop him but at the cost of her own life. A deep chasm of sadness yawned open in the pit of Josie’s stomach. In it somewhere swirled a profound admiration for the girl. Dead or not, the fight mattered. Josie needed to believe that.
Questions about Cassidy invaded her mind next. Had he taken her and Dani instead of killing them in Griffin’s home so he could have time with her? Had he hurt her before he killedher? The thoughts made her skin feel too tight for her body. She had to slap them away, vanquish all memories of Cassidy Turner standing before her in the great room a few months ago or she wouldn’t be able to do her job.
Gretchen said, “Come on, Saul. We know you were planning to go back to Liora once you recovered.”
“You got me,” he said. “You figured out my big secret. Once I was back on my feet, I was going back for the kids. I couldn’t leave them alone with their crazy mother. That wouldn’t be right, but, as you know, I got into some trouble before I could do that.”
“Did you come back to this area to help the kids when you got out of prison?” Josie asked.
Saul walked over to where the bag of gypsum plaster mix sat next to a collection of trowels. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Reina took over the garden center. She’d made it more successful than ever.” Josie tapped her finger against her chin. “Funny thing, though. Around the time that you moved back here, they started having all kinds of problems. Vandalism. Theft. Fires.”
“Don’t know nothing about that,” Saul muttered.
“Then there’s Griffin. He’s a successful pharmaceutical rep. He’d met a woman. They’d fallen in love. He bought a house.”
Saul barked out a laugh as he knelt and put the doorknob onto the floor next to an empty five-gallon bucket. “That boy ain’t normal enough to fall in love. He’s a sniveling little weirdo. No one needs to sabotage him. He does it his own self. Buying a big fancy house next to the mayor ain’t gonna change that.”
Across the room, Josie met Gretchen’s eye, acknowledging the bomb Saul had just detonated.
“You know where Griffin lives?” Josie asked. “You said you hadn’t had any contact with him in twenty years.”
“I-I haven’t,” Saul stammered. “I don’t.”
“Have you ever been there?”
He searched through the trowels along the floor. “No, no. I told you, I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”
Josie’s hand hovered near her holster. Those trowels had sharp edges. No way in hell was she letting this pedophile get the drop on her.
“But you’ve been living in the same city as him for at least a year since you got out,” Gretchen pointed out. “You never sought him out? Maybe followed him around? Kept tabs on him? Maybe took note of the women he was seeing.”
“Like I care which married bitch that little shit was sniffing around,” Saul sneered, picking up a mixing paddle and thumbing away some dried plaster.
Neither of them pointed out that he’d just admitted to knowing enough about Griffin’s love life to reveal that he had dated married women.
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said conversationally. “Seems like messing with his love life would have been sweet revenge for what happened with Liora. She’d already passed away when you were released. Nearly twenty years of waiting to pay her back. Why not just take it out on the kids instead?”
“Yeah,” Josie agreed. “Griffin really had it coming, didn’t he? He’s the one who ratted you out to Liora. Told her what you were doing with Reina. Made her so mad she beat the hell out of you. Drove you away. Then you got in some ‘trouble.’ Spent all that time locked up while he got to live a good life. Why should he get the mom and the teenage daughter?”
The last two words caused a muscle in his jaw to jump. Abandoning the mixing paddle, he stood and grabbed the handle of the bucket. “I don’t give a damn what that little pissant got up to the last twenty years.”
With that, he turned and walked out the front door. After exchanging a wary glance, Josie and Gretchen followed him.Picking through all the detritus outside, he made his way along the side of the house where a new outdoor hose had been installed. Squatting down, he used it to fill the bucket with water.
Josie wiped sweat from her upper lip and put her hands on her hips. “One of the women Griffin was seeing had a daughter. Her name was Cassidy Turner. Her and her mom’s faces have been all over the news, social media.”
“Don’t watch no news or go on no social media,” he grunted.
Gretchen stepped closer to him, peering down into the bucket as the water level rose. “Cassidy told a friend that a man had been following her around back in June. You know anything about that?”
Saul reached into the bucket and gathered some water into his palm, using it to dampen the back of his neck. “Why would I know anything about a girl?”
Josie pulled a copy of Cassidy’s sketch from her pocket and held it out for him to see. The muscle in his jaw twitched again. Slowly, he hauled himself to his feet, never taking his eyes from the drawing. His poker face was good, Josie would give him that. Saul Vought was good at manipulating people, lying, covering his tracks and biding his time, despite the fact that after he murdered the woman in the bar two decades ago, he’d been caught immediately. That had been an impulsive act. Since his release, he hadn’t gotten caught once wreaking havoc on the garden center, and he’d managed to stay off the radar of police after murdering the Barnes women and taking Dani and Cassidy. Griffin had been poised to take the fall for him, and he remained a veritable ghost.
