As Josie kicked him with all her might, toppling him off Gretchen’s prone form, she wondered if any woman had ever instilled that kind of fear into him before. Liora Holt, maybe. Regardless, Josie was glad—no, massively, euphorically thrilled—that the last thing this fucker was going to feel before he bled out was terror.
She had him on his stomach in seconds, securing his hands behind his back with zip ties while he labored to breathe. Once he was flipped onto his back, she tore away one of his shirttails and used it to apply pressure to his wound. She already knew he wouldn’t make it. There was no way he would survive the time it would take for medics to get all the way out here and find them in the woods.
“Where are they?” she snarled. “Where are Dani and Cassidy Turner?”
His face was gray and damp with perspiration. Under her hands, Josie felt his heart slowing. The horror in his brown eyes started to fade, leaving them unfocused and empty.
“Where are they?” Josie hollered. “What did you do with them?”
One of his hands lifted, just a fraction, and fell back to the ground. He was fading faster now.
“You son of a bitch! Where are they! Tell me! What did you do? What did you do?”
She was in such a haze, her body humming with rage, that when a palm landed on her shoulder, she felt like something short-circuited in her brain. For a moment, everything inside her body and all around her was nothing but static. A steady, grating buzz. An ugly gray liminal space between the precipice of getting the answers she needed and the rock bottom of them slipping away.
Josie didn’t regret taking the shot, though. Especially when she came back to herself and found Gretchen kneeling beside her, one hand clutching her ribs while the other squeezed Josie’s shoulder. Her face was a disturbing shade of red. Twigs and thick pieces of dried brush caught in her short hair. Her chest heaved. Each breath seemed to require a herculean effort.
Josie’s fingers fumbled to get her phone out so she could call for help. In her coolest, most professional tone, she recited all the information dispatch needed to get to them. Then she turned and gathered Gretchen gingerly into her arms, holding her friend up as they watched the first blowfly land on Saul Vought’s face.
FIFTY-SIX
Every square inch of Josie’s body hurt. She was hard-pressed to remember a time when she’d been this busted up. When every little movement made her hiss out a breath. It had been three hours since she shot Saul Vought at the bottom of that embankment in the woods. Her adrenaline had long faded, allowing each scrape, bruise, laceration and lump to clamor for ibuprofen and a good, long week in bed.
None of that compared to the pain that was splaying her heart wide open at the moment.
“Josie, you need to go back to the ambulance.” Noah appeared in Saul Vought’s kitchen. He looked just as haggard and defeated as she did.
She waved her bandaged arm at him. “I’m fine.”
It was the one thing she let the paramedics patch up before she joined the search of the house.
Noah stepped toward her. “Your ribs. That bump on your head. You should?—”
“Is this your way of telling me it’s time to stop?” she asked, hating the way her voice cracked.
He just stared at her, mouth pulled back in a grimace. She kicked at the broken floor tile. There was no need to say thewords out loud. She could already hear them in her head.It’s been hours. We searched every inch of this place multiple times. The truck has been searched. The areas all around the house in every direction.
There was no sign of Dani Schwarber and Cassidy Turner.
No blood. No freshly dug graves. No fragments of personal effects. No evidence that they’d been here.
“I was wrong,” Josie said. “The Chief was right. I got too arrogant. I thought I was on to something.”
“Josie,” Noah said, taking a step toward her.
“My high clearance rate,” she mumbled, repeating the Chief’s words from earlier. “Big cases. I just thought…because my gut is so rarely wrong, but I was stupid and I let my emotions get in the way.”
“Hey,” he said, drawing close enough to touch her arm.
Tears blurred her vision. “I just wanted there to be a possibility that we could find them, even if they were already gone. I didn’t want Turner to live with that, without closure. I let my feelings cloud my judgment and it almost got Gretchen killed.”
Noah took her hand. “Gretchen’s fine.”
Reluctantly, she had let the paramedics take her to Denton Memorial Hospital to be checked out. They’d gotten word an hour ago that she’d sustained no serious injuries.
“I got lucky,” Josie said hoarsely. “If I’d been badly injured from the fall or more dazed, or if I hadn’t turned around in time or if I’d stopped before the clearing to call for units, she’d be dead. All because I let Griffin Holt dupe me.”
Him and his stupid salesman persona.
