“I don’t know. Five? Six?”
“Did you always approach her at home?”
“What are you getting at here, Quinn? ’Cause the clock is ticking.”
“And everyone we can spare is working on finding your family as soon as possible,” she assured him. “Chief authorized overtime. We’ve got all hands on deck, so even while I’m here talking with you, lots of our people are working the case. I’masking because in the past week, Maxine was killed and Dani was abducted and you’ve got connections to them both. Not only that but Dani works in a medical office building a block away from the one where Maxine worked.”
“You think this guy saw me with Maxine?”
“Did you approach Maxine at work? None of her coworkers seemed to recognize you when we questioned the staff.”
“Because that was the first time I was ever in that building,” Turner said. “I didn’t approach Maxine at work, only at home. But there were a couple of times I ran into her in that café between the buildings. I was picking up lunch for Dani, trying to soften her up, and Maxine was sitting in there, eating alone.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yeah. I sat and had lunch with her one of those times.”
“Does Dani ever join you for lunch there?”
“Not often but yeah, we’ve eaten there together before if our schedules lined up and she wasn’t in the mood to cut off my balls with a rusty knife.”
Josie left that alone. “Do you know if Dani and Maxine ever came into contact?”
“I wouldn’t know but when I reviewed the contents of Maxine Barnes’s phone, I didn’t see my wife’s name or number in her contacts. They weren’t connected through social media. Maybe they met or ran into one another. Maybe they talked, maybe they didn’t but it doesn’t look like they were friends. Listen, Quinn, you know all the same things I know about the Barnes case. Did my wife and kid come up during that time?”
They hadn’t but the questions still needed to be asked.
Josie already knew that Haven Barnes and Cassidy hadn’t gone to the same high school and there were no connections between them via social media.
“Are you aware of Dani having issues with anyone recently?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll make a list of Dani’s friends from back home and here so you can interview them, too. See if she told them stuff she wouldn’t tell me. Before you go down this road, ’cause I know what you’re going to ask, Cassidy wasn’t having issues with anyone either, at least not that she or Dani told me about. I can make a list of her friends too although these kids—you’ll be able to find everyone she knows on social media. What else?”
There was a loose connection between Maxine and Dani in terms of workplace location and the café Turner had mentioned. However, Josie didn’t believe that the killer had inadvertently targeted two different women because he saw them in the café and they both just happened to have a connection to Turner. She didn’t believe in those kinds of coincidences. Still, she’d question all of the café employees and run background checks on each one of them.
“What about you?” she asked. “Would anyone target Dani and Cassidy because of you? Besides Charles Barnes. Obviously, we’ll be taking a much closer look at him, but I need to know if there are others.”
TWENTY
Turner moved around the table and flung himself back onto the couch, hands covering his face. In the silence, Josie could hear his harsh breaths as he tried to maintain his composure. The only other noise was Spot’s tail thwacking the edge of the coffee table. Sensing his human’s distress, he deposited his octopus between Turner’s legs.
“Turner,” Josie said when he didn’t respond. “Can you think of anyone you’ve pissed off enough to come after your family?”
His voice was muffled from behind his hands. “I’m thinking.”
“That many people?”
“What do you think?”
Josie sighed. “Why, Turner?”
His hands dropped and he scratched behind Spot’s ear. “Why what?”
“You know what.”
“Why am I like this? Nice of you to ask. I’m just an asshole.” The forced nastiness in his voice was betrayed by the tight lines around his mouth and the bone-deep anguish that flashed through his eyes. “A garden-variety asshole. Sweetheart.”
Josie stabbed the end recording icon on her phone app. She stood up and collected both their phones. Waving his in the air,she said, “I’ll get this back to you as soon as possible. In the meantime, go buy a temporary phone and text me the number so I can reach you. If you think of anything I need to know, I want to hear about it. Immediately.”
