Gretchen sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Good lord. You know how long it’s going to take to track down all the places she was frequenting and the people she was in contact with at those places, and then interview them all. How much manpower?”
“Wait,” Josie said, allowing the realization racing through her insomnia-addled brain to crystallize.
“Chief should have turned this over to the state police. Maybe we still can. It’s not that I mind the work, you know that, but Dani and Cassidy don’t have that kind of time.”
Josie gripped the arms of her chair. “We don’t need to, Gretchen.”
“Because the state police will do it for us?” Gretchen replied. “You have to get the Chief on board.”
“No.” Josie shook her head. A tiny jolt of excitement shot up her spine at the possibility that there could be a more fruitful avenue of investigation they hadn’t yet discovered. A shortcut, maybe. “Think about this. About the last year of Maxine Barnes’s life based on what Angela Lewis just told us. What do you see?”
Gretchen blew out a breath. “A woman who was in a bad marriage for twenty years turning over a new leaf, working up the nerve to tell her ass of a husband to take a hike, then taking a nosedive.”
“Right,” said Josie. “But not just turning over a new leaf. Maxine Barnes developed a new and marked interest in self-care despite Angela having been encouraging her to do that for years. Months before she and Charles got to the point where they separated. We’re not talking about the kind of self-care that involves massages or hot baths.”
“Things she’d do privately,” Gretchen said slowly, one eyebrow arching.
“Right,” Josie said, feeling more energized by the second. “Everything Maxine Barnes did during that time had to do with making herself moreattractive—new clothes, new hairstyle, getting fit.”
There was nothing wrong with that. Doing those things could add a whole new level of confidence and joy to a person’s life. Josie was all for that. Everyone from her therapist to her husband to the woman who delivered her mail was constantly telling her she should do more self-care. It was a good thing, which was why there was nothing inherently suspicious about Maxine’s activities. However, taking in the whole picture, Josie’s subconscious had started screaming.
They’d been working on the assumption that Maxine’s killer had been her stalker. But before that, he’d been more to her. A lot more.
“She was having an affair,” Josie finally said.
Lover. Stalker. Killer.
“Son of a bitch,” Gretchen swore. “She broke it off and he didn’t take it well. That’s why she couldn’t tell people what was happening. Regardless of the fact that her husband was unfaithful as well, he would have made sure that she suffered. Found ways to punish her. Or it might have tipped him over the line into violence.”
“Not to mention the man she was having the affair with.” Josie dragged her chair closer to her desk and started riffling through the stacks of documents on it, searching for Maxine’s phone records. Maybe they’d missed something. “I don’t think her lover would have taken kindly to her reporting his stalking activities to the police. We both know how useless those PFA orders can be. Instead of setting off just one abusive asshole, she’d be setting off two.”
Gretchen glanced at Turner’s desk, her mouth firming into a thin line. After a few beats, she blew out a harsh breath. “Let’s say we’re right and he met Maxine at her office or nearby. He could have met Dani there as well—or while he was stalking Maxine post-breakup, he saw her around. Hell, maybe he overheard her arguing with Turner on the phone or something. You said he used to meet her at the café for lunch sometimes, right?”
“That’s what he said.”
Josie saw a yellow Post-it note near the bottom of one of the piles. She recognized her own handwriting. Only the letters PHO were visible. She unearthed the thick stack of pages it was attached to and started flipping through them.
“Maybe they had a spat over lunch, and this guy was hanging around, heard it, got fixated on Dani.”
The records on top were from Dani’s phone. Text messages. Josie had read them all. “Based on the tone of their messages to one another,” she said, “it’s not a stretch that the Turners would argue in public. I’m not sure they could help themselves.”
“Maxine’s emotional breakdown started around the beginning of April. Cassidy saw a guy lurking around in June. The killer’s obsession was shifting toward Dani. Then something happened that sent him off the deep end.”
“A trigger of some kind. In his personal life, at work, something like that,” Josie murmured. Her hands slowed almost of their own volition as she flipped through more of Turner and Dani’s exchanges, perusing them again. “Whatever it was made him violent.”
Josie’s cell phone started ringing from somewhere on her desk. She fished it out from under some of the paperwork she’d disturbed, to find Annette Miller’s name filling the screen. Balancing the phone records in her lap so she could keep going through them, Josie swiped answer and put the phone to her ear.
Annette didn’t waste any time. “Quinn? Got some info on our kinky pal, Emmer. Looked into his family for you. Found out some other stuff you’ll be real interested to hear, too.”
“Sounds great,” Josie said. “I’m going to put you on speaker so my colleague can hear you, too.”
“Oooh,” Annette breathed excitedly just as Josie hit the speaker button. “Is it the hot one you had with you at the diner?”
Gretchen’s eyes bulged almost comically, making Josie laugh. Neither she nor Noah had told Annette they were married. It wasn’t something they went around announcing while they were working, but Josie certainly couldn’t fault Annette for noticing her husband’s assets. With a wink at Gretchen, she said, “I’m pretty sure he’s off the market.”
“Lucky bitch, whoever snagged him,” Annette said. “He’s too young for me anyway.”
Gretchen’s face was red. Her body shook with silent laughter. Josie kept scanning the records in her lap while her colleague regained her composure and introduced herself to Annette. It was in that moment that Josie realized she was looking for something. What, she couldn’t say. She just knew that she’d recognize it when she saw it. Why her brain was nagging her about whatever it was, she was just as clueless.
