“I went to talk with her,” Griffin admitted. “I had seen the news on TV about Maxine and Haven. I was afraid they might be in danger. I only wanted to protect her—them. I didn’t think she would be so unreasonable. So closed off. We’d had something, shared something. For years! Much longer than what I shared with Maxine. I even brought her flowers—her favorite kind—to soften her up.”
“She wasn’t happy to see you?” asked Noah.
“No,” he said quietly, making Josie lean in to hear him. “I tried talking to her, but nothing went right. I had to resort to drastic measures. They wouldn’t come with me.”
“No shit,” Josie said. “Most women balk at going places with their stalkers.”
“What?” His brow furrowed. “I wasn’tstalkingthem.”
“A month ago, while Cassidy was still in school, you didn’t follow her around? Hang out in front of Dani’s house?”
Josie hadn’t yet confirmed this via the location history on his phone and car since their priority had been getting into his house, but it wouldn’t take long to do so.
“This would have been in June,” Noah clarified.
“I—” The tips of Griffin’s ears started to turn pink. “I just wanted to see them. Just one time. I was lonely, okay? I missed Dani. Once I saw her, I left. That was it. I wasn’t following anyone around.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Josie said. “Griff, that’s the very definition of stalking. You can dress it up and call it love, but lurking around the home of a woman who dumped you two years ago and following her teenage daughter back and forth to school is not good or welcome under any circumstances.”
“I wasn’t following anyone!”
Having gotten him to admit to lurking outside Dani’s home in June, Noah moved on. “You hadn’t had contact with Dani in months, according to what you told us earlier. Why the sudden need to ‘protect’ her?”
As usual, Noah did his best to match the delusion—lies—of the man they were interviewing. Although they both knew that Griffin had kidnapped Dani and Cassidy, in his mind, he’d merely been protecting her from the fate that had befallen Maxine and Haven. Noah went with that, and Josie knew it was to keep Griffin talking, spilling his secrets. Make him comfortable.
Griffin kept digging his nail into the tiny brown splotch on his cuff, but he didn’t answer.
Noah leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table, his face filled with sympathy. “Did you really want to protect them, or was it about something else?”
“I, um…” Griffin’s voice failed him. After another hard swallow, he tried again. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Let me tell you then,” Noah said evenly. “After seeing your sister happy, about to start her own family, you felt left behind. Lost. You’d already struggled for years to find your own family.”
Griffin didn’t answer but started nodding his head so slightly, it was almost imperceptible. Josie was pretty sure he had no idea he was doing it.
“You weren’t trying to start any particular family, though,” Josie interjected, toning down her anger, her nearly irrepressible urge to choke him until he told them what he’d done with Turner’s family. She needed to be slow, steady, methodical, like her very patient husband. “What you really wanted was to recreate your ideal family. The one you had when your father died. The one that was nearly destroyed by a pedophile con artist. What you were searching for was a woman with a teenage daughter, preferably a woman in a bad marriage, so that you could swoop in and save them both the way you weren’t able to with your mom and Reina.”
Griffin sucked in a sharp breath. His body jerked as if she’d physically punched him.
“Milo told us about what happened after your dad died,” Noah explained. “It makes sense that you’d want to rewrite that history a little. I’m not sure about Dani, but you came very close with Maxine. You thought she’d come back to you. Still, when you found out your little sister was pregnant, it was a shock to the system, wasn’t it?”
Griffin didn’t answer. Just kept nodding along in tiny motions.
“Not just a shock,” Josie said, “the rug was pulled out from under you. You’d spent so long ‘protecting’ Reina that you didn’t know how to live any other way. Suddenly, everything about your life was different and wrong. You were in agony and the only way to get that pain to stop was to get someone to take Reina’s place. Fill that void as soon as you could so you wouldn’t be alone.”
“I want Reina to be happy,” Griffin whispered. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I just didn’t think about what it would be like when she found someone. We didn’t see each other often, but she was always there. I was always watching over her. You’re right, it was difficult and I acted rashly. I handled things poorly.”
Josie almost laughed. Committing a double homicide and abducting two women twenty-four hours later was a little more than handling things poorly.
“Is that what happened?” she asked. “You didn’t handle it well when you tried to get back together with Maxine and she rejected you? Is that why you killed her and Haven?”
“W-what?” Griffin spluttered, his body freezing as he stared at her in horror. “No. I didn’t kill anyone!”
Patiently, Noah said, “The location history on your phone and car put you at the festival most of the afternoon and early evening on Saturday. You went home and returned in the early hours of Sunday morning, which is when they were killed.”
“That left you with no ready-made family of your own,” Josie mused. “So you went after Dani. She was your second choice.”
All the blood drained from his face. He threw his hands up as if to ward off an attack. “N-no, that’s not…that’s not right. Yes, I did try to get back together with Maxine, but I didn’t kill anyone. Dani wasn’t my second choice. It wasn’t about that. When I went there, I just wanted to protect them. I-I…”
