“Who would break into your house and take Dani and Cassidy from right under your nose?” Noah asked, the idea sounding more ridiculous the more they discussed it.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled from behind his hands. “Maybe Maxine’s husband, Charles. He killed Maxine and Haven.”
“Did you see him there at Maxine and Haven’s tent?” asked Josie.
Looking back up at them, he said, “No, no. It’s just the only thing that makes sense. He must have found out about us. He treated Maxine horribly but he was never going to let her go without a fight.”
Josie said, “Why would Charles kill them months after you and Maxine had already broken up?”
Griffin shrugged, the movement jerky. “How should I know? Because he’s a domestic abuser who gets off on screwing with people, on making them afraid. He needs to have power over everyone. He likes hurting people. Maybe he wanted to hurt me, too, and he did something with Dani and Cassidy. He could have been following me. Watching me. Today was the first time I left the house since I brought them home with me. He could have taken them after I left for the office.”
It certainly wasn’t implausible that Charles had done exactly that, or that he’d killed his family. Maybe he hadn’t physically harmed Maxine during their marriage but everything they’d learned about him pointed to him being a master of coercive control. It wasn’t always a huge leap for someone like that to go from emotional abuse to physical violence. It wasn’t even that unthinkable that a man like Charles could go from never laying a hand on his wife and daughter to killing them. Josie had seen cases like that before. Charles had some impulse control issues, but he wasn’t stupid. It would be easy to come to that conclusion seeing him on his worst day—quick to anger, soulless, and bitter. Hung up on petty squabbles with a wife whose battered body was on its way to the morgue. In truth, Charles was more intelligent and calculating than most people gave him credit for. It was possible that he’d thought through a plan to kill his family and get away with it and then executed it flawlessly. Was he vindictive and angry enough to go after Dani and Cassidy just to ruin Griffin’s life?
Josie said, “Okay, let’s say you’re right about Charles and how all of that went down. How would Charles figure out your connection to Dani?”
“I don’t know! Isn’t that your job to find out? Have you even talked to him? He could have them right now! You should be out there looking for them instead of here with me!”
“Is that right?” asked Josie.
The air in the room seemed to still, the moment suspended, only the ticking of the clock high on the wall reminding them that time was still passing.
Another moment ticked by. Then Josie said, “Are you ready to tell us the truth now, Griffin?”
“Oh God,” he moaned, tipping his head back toward the ceiling. “I’ve been telling you the truth. You have to believe me.”
“Just tell me this,” Josie tried. “Are they still alive?”
Griffin’s chin dropped to his chest. “I don’t know.”
FORTY-NINE
Josie ducked as a stapler flew past her head. It smacked into the stairwell doorframe and clattered to the ground. Noah pushed through after her just in time to throw his body over Josie’s, crushing her against the wall as a cup of pens sailed through the air. The pens came loose halfway across the room, hitting Noah’s back like arrows, from what Josie could tell. Once they all landed at his feet, he turned around but kept Josie tucked behind him. She was pretty confident that she could defend herself against office supplies, but it was a lovely gesture. Peeking around his arm, she surveyed the scene.
The great room was in chaos. Several of the desks were overturned, their contents strewn everywhere. It looked like a tornado had passed through. And that tornado’s name was Turner. He trembled in the middle of the maelstrom, his rage making him loom over everything like he’d grown ten feet in the last hour. A riot of curls reached out in every direction, as though his fury was so great, it was exploding from the locks of his hair. The look in his eyes was downright feral.
Josie hadn’t noticed Gretchen or the Chief on the other side of the room until the inhuman roar that ripped from Turner’sthroat caused both of them to flinch. He flipped another desk, kicking its drawers as they came loose.
“He doesn’tknowif they’re alive?” Turner hollered. “That’s the bullshit line he’s going with?”
Either he’d been observing in the CCTV room and left right after Griffin uttered that sentence, or the Chief, possibly even Gretchen, had come down to meet him and missed the rest of the interview, filling Turner in on only what they’d heard.
Noah stepped forward. “That’s what he’s giving us. He insists he didn’t kill them. That Charles Barnes must have come for them and they fought back. That’s why there’s blood.”
“Bullshit!” Turner shouted. “You really believe that crock, LT? You weren’t born yesterday.”
The truth was that none of them believed that, but they weren’t able to get anything more out of Griffin Holt. Instead, they’d sent some units to find Charles Barnes and bring him in for questioning. At the moment, patrol officers were searching the banks of the moat around Quail Hollow Estates, which were technically public land, to see if there were any places where the ground had been disturbed. A state police marine unit would be diving in the moat to search for their bodies there.
“My kid. Jesus, my kid. My wife. He took them. He’s gonna sit in there and say he doesn’t know if they’re alive? You know what this means, right?” His head swiveled around the room, stopping briefly on each of them. “They’re dead. He killed my family. My kid. My Cassidy. And he’s not even going to give me the fucking courtesy of telling me where he put their bodies.”
Every one of his words felt like an uppercut punch to Josie’s solar plexus. It felt hard to breathe. Pain so raw and palpable was always hard to witness but Turner, his grief like a serrated knife that sawed endlessly at his insides, stripped of everything that made him Turner—good or bad—was soul-crushing.
“Son,” the Chief said. “They’re alive until we know they’re not.”
“Fuck you,” Turner spat. “What is it you always say? You’ve been doing this since we were all in diapers? You know better than all of us how these cases go. They’re dead. That goddamn bastard killed them and now he’s playing games. It wasn’t enough for him to take them from me. Now he’s going to torture me with this. We may never find them.”
Gretchen inched forward, picking her way through the detritus until she was an arm’s length away from him. She hesitated for a second before reaching out to touch the sleeve of his suit jacket. He jerked away from her, but she didn’t let it affect her. “Turner.”
“Leave me alone,” he snarled. “All of you, leave me alone. You botched this. This whole investigation. You fucked it up and now my wife and kid are dead. Probably cut up somewhere being used as fertilizer so this sick fuck could grow more death flowers to give innocent women.”
