Josie knew he was lashing out. Knew that he wasn’t in control. She also knew that she shouldn’t feel guilty—no matter what the outcome. She’d done everything she could. They all had. But his words sliced through her like a sword, splitting her in half. She stepped forward. “Turner?—”
“No.” He stomped over strewn files, phones, keyboards until he was only a foot from her. “You have my family’s blood on your hands, Quinn.”
“Hey,” Noah said, pushing himself between Turner and Josie. “That’s enough.”
Turner laughed, the sound so bitter and hollow it opened up a pit in Josie’s stomach. “Enough? I don’t think it is enough ’cause my family is still dead. Now get out of my way.”
He stalked past them, disappearing into the stairwell, leaving the room in shambles and Josie’s racing heart in agony.
FIFTY
Josie shivered as Noah tugged down the thin strap of her tank top and pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. The bed dipped as he shifted behind her. The sheets fluttered and then she felt the length of him meld to her body. His chest pressed against her back and the fronts of his thighs lined up with the backs of hers, fitting against her like a perfect puzzle piece. He was warm and he smelled good. Feeling his hand across her stomach and his face nuzzled in her neck gave her the most comforting feeling she’d had in days. It was almost enough to keep the shame she’d felt since Turner’s outburst at bay.
“Hey,” Noah whispered, reaching up to brush her hair back from her cheek. “It’s not our fault.”
“Isn’t it?” Josie asked. “Could we have moved faster? Slept less? Looked harder?”
Noah ran his nose along the shell of her ear. “You know how these things go. We could have done all of those things, and the outcome might be the same.”
“Might be.”
“Killers kill, Josie.”
For a millisecond—which was all her frayed heart could take—she imagined losing Noah and Wren to violence and not evenknowing what happened to their remains. A shudder ran the length of her body. Noah’s hold on her tightened.
“What if the Chief had called the state police?” she whispered. “They have a lot of resources. Stuff we don’t.”
Noah sighed. “It was his decision.”
They left that statement hanging in the air over their heads. No one on their team liked handing over cases to another agency, especially when it was personal, but the state police investigators were good. They did have more resources readily available than Denton. Josie wondered if the Chief was lying in bed right now too, wondering if he should have called them in.
“We’ll find them,” Noah said, kissing her neck.
“You can’t guarantee that,” Josie replied.
His lips paused against the side of her neck. He tensed and then a tremor ran through his body, so faint that if she hadn’t been pressed up against him, she wouldn’t have noticed it. He was trying to push down his emotions, the same way she always did. When he spoke next, his voice was raw. “We have to find them, Josie. I like Turner even less than you do but we can’t leave it like this. We can’t. I can’t live with myself if I don’t find his daughter—or go to my grave searching.”
Something hot dropped onto the skin of her neck, rolling down to the hollow of her throat, and she realized that Noah was crying. Generally, her husband was far more well-adjusted than her, his post-abduction PTSD notwithstanding. He didn’t see crying as weakness. He’d cried when his mother was murdered and when their colleague, Finn Mettner, was killed in the line of duty. He had even shed some tears when Josie’s grandmother, Lisette, died but this was something different.
All of the things about this case and how close they were to it, to Turner, had gotten to him. Just like it had gotten to her.
She covered his hand with hers and squeezed. Then she brought it up to her chest, laying it over her heart and letting himfeel the rhythm of her breathing. Measured and steady. A few more tears leaked onto her skin before his chest began to rise and fall in sync with hers and some of the tension left his body. When she was certain he’d composed himself, she asked, “How are we going to find them?”
Noah used the hand on her chest to pull her more tightly to him. “The blood in the basement was fairly fresh. He didn't have much time to dispose of them before we executed the search warrant. He'll have made mistakes. We can exploit them.”
How they would do that was a question she was too exhausted to entertain.
They fell silent. Josie concentrated on the beat of Noah’s heart against her back. She moved her hand from over the top of his and traced the muscles of his forearm. Noah peppered more kisses along the side of her throat. They weren’t the kinds of kisses that would lead anywhere. Not tonight. Right now, they were taking comfort in each other’s touch, in the closeness.
Josie’s mind drifted back to Dani and Cassidy. She replayed every minute of the last week, every interview, every aspect of the two cases, scrounging for something, anything, that might change the outcome. Something they’d overlooked. Maybe it was sleep delirium that made her say, “What if Griffin’s right?”
She felt Noah’s head lift. “What?”
“What if he didn’t kill Maxine and Haven?”
“We’ve got GPS putting him at the festival,” Noah said. “He admitted to going inside the tent with the flowers, and the flowers were found in the tent. The whole ‘I was there but I didn’t do it’ defense never works.”
“But what if it’s true this time? Think about it. Hummel said the killer tracked wood putty into the tent. But Griffin’s house isn’t under construction. He’s not doing any renovations.”
