With absolutely no urgency, Gretchen stood and plucked her empty coffee mug from her desk before sauntering off. Josie appreciated that her friend was trying to distract the Chief, but it wasn’t going to work. Best to just get it over with and let him blow his top.
“Quinn,” he hollered once Gretchen disappeared into the stairwell. “This isn’t some weird TV shit we’re dealing with here. Griffin Holt has been booked, charged and arraigned. It’s a done deal. You’re part of the damn reason he’s there! From the evidence you helped gather. You can’t go down this rabbit hole of fuckery, Quinn. You’re upset we didn’t recover the bodies? Guess what? We all are. That’s not an invitation for you to take this entire department on a wild goose chase to looney town. You’ve gotten arrogant. All these big cases, the high clearance rate. You think you’re always right.”
“Chief,” Josie said.
“No,” he said. “I’m not finished. If you were so damn smart, you’d know that putting a sketch through the facial recognition program is unreliable at best. Not to mention a sketch by a teenager. Even composite sketches don’t make the cut with these programs. Whatever this is—whatever little crusade you’ve taken up—it needs to stop right now. No detective of mine is going to take a goddamn wrecking ball to a perfectly solid case!”
“You’re right!” Josie burst out, jumping from her seat and sending the Chief back a few steps. “The sketch didn’t get a hit in the facial recognition program, but Griffin Holt maintains that there had to be someone else involved and it had to be someone who knew him and knew where he lived. Charles Barnes checked out. There are inconsistencies in Holt’s phone and GPS recordsand yes, we have this sketch. Holt’s defense attorney has already agreed to let us show it to him.”
The Chief laughed bitterly, crossing his arms over his thin chest. “Of course he did. A get-out-of-jail-free card is every defense attorney’s wet dream. Jesus, Quinn.”
Chief Chitwood had always been tough, ornery, quick to anger, but he’d also been fair and most of the time he trusted Josie’s instincts. The fact that he didn’t trust her now planted a seed of doubt in the back of her mind. Did he really think she was self-destructing or was he lashing out from his own guilt over the case?
Josie straightened her spine and thrust her chin up at him defiantly. “Holt and his attorney have agreed to meet with me at the Alcott County Courthouse in an hour. Yes or no?”
His flinty gaze dragged over her, nearly making her resolve waver. Finally, he squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger. “Fine. Show him the damn sketch but be prepared for the consequences if this goes sideways.”
As soon as his office door slammed, Josie let the muscles in her shoulders relax. After a couple of moments of box breathing, she snatched the sketch from her desk and strode toward the stairwell. On the ground floor, Gretchen waited, leaning against the wall beside the door leading outside. “We doing this?”
Josie nodded and pushed through the door into the municipal parking lot. Without discussing it, they hopped into Gretchen’s vehicle. She drove them forty miles through winding mountain roads to Bellewood where the Alcott County Courthouse was located. Denton Police had only temporary holding cells on their premises. Once a suspect was formally charged and ready to be arraigned, they were turned over to the Alcott County Sheriff, who transported them here to await trial. The building was massive, sprawled over a couple of city blocks, and almost as old and stately as the Denton PD headquarters.
Within twenty minutes of their arrival, Josie and Gretchen were escorted to a small room typically used for inmates to meet with their attorneys. Inside, Denton’s premier defense attorney, Andrew Bowen, stood as they entered. His signature glare was trained on Josie but beneath it was something new. A softening of his edges. He’d hated her ever since she put his mother away for murder, but she was the reason his teenage daughter was still alive.
At the table next to Bowen sat Griffin Holt, dressed in a tan jumpsuit courtesy of the county lockup. Even in the drab, shapeless thing, he looked put-together and handsome. There was a hopeful gleam in his eyes when he looked at Josie, like she was there to save him. It made her stomach turn. If Griffin’s crazy story about a second stalker was correct, it still didn’t absolve him. He’d kidnapped Dani Schwarber and Cassidy Turner at gunpoint. How much violence he’d inflicted on them and the Barnes women might be in question, but he certainly possessed the capacity for it.
Josie gave Bowen a tight nod in greeting. She knew she should thank him for agreeing to this interview, but she couldn’t bring herself to utter the words. Thankfully, Gretchen did it for her as the two of them sat down across the table from the men.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Bowen said coldly.
Griffin looked back and forth between Josie and Gretchen expectantly. He clasped his hands together, making the cuffs wrapped around his wrists clink against the metal table. “Andrew said you had a drawing of some kind that Cassidy did.”
“Cassidy told a friend from school that a man had been lurking around her home and outside her school back in June,” Josie said. “Among her personal things we found several sketches of people she knew.”
Knew. The past tense was a knife slicing dangerously close to Josie’s heart. If Griffin or Bowen sensed the way it affected her,they didn’t show it. Maybe Gretchen did, though because while Josie tried to catch her breath, she jumped in. “Mr. Holt, your claim is that someone took Dani and Cassidy from your home.”
Bowen watched his client hawkishly.
“Yes,” Griffin said. “Someone did.”
“The entire city of Denton didn’t know where Dani or Cassidy were,” Gretchen said. “But someone was aware that they were in your house. Someone knew where to find them, knew to disable your security system so they could get inside.”
The skepticism in Gretchen’s voice was evident.
Griffin said, “Yes, that’s the only explanation.”
With a sigh, Bowen looked at his watch. “Really, ladies. You’ve been over this before. You’re well aware of the statement my client has given on this matter. If you have something to ask, just get it over with. Otherwise, you’re wasting our time.”
Josie scowled at him. She knew the point Gretchen was making, which was that, normally, there would be no reason to show the sketch to Griffin except that if his crazy story was true, then whoever had taken Dani and Cassidy from his home had done it for very personal reasons.
Reasons that had everything to do with Griffin and very little to do with Dani and Cassidy. Otherwise, it was just too outlandish. The shadowy second man would have to have known Griffin, been stalking him, gathering information about his life and the women he was obsessed with, watching and waiting for the right moment to turn Griffin’s world inside out. If Griffin was telling the truth, there wasn’t a chance in hell that Dani and Cassidy’s second kidnapping was random.
Josie slid the sketch across the table. “We believe Cassidy drew this in June. She named it ‘dirty lurker’, which leads us to believe that perhaps this was the man she saw hanging around. Does he look familiar to you?”
Griffin’s brows drew down in concentration as he stared at it. Several seconds ticked by. The cuffs circling his wrists began to jangle on the surface of the table as his hands shook. His mouth opened and a silent “no” formed on his lips.
Bowen said, “Mr. Holt? Do you recognize this man?”
Griffin pushed back from the table, the legs of his chair screeching over the tile. A sheen of sweat formed on his face. He was paler than Josie had ever seen him. Disturbingly so. “No,” he finally said. “No.”
