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Noah folded his arms across his chest. “He’s a member of the church?”

“Yes,” Josie answered. “He runs the AA and NA meetings.”

“This guy?” Gretchen picked up a page from one of the piles she was making on her desk. On it were two selfies of Sylvia West and Louis Fisher. In one, Fisher stood behind Sylvia, his arms wrapped around her upper body, chin resting on her shoulder while they grinned at the camera. In the other, Sylvia smiled while Fisher kissed her on the cheek. Josie had accessed his driver’s license to confirm his identity. He looked a bit different in candid photos. Wrinkles were starting to score the skin around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes. The hair near his temples was dusted with gray, contrasting with his natural, darker hair color. From the second photo, Josie could see that it was long, pulled back into a ponytail at the nape of his neck.

“That’s the guy,” Turner said. “There are more pictures where that came from. The phone records go back about three years and he’s all over them, so they’ve been seeing each other at least that long.”

Noah frowned. “Josie, did Trinity say anything to you about Sylvia having a boyfriend?”

She shook her head. “No. It never came up, but based on what we found, I think she might have been keeping him a secret.”

“A secret?” Gretchen said.

Josie pointed to the pile of records that contained text messages. “Sylvia’s messaging app has a thirty-day trash rule. That means that when she deleted a text, it would sit in a hidden folder marked as trash for thirty days and then it would be permanently deleted. From the cloud as well.”

“So any messages she deleted in the thirty days before she died would be here,” Noah said.

“Right,” Josie replied.

“But those aren’t the ones that tipped us off that she’s got this whole secret romance going on,” Turner said. “It’s all the exchanges before that.”

Gretchen was already flipping through the pages, eyes scanning each one rapidly until she found something that made her stop. “Here’s a flurry of messages from five months ago between her and Fisher, trying to figure out when and where to meet for dinner. They finally decide on a place in Bellewood.”

“Forty miles from here,” Noah noted.

“Right,” Gretchen agreed. “She says, ‘I’ll see you there at eight,’ and the next message is from her and all it says is, ‘yes, it was.’ You’re right. She clearly deleted some of the messages.”

“There are tons of those,” Turner said. “And if you pay attention, the only things those two talk about in the messages she didn’t delete are innocent lunch and dinner dates and church stuff.”

“Who else would have access to her phone that she’d need to delete things?” Gretchen said.

“There were a lot of videos in her cloud storage that were taken by her oldest granddaughter,” Josie said. “She probably let them play games on her phone as well.”

“Harris was playing games on our phones before he even turned four,” Noah said.

“Kids are nosy as hell,” Turner added. “Her granddaughter sees something on there and then blabs to her parents and then everyone knows.”

“Why would she be keeping her relationship a secret though?” Noah asked.

Turner said, “He’s got a record.”

Gretchen dropped the pages and found Louis Fisher’s criminal record in another. When she finished reviewing it, she handed it to Noah. He said, “Interesting.”

“Not as interesting as what he did the night before Sylvia was murdered,” Josie said.

Sixteen

Josie pushed through the main doors to Denton East Methodist Church. She didn’t bother holding them open for Turner, who trailed behind her, scrolling on his phone. He grunted as he walked into one of them. Josie heard the clunk of his phone hitting the concrete outside. She stopped to enjoy the cold air that filled the vestibule. A moment later, Turner appeared beside her, a scowl on his face.

“Not so much for manners, are you, Quinn?” he grumbled, rubbing his forehead. “We’re in a church, you know.”

“Not so much for paying attention, are you, Turner?” she said. “What would it take to get you to focus longer than five seconds?”

“Better company.”

She rolled her eyes, not bothering to respond, instead pausing to look around. With its dark weathered wood floors and pews, the inside of the church was just as well-preserved as its exterior, which was made from Pennsylvania white limestone quarried right here in the Susquehanna Valley in the 1800s—according to the plaque from the Denton Historical Society just outside. It was small, but an addition had been built onto the side of it.

Josie located a corkboard filled with schedules and notices of meetings and events. She tapped her finger against a flyer for AA and NA meetings. The dates and times of the meetings were on the church website but not the specific area in which they were held. Josie and Turner had tried Fisher’s home first, but he wasn’t there.