Flicking on her lamp, Josie snatched the phone up and swiped answer. “Quinn.”
“Detective Quinn?” said a male voice. “It’s Officer Hiller. Sorry to bother you so late. We’ve got a woman on the line who wants to talk to you directly.”
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “It’s the middle of the night. You couldn’t take a message?”
There was a beat of silence. Then, “I thought you’d want to talk to her. She knew the name of the Hempstead victim.”
Josie sat up. Trout poked his head up from the foot of the bed, his ears perfect steeples. Noah patted the bedcovers next to him and Trout scampered over, settling against Noah’s stomach. Josie asked, “What exactly did she say?”
“She called in and said that she needed to talk to Detective Josie Quinn about the Beverly Urban murder.”
Josie’s hand tightened around the phone. Beverly Urban’s name hadn’t been released to the press, nor had the fact that she was a homicide victim. The only people who knew her name and manner of death were Dr. Feist, members of Josie’s team, and Calvin Plummer and his secretary. It couldn’t be Tammy calling, could it?
“Did she give her name?” Josie asked. She glanced back at Noah, but his eyelids were heavy. He’d be asleep in moments.
“She would only give us the name Alice. That’s it.”
Josie stood up and padded quietly out to the hall and downstairs to the kitchen. “Put her through and text me the number she called from in case we get disconnected.”
“You got it, boss.”
The light over the sink had been left on in case Misty or Harris got up during the night. As she waited to be connected to Alice, Josie looked around, amazed at how clean Misty kept the kitchen. She wanted a drink of water but didn’t want to disturb the orderliness. Instead, she leaned a hip against the counter and waited. There was a delay and then a change in the quality of the silence. Finally, a female voice said, “Hello? Detective Quinn?”
Too old to be Tammy, Josie thought. Unless she was somehow disguising her voice. A smoker, judging by the scratchiness. “This is Josie Quinn. What can I do for you, Alice? You have some information about the body we recovered from under the house on Hempstead?”
Hesitation. Then, “Y-yes. I do.”
“What kind of information?” Josie asked.
“I know what happened to that girl,” said Alice.
Josie listened for any background noise, but there was nothing. “What do you mean?”
“I know she was murdered. I know who did it.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that the department had received a call from someone looking for a bit of attention who claimed to have information about a crime. Josie needed to know that Alice was genuine. “How did Beverly die?”
“I can’t talk to you on the phone about this,” Alice said. “We need to meet.”
Josie said, “Alice, I get a lot of phone calls. A lot of tips. I’m just trying to figure out whether you’re telling the truth or not.”
More hesitation. “She was shot in the head, okay?”
A chill rippled over Josie’s body. “Okay, Alice. I think you’re right. We need to meet.”
“I can meet with you in private. Only you. No one else,” Alice said hurriedly.
“Good,” Josie said. “How about tomorrow at the police station in Denton? Do you know where that is?”
“I can’t meet you there. It’s not safe.”
“Alice, I can assure you that there is no safer place in this city than the police station. I’ll be there at nine a.m. You’ll have to come in through the back. I can wait for you outside if you’d like, in the parking lot.”
Alice’s voice lowered to a whisper. “If you think the police station is safe, you’re not as smart as I thought.”
Before Josie could respond, the line went dead. Josie found the text from dispatch with the number and tried calling it back. It rang seven times before going to voicemail, but the outgoing message was an automated voice that read off the number she’d just called and told her to leave a message. “Alice,” Josie said after the beep. “This is Josie Quinn. It’s extremely important that you call me back. I need to talk to you. Please call me at this number as soon as you can. I’ll meet you wherever you’d like.” Josie rattled off her number and hung up.
She waited ten minutes but there was no return call. There was no way she was going back to sleep now. Questions whirled through her mind. Who was Alice? How did she know about Beverly’s murder? Why had she kept it a secret for sixteen years? Had she murdered Beverly?
Josie went upstairs to get dressed.
Fourteen
Although two news vans sat in the municipal parking lot, no reporters waited near the entrance to the stationhouse. The rain was still coming down in a light drizzle. Josie was able to slip inside under the cover of darkness unnoticed. She checked in with the night desk sergeant and went up to her desk. She searched various databases, but the number that Alice had called from was a prepaid burner phone. Josie wrote up a warrant that would allow her to contact the major cellular networks and attempt to locate Alice’s phone. Even burner phones had to use existing cellular networks to make calls. If Josie could figure out which network the number was using, she would be able to triangulate the phone’s location. It would only bring her within a few miles, and she might not get the information for a few days, depending on the speed of the network’s legal department, but it was better than nothing. She’d wait until regular working hours to ask a judge to sign it.
She tried calling Alice again but got only the voicemail. Next, she went through Calvin Plummer’s files and her high school yearbook but found no one named Alice. Her eyes burned with fatigue as daylight crept through the windows. Rain spattered against the glass and Josie suppressed a groan. It seemed as though the rain would never end. The flooding was reaching doomsday proportions, and the river hadn’t even crested yet. She heard the stairwell door swing open and a moment later, a steaming cup of coffee and a box of baked goods appeared in front of her.
Noah said, “The pastries are from Misty. You didn’t even leave me a note. Everything okay?”
Josie sipped the coffee gratefully and leaned back in her chair. Noah took a seat across from her at his own desk. She told him about the call.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he said.
“Then you wouldn’t have had any sleep at all. Besides, it’s a dead end right now. Unless she calls back.”
Gretchen and Mettner banged through the stairwell door, both shaking water from their hair. They attacked Misty’s box of goodies and settled in at their desks, ready to catch up. Gretchen booted up her computer, checked her email, and started printing documents out. Before Josie could brief them on the Beverly Urban case or the mysterious female night caller, Amber arrived, dressed in another form-fitting skirt and blouse, this time in darker tones. Instead of a briefcase, she carried a cup-holder filled with paper coffee cups. She set them down on Mettner’s desk. “Hi, everyone,” she said with a smile. “I thought you might need these.” Her face fell as she saw the cup in Josie’s hand, but she quickly covered it with a smile. “Now you’ll have two,” she told Josie, setting a cup in front of her. “Detective Quinn,” she said. “Detective Mettner told me you like your coffee with two sugars and lots of half and half.”