“You ran DNA on Beverly and the baby, right?” Noah asked. “Something might come of that.”
“Only if the father’s DNA is in the system. If it doesn’t, we’re right back to where we are now. All we know is that the father of Beverly’s baby was a married man with a skull tattoo on his back.”
Noah said, “If he was married, then we need to be looking at adult men Beverly was exposed to—I’d start with teachers. Do you remember if she had a job in high school?”
“Great point,” Josie said. “She worked at this ice cream place on Aymar Avenue, but it closed ages ago. There’s something else there now.”
Josie fished her yearbook out from under a stack of paperwork on her desk. “I’ll make a list of teachers who were on the faculty at Denton East when Beverly and I went there.”
As she paged through the yearbook, she winnowed out the male teachers who were single at the time. That left five teachers. All of them still lived in the area and two of them still worked at the high school. Josie started making calls and interviewing them. Most of them didn’t remember Beverly and had only been reminded of her when her murder was featured on the news. All of them had alibis for Vera’s murder.
More dead ends. Josie started going through all the reports, paperwork and photos that had amassed in the Beverly and Vera Urban files, hoping she might find some clue they’d overlooked.
Gretchen took a call from the Colbert Police Department. They had interviewed the neighbors of Alice Adams as well as several local establishments. Although many people in town knew of her, no one was close to her. No business would admit to hiring her on a cash basis. It was another dead end.
“We’re missing something,” Josie said, echoing one of their earlier conversations. “What the hell is it?”
Before Gretchen could answer, Hummel emerged from the stairwell with a sheaf of papers in his hands. “Hey, boss,” he said, walking over and handing them to Josie. “More reports. Mostly to do with the clothing that Beverly and Vera Urban were wearing at the times of their deaths. We also processed everything you found in Vera Urban’s motel room for prints and DNA. No prints other than Vera’s. I’m sorry we don’t have more for you.”
“It’s okay,” Josie said. “This case is just one dead end after another.” She flipped through the reports, a familiar name catching her eye. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to it.
Hummel leaned over her shoulder. “That’s from the receipt we found in Beverly’s jacket pocket from the Wellspring Clinic. There were some unidentified prints, most likely hers, and then Ray’s prints as well.”
Josie stared at Ray’s name in black and white on the report. Her heart hammered in her chest. She choked out a “thank you” so that Hummel would leave. She felt three sets of eyes on her: Gretchen, Noah, and Mettner, all staring.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. It wasn’t important. So what if Ray’s prints were on the receipt from the clinic that Beverly had gone to shortly before her death? Maybe they had been involved. Maybe they’d had a relationship behind Josie’s back. Maybe Ray was the father of Beverly’s baby. That would explain why she was wearing his jacket. Lana had said Beverly was only intimate with one man, but Beverly could have been lying to Lana. Josie still didn’t believe Ray killed Beverly, and he certainly could not have killed Vera. Something much larger was at work in the case. Something that had nothing to do with Ray. It was ancient history, anyway, she thought. Both Beverly and Ray were gone. Anything that might have happened between them no longer mattered. The only thing that mattered was finding who killed Beverly and Vera and putting them away so they wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again.
So why did Josie feel as though her heart was about to burst out of her chest?
She placed the report onto the desk and said, “I’ve got to use the bathroom.”
Then she walked into the stairwell, down the steps, and out into the parking lot. She barely registered the reporters. Their shouts were drowned out by the rush of blood in her ears. Without even realizing it, she got into her car and began to drive. Her cell phone chirped, but she ignored it. She came out of her daze when she found herself parked in front of the nearest liquor store which, mercifully, had escaped the flood zone. Her feet carried her out of the car and into the store. Some part of her fought to be heard. The part that had been buried beneath the avalanche of emotion as a result of Lisette’s news, the guilt over Vera’s death, the terror of having nearly drowned when they were swept downriver, and the possibility that Ray had lied to her, back when they were both still innocent and in love.
Her hand closed around the neck of a bottle of Wild Turkey.
Don’t do it, said the muffled voice.
Just one sip, said the voice that was now firmly in control of her body. The voice of panic, loud and unpleasant, driving away reason, wanting only to soothe the demons that now swirled around the periphery of her consciousness. Demons that had been there since childhood. She thought she’d pushed them down, exorcised them. They didn’t matter. But they were here.
“Cash or credit?” said a male voice.
Josie looked up at a young cashier placing the bottle of Wild Turkey into a bag. “No,” she said.
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Well, those are the only two ways to pay, so…”
“I’m sorry,” Josie said. “I—I have to go.”
She went back to the car, trying to slow her pounding heart, and peeled out of the parking lot. She didn’t realize where she was headed until she was already through the gates of the cemetery. After parking, she picked her way between the headstones to Ray’s grave. Following his death, she had come there often, but she hadn’t been there in months. A bouquet of flowers lay limply at the stone’s base. Most likely from Misty, Josie thought. Misty visited religiously. The ground was damp from weeks of unrelenting rain, but Josie sat down anyway, crossing her legs. She wasn’t sure why she had come. After five minutes, she realized she didn’t feel any better.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered at the headstone through gritted teeth.
She needed to focus on her job. Letting things like Lisette’s news and silly high school mistakes that her dead husband may have made in the past interfere with her present-day life was a huge problem. What was happening to her?
She heard Gretchen’s voice in her head. You can only push trauma down for so long before it starts coming out in weird ways and at weird times.
Closing her eyes, she took in several deep breaths. She would calm herself down, get control. Then she would take all these strange, cumbersome feelings threatening to overtake her and push them down as far as they would go into some black hole in her mind. She would move on. Go back to work.
“Josie.”
Noah’s voice startled her. She jumped to her feet, swiping at the back of her jeans, brushing off dirt and grass. He stood several feet away, hands jammed into the pockets of his khaki pants.
She said, “What are you doing here?”
He stepped closer until there was only a foot between them. “You didn’t come back. I was worried.”
“How did you know where to find me?”