He stopped talking and looked the door up and down like it was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. Trinity said, “You didn’t ask if the best friend had a key?”
He blushed and pulled out his cell phone. “She’s out of town, but she said she didn’t have one anyway. Misty was very private. But maybe she knows if Misty has one of those hide-a-key things—”
Josie pushed him out of the way and drove her heel as hard as she could against the door, just below the locking mechanism. It took three kicks, and the door swung inward. She stepped over the threshold. When Noah and Trinity didn’t follow, she glanced behind her and found them staring at her, open-mouthed.
“What?” Josie snapped.
“Boss,” Noah said. “You can’t… we need a warrant. That’s breaking and entering.”
“If she’s lying in there wounded or dying, I’m not wasting time waiting for someone with a key,” Josie said. The glare she shot them left no room for argument.
The house was completely empty. It was also immaculate. The three of them moved from room to room with a strange sort of reverence. It looked like it belonged in a magazine. Expensive, ornate antique furniture, perfectly matched, adorned every room. Some rooms looked so perfect, Josie felt like they should be cordoned off. Misty could open her house for tours. Josie thought of her own house and felt like someone was driving tiny spikes into her heart. While beautiful, it lacked all of the charm and style that dripped from every tasseled lampshade and every perfectly plumped cushion of Misty’s house. Hell, Josie didn’t even have furniture, and even if she did, it wouldn’t be as finely coordinated, as expensive, or as neatly kept as the pieces in Misty’s home. Josie tried to imagine Ray in this house with his perpetually muddy boots tracking dirt through every room. Or leaving his pit-stained undershirts over the back of the couch all the time, or leaving empty beer bottles around the house—sometimes even in the bathroom. Josie couldn’t picture it. Of course, now she would never have to; she would never know whether Misty could tolerate him. Emotion rolled through her like the tide, and then receded. She was here to work.
“Obsessed, much? Holy shit.” Trinity’s voice came from the kitchen. Josie followed it and found the reporter standing in front of Misty’s very modern refrigerator. “Look at this,” she told Josie and Noah.
The fridge was covered with colorful pages cut from magazines. Each page showed a room that precisely matched a room in Misty’s house. “She’s copying from these magazines,” Trinity added.
From behind the two women, Noah remarked, “It’s kind of sad.”
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but it made Josie feel slightly better. Awkwardly, she clapped her hands together. “Well, we should go. Obviously, she’s not here. There aren’t any signs of struggle. Nothing looks amiss. It looks like she took her dog for a walk and never came back.”
Outside, Josie instructed Noah to call someone to fix the door and pull one of their officers from the Coleman investigation long enough to make some official inquiries into Misty’s whereabouts. She turned to Trinity. “You think you can get this on the afternoon broadcast?”
Trinity’s brow crinkled. “We are talking about the chick who stole your dead husband from you, aren’t we?”
Josie resisted the urge to lash out. “My husband had an affair with her. Our marriage ended. But she’s still a citizen in my town and she’s missing. Given what I saw up on that mountain last weekend, I’m not taking any chances. So I’d like to make an appeal to the public. Please.”
Trinity stared at her a moment longer, almost as if she could see how much it burned Josie to ask.
“No more Ginger Blackwells. No more June Spencers. No one falls through the cracks,” Josie promised, mostly to herself.
Chapter Seventy-Four
That night, Trinity made a sincere and urgent request to the citizens of Denton to gather to search for the two missing women. Her face was now on the news practically every time Josie turned it on. Even national news shows tapped her for their ongoing coverage of the madness taking hold of central Pennsylvania. As Trinity gave her report, photos of Isabelle and Misty appeared to the right of her head. Beneath their smiling faces the word “Vanished” appeared. Then it was replaced by the Denton PD tip line number.
Josie watched the broadcast from beside Carrieann in the ICU waiting room. The doctors had reduced Luke’s medication hours earlier; now they just had to wait and hope he woke up on his own. They took turns sitting by his bedside until the nurses kicked them out during shift change so they could bring their incoming replacements up to date.
The two women sat silently side by side, staring up at the television, watching Trinity Payne’s special news bulletin about the missing women and the rest of the unfolding events in Denton.
“Boss?” Noah appeared in the ICU waiting room doorway.
Josie’s heart jumped into her throat. If Noah had driven all the way to the hospital it couldn’t be good news. Had they found Isabelle Coleman? Was she dead? She excused herself and went out into the hallway with him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
He held up a plastic baggie with a cell phone inside it. “I thought you might want this.”
She stared dumbly at the phone, completely confused. All she could think about was Isabelle Coleman. “I don’t get it. Did you find Coleman? Or Misty?”
Now it was Noah’s turn to look baffled. “What? No.” He shook the baggie. “The FBI found your cell phone. They’re done processing it. I thought you might want it back.”
Slowly she reached out and took the bag. She’d been using a temporary, department-issued cell phone. Only Lisette, Noah, Trinity, Carrieann, and Holcomb had the number. With everything going on, her actual cell phone had been the furthest thing from her mind. But as she took it out, she remembered all the photos of her and Luke she had on it and was grateful that Noah had come all this way to return it to her.
She looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said.
With his good hand he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a charger and cord. “You’ll need this,” he said.
Impulsively, she rocked up onto her toes and kissed him on the cheek. His face turned fire-engine red. “What was… What was that for?”
“For being one of the good guys.”
Noah sat with her for a while but then had to return to Denton to oversee things while she stayed at the hospital for the night. She left her phone charging beneath a chair in the ICU waiting room. Once the nursing staff changed over, she and Carrieann resumed their vigil at Luke’s bedside, trading off every couple of hours. He had slightly fewer tubes and wires coming out of him than before, so Josie was able to get close enough to hold his hand and speak softly to him. She talked endlessly. Not about all the horrific things she had been through since his shooting, but about all the things they would do together when he woke up, and about how maybe she would take up fishing instead of knitting, and they could have a hobby together. She was only half-joking.
She was dozing when the nurse came in around five in the morning to tell her it was Carrieann’s turn to sit with Luke. As she stood to go, Luke squeezed her hand.