The television blared from her living room. Josie could hear it from her bedroom on the second floor of the house, even with the door closed. As the first notes of the theme song of WYEP—the local news station—drifted up she sighed, gathered up the wedding magazines on her nightstand and headed downstairs.
Her fiancé Luke was sprawled on her couch, his tall, muscular frame taking up almost the entire space. A foam takeout container straddled his lap, and from it he shoveled French fries into his mouth. Both feet rested on her coffee table, almost touching the stack of mock wedding invitations she’d been trying to get him to look at for the last two weeks. His eyes were glued to the television where the twelve o’clock news broadcast nonstop coverage of the Interstate Killer’s trial, which had started that morning.
“Luke, can you please turn that down a bit?”
He didn’t even look at her. Josie put the stack of magazines onto the coffee table and sat down next to him, her thigh brushing his. He still didn’t look away from the television. On the screen, reporter Trinity Payne stood outside the Alcott County Courthouse, the breeze lifting her dark hair as she spoke confidently into her microphone. “Opening arguments in the trial of the Interstate Killer, Aaron King, were scheduled to begin this morning. However, King reportedly fell in his cell just a few hours ago, splitting his lip on the sink. Prison officials tell us he required several stitches.”
Luke snorted and popped another fry into his mouth. “Fell. I’ll bet he fell.”
“My money’s on the guards,” Josie said, trying to engage him—the King case was one of his favorite topics of conversation lately—but Luke seemed not to hear her. She looked around. “Did you get me a cheeseburger?” she asked.
No answer. From the depths of the cushions, he produced the remote control, using it to turn the volume up even louder.
“Luke?” Josie said, but he dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
Blue eyes flashing from the screen, Trinity Payne went on, “Aaron King is believed to be responsible for up to thirty murders in the state of Pennsylvania in the last four years, although investigators have only been able to link his DNA to eight of those murders, the most recent of which happened right here in Alcott County.”
“Should have been my stop,” Luke said under his breath.
It was a familiar refrain. A year earlier, the Interstate Killer had been caught by a state trooper who had pulled him over for a routine stop. King had been speeding along Route 80 in central Pennsylvania, down a stretch of highway that Luke usually patrolled. That night he had traded shifts with a coworker so he could go to dinner with Josie and her grandmother, Lisette, to celebrate Lisette’s birthday. Luke’s colleague had taken all the glory and fanfare for the capture of the serial killer who had terrorized the state for nearly four years.
“I’m glad it wasn’t your stop. You could have been killed,” Josie pointed out, gently squeezing his thigh. His knee jerked away from her touch.
Her hand recoiled and she felt the familiar sting of tears behind her eyes and blinked them back. She shouldn’t feel rejected—this had been going on for months now—but she did.
“Luke,” Josie said, taking the remote from his hand and turning the volume down.
“Hey,” he protested, sparing her a glance for the first time that day.
She forced a smile. “I thought we were going to spend some time together today. Just you and me. No work, no distractions.”
“I’m right here,” he said.
No, you’re not, she thought. His gaze had already traveled back to the television.
She picked up a mock-up of their wedding invitation from the coffee table. “I thought we could talk about the wedding. Your sister sent these for us to look over.”
“Really?” he snapped.
“Oh, well, we don’t have to use any of the invitations Carrieann sent. We can probably find others online. I’ll get my laptop.”
“Please, Josie, not now.”
Josie stared at him, her body stiffening. “Oh, okay. Well, maybe we could—”
“Look, I just wanted to relax today, okay?”
“Oh, sure, yeah,” Josie agreed. “We haven’t had much time to relax together lately, have we?” Her duties as Denton’s chief of police took up far more time than she had ever anticipated. She lived in a constant state of guilt. She knew that most of what he was struggling with had nothing to do with her, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she had more time for him, maybe he wouldn’t be drifting away from her more and more each day.
She pushed closer to him, leaning into his side, but he shifted away from her, his fingers scrabbling along the bottom of his takeout container for the last of his fries. He tossed the empty box onto the other side of the couch and Josie raised an eyebrow. “Would you like me to throw that away for you?” she asked pointedly.
“I got you a burger,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard a single word she’d said in the last five minutes. “It’s in the kitchen.” He motioned to the television. “Shh. They’re bringing him into the courthouse.”
With a heavy sigh, Josie turned her gaze back to the screen. She heard Luke’s barely audible groan as the sheriff’s deputies led King from the car to the courthouse with a jacket over his head. “They don’t want to show how bad his lip looks,” Luke said.
For the benefit of the viewing public, WYEP flashed King’s mug shot across the screen. King was young, only twenty-three, with pasty skin, unruly brown hair and a scraggly, wild beard. He had a long, narrow nose that hooked slightly at the end and dark eyes that seemed to penetrate right through the camera. Every time she saw his photo, it gave her the creeps. She was glad Luke hadn’t been the one to stop him; King had gone after the trooper who had made the stop with a machete, a fact which Luke overlooked each time he bemoaned his horrible luck in not having been there.
By Josie’s estimation, Luke had had enough trauma to last a lifetime without adding a machete attack to the list. A year and a half earlier he’d been shot and nearly killed helping Josie solve a string of disappearances of teenage girls in her town.
But that wasn’t the thing that had turned him from a loving, good-humored, passionate fiancé into the apathetic stranger before her. Four months earlier he had gone around to his friend Brady’s house to watch an NHL playoff game to find that Brady had shot his wife, Eva, and himself in a murder-suicide. The Conways had lived in the small town of Bowersville, out of Josie’s jurisdiction, so she hadn’t seen the aftermath of the crime, but Luke hadn’t been the same since. It was like Brady Conway had taken a part of Luke with him when he shot his wife and himself, and Josie wasn’t sure she would ever get it back. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to reach him anymore. Each day brought a new degree of distance and a new level of sadness and uncertainty for Josie.
“A real live serial killer,” Luke said. “I could have had that arrest. How many people can say they arrested a serial killer?”
Josie could. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said. She picked up the remote once more and turned the television off. “Luke, we have this time together today. I really thought we could—”
He sat up straight, color flooding his face. “Hey, I was watching that.”
He plucked the remote out of her hand and turned the television back on, blasting the volume once more.
Josie said, “Luke, I’m trying to have a conversation with you.”
His eyes remained glued to the screen. “About what?”
“Whatever you want to talk about.”
His gaze swept over the coffee table and then he met her eyes. “Please, Josie, I’m tired.”
She was about to reply, but he was already engrossed in the WYEP broadcast again; a million miles from her even though there were only a few inches between their bodies. Not for the first time, she wondered what had happened to him. His tenderness, his innate sense of chivalry and his absolute normalcy were the things that had drawn her to him. She knew these bouts of coldness were not really about her. She understood that. But she wasn’t sure how many more of them she could take.
She had suggested he get counseling; he clearly hadn’t processed what had happened to his friends and she suspected that he blamed himself. If he had arrived a few minutes earlier, maybe he would have been able to prevent the whole thing.
Her cell phone rang into the cold silence between them and both their heads turned in the direction of the sound—she had left it on the foyer table. “I have to get that,” she said quietly.
Crossing the room, she snatched the phone up and pressed it to her ear. “This is Josie.” It was Lieutenant Noah Fraley, her second-in-command.
“Boss,” said Noah. “We have a situation. I think you need to come and meet me right now.”
She didn’t ask why. She simply said, “Okay,” and listened as Noah rattled off an address she knew she should recognize, but that wouldn’t come to her in that moment. She hung up and grabbed her jacket from the closet.
“Josie?” Luke called from the living room.
“I have to go to work,” she said.
She hadn’t realized just how tightly knotted the muscles in her shoulder blades were until she was a mile away from home and her body finally started to relax. She knew she shouldn’t hide behind her work, but it was the only place she felt in control. But her relief quickly dissipated as she arrived at the address Noah had rattled off and suddenly realized why it had seemed so familiar to her.
Noah stood outside of the large Victorian, a grim, fixed look on his face and a Denton PD patrol officer with a clipboard guarding the front door by his side. “We’ve got a crime scene?” Josie asked.
Noah nodded.
“Have you set up a perimeter?”
“Yes. I’ve got someone on the back door as well. All points of entry are covered.”
“Is she—is she dead?”
Josie honestly didn’t know how she would feel if Noah told her that Misty Derossi was dead. It was no secret that Josie detested her; ever since she caught her late husband, Ray, sleeping with the notoriously promiscuous stripper, she’d found it difficult, but after Ray confessed he’d fallen in love with her, well, that changed everything.
“No,” Noah said. “At least, not yet. EMTs already rushed her to the hospital. I’ve got a man following to report on her condition. A neighbor found her unconscious. An older woman who lives next door hadn’t seen Misty coming or going for a few days and came to check on her. She knocked and got no answer, so she went around to the back and said she found the back door partially open. She came inside and that’s when she found Misty unconscious on the living room floor. Then she called 911. Misty was beaten pretty badly. Most of the house is undisturbed but the living room is a mess. You’ll see.”
Josie stilled her mind for a moment, resetting herself to put her personal feelings aside and treat this like any other case. She stepped past Noah and he followed her as she nodded to the patrol officer and watched him record her name onto the crime scene log. Just inside the front door, one of their crime scene officers had set up a small supply area.
The city of Denton was roughly twenty-five square miles, many of those miles spanning the untamed mountains of central Pennsylvania with their one-lane winding roads, dense woods and rural residences spread far and wide. With a population edging over thirty thousand, it wasn’t big enough to have a crime scene unit, but they did have a small contingent of officers who were specially trained in evidence collection and scene preservation—an Evidence Response Team, or ERT.
At the supply station, Josie and Noah donned Tyvek suits with booties, skull caps, and latex gloves. “Have you got someone canvassing the neighbors?” Josie asked. “To see if anyone saw anything?”
“Yeah,” Noah replied. “I’ve got two officers out now.”
As she followed Noah deeper into Misty’s home, she saw that he was right—the exquisitely furnished and carefully arranged rooms looked untouched. Josie and Noah had walked through this house once before, almost two years earlier, when Misty had gone missing after Ray’s death. The place was filled with ornate antique furniture that looked as uncomfortable as it did fancy. Apparently dancing at the local strip club was extremely lucrative.
“Like I said, almost everything is in its place,” Noah said as they moved down the first-floor hall.
“You said the neighbor found the back door ajar,” Josie said. “Any signs of forced entry?”
Noah shook his head. “Nope. Either Misty left her back door unlocked or she let her attacker inside.”
“Broken windows?”
“None.”
“Misty’s car?”
“Parked around the back of the house in her garage.”
Noah stopped at the entrance to a sitting room near the back of the house. He waved a hand, indicating she should enter first. “You ready? Watch your step.”
Josie swallowed a gasp as she entered the room. The once pristine living room looked as though a tornado had torn through it; the hardwood floor was covered in glass, wood splinters and maimed pieces of furniture; the light-blue floral pattern of the area rug was splattered in blood; a few feet away, a small wooden coffee table lay splintered in half with a clump of blond hair hanging from the jaws of the broken wood. Josie counted three large lamps on their sides around her, shards of their hand-painted glass scattered around the room. One whole area of cream-colored wall to Josie’s left was caved in where someone had been thrown against it so violently the drywall had buckled. Josie took a few more careful steps into the room, a small white object next to one of the evidence markers drawing her attention. She knelt and pointed to it.
“My God,” she said. “Is that a tooth?”
She heard Noah take a breath. “Yeah,” he said. “Paramedics said Misty was missing one of her top front teeth.”
She tore her eyes away to survey the rest of the room and counted three of her officers at work. One dusted the walls and furniture for prints while another vacuumed fibers from the round area carpet in the center of the room. The third officer followed the yellow plastic evidence markers that had been placed throughout the room, taking photographs of every detail. Clad in their white suits, just like Josie and Noah, all of them took slow and careful steps, as though walking across thin ice. They glanced up at her when they felt her watching.
“Boss,” said the officer with the small, handheld vacuum.
She nodded at him and he moved from the area rug to a thick, white fleece blanket discarded on the floor. He pointed to it and the photographer picked her way over and snapped several pictures of it. Then the blanket was flattened and vacuumed for any hairs or fibers remaining on it. A bloody handprint marred its clean white surface—Misty’s handprint, judging by the size of it.
Then something else caught Josie’s gaze and she pointed to the item beside the couch.
“Noah, what the hell is that?”
The infant bouncer chair was a soft gray with green and yellow pastel polka dots. It lay on its side and the mobile that normally hung from the U-shaped bar over the seat had been snapped off, its soft zoo animals sad and scattered across the floor. Beside the bouncer lay a small stuffed elephant and a crumpled green blanket just big enough to swaddle a newborn.
“There was a baby? She had a baby? Is it—?”
“The baby’s not here,” Noah said quickly.
That didn’t quell the awful feeling of anxiety blooming in Josie’s stomach.
“I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”
Noah nodded. “The neighbor said that Misty was due any day. Based on what we found in the upstairs bathroom, we believe she delivered the baby here at home. But there’s no sign of it. We found a dog locked in the basement, barking up a storm. The neighbor said she’d care for it until things get sorted out.”
“When did she deliver?”
“We don’t know, but I think it was in the last day or two. The neighbor says she saw Misty four days ago and she was nearly due.”
“You think she was alone when she delivered?”
“I don’t think so. Come upstairs.”
Josie followed Noah up the steps and he led her past a room that Misty had obviously prepared as a nursery. Josie glanced in; the walls were yellow with animals dancing across them; the dresser, changing table and crib all looked newly bought. If Misty had really given birth in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours, she wouldn’t have had a chance to use any of it.
Noah led her past the nursery to the master bedroom and the first thing that hit Josie was the smell: stale sweat, a strange sweet smell that she couldn’t place, and the faint coppery scent she knew to be blood. The room was a mess. The massive bed, couched in an ornately carved mahogany bed frame was littered with crumpled towels and sheets, the bedspread tangled in a heap on the floor. Wadded towels, washcloths, and sheets made a trail into an adjoining bathroom, almost all of them covered in dried blood.
“We’ve processed this room already, so you can move freely,” Noah told her.
Josie went to the master bathroom. “She had her baby here.”
“Yeah,” Noah said.
Josie didn’t know much about childbirth, but she knew Misty must have had help.
“Where’s her phone?” Josie asked.
“We haven’t found it.”
“Did the elderly neighbor see anyone coming or going? You interviewed the neighbors closest to her first thing, right?”
“I did. I talked to them myself.”
“Did they see anyone? Perhaps carrying a baby? Any unusual vehicles?”
“No one saw anything,” Noah said.
“We need to issue an Amber Alert for the baby immediately.”
“Based on what?”
“This meets the criteria. Amber Alerts are to let the community know when a child under eighteen is missing or has been abducted and is in imminent danger. If a newborn baby is not here and it’s not with its mother, then we need to treat this like an abduction. I’m not taking any risks, not with a newborn baby.”
“Boss, we don’t even know the sex.”
“Then you need to find out. Someone should be talking to her ob-gyn. What about her best friend? The one who called us when she went missing last time?”
“I already have a call out to her,” Noah told her. “I found an appointment card on the fridge for a local ob-gyn and sent Gretchen over to their office to see what she could find out.”
“Good,” Josie said.
Gretchen Palmer was the department’s appointed detective. Josie had hired her shortly after she became chief of police and needed a detective to replace her. Gretchen was approaching forty and had worked as a detective in Philadelphia most of her career. She was seasoned and no-nonsense and a real asset to her team.
Noah frowned. “We have no photo, no vehicle, no witnesses.”
“I know. It’s not a lot to go on,” Josie said. “Let’s at least try to find out the sex as quickly as we can before we put out the alert. What about the father?”
“According to the neighbor, Misty wouldn’t talk about him to anyone.”
“So, it’s possible that this is domestic, and the father has the baby,” Josie said. “We need to find out who he is. We also need to work out who helped her deliver, and whether she was even planning a home birth.”
“Boss? Lieutenant Fraley?” a voice from downstairs called. She recognized it as the officer standing sentry outside of the house. “Someone here to talk to you.”
Out on Misty’s wrap-around porch, a woman in her mid-twenties paced, hugging herself tightly. She was dressed in dark-blue jeans that were rolled at the bottom and cuffed neatly above a pair of strappy sandals. On top, she wore a black sweater over a white T-shirt. Her skin had the deep orange hue of a spray-on tan, clashing with the jet-black hair which flowed down her back in waves. When she saw Josie and Noah she raced over to them, opening her arms as though she were about to embrace one or both of them, then pulled up short, wrapping her arms back around herself again instead.
“Can I help you?” Noah asked, pulling off his disposable head covering.
For a moment, the woman’s eyes were drawn to Noah’s thick brown locks. Josie had to admit, they looked even more expertly tousled after the removal of the cap than they had before he put it on.
“Ma’am?” Josie said.
She smiled uncertainly, her eyes darting briefly toward Josie. “My name is Brittney. Lieutenant Fraley called me. I’m Misty’s best friend. Is she… is she okay?”
Noah pulled off his latex gloves and extended a hand, which Brittney shook. “That’s me,” he said. “Miss Derossi is alive but badly injured. She’s at the hospital now. We don’t have word on her condition yet, but a neighbor found her unconscious.”
One of Brittney’s hands flew to her mouth. “Oh my God. Is the baby okay?”
Noah looked at Josie. “Brittney,” Josie said. “The baby is missing.”
Brittney gasped. “What? What do you mean missing? She had the baby?”
“Do you know if Misty was going to have a boy or a girl?” Josie asked.
“A boy. Oh my God, where is he?”
Josie ignored the question, asking her own instead. “When is the last time you spoke to or saw Misty?”
Brittney touched a hand to her chest. “I don’t know. Maybe four, five days ago? I travel for work, so I’ve been out of town. I told her I’d be back for her due date. I texted her a couple of times yesterday and the day before, but she didn’t respond. I didn’t think anything of it. Sometimes if she is tired or feeling really shitty, she’ll take forever to return a text.”
“When was her due date?” Josie asked.
“Tomorrow. I just got back today.”
“What do you do?” Noah asked.
“I’m a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company. Wait—so, when did she have the baby?”
“Sometime in the last twenty-four to forty-eight hours by the look of her bathroom.”
The color drained from Brittney’s face. “Her bathroom?”
“She gave birth at home,” Josie said. “Brittney, do you know—did she have a midwife lined up?”
Brittney resumed pacing before them. “No. No, she didn’t. She was going to go to the hospital. I don’t understand. She didn’t call me. Who was here?”
“We were hoping you could help us with that,” Noah said.
“Brittney,” Josie said. “Did Misty tell you who the baby’s father is?”
“No, it was a big secret. She wouldn’t even tell me. No one knew. She said maybe she would tell me after the baby was born.”
“Why would she keep it a secret?”
Brittney shrugged. “I don’t know. I told her whoever it was, it wasn’t a big deal—I mean, not to me. She was super sensitive about the whole thing. You know, she had an ectopic pregnancy when she was, like, twenty and it almost destroyed her insides. I was surprised she could even get pregnant, ’cause the doctors had told her she couldn’t. When it happened it was like this big miracle. So, I was joking with her that I really wanted to know what man finally knocked her up, but she wouldn’t say. She just said that there were some things she needed to get in order before she started telling people.”
“Like what?” Josie asked.
“I don’t know. It was weird, you know? She wouldn’t even tell me. We’ve been friends since kindergarten. I pushed her a lot at first, but then it got to the point where every time I brought it up she’d get really upset, so I stopped.”
Josie frowned. “Is it possible that her pregnancy was a result of a non-consensual encounter?”
Brittney stopped pacing and stared at Josie. “What? You mean like, rape?”
“Yes. Would she have told you?”
“I don’t know. I mean she had some problems now and then with customers where she worked—you know she worked at Foxy Tails, right?”
“Yes,” Noah said.
“. . .
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