Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107766 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 539(@200wpm)___ 431(@250wpm)___ 359(@300wpm)
“Thank you, Nia,” Zach said. “We appreciate the information.”
“Could that be why the man on the Merricks’ porch looked familiar, Mrs. Parsons?” Zach asked.
She appeared to think about that but then shook her head. “I can’t say for sure. Possibly, but no way I could swear to it. I just didn’t get a good enough look at him.”
Nia left the room, and Dawn turned around, continuing to leaf through the album. “I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought about Charlie in a long, long time,” she said, replacing that one and pulling another one down. “I suppose he must have felt like a throwaway boy.” She flipped another page and another. “In some ways, I suppose he would have been right.” She stopped, turning to them. “Ah, here we go.”
Zach and Josie both met her in the middle of the room. They stared at another photo—this one closer up—of all five kids standing on the curb, backpacks slung over their shoulders, a first-day-of-school sign held in the only boy’s hands.
He was young, just a kid. But Josie knew him immediately. It was Cooper.
Chapter Thirty-Six
As it turned out, there were thirty architectural firms in downtown Cincinnati. Zach called in to the station and put out an APB on Cooper Hart. Jimmy was calling the firms Cooper might work at in an effort to locate him. Josie tried his cell phone number again and shook her head when Zach looked at her, indicating his voicemail had picked up once again. She appeared shell-shocked, distant.
“He can’t have anything to do with this,” she whispered, shaking her head as if to deny it further to herself, if not to him. She turned to face him as he drove toward Professor Merrick’s house. “He can’t have hurt me, Zach. I…I would have known him, wouldn’t I? I can’t understand this. No. There’s some other reason he lied. Something…” She sat up straighter as though something had just occurred to her. “Also, Cooper’s gay.”
That stopped Zach up. He hadn’t had that impression. The way he’d looked at Josie… Zach had the notion Cooper was a man who’d long carried a torch for her. Hell, Zach had been jealous. “Yeah?” he said.
“Zach, the man in the warehouse raped me. Repeatedly.”
His shoulders tensed as he glanced at her. Her eyes were slightly wild. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to bring her along. Maybe he should drop her off at the station while he worked. But fuck it all, he wanted her directly in his line of sight. Especially now. “Josie,” Zach said evenly. “Rape is a crime of violence, not of sex.”
She stared at him for a moment. His every nerve was stretched taut at the picture their conversation evoked, the fact that he could do nothing to make what happened to her go away.
Josie let out a stilted breath. “Yes…I—I know.”
“What about his eyes? What color are Cooper’s eyes?”
“Brown. Dark brown.” She looked at him, something dawning in her gaze. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “It’s why there was that unusual ring of brown around the outside of Marshall’s—my captor’s—eyes.” She looked back to the road, her expression dull. “He was wearing contacts.”
Contacts. Okay, but how had the man who held Josie sounded just like Landish? Smelled like him? Moved like him? Zach’s mind was reaching in all directions, arranging and rearranging the puzzle pieces that were being thrown at him by the moment. Cooper…Charlie had known about the woman in Tennessee, Deanna Breene, because he’d run into Nia Parsons. Had he taken a day trip there? Would they find her bones sooner or later, wrists still shackled to a basement wall?
Vaughn Merrick was a prolific cheater. Cooper…Charlie, if it was him, couldn’t have known about every single woman the man had cheated with unless he’d tailed him twenty-four/seven. He must have considered what Nia told him opportune information.
But why? Why did he go after the girls that Merrick slept with? Why was that so important to him?
It suddenly occurred to Zach that Reagan had sat in front of Cooper in Josie’s living room and confessed her own affair with the man. Jesus. Had she delivered her own death sentence in that very moment as Cooper sat listening innocuously, a chocolate-chip cookie hiding his expression?
Something else dawned on him. “The call, Josie. It came right after Cooper left your house, right?”
“The background noise,” she murmured as her eyes widened. “Was it…could it have been an…engine? His car?”
Possible, yes. Zach’s jaw tightened, his mind continuing to whirl. The profile. Cooper/Charlie matched Pickering’s profile. White, late twenties, smart…although they didn’t know any of his past to determine if he’d been abused. Still so many damn questions and not enough answers.
They pulled up to the curb on Vaughn Merrick’s street, and Zach spotted the officer sitting in his car across from the professor’s house. He turned to Josie. “Stay here. Your presence could keep the professor from talking to me, and I need him to talk.”