Chapter 29

TWENTY-NINE

Back in the CCTV room, Gretchen sat with her feet up on the table, watching the monitor with a bored expression. “They’re still going round and round,” she told Josie.

Josie glanced at the clock. “It’s been twenty minutes.”

“Yep, and for twenty minutes, Remy has insisted that his affair with Stella isn’t relevant to Cleo’s murder. At all.”

Josie plopped into the chair next to Gretchen. “‘My affair has nothing to do with my wife’s murder’ sounds like the catchphrase of cheating men whose wives are found murdered everywhere.”

Gretchen snorted.

“Noah didn’t tell him that Stella was murdered yet?” Josie asked.

“Nope.”

He’d save it for when it would have the most impact, and try to get as much information about the affair from Remy as possible before dropping that bomb. Once Remy knew, it wouldn’t take long for him to realize how much worse he came off in the situation and that he was a suspect, at which point he might ask for an attorney.

“What’d the producer say?”

Josie filled her in.

“Hmmm,” Gretchen said. “You believe her? That she didn’t know what story Stella was after?”

Josie leaned forward, eyes on the CCTV monitor. From Remy’s defeated posture, it appeared that Noah was wearing him down. “I don’t know, but I can’t see how she benefits by lying about it. I mean, she admitted to having discussed illegally obtaining sealed court records with Stella. Why put that out there but lie about the story?”

Gretchen stretched her arms over her head, yawning. “True. I suppose the real question is how relevant this mystery story is to these murders, if at all.”

Josie rubbed at her eyes. It hadn’t even been that long since her last coffee, but she felt like she hadn’t had one in days. “You’re right. Maybe it’s completely irrelevant—it probably is—but one of us should start going through the Word documents on her laptop to see if we can find anything that might tell us what she was working on.”

On the monitor, Noah leaned back in his chair, tapping a finger against one of the pages on the table. “Listen, Remy. We can keep doing this whole back-and-forth thing all day but that’s not going to help anyone, and it’s definitely not going to get us closer to finding Cleo’s killer. I get why you don’t want to talk about the woman you were low-key seeing behind your wife’s back. Especially now that Cleo’s gone. I do. But it’s my job to ask questions. Even questions that seem completely off-the-wall. This will go a hell of a lot faster and be a lot less painful for you if you just talk to me. The sooner you do, the sooner you can get back to your daughter. She needs you right now, doesn’t she?”

Remy didn’t seem very excited about the prospect of being reunited with Gracie but went along with it anyway. Maybe he realized how bad he’d look if he didn’t want to get back to his daughter at a time like this. “Okay. What else do you want to know?”

“You and Stella started talking a lot. Met for lunch. You said you liked her. A lot. Did she like you back?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course she did.”

Noah canted his head to the side, regarding Remy skeptically. Then he picked up one of the pages. “Really? ’Cause in a lot of these texts to you, she’s saying things like, ‘I’m really not comfortable with this becoming more than a friendship.’ ‘You’re coming on really strong.’ ‘Please don’t say sexual things like that.’ Oh, and here’s a good one: ‘You absolutely cannot touch me like that anymore.’”

Remy shook his head vigorously. “Because I’m married! Not because she doesn’t want to be with me.”

That sort of lined up with what Josie knew from Stella’s version of events but Stella hadn’t been after Remy as a romantic interest. She’d been after him for some big mystery story that she felt was important enough to try to illegally access sealed court records. The attraction—and whatever they’d done as a result of it—was an unfortunate consequence.

Noah shuffled more pages around. “But then when you contacted her the morning that Cleo went missing—after you spoke with Detectives Turner and Quinn—she told you, ‘I will not, under any circumstances whatsoever, give you an alibi. I cannot be involved in this. We didn’t see each other this morning.’”

“But we did!”

Noah nodded slowly. “Okay, okay. I believe you. I’m sure that if we check location monitoring on Stella’s phone, we can prove she was with you, but Remy, why wouldn’t she give you an alibi?”

He banged the back of his head lightly against the wall. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want anyone to find out about us. Because I’m married.”

Noah kept nodding. “But you could have both lied and just said she’d stopped by to follow up on the WYEP story. Sure, it was old, but it might have been believable since it hadn’t aired yet. Worth a shot, right?”

Remy didn’t answer.

On the other CCTV feed that monitored the second interview room, Kellan Neal appeared, followed by Chief Chitwood. The sound was down so Josie couldn’t hear their brief conversation.

“Stella was what? Sixteen years younger than you?” Noah asked.

“She’s not a minor,” Remy said quickly. “She’s a grown woman. We’re consenting adults.”

“No argument there,” said Noah. “I’m just wondering if there was something else, some other reason that Stella was so interested in you and why she refused to give you an alibi.”

Noah didn’t yet know about what Vicky had told Josie. He only knew about the texts between Stella and her friend, Abbie, in which Stella had only referenced a ‘story.’

Three horizontal lines appeared across Remy’s forehead. “What are you talking about? What other reason?”

“That’s what I’m asking you. Are you sure that Stella wasn’t angling to do some kind of story about you or someone you know?”

Josie’s gaze flitted back to the other screen. The Chief left Kellan alone inside the room.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Remy asked.

If Stella had been using Remy for a story she was developing, he had no idea.

As if thinking the same thing, Gretchen muttered, “Blinded by all that youth and beauty and lack of stretch marks. What a dumbass.”

Noah came to the same conclusion, changing the subject abruptly. “Remy, the day that Cleo was abducted, after you went home with Gracie, maybe got in touch with your family, Cleo’s parents, where were you?”

Remy’s body went very still. “What?”

“Where were you in the late afternoon of the day that Cleo was abducted?”

He scratched his scalp. “I was home with my daughter.”

Noah sat up straighter in his chair. “No one came over to be with you? To help with Gracie?”

“I mean Kellan came by for a little while and then he left. People offered but I just—I just wanted to be alone.” More quietly, he added, “I felt fucking guilty, man, okay?”

“Yeah,” Noah said. “I get it. Of course you did. But Remy, we’ve got a much bigger problem now than your affair.”

Remy scoffed. “Bigger than my fucking wife being murdered?”

“Well, you tell me,” said Noah, calmly lacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back in his chair again. “Because a few hours after your wife was killed, Stella Townsend was also murdered.”

All the color drained from Remy’s face. “Wh-what?”

“Stella’s dead, Remy. Someone killed her.”

Remy lurched forward, nearly coming out of his seat, and vomited all over the floor.