Chapter 49

FORTY-NINE

Josie sighed. She wanted to look anywhere but at her colleagues, but the one thing she would not do was try to escape accountability for her screw-ups. Raising her chin, she said, “Yeah. I ran down to the sidewalk. I pushed him. Hard. He fell. It wasn’t pretty. I said a whole bunch of things I shouldn’t have said.”

“Bet it felt good, though,” said Gretchen as her index finger kept hammering her computer mouse.

It had. Until the consequences of her actions came back to bite her in the ass.

“It was quite the commotion. Weaver came to the door, pushed Dusty right out of the way and came outside. Peluso left the back and came around to separate us. Bud Ernst was supposed to be covering the back for Peluso but then he came around, too. When additional units showed up, we were all out front, shouting at one another. Dusty left the front door when things got heated between Peluso and Lampson.”

“Both entrances were unattended,” Noah said. “Anyone could have gotten in and messed with things.”

This part Josie remembered more vividly than the rest because of all the blowback when it came time for Kellan Neal to put Roger Bell on trial. “That’s exactly what the defense attorney argued in his motion to suppress evidence. When Hugh Weaver went back in, the knife wasn’t there. He didn’t even realize that it was gone. No one did. He took the rest of his photos. The other members of the ERT showed up to help but they didn’t find the knife either. Later, Lampson went back and found it under a radiator. No one ever did figure out what happened, but the theory was that Weaver kicked it when he rushed outside to see what the commotion was about.”

“Are you serious, Quinn?” Turner reached into his pocket and took his phone out but this time, he didn’t scroll, just held it in his hand. “That can’t be real shit. That is beyond incompetence. It’s—I’m not sure I even believe you.”

Josie hooked a thumb over her shoulder toward the computer screen. “It’s all in there. Ernst was fired. Weaver was suspended for months. He was fired for something else several years later, although I’m pretty sure once the dust settled, he found work elsewhere.”

“Still don’t believe this horseshit,” Turner said. “Although if you’re right that these murders are about the Cook family, the polaroids make a hell of a lot of sense. But man, how the hell did anyone get away with that shit? It’s not just incompetence. It’s dereliction of duty. Negligence.”

Noah crossed his arms over his chest, body turning slightly to face Turner. “I’m not saying this in anyone’s defense, but we’re talking fifteen years ago. The department was corrupt from top to bottom. How do you think that sex-trafficking ring survived and thrived for so long?”

Josie said, “The Chief back then, before Wayland Harris took the job, protected all of the officers involved. Peluso and I didn’t get fired because we made sure someone took over our posts before we left them. Branson should have been fired but, like Lampson, he was under the protection of the network of men who needed to keep their crimes under wraps. Plus, the girl—Miranda O’Malley’s best friend—refused to file a complaint against him. Wouldn’t give us a statement. I don’t think her name is even in the file. Even if she had tried to report him, like I said, he was protected.”

“After Josie busted that sex-trafficking ring, there were only a handful of us left,” Noah said. “When she became interim chief, it took months for her to fill all the vacancies.”

Gretchen raised a hand. “I took one of them. It was a bit of a shitshow when I got here, with the rebuild.”

Turner’s thumb brushed the side of his phone, like he was itching to press the start button, log in, and start scrolling. “Kellan Neal must have been apoplectic.”

“He was,” Josie said. “When he realized just how badly things had been screwed up. He did his best to salvage the case.” Turning back to her computer, she read through more documents, trying to recall exactly what had happened after the debacle with the knife. She hadn’t followed the rest of the case that closely. She was too busy trying to obliterate her memories of the scene and her screw-up with Wild Turkey.

Gretchen beat her to it, reading off the facts as she located them. “There were witnesses who saw Roger Bell entering the Cook residence. Other witnesses who saw him only a block away after the murders, covered in blood. Unfortunately, his clothes were never found. Once he was arrested, he refused to talk.”

“But Quinn saw the knife,” Turner said. “That didn’t count?”

Josie sighed. “I saw it when I first went in. Peluso didn’t notice it, but I did. I was willing to testify to that, but the judge ruled in favor of the defense and the knife was kept out.”

The ancient printer sputtered to life. Gretchen stood up and walked over to it, waiting for the pages to emerge in the output tray. Once she had what she needed, she walked to the corkboard. The rest of them watched as she pinned a photo from the Cook crime scene under a photo from their present-day scenes.

She narrated as she went. “Evan Cook was the father. The positioning of his body most closely resembles the way our killer staged Cleo Tate’s body.”

Evan Cook had been stabbed in the front parlor, just off the foyer. He had turned on his side after being attacked. He’d been found with one hand gripping the edge of a chair, as if he’d tried to pull himself up.

“Amelia Cook was his wife,” Gretchen went on, pinning another photo over part of the map, nowhere near their present-day crime scene photos. “The mother. Her body position doesn’t match up with any of our victims.”

Although the pictures showed the individual victims, Josie remembered from just having perused the file that Amelia had been found in the hall that led from the foyer to the dining room, her body like a discarded marionette, rolled partially onto her shoulder, her arms twisted round one another.

Turner’s fingertips beat out a rhythm on his thigh. “You mean any of the victims we’ve found so far .”

Ignoring him, Gretchen took another photo and put it under Stella Townsend’s crime scene picture. “Iris Cook. Thirteen years old. Daughter of Evan and Amelia. She was found in the breakfast room, on her stomach like she was trying to crawl away. Then there’s the visiting student, Miranda O’Malley. She was found near Iris. Her positioning matches that of Everly Rowe.”

Miranda’s photo went beneath Everly’s—both on their backs, one arm flung outward, each one bearing the most stab wounds because Miranda was Bell’s main target. She’d been found in the corner of the room, behind the overturned table. Josie wondered if there would have been less bloodshed if Bell had found Miranda alone at the home, or had he always intended to kill them all?

Empty-handed, Gretchen turned toward them. “Then you’ve got another kid, Simon Cook, seventeen years old. Found in the kitchen, stabbed in the back. Finally, a toddler, Felicity Cook, three years old, also in the kitchen, stabbed once in the abdomen and once in the chest. No photos of them.”

Josie’s mouth was suddenly dry. The memory she’d worked so hard to bury for the last fifteen years came rushing back. Peluso dropping to his knees beside the boy, finding a pulse, rolling him over to find tiny Felicity Cook sheltered beneath her brother’s body. Peluso had immediately started working on Simon while Josie did what she could to keep the life from draining out of the tiny girl’s fragile body, at least until the EMTs arrived.

“There are no photos,” Josie choked out. “Not from the scene. They were both alive when we got there.”

Noah said, “Did they survive?”

Josie remembered getting the news from Peluso a week later that the girl had finally been upgraded to stable condition. He’d known how badly shaken Josie had been from trying to save her. “I’m pretty sure Felicity survived,” Josie said. “But I don’t know about Simon. I wasn’t involved in anything more than the initial call and I didn’t follow it. I was just trying to keep my head above water back then, being new, and after the disaster with the murder weapon, I didn’t much want to think about it.”

She didn’t mention the way she’d spiraled into alcohol use.

Gretchen returned to her desk, clicking her mouse a few times. “They both survived, at least until trial. The charges against Bell for those two victims were attempted murder.”

Turner went back to his desk, sitting and tossing his basketball at the net over and over, missing every time. “So what are we looking at here? It’s obviously some kind of revenge tour, targeting everyone in law enforcement who screwed up the scene and got the knife kept out. But why?”

Josie spun her chair around to face him. “Because Roger Bell was acquitted of all charges. He went free.”