Chapter 5

FIVE

If he hadn’t been holding his infant daughter, Josie was certain that Remy would have lunged for Turner. She stepped forward and put a hand behind his elbow, ushering him toward the door. “Just a couple of things before you go, Mr. Tate. Do you or Cleo own a polaroid camera?”

Shock slackened the features of his face. “Wh-what?”

Josie took out her phone and showed him the polaroid found in Gracie’s seat. She had taken the time to crop out the bloodied edges. “This was found in your daughter’s stroller.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither you nor your wife owns a polaroid camera?” she asked again.

“No. We use our phones for everything. I didn’t even know they still made those.”

“What about the picture itself?” Josie prodded. “Does it seem familiar to you at all?”

Remy looked from the photo to her face. “Do a couple of rocks look familiar to me? No. Shouldn’t you be trying to find my wife?”

“That’s what we’re trying to do, buddy,” Turner called, without looking away from his phone. “Unless you don’t want us to.”

Red bloomed across Remy’s cheeks. His mouth thinned into an angry line. Before he could unleash his wrath on Turner, Josie ushered him quickly through the door. “That’s all we have for you right now. Thank you for answering our questions.”

He craned his neck to look back at Turner, but Josie guided him down the hall to the first desk, which Brennan now sat atop. He jumped to his feet when he saw them. “This is my colleague, Officer Brennan,” Josie said. “He will take it from here. He’ll help you with whatever you need. If you’d like to take Gracie to the hospital or you would just like to go home.”

Face still flushed with rage, Remy glanced back down the hall, as if waiting for Turner to emerge. Josie held a business card out to him. “We need to get back to trying to locate your wife. Cleo is our priority right now.” When he didn’t respond, she repeated the words, more slowly this time. Blinking, he took the card.

Discreetly, Josie signaled for Brennan to take over. Then she strode back to the other room, where Turner still leaned against the desk, scrolling on his phone. She slammed the door and advanced on him, snatching the phone from his grasp.

His eyes widened. “What the hell are you doing, sweetheart?”

“You’re asking me what the hell I’m doing? Me?” she raged, waving his phone in the air. “What the hell were you doing pushing Remy Tate like that? His four-month-old baby was just found abandoned in the city park in the middle of damn July and his wife is missing!”

Turner folded his arms across his chest. “He doesn’t have an alibi.”

Josie froze. “What?”

“He wasn’t at work when I went there to get him. He had clocked in at the usual time and then left the office at eight thirty—the exact same time his wife left the house with the baby. Told his boss that he forgot his laptop and then he went home. That’s where I found him. While Cleo Tate was pushing baby Gracie around the city park, Remy Tate was home—or so he says. Guess where his laptop was?”

Unease prickled over her scalp. “His office.”

Turner didn’t say anything but his smug look confirmed that she was right.

Josie’s hands fell to her sides. She kept hold of Turner’s phone. “Was anyone else there with him?”

“Not that I could tell. He only let me into the living room, but I asked to use his bathroom.”

Of course he had. Turner used the bathroom everywhere they went. It was his way of doing a plain-view search of any premises they entered.

“Most of the doors in the upper part of the house were open. I didn’t see any signs of a struggle. No blood anywhere. Then again, there were rooms I didn’t see. Like the basement.”

“What did the Ring camera show?”

Turner held out his hand for the phone. “They’ve only got one. At the front door. He showed me the footage from the morning of him leaving for work and then Cleo taking the baby out. No video of him arriving back home. They have a fairly large portico and a lot of shrubbery. I’m pretty sure the camera doesn’t pick up the driveway, and if they don’t have cameras out back…”

Josie laid the phone in his hand. “He could sneak into the house without appearing on the camera.”

“And while Cleo was here at the park, she wouldn’t have gotten a notification from the surveillance app that her husband had come home.”

“Which means she wouldn’t know what time he came home,” Josie said. “When we get a warrant for the contents of her phone, we won’t know either. There’s the GPS on his car?—”

“But the park is within walking distance,” Turner filled in. “He could have parked his car there and made it look like he was home but then walked here. The 911 call came in around ten, an hour and a half after he left work. The time frame is tight, but it’s not implausible that he could have caught up with her.”

“You think he did this?”

“I think he doesn’t have an alibi.”

A man who would stage his own wife’s abduction would certainly not balk at putting his child in danger by leaving her unattended in the park.

“Do you have that still?”

Turner punched a code into the phone, swiped a couple of times, and then turned it to face her. A full-color still of Cleo Tate pushing her stroller out her front door filled the screen. It only showed her in profile but that didn’t matter. Now they knew what she’d been wearing when she disappeared. Black yoga pants and a navy blue T-shirt. Her dark hair was covered by a white ballcap. Turner texted Josie the picture.

“If the husband didn’t do this,” Josie said, “then the only other explanation for him sneaking into his own home when his wife isn’t home is that he’s having an affair.”

Turner pocketed his phone. “In which case, it might clear the husband but then we could have a jealous mistress on our hands. Maybe Cleo didn’t know anyone who wanted to harm her, but her husband does.”

Josie didn’t say anything, moving the pieces around on a puzzle board in her head. “But we can’t get warrants for the GPS in his vehicle or any electronic devices, and we can’t get a warrant to search the Tate home because we don’t have enough probable cause to look at Remy.”

“Yet,” Turner said.

“We’ll have to bring him in for an interview. Get his story locked down. Ask him for consent to look at the contents of his phone and go from there. Do you have someone canvassing his street to see if anyone witnessed him returning home?”

“It’s not my first day.” He shoved a hand into his pocket and came up with another crumpled dollar bill. “I know you didn’t miss me calling you sweetheart just now, in spite of all my brilliant investigative work, so do you want my dollar, or do you want to take a shot at me?”

Josie stared at the bill, nose wrinkling as she remembered the one he’d given her earlier, moist with something she didn’t even want to think about.

“You know you want to,” he goaded her. “Come on, Quinn. We’ll call it even.”

Josie took out her own phone and texted the photo of Cleo to Brennan and Dougherty, instructing them to get it out to the rest of the officers searching and canvassing. “We’ve got work to do,” she said. “Keep your dollar, Douchebag.”