Chapter 65

SIXTY-FIVE

TWO WEEKS LATER

“What are we doing here, Quinn?” Turner pushed his curly mop away from his forehead. A sheen of sweat covered his face. He was wearing his suit jacket even though it was almost one hundred degrees.

Josie kept walking down one of the tree-lined streets of the oldest residential neighborhood in the city. Stately Victorian homes rose up on either side, their manicured lawns stretched out like emerald carpets. Her friend Misty lived only a couple of blocks away. If Turner wasn’t with her, she’d stop by and have lunch. The pleasant thought of Misty and Harris was pushed to the back of her mind as the old Cook residence came into view.

“This is it,” Josie said, stopping in front of the home.

Turner sighed. “We’re still on this. Quinn, you have to let this shit go. The Polaroid Killer is dead. The girl survived. We have no leads on the mysterious grandmother but hey, I don’t think Granny is going to go on a stabbing spree, so case closed.”

Except it wasn’t closed. Not for Josie. She couldn’t stop thinking about the grandmotherly woman who’d bought Bell access to the classic cars on Schock’s Auto Repair lot. She couldn’t sleep at night wondering about the final polaroid, taken inside her house. The rest of the team was more or less convinced that Bell had lied about not taking it. Noah said it was just another way to screw with her mind. Gretchen thought he’d denied taking it because he knew it would have this effect on her. Slowly drive her out of her mind. Who could trust a man who’d lied to his wife for over a decade and slaughtered so many innocent people?

Bell had been looney tunes, as Turner put it.

But Josie had read everything else correctly. She’d been able to figure out that Isaac Hampton was really Roger Bell, not Simon Cook. She’d figured out what Bell wanted her to see—the story he wanted to come out—just from the small, infinitesimal details in the case file and news reports. Her guesses had saved the lives of her husband and Juliet Bowen. When everything was said and done, Kellan Neal had admitted to her that after Bell’s acquittal, Andrew Bowen had come to him, suggesting that Simon Cook was the actual killer, and imploring him to look into charges. Neal wouldn’t even entertain it.

When Josie spoke with Andrew Bowen at his daughter’s bedside in the hospital, he confirmed Neal’s recollection. He hadn’t believed Bell’s version of events. He hadn’t even believed in his innocence, but he had a job to do. He was young and hungry, bent on proving himself as a defense attorney. His only interest was in an acquittal, and he did what he had to do in order to get it, including completely dismissing Bell’s claims that Simon Cook was the killer. Bell’s story didn’t matter because Bowen was able to keep the knife out. Then, after being acquitted of four counts of first-degree homicide and two counts of attempted homicide, Bell was a broken man. That got Bowen to thinking that maybe he had been telling the truth. It ate at him, even after Bell disappeared from the area. To ease his own guilt, Bowen had broached the subject with Neal, and even Lampson.

Nothing ever came of it.

“Did you hear me, Quinn?” Turner’s voice broke through her ruminations.

Josie touched the picket fence surrounding the Cook property. It was vacant. A For Rent sign hung crookedly on the front door. A developer had bought it after the trial but when he realized that the home was on the historical register and therefore, he couldn’t knock it down and build an apartment building in its place, he sold it to someone else, who’d been trying to rent it out ever since. There had been a few tenants over the years, but most people didn’t want to live in a house where so much violence had occurred.

“I heard you,” Josie muttered.

It had been painted since then. A new roof had been installed. The flowers Amelia Cook had planted in the front yard were long gone.

“Can we eat after this walk down memory lane?” Turner took out his phone and started scrolling. “I’m starving.”

“I’m not having lunch with you.”

“Come on, Quinn. Buy me lunch. Somewhere nice. You’re flush with cash. Hell, I don’t think I can fit one more dollar into your jar.”

“I’ll get another jar.”

“You won’t need one if you spend some of it taking me to lunch. If you think about it, it’s really me buying you lunch since that’s my money.”

She rolled her eyes and pushed the gate open. As she walked up to the porch, sense memories crashed over her. The overpowering scent of blood. Little Felicity Cook’s fragile, cracked sternum under Josie’s fingers. The odor of her own vomit. The bile burning the back of her throat. Blood sticky on her forearms and wet against her kneecaps where it had soaked through her pants. Peluso’s hand at her back. The unbridled rage consuming her as she watched Lampson harass a teenage girl.

Turning to face the street, Josie saw Turner standing in almost the same place the girl had been that day.

Tory.

Why had Roger Bell known her name? Because she was Miranda O’Malley’s best friend? It made sense given how much time he’d spent at the Cook family home. Enough time to bond with Felicity and feel protective of Miranda. What didn’t make sense was why no one had ever interviewed Tory to corroborate the events that led to the murders. Surely, Miranda would have told her that it was Simon making her uncomfortable and not Bell. Then again, it would have been Lampson’s job to get her statement. Josie doubted the girl had been willing to make herself available after what happened.

“Quinn,” Turner called without looking up from his phone. “Revisiting this house of horrors is a waste of time.”

Roger Bell had visited this house multiple times after the death of his daughter, Jenna Hampton. They’d received the GPS report from his vehicle yesterday. It showed that he had driven here, to the old Cook house, over two dozen times in the last two months. He’d started coming here long before the murders. Sometimes his car was parked in front of the house for hours and other times for no longer than fifteen minutes.

Josie wondered if Sheila Hampton had been right about her husband having an affair. When Josie first examined the GPS records, she wondered if his mistress lived here, in one of these houses. Why else would he be here so often? But then she had seen all his visits to the Patio Motel. Just off the interstate, it was the very definition of seedy. The building was practically falling down. The room numbers on the exterior doors were written in Sharpie. An old in-ground pool sat out front, filled with garbage. The owner rented by the hour and only took cash. No credit cards, no records. He didn’t check IDs so his guest log was unreliable. The names she’d found in it that matched the times Bell had been there were listed as Daffy and Daisy Duck.

The owner claimed he had never seen Roger Bell there. When Josie showed him the GPS records, he said he didn’t remember. It was a dead end. As was Bell’s phone. They’d managed to get records of his text messages. There were several that referenced meeting at “PM”, a clear reference to the Patio Motel, but the phone number he was communicating with was a burner.

Turner pocketed his phone and sauntered up the path, stopping at the bottom of the steps. “Quinn, really. I know someone helped this guy. We all know it. But we can’t prove it. All the evidence that came back processed, all the records, only point to him. Clearly, he made sure we wouldn’t be able to identify his accomplice. We can’t find that person without some sort of lead, and we’re fresh out of those.”

He was right. They were at an impasse. Frustration knotted the muscles in her shoulder blades. Slowly, she scanned the houses all around them. There were only two people she knew personally in this area. Misty and Margaret Bonitz. Josie walked the length of the wraparound porch until she could see between two houses across the street.

Turner said, “Whaddya wanna do? Start knocking on doors? See if anyone remembers seeing him hanging around? Ask if they remember whether or not he was with someone else?”

Margaret Bonitz lived one block over. She was the longest-tenured resident in the neighborhood. Long before the Cook murders, Margaret and her husband had moved into their home. They’d raised their children and seen them off to their adult lives in other parts of the country. Then Mr. Bonitz passed away, leaving Margaret alone in their big old house. Every time Josie visited, it was like a time capsule, everything just as it was in the late nineties after she was widowed. In fact, she still kept his ’95 Lincoln Continental in the garage.

“Son of a bitch,” Josie said.

Turner squinted up at her. “What’s that?”

“Remember when you spoke with Margaret Bonitz a few weeks ago?”

“Oh, the lady whose dog you let piss on me? Yeah.”

“What was her complaint? Why did she call?”

Turner shook his head, looking at her like she was nuts. “I don’t know. Something about a neighbor putting their garbage into her bins on trash day. Who cares?”

Josie moved down the steps, stopping in front of him. “Did you look in her garbage bin?”

“You really are losing your mind.”

“Did you?”

He said nothing. The way he pursed his lips told her he was seconds away from being finished with this entire conversation.

“Turner!” Josie snapped.

“Of course I did!” He threw his hands in the air and let them fall to his sides. “I know you think every day is my first day on the job but it’s not. You think I’m careless and lazy and that I’m only here to do the least amount of work in order to get my paycheck, but?—”

“What was in it?”

“What?”

Josie put a hand on her hip. “What was in Mrs. Bonitz’s trash bin?”

“Trash, Quinn. Trash.”

The urge to throat punch him was very, very strong. He must have figured that out because he took a step back from her and said, “I don’t know. I just opened the bag and peeked inside. I didn’t go through it. There was just some old exterminator suit or something. Wait.”

Josie left him standing there, his mouth agape, and strode back to her SUV. By the time she started the ignition, Turner was folding himself into the passenger’s seat. “You think Bell came here to dispose of the hazmat suits he took from his wife’s work supplies and wore to murder people so he could put them into Mrs. Bonitz’s trash?”

“I don’t know,” Josie said, pulling away from the curb.

“There wasn’t any blood on the suit I saw,” Turner pointed out. “And she called us before the murders started.”

Josie swung the SUV around the corner and onto Margaret Bonitz’s street. “Before the murders in Denton started. Bud Ernst was strangled shortly before the first murder in our jurisdiction. He lived in the Poconos. Not far from here. It’s entirely possible that Bell was responsible. Maybe he wore the suit so he could avoid leaving DNA. Then he brought the suit back with him and threw it out in her garbage. No one would ever think of searching Margaret Bonitz’s garbage for evidence of a murder.”

They never had figured out what Bell did with the hazmat suits when he finished with them.

Turner eyed the house as they pulled up in front of it. “You think Margaret Bonitz is the grandmother?”

Josie threw the SUV in park and turned it off. “Let’s go find out.”