and fished her phone out of her pocket. Breathe, the voice said as she punched in her passcode. Just breathe.
Noah answered on the third ring. “Hey,” he said. “I’m glad you called. I can’t find Trout’s heartworm—”
“Something’s wrong,” Josie said, cutting him off. “I need you here. I need the team.”
Noah’s tone turned serious. “Josie, are you in trouble? What’s going on?”
“B-b-bones,” she stammered.
“What? Josie, what’s happening? Where’s Trinity? Is she there?”
Her voice was a whisper. “I think she’s dead.”
Five
Noah started with simple questions that Josie could answer easily with just one or two words. Was she inside the cabin? No. Was she at the front or the back? Back. Was anyone there with her? No. His voice was an anchor, steadying her, keeping her from being swept away on a choppy tide of panic. Bit by bit, he pulled the information from her. In the background, she was vaguely aware of the jingle of his keys, the slam of a door, his car roaring to life. He was on his way.
“You’re saying she left a note for the landlord three weeks ago. Her car is packed with the keys in the ignition and her phone in the console but she’s not there,” he recapped.
“Th-there are bones. Remains. I think it’s—I think it’s her. Oh God, Noah.”
His voice didn’t waver, “Josie, right now I need you to get in your car and go back down to the main road. We’ll meet you there.”
Josie shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. “I can’t.” Her legs felt paralyzed. She didn’t want to stand up because then she would see those empty eye sockets again. She already knew she wouldn’t be able to look away.
“Get in your car,” Noah repeated. “Meet us at the main road.”
She said nothing.
“Please, Josie, listen to me,” he went on. “You’re in the middle of a crime scene. You know that it needs to be preserved. That means you need to leave until we can get the Evidence Response Team out there.”
Crime scene. Evidence Response Team. These were words she recognized. Concepts that made sense even in her shock-addled brain. “Okay,” she said, hefting herself off the ground and averting her eyes from the display on the other side of the fire ring.
“Are you going back to the car?” Noah asked.
“Yes,” she mumbled. She was unsteady on her feet but slowly, she made her way back to the front of the cabin to her car. “I’m at the car,” she told him once she reached it.
“Good,” he said. “Get in. Drive to the end of the driveway. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
He hung up. Josie sat in the driver’s seat, the phone still pressed to her ear. Her breath came fast as her eyes tracked from the cabin to Trinity’s vehicle. Even as her body became overwhelmed by emotion—fear, panic, shock; making her skin crawl, her scalp tingle, and her heart thunder in her chest–—the police officer in her was going over the details she had managed to take in while she was at the back of the cabin. An image of the garish display flashed through her mind.
Her investigator’s brain worked to remember everything she knew about human decomposition. If Trinity had been taken on the day she’d intended to leave, and killed that same day, that meant that three weeks had passed. That wasn’t enough time for her body to decompose to the point of being skeletal, Josie told herself. Right? She tried to remember everything she’d learned from her time on the job about how long it took for a body to skeletonize, but the knowledge wouldn’t come into focus. She would need the county medical examiner, Dr. Anya Feist. She thought about calling Noah back, but that was stupid. Her team would know to alert Dr. Feist.
Shaking the morbid thoughts out of her head, Josie pocketed her phone and started her car. Her mind raced so fast, it was dizzying. There was a war within her—sister versus police officer. Emotional versus clinical. Never had she felt so torn in those two different directions.
She barely remembered driving back out to the main road but there she was, seated in her vehicle, white-knuckling the steering wheel when Noah and Detective Finn Mettner pulled up in Mettner’s car, with two patrol units in tow. Their lights flashed blue and red through the canopy of trees that shielded the gravel road from the sun. Detective Mettner had been with the Denton PD for