the front door. As she pushed her way through heavily armed FBI agents, she saw the paramedics maneuvering a gurney out of the house. On it, a shriveled husk of a man lay on his side. He wore a T-shirt and adult diaper. His arms and legs were permanently bent and curled into his body. His eyes bulged from his head, and his skin pulled tightly against the bones of his face. He didn’t even look like a living thing.
“Frances Thornberg,” she said when Drake met her in the doorway.
“We believe so, yes.”
“Where is my sister?”
Drake’s mask of professionalism slipped, and in that moment, Josie saw a number of emotions: rage, frustration, panic, and sorrow.
“Drake,” Josie said quietly. “Just tell me.”
Rip the Band-Aid off, she thought. We’re too late.
He looked behind him into a large foyer. “She’s not here.”
Josie looked around. “She’s not in the house, but she has to be here. We just need to look.”
“I already dispatched search teams onto the rest of the arboretum property and Hanna Cahill’s hundred acres behind us.”
Josie put a hand on her hip. “Where is he?”
“Detective Quinn—”
“Where is he?” she repeated, her voice rising to a shout.
He stepped aside and she moved past him, into the house. “He’s already been read his Miranda rights,” Drake called after her.
Drake’s agents held him in the kitchen, which didn’t look like it had been updated since the early eighties. The walls were dark wood paneling and the cabinets looked almost identical. The faux-brick tile floor was worn and chipped. Alex Thornberg sat in a chair with his hands cuffed in front of him. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists. When Josie entered the room, he sat up straight. She thought she saw a smile, or at least the beginnings of one. It took everything in her not to punch him right in the face.
Three agents surrounded him, but when they saw the look on her face, they backed away, giving her room. She pulled one of the other chairs over and pushed it as close to him as she could get it and still have room to sit down. A look of surprise lit his face as she took her seat, her knees between his, her face inches from his. He had no choice but to back up slightly, holding his bound hands up between them.
Josie used one hand to gently push them down into his lap. “Your father calls you Max,” she said. “Because he can’t say Alex, isn’t that right?”
Confusion creased his face. “Yes,” he murmured.
“You left your sister’s bones behind Trinity’s cabin.”
“No, I—I left a piece behind Trinity’s cabin. You needed to know it was me.”
“The ‘piece’ you left behind the cabin was made up of your sister’s bones.”
“That’s not possible.”
Josie stared at him. What was he trying to accomplish by denying that Nicci was his sister? This made no sense. She tried again, drawing out her words. “Nicolette Webb was your biological half-sister.”
His head reared back ever so slightly. He blinked. Then he leaned back in toward her and said, in a voice that was almost childlike, “We don’t say her name. Not ever.”
“What about the name Zandra? Can we say that name? Where is Zandra, Alex? Is she here?”
His chin dropped to his chest. “She went away a long time ago. I made her. She did bad things. Worse things than me.”
Behind him, Drake lingered in the doorway. Josie met his eyes and he shrugged and shook his head. His team had cleared the house. There was no one else there.
Josie looked back at Alex. “Does Zandra have Trinity?”
He didn’t answer. Josie kept her expression carefully blank even though she was baffled by his behavior. “Alex,” she said loudly, firmly.
He looked up just in time for her to see something in his dark eyes shift. It was barely perceptible but Josie saw it. The childlike moping was gone, replaced by the keen intelligence that had been there only seconds earlier. She asked, “Does Zandra have Trinity?”
He sighed. “I told you, Zandra is gone. She has nothing to do with this.”
“Then where is Trinity?”
“Do you think I’d tell you that easily?”
“I think this game is over, and I won. You can tell me where she is, and I can pull whatever strings are available to me to make the judicial process easier on you—maybe argue against the death penalty. Or you can not tell me and rot in hell, because whether I