Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,111
know where she is or not, I’ll be free and you’ll die in prison, and every single day of my life I will work to make sure that people like you don’t hurt people like my sister ever again. I’ll track down Zandra and find out just how much she knew about your crimes, and if I have to, I’ll send her to prison as well. So what’s it going to be, Max?”
“Detective Quinn, the game’s not over.”
Josie tapped on the cuffs circling his wrists. “I think it is, Alex.”
He smiled. “No, it’s not over. It’s your move.”
Sixty
“Detective Quinn,” Drake called. “Upstairs!”
Josie struggled to keep from jumping out of her chair and sprinting into the foyer. She slid her chair back slowly, placed it back under the kitchen table, and walked calmly out of the kitchen, head held high. She made herself walk slowly up the steps so Thornberg wouldn’t hear her footsteps pounding on the stairs. Drake stood outside the bathroom. “He was keeping Trinity here.”
Josie peeked around him and saw a large clawfoot tub with a blanket inside it. On the floor was a pair of Louis Vuitton heels. On top of the sink was an old typewriter. A stack of paper sat beside it. Josie snapped on some gloves and went over to peruse the pages. “This is his story,” she said. “He was making her write his story.”
Drake rubbed a hand over his face. “She could still be alive.”
“But where?”
“We’ll get dogs,” he said. “If she’s here, we’ll find her. Also, I’m going to have my people comb through every one of these sickos’ backgrounds—Hanna Cahill, Frances Thornberg, and Alex—to see if we can find this Zandra person. She could be an accomplice, for all we know. She could have taken Trinity. We can’t believe anything this psycho says.”
“Zandra could well be another victim,” Josie said. “You’ll also need to search both the arboretum and the Cahill property for the remains of the mirror victims.”
* * *
Alex Thornberg was transported to Denton where he was booked and put in their holding area, which was a little-used group of cells in the basement of police headquarters. It was mostly reserved for rowdy college students and drunks who needed to sleep it off. They’d only be able to keep Alex there for a day, two at most. Once he was charged, he would be transferred to the county’s central booking office which was roughly forty miles away. It was much more secure, manned twenty-four hours, and the sheriff supplied transportation of prisoners to and from court. There he would be arraigned and held until it was time for his trial.
After Drake dispatched a separate team to try to track down the mysterious Zandra, Josie, Noah, Gretchen, and Mettner joined the FBI, state police, and Easton police department in an exhaustive search of the arboretum and the property behind it. Josie’s team worked in twos. She and Noah searched for six hours while Mettner and Gretchen slept in the vehicle. Then they traded off. Noah fell asleep instantly, reclined in the passenger’s seat. Despite her overwhelming exhaustion and the headache that just wouldn’t quit, Josie forwent rest to read the pages that Trinity had typed while in captivity. The narrative was choppy, with many typos, and sometimes it didn’t make sense at all. Trinity must have been typing as Alex spoke, trying to get everything down. There were references to Zandra, but Alex didn’t identify exactly who she was—Trinity had typed his sister??? in parentheses the first few times Alex talked about her. There was no mention of Nicolette at all.
From what Josie could gather from Trinity’s stab at the Bone Artist’s biography, Hanna had been the more loving and stable of the two parents in this reclusive family, which wasn’t saying a lot considering she let Frances do anything he wanted—including making Alex sleep in the shed for several years from a very young age. By Alex’s account, Frances was cold, manipulative, and mean. If there was serious traumatic abuse beyond the burn on his face, Alex had not confessed it to Trinity. He had, however, noted that Zandra frequently harmed Hanna, and that it was a source of great contention in their family. Although after Frances’s “accident” the attacks seemed to stop. Zandra wasn’t mentioned much after that, and yet, Alex seemed to blame her for all his woes.
Who the hell was she? Josie wondered. Had he killed her?