Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,4
a job at any network. In just the last five years, you’ve covered some of the biggest cases in the country. You even broke some of them yourself.”
Trinity pointed a finger at Josie. “No, you broke them. Then I got the story. I don’t have my own story.”
Now it was Josie’s turn to raise a brow. “I seem to remember both of us being the actual story not so long ago. I did that damn episode of Dateline for you. I didn’t want to, but you insisted.”
When Josie and Trinity first met, roughly six years ago, Trinity had been a national correspondent for the network. After a source fed her bad information, the network banished her to Denton’s local news station, WYEP, where she worked as a roving reporter. After a year at WYEP, Trinity had been instrumental in helping Josie expose the depravities and the criminals behind the famous Denton missing girls case. That story had propelled Trinity to her current position.
Back then they hadn’t even known they were related. They’d simply been police officer and reporter—often at odds with one another. In fact, Josie couldn’t stand Trinity; she was ambitious to a fault and always underfoot, sniffing around for the scoop on a big story. Qualities Josie later came to appreciate. Two years after the missing girls’ case, human remains were found behind the trailer park where Josie had grown up. The labyrinthian case surrounding those remains ultimately led the women to find out that they were long-lost sisters. At three weeks old, Josie had been snatched from her family and raised just a few hours away from her twin by an evil and abusive woman. The woman who kidnapped Josie set the Payne family home on fire leading both authorities and the Paynes to believe that Josie had perished in the fire. The reunification of the Payne family after thirty years, together with the fact that Josie and Trinity had not only known one another before finding out they were related, but worked together on high-profile cases, was television gold. With such a scintillating past, and Trinity’s willingness to share it on air, she firmly cemented her place as co-anchor for as long as she chose to hold it.
Until now.
“Oh please,” Trinity said. “The news cycle is like twenty seconds now. No one cares about our long-lost twin story anymore.”
Josie bit back a remark about her using their traumatic history to advance her career. “Trinity, you’re good at what you do. Maybe you won’t stay with this network, but you’ll find a home elsewhere. Things will work out. I’m sure of it.”
“Yeah, they’ll work out for Mila Kates. I’ll be lucky to get my old job back at WYEP.”
“Am I?” When Josie didn’t answer, Trinity splayed her fingers across her own chest. “I need something big. Bigger than the missing girls’ case. Bigger than Mila Kates. Not some case you solved that I can piggyback on. I need to get the story myself, and it can’t be just any old story.”
“I thought there was some rule that journalists should never be the story, anyway,” Josie said.
Trinity rolled her eyes. “Oh sure. That’s what they teach you in school, but that’s not necessarily true anymore. Look at Mila Kates. Look at that guy who worked for our biggest competitor. He wrote a book on how his own bosses tried to kill one of his stories for a year and now he’s famous.”
Josie did remember that reporter. “But he was covering something very explosive. It was about sexual harassment in the entertainment industry, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“So, if he was covering a small-town bake-off, he wouldn’t be famous. He needed a good story.”
“So do I!” Trinity exclaimed. “I need something that all of the networks would kill for, figuratively, of course. Something no one has ever done. I have to do something. Something really…”
“Desperate?”
Trinity glared. “Ambitious. Explosive.”
Josie didn’t like the sound of it, or the look in Trinity’s eyes. It wasn’t ambition. It was despair.
“I think your career is going to be fine,” Josie told her. “Your body of work stands.”
Trinity pointed at her. “You’re wrong. You probably think I’m crazy, but I’m not, Josie. Everything I’ve worked for is in jeopardy.”
“You made one off-hand comment, Trin. Celebrities have come back from worse.”
A scratch sounded from the other side of the back door. Trinity reached over and let Trout in. He trotted past her and over to Josie, nudging at her hand for a pet. Josie