Find Her Alive (Detective Josie Quinn #8) - Lisa Regan Page 0,52
had,” he said. “Cleared suspects, the investigation, all of it. That’s what I believe. There were things she talked about that she could only have known if she’d had access to the files.”
“That’s what you were fighting about,” Josie said.
“How do you know we were fighting?”
“Because when I called you, you thought I was her, and you said, ‘I haven’t changed my mind.’ You didn’t ask her how she was, you didn’t say it was good to hear from her. What was it that you didn’t change your mind about?”
“Helping her,” Drake said. “She wanted to solve the case.” His eyes flitted to the table, a half smile curling one side of his mouth. “This woman—she thought she could solve a cold serial case that an entire task force and the FBI hasn’t been able to solve.”
Josie fought her own smile. “Of course she did. That’s Trinity. But she’s not wrong. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes makes all the difference. There was a blogger in Minnesota who helped solve the abduction case of Jacob Wetterling twenty-seven years after his kidnapping. She had help from law enforcement, of course, but it was her work that led to the perpetrator.”
Mettner said, “Why would Trinity think she could make contact with him? What did she see that no one else did?”
That was classic Trinity, Josie knew. She’d never tell Drake without some assurance that she wouldn’t be shut out of the investigation.
“She had some kind of theory,” Drake explained. “But I don’t know what it was.”
“What did she ask you to do?” Gretchen asked.
“She wanted to draw him out into the open, and I could arrest him, she said.” He rolled his eyes. “It sounded like some kind of press stunt which could and would most likely go down in flames.”
Noah said, “You weren’t willing to take the chance.”
Drake turned to him. “That’s not how these things work. You guys know that. If she had a lead or a theory, she should have just told me and let me take it from there.”
Josie said, “That’s not how Trinity operates.”
“No shit.”
“How did she even become fixated on this case in the first place? Why this killer?” Gretchen asked.
Drake rubbed a hand over his face. “Right after we started seeing one another, she had some spat on the air with a correspondent. This was probably four months ago. The correspondent was doing an ongoing true crime segment. He chose a geographical area each week and prepared a segment on killers in those areas who had never been caught. That particular week, he did a piece on serial killers in the Northeast which included the Bone Artist. His theory was that the Bone Artist and a couple of the others in the report were dead or in prison and that was the end of it. Trinity thought that that was just an easy way out and argued that just because a serial killer was inactive for a period of time didn’t mean that they were no longer a threat. She said maybe some of these guys were smart enough to know when they had to take a break in order not to get caught. Anyway, she was all fired up about it. I guess she got a talking-to by the brass although the viewers liked it. They saw it as her being a ‘hard-hitting’ journalist. But at the time, she was pretty bent out of shape. We talked about it over dinner, and she played the whole thing for me. I told her that actually, the going theory was that the Bone Artist was dead or in prison. She asked how the hell I’d know that, and I told her it was my file.”
Josie raised a brow. “Trinity might have liked you, but she wouldn’t get that obsessed with a cold serial case just because you had the file.”
“Well, she got obsessed with it. She was miffed that I didn’t side with her on the whole thing. I think she was trying to prove me wrong.”
“Initially,” Josie said. “But the deeper she got into the case details, the more she became convinced she could solve the case. Then when she got banished here to Denton after her on-air faux pas, she thought she might use the whole thing to get back in the limelight.”
Mettner said, “Do you know how she planned on making contact with him?”