from Gretchen to Noah, thrust her chin forward and said, “I’m talking to him.”
She turned to walk away, but Noah caught her hand. Quietly, he said, “You don’t have to do the hard stuff all the time. The last twenty-four hours have been… difficult.”
In the last twenty-four hours, Josie had watched biblical flooding swallow up her city; she’d been shot at; she’d been swept away; and she’d failed to save Vera Urban, the only solid lead they had in the Beverly Urban case. The culmination of those things had hollowed her out and pushed her to the brink of a mental breakdown, but she said, “Noah, it’s fine. Besides, we have a history of sorts, Needle and I. He’ll be more likely to tell me what we want to know than Gretchen. Trust me.”
He let go. “Okay, but let me have him brought up to an interview room. You can butter him up with coffee and cigarettes.”
“Fine,” Josie said.
Twenty minutes later, Josie and Gretchen walked into one of the interview rooms on the second floor. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Larry Ezekiel Fox, the man Josie had come to think of as “Needle” sat in a chair next to the metal table centered in the room. In front of him was a half-empty paper cup of black coffee and an ashtray that already contained two cigarette butts. Josie hadn’t seen him in three years, but he looked like he had aged a full decade. He was in his mid-sixties, but a hard life of drug use, homelessness, and criminal enterprise had aged him well beyond that. His skin was tanned and wrinkled. He had unkempt, stringy gray hair and a long beard that yellowed at the edges. In Denton’s holding cells, he’d been allowed to wear his own clothes which included a drab, olive green jacket that he’d owned for as long as Josie had known him. It was threadbare and faded now, worn over a black T-shirt, dirty jeans that had seen better days, and a pair of boots that were blackened with age and grime. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed since the last time she saw him.
He looked up and smiled at her. “JoJo,” he said, using her childhood nickname. “I was wondering if you’d pay me a visit.”
“Zeke,” she greeted him, using the name he went by. Only Josie called him “Needle”—he didn’t even know about the private nickname she had given him as a small child, knowing him only as the man who brought needles to the woman who had posed as her mother. As a child, Josie hadn’t realized the needles were so that Lila could inject herself with drugs. She just knew this man came to their trailer often and as much as she didn’t like him or his wares, the truth was that he’d saved Josie from terrible things as a child. Not all the terrible things that had happened to her—he’d stood by while Lila locked her in a closet for days, starved her, and otherwise abused her, but he had saved her from the worst that Lila had tried to do to her.
Josie was never sure if she should feel grateful to him for having improved her life with Lila even incrementally, or if she should be furious with him because he never stepped in and tried to have her removed from Lila’s care. Then again, he had been Lila’s drug dealer. That he noticed Josie at all and tried to help her was probably more than was warranted.
“Sit,” Needle said, waving toward the other chairs in the room, as if he were hosting them in his living room and not in an interview room at the police headquarters.
Josie took the seat closest to him, trying not to grimace as her stitches pulled. Gretchen sat opposite, her notepad in hand, pen ready to go. “I’m not here for a social visit,” Josie told him.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke upward, away from her. “I know that, JoJo. But it’s good to get out of that cell. Never liked them cells much. Truth be told, I’d rather be out under the stars with nowhere to lay my head than in a cell.”
Josie took out her phone and brought up a photo of Vera from her days at the salon, before Beverly was born. She slid it across to Needle. “Do you remember that woman?”