Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn #6)- Lisa Regan Page 0,113
viewing room. Chitwood, Noah, Gretchen, Mettner and Oaks stared at her. Chitwood said, “Well, that went well.”
“He wasn’t going to tell me,” Josie said. “He’s a sad, pathetic little man. This is what he’s got. This control. This game. He’ll never give that up. He’s got nothing to lose now.”
Gretchen said, “Do you think he killed her?”
“I don’t know.”
Noah said, “So we need to figure out the riddle. If we’re him, what do we do with Lucy Ross when the rest of the plan has gone to shit?”
Oaks said, “Well, he wouldn’t return her. I don’t think that was ever his intention.”
Josie said, “He wouldn’t return her because he would want Amy to wait and wonder, just like he did as a small child. He waited for her to come back. He wondered if and when she would return.”
“It was torture for him, I’m sure,” Gretchen put in.
“If he kills Lucy and we recover her body, that puts a stop to the uncertainty,” Noah said.
Chitwood said, “If he kills her and hides her body well enough, the uncertainty lasts forever.”
Josie could not disagree, but she also couldn’t give up on the possibility that Lucy was alive. If she was still alive, she was somewhere out there alone and terrified. Time was running out. Josie said, “Let’s assume for a minute that he means what he says, that he wouldn’t kill a child.”
“If she’s alive, he left her somewhere,” Gretchen said. “Where?”
“Somewhere she won’t be found,” Noah said.
“Which means she’s as good as dead,” Oaks said.
“She wouldn’t be found in the woods,” Gretchen said.
Noah let out a lengthy groan. “That’s everywhere. Literally every place outside of this city.”
“Why would he leave her in the woods?” Chitwood asked.
“Because of what he went through,” Josie said. “When he was a child, Amy left him alone in the figurative wilderness. She left him with an abusive father. He had to fend for himself.”
“But he made it out,” Noah said. “So if the game is to recreate that scenario—a child left alone to fend for herself in a harsh environment—there has to be a chance that she could get out, that she could survive.”
Gretchen said, “People can survive in the woods, even a child.”
“Not a seven-year-old,” Josie said.
“He’s got no concept of age,” Oaks remarked. “He didn’t have a normal childhood. He had to learn a lot more survival skills at seven than Lucy Ross. He’s not thinking of what it’s like for her being seven years old. He’s thinking of how it was for him.”
“So we’re back to the woods,” Chitwood said.
“Let’s get a map,” said Josie.
A few minutes later they were all gathered around Noah who had pulled up a satellite view map of the county on Google Earth.
“My God,” Oaks said. “This really is like looking for a needle in a haystack. How do you find a seven-year-old girl in miles and miles of forest?”
Josie stared at the map. “He would have thought this out. He wouldn’t have just left her anywhere. He would have wanted to put her where she wouldn’t wander into a residential area on her first foray. Here,” she pointed to southern Denton where Alcott County ended, and Lenore County started. “State gameland, maybe? It’s remote.”
“Too many people,” Noah said. “It’s for public use. You’ve got hikers, fishers, hunters. The chances of someone running into her are a lot greater in state gameland.”
“You think so?” Mettner said. “I mean, some of those areas aren’t used for months by anyone. There are plenty of wild animals out there—if I’m this sick bastard and I’m playing his demented game of trying to see if a seven-year-old girl can get out of the woods alive or not, I might choose the state gameland.”
“Well,” Oaks said. “It has to be close by. From the time of the drop to the time Quinn caught him in the Ross house, it was only about twenty-four hours. He would have had to go to wherever they stashed her, gotten her, driven her to wherever he was going to leave her and driven back to the Ross household.”
Josie said, “Twenty-four hours could put her anywhere in the state. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time to us, but you could easily drive six hours from here, spend a couple of hours and drive back.”
“Jesus,” Chitwood said. “We’ll never find her. Someone should go back in there and try to get him to tell us.”