Page 32 of Remember Her Name

Josie went back to studying the polaroid.

The Chief sat down in the folding chair next to her. “You should be home, sleeping. Like Turner.”

“Do you honestly think I’d be asleep right now?” she said, without taking her eyes off the picture.

The Chief reached over and tapped a long finger against her phone screen. “Because you know where this is.”

Josie laughed. “If I knew where this was, we would have been there hours ago.”

“If you didn’t know where it was, you wouldn’t be obsessing this hard,” he replied. “I’ve seen you work, Quinn. I know this look.”

She sighed and held her phone flat, looking at the polaroid from a different angle. “What look is that?”

“The one you get when the answer is floating around somewhere in the back of your mind, but you just can’t catch it.”

She met his flinty eyes and smiled. “I didn’t know I had a look that went with that.”

“Well, you do. So let’s get at it. What is this guy showing us?”

On the CCTV, Noah and Gretchen circled round and round with Remy Tate.

Josie pushed her phone across the table so that it was between them. “Asphalt, white line, building in the distance. Windows. This could be anywhere.”

“No. It can’t be anywhere. If we’re right about what’s going on here, this guy intends to abduct a woman, get her to this location, and stab her to death. He can’t do that just anywhere.”

Josie nodded. “Okay, yes. It has to be remote. He’s stayed away from cameras thus far, so he’d choose a place where it was not very likely that he’d be caught on surveillance driving there, being there, leaving there.”

“That eliminates central Denton or any of the business areas that are densely populated,” said the Chief. “Keep going.”

“All right. The outskirts of the city. Still a huge area to cover. But it would have to be a place where no people, or at least not many people, would be coming or going. Or at least a place that would be unoccupied long enough for him to commit murder. It might have cameras but maybe they don’t cover the entire area—like the parking lot.”

“Abandoned buildings, then,” said the Chief. “An office building, maybe?”

Josie tapped against the top right of the photo. “A building with lots of glass. Lots of windows.”

“An unfinished office building, perhaps.”

“Could be.”

In the interview room, Gretchen changed topics from the identity of Remy’s mistress to how the relationship began.

The Chief pointed to the spear of light that sliced through the center of the photo. Whatever might be between the asphalt and the building—shrubs, parking spaces, anything that might help narrow down the location, was obscured by the flash. “It gets sun though. Look at this glare. Or, I guess this could just be the camera flash reflecting off the windows. Abandoned or unfinished buildings with lots of windows, asphalt parking lot. Outskirts of town.”

That still didn’t narrow things down. Without driving through the mountains in every remote part of the city—which would take hours, if not days—trying to locate any and all abandoned office buildings with asphalt parking lots, or trying to pull permits for construction projects on the outskirts of the city, which would also be time-consuming, they were not going to find this place.

But the killer wanted them to find it. Josie was certain of that. This was a game. If they didn’t figure out where to go from this photo, they couldn’t play. Josie didn’t think he would give them a clue they couldn’t follow, no matter how obscure. She had to look at the scene differently. Why, for example, would he give them a photo with such glare on it? So much glare that the rest of the area could barely be viewed.

Unless it wasn’t a glare at all.

“It’s a light,” Josie blurted out.

“What?”

She picked up the phone and zoomed in on the portion of the photo where the asphalt ended and the streak of light began. “This is from a light that is recessed into the concrete.”

The Chief frowned. “Maybe.”

Something veiled in Josie’s memories screamed to be uncovered. Her heartbeat ticked up. “Not maybe. It’s a light.”

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