Page 37 of Husband Missing

Another rogue wave of emotion washed over Josie, disconcerting her, batting at her mental shields. “I’m happy for you, Dex.”

“Thank you.”

Trinity must have sensed Josie’s internal struggle, the way she was barely hanging onto her composure, because she tookcharge, trying to move things along. “You said something happened a week ago that made you think of calling Josie?”

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. “This guy showed up out of the blue asking me about Lila.”

Josie’s spine straightened. “What was his name?”

“He only gave me a first name. Dylan.”

It could be a fake name. “How old was he?”

“Not sure. Mid- to late twenties.”

Trinity’s heel tapped along the floor. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to know if I knew Lila Jensen. I told him if he was here asking me then he knew the answer. I mentioned that she’d passed on years ago but he didn’t seem too concerned with that. He asked me when was the last time I saw her. At that point, I wanted to know who the hell he was ’cause he wasn’t a cop.”

“What did he say?” asked Josie.

“He gave me some story about Lila screwing his dad over when he was a kid. Said she scammed him out of a bunch of money and then took off. He also said she’d stolen his grandmother’s jewelry. I think that’s what he was after. He told me his dad died recently. When I asked him for a name, he refused to give me one. I asked why he came to me, and he said he thought maybe I might have kept something of Lila’s.”

The box. The kid, Dylan, was looking for the box. That had to be it. Which made it more likely that he had used a fake name.

Was it Dylan who broke into their home and threatened Noah? Was he the man her neighbor had seen walking up and down the street? Was he Mr. O Negative? Is that why he’d taken the jewelry from Lila’s box? Because it belonged to his grandmother? If that was the case, why take the photos? Maybe his father had been in one of the photos but if that was the case, why take them all and not just the one of his dad?

Her thought process snagged on something else. “How did he know about you?”

One of the newspaper clippings in Lila’s box of horrors was about the fire at their trailer that had left Dex disfigured but back then, Lila had been going by a completely different name: Belinda Rose. Then again, the kid could have found out her alias from theDatelineepisodes and investigated from there. Still, Dex’s connection to Lila had never been made public.

Dex picked up a small, unfinished wooden owl and ran his fingers over the unsculpted portion. “He claimed he heard her brag about me—what she’d done to me.”

“Psycho bitch,” Trinity muttered under her breath.

Something about that still didn’t sit right with Josie. Lila bragging wasn’t implausible but her giving this kid a full name to go by seemed out of character. It was an admission of guilt, her actually explicitly confessing to one of her crimes. Then again, if Dylan was only a child when she said it, he wouldn’t understand the legal ramifications. Josie could definitely see Lila telling the story to a young boy with the implication that she might do the same to his father. She always loved to threaten children. It was one of her favorite hobbies.

What made the most sense was that Dylan had seen the box at some point. Maybe Lila showed him the clippings, hinting that she’d been behind the fire.

“Did he say where he was from?” asked Trinity.

“Nah. Didn’t answer many of my questions. Something was off about him. My opinion? He was in trouble.”

Trinity watched, fascinated, as a small woodworking tool appeared in Dex’s hand, and he started whittling at the owl. “What kind of trouble?”

“The kind that makes you desperate,” Dex said.

“Someone was coming after him,” Josie suggested. “Maybe he was in debt. It makes sense if he was grasping at straws, trying to track down Lila’s personal effects to reclaim his grandmother’s jewelry.”

It also explained why he’d taken her jewelry. Bad people coming after the kid over his debt also lined up with the theory that more than one person had been inside Josie’s home and taken Noah. Whoever Dylan had pissed off or owed money to was likely following him. Her heart did a double-tap. “Dex, you need to be careful.”

“I always am,” he said without looking up from his owl.

Trinity said, “If he wanted something from the box, why didn’t he just ask you, Josie? He asked Dex. You probably would have shown him if he’d just been honest with you, right?”

It was a valid question. Had anyone shown up on Josie’s doorstep claiming to be a victim of Lila Jensen looking for personal items she’d stolen, Josie would have shared the contents of the box freely. Why would he approach Dex but not her? Why break in and harm her husband?

“I wouldn’t have turned him away,” Josie answered. “But if he was as squirrely as Dex says, I might have demanded a lot more information from him.”

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