Page 40 of Husband Missing

Turner must have figured out what she was thinking. He smiled, stoking her irritation. “Looks like you’ll have to rely on my exceptional detecting skills to solve Gina Phelan’s case ’cause the Chief is going to take you off it.”

Josie gave him her best death glare. It wasn’t official. Not yet.

“Did you call Tilly Phelan at least?”

Turner drained the rest of his energy drink. “Of course. Couldn’t tell her much though. We’re not releasing the stuff about the prints. Not yet. I don’t think she likes me.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Josie said.

Trinity’s nails clicked against the sides of her cup. She changed the subject. “So this Dylan and his friends are on some kind of crime spree? Also, did you say Gina Phelan? As in Phelan Construction?”

“Her name hasn’t been released, Trin.”

Her sister rolled her eyes. “No shit. I would have heard about it by now.”

Without hesitation, Turner launched into a description of what had happened outside of the children’s hospital site yesterday afternoon. Josie watched in wonder. He really did trust Trinity. As much as Josie did, evidently. It would be both their jobs if anyone found out they’d talked to her about an open investigation.

“This kid really is in trouble,” Trinity said. “He’s escalating. I read about the armed robberies. They started by targeting houses where no one was home. From what I gleaned, they stopped caring whether the residences were empty and just assaulted anyone who was inside. Now one of them—this Dylan—killed a woman for…what did you say? A necklace?”

“Seems that way,” Turner said.

“Then he broke into the home of a couple of police officers. He’s desperate, like Dex said.”

Josie wasn’t sure where the accomplices fit in. Were they just as desperate as Dylan? Had they all gotten into trouble together? Was someone after them? Had they all found themselves so deeply in debt to someone higher on the criminal food chain that they’d started breaking into homes to try and pay it off? Or was Dylan in debt to the rest of his crew? Whatever the reality, he’d been desperate enough to try to exploit his childhood connection to Lila.

“But his prints aren’t in AFIS,” Josie blurted out. Dylan had never been arrested or convicted of a crime, so his prints weren’t saved in that database, which meant they couldn’t locate him that way. He could leave his prints on every damn surface in Denton but without something more, they wouldn’t be able to find him.

“What about the tag number Dex gave the state police?” Trinity asked.

Turner said, “Stolen from some accountant in Bellewood. At gunpoint.”

Bellewood was the Alcott County seat, located about forty miles south of Denton. There was no way to know where Dylan had come from or where he lived at this point. Josie wondered if he’d stolen the car from Bellewood because he lived there or if he lived somewhere else and drove there to steal a car in order to throw police off. Criminals often started close to home because it was where they were most comfortable. The armed robberies had started in Bellewood.

Turner gripped the empty can in front of him. “There’s a statewide BOLO for the car. They tried tracking it through the infotainment system but evidently that was disabled. Loughlin’s doing the usual checks to see if it was flagged going throughany tolls or anywhere else between there and Fairfield where he might have been caught on camera.”

Josie wondered how he was getting this information, who in the state police CID trusted him enough or owed him something that they’d risk their job to pass things along. Then she decided she didn’t want to know. She shifted her body so she could really look at him. Fatigue was sapping her ability to control the words that came out of her mouth. “Why are you helping me?”

Turner smirked. “’Cause your sister asked me to and I actually likeher.”

Josie could count on one hand the number of times Turner had ever answered a question seriously. “It’s one thing to update me as your colleague, even if it’s frowned upon, but you’re sitting across from a journalist, giving out information that she asked you to find out and I’m guessing not all of your inquiries were through official channels.”

“So?”

“You could get in trouble.”

Turner laughed, long and loud, drawing the attention of the college students again. “Quinn, do I seem like the kind of guy who cares about trouble?”

“You don’t seem like you care about anything, actually.”

Something flared in his eyes. A momentary blip, gone in a heartbeat. Vulnerability. If Josie hadn’t been peering so intently at him, she would have missed it. It was the first chink in Turner’s armor she’d ever seen. She let it go.

He said, “Not that I don’t trust the powers that be to do their jobs. Loughlin is a fine investigator. If I was missing, I’d be damn happy to have her looking for me. But if whatever you two are cooking up is going to help get the LT back, I don’t really care if what I’m doing costs me my job.”

Josie’s mouth dropped open. It was the nicest thing he’d ever said. He probably realized it because he immediately winkedand added, “Because I feel so bad for you, it’s keeping me up at night…sweetheart.”

Josie rolled her eyes. “We’re even. Keep your hands out of my jar. Let’s get on with this.”

TWENTY-NINE

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