Page 58 of Husband Missing

Lila had always used aliases. Josie hadn’t known her real name until she was finally arrested. She didn’t know all of the aliases Lila had ever used but the two she was aware of had the same initials, B.R.

Belinda Rose and Barbara Rhodes.

Maybe those initials were Lila’s calling card, her signature.

“Bea Rowe,” Eva answered.

“Can you spell her last name?” Trinity asked, phone in hand, browser open.

“R-o-w-e.”

Rowe. Roe.

Josie was probably the only person who knew Lila well enough to see the connections, to follow the crumbs she’d leftbehind. Her heartbeat sped up, then seemed to skip before racing again. Despite the fact that she’d only been subjected to Lila for the first fourteen years of her life, she might be the one person on the planet who understood Lila best. That was as much from her years living with Lila as it was from all the time spent honing her skills as a detective.

An image of Lila sitting on the other side of the thick prison glass flashed through Josie’s mind. Standing up, blowing her hot, moist breath against the glass so she could write Roe Hoyt’s inmate number in the condensation. Josie had wanted to know where she came from.

I’ll tell you what, JoJo. You’re a detective, right? I’ll give you a clue. You figure it out before I die, and I’ll give you those names.

What if it had never been about giving Josie the names of her accomplices? Josie hadn’t believed for a hot second that Lila would disclose them, which was part of the reason she hadn’t followed up. Only a fool would trust Lila Jensen to keep a promise. But what if Lila hadn’t been trying to one-up her in terms of whose childhood was worse?

Lila had known her end was near. Not only was she in prison but she had stage four ovarian cancer. What if there was something Lila had wanted Josie to piece together? She could have simply told her outright but that wasn’t Lila’s style. For decades, Josie had been the bane of her existence, the object of her fathomless hatred. There was no way she’d pass up an opportunity to screw with Josie, no matter what the stakes were. She enjoyed taunting her too much to make things easy. She wanted Josie to work for every piece of information.

What had Lila wanted her to figure out? Most importantly, would it somehow help her find Noah? She had to believe that it would. If his abduction was a result of someone searching for Lila’s trophy case of carnage, there had to be something in Lila’spast that would give them the lead they needed to find him. Even though the box was now missing crucial items, Josie had to believe she could still piece together Lila’s puzzle.

She needed this.

“What media outlet did Bea Rowe say she was with?” Trinity asked.

“Oh,” said Eva. “She said she was freelancing but she had a lot of connections and wouldn’t have any issues getting it published.”

Trinity closed the internet browser on her phone. She locked eyes with Josie for a brief moment and Josie could feel their wispy twin telepathy working. There was no reporter by that name. Until this morning, Eva hadn’t even known about Lila. Josie doubted she’d taken to the internet to find out more information before they arrived.

“Show her the photos,” said Josie.

During the night, Trinity had tracked down the only two photos of Lila Jensen that they’d been able to find. One, Dex had given Josie seven years ago. He’d kept it from when he lived with them. In it, Lila and thirteen-year-old Josie stood side by side outside their trailer. Lila was very young and still strikingly beautiful, slender but shapely, her long, silky black hair cascading over her shoulders. Her thin face showcased piercing blue eyes and high cheekbones. Men had always found it difficult to resist her. The second photo was her mug shot. In it, she was barely recognizable as the same person. Puffy cheeks swallowed her eyes. Weight gain had stretched her skin taut. Her black hair had turned white and brittle. The contrast was stark.

Trinity had created a digital photo that put them side by side, cropping Josie out of the older one. She turned her phone screen toward Eva. “Any chance Bea Rowe looked like this?”

Eva gasped, pointing an arthritic finger at younger Lila. “That’s her, isn’t it? Roe’s daughter. My God, they look…almostexactly the same. Not now, of course, but when I first met Roe. The hair is different but everything else…Wow.” She turned her attention to the mug shot. “This woman—she looks a bit like Bea Rowe except Bea was younger, not so sickly. Do you know her?”

A sad smile stretched across Trinity’s face. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Mrs. Owens. That’s also Roe’s daughter, just several years older.”

FORTY

The chill that had enveloped Josie in Eva Owens’s living room returned as she stared into the wary, penetrating blue eyes of Roe Hoyt. The cold prickled along every inch of her body. They were Lila’s eyes, alert, aware,intelligent. They lacked Lila’s signature malice, but they were still familiar enough to unleash a barrage of disturbing memories. Josie’s scar tingled again. Without her permission, her fingers reached up to rub at the thin, silvered line. Josie wondered what Lila had seen when she sat across from her mother, finally, posing as a reporter. Had Lila told her the truth? Prisons kept recordings of all inmate visits, but Josie wasn’t sure for how long.

From the corner of the room, a female corrections officer watched, unable to mask her obvious boredom. Josie had been shocked when she was ushered into a private meeting room usually reserved for when inmates met with their legal counsel. She had expected a non-contact visit with glass separating them.

“She won’t hurt you,” the guard had said as Roe shuffled over and sat down across the table from Josie.

It seemed like a bold assumption given all Josie had read about Roe and everything Eva had told them, but looking at her now, Josie believed the guard. Roe’s hands and feet wereshackled but her body was thin. So thin she looked like a gust of air would knock her down. Crepey skin stretched across her skeletal face and gathered in delicate folds at her neck. Like Lila, her hair had turned completely white, but it was still thick and straight, cascading down her back.

She seemed so inconsequential, so non-threatening. Then again, sometimes the worst murderers were nothing like one expected.

“Miss Hoyt,” Josie said. “Thank you for seeing me. My name is Detective Josie Quinn. I work for the Denton Police Department. About two hours from here.”

No response. The fingers of her right hand twitched.

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