Page 87 of Husband Missing

Nausea rocked her stomach as thoughts of Noah broke through. Images of her sweet, gorgeous husband flashed through her mind. This time it wasn’t his smile or what waited for her beneath his clothes. It was his lifeless body being dumped into a hole and covered over with dirt. Before she could wonder exactly how that would work with all the excavating and grading that needed to be done on building sites, Drake nudged her ribs with his elbow, bringing her back to the present again. “Keep going.”

Josie took a deep breath. “It would have had to happen after hours, so he just had to keep her hidden until then. Gina was inspecting the site. What if when she came back from lunch, she stumbled upon Erica and decided to get her out? Whatever Erica told her made her believe it was too dangerous for her to call the police or to parade Erica around the site. She decided to sneak her out.”

Drake nodded along. “She had to get Erica out to her car but to do that, it had to be parked where no one on the site would see them get inside it.”

“So she moved her car,” said Josie. “Then came back for Erica. They both ran toward the protestors after the attack, but Gina’s car was in the opposite direction which makes me think she snuck Erica out along the fence rather than walking her out the back entrance.”

“Was there a gap in the fencing when you showed up to the scene?”

Josie shook her head. Someone had covered it up, put everything back into place.

“But that guy caught up with them,” Drake said. “Where did he come from? He had to be either working at the site or visiting it for some reason—like independent contractors or truck drivers making deliveries.”

Drake was right. How had they missed it though? Josie and Turner had interviewed every employee present when Gina was killed. Just in case some of them had already gone home, they’d been given a list of every person who had set foot on the site that day.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, realization dawning.

Mace had given them the list. He’d sent Shirley home. Josie and Turner had taken a cursory look around the site while Mace compiled the list for them and instructed all employees to come to the trailer so they could be interviewed.

Drake arched a brow at her.

“It’s Mace,” she said. “I’m telling you, he’s involved in this somehow.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

“We’re working on something,” Gretchen said. “But I can’t talk right now.”

Josie’s fingers tightened around her cell phone. She heard the guilt in her friend’s voice but that didn’t make her feel better. Freshly showered and barefoot, she paced at the foot of the bed in Gretchen’s guest bedroom. It was one thirty in the morning and Trinity and Trout were sound asleep, giving an encore of their snoring opera. Josie had to speak louder to be heard over it. “Then don’t talk to me. Just listen. I think Mace Phelan is involved in his sister’s murder and whatever happened to Erica. I don’t know how or what his role is in all of this but he’s part of it which means, at the very least, he knows one of the guys who was there the night Noah was abducted.”

Before Gretchen could protest, Josie launched into her theory, which turned entirely on her other unproven theory that Gina had been trying to smuggle Erica out of the site without alerting Mace. It still sounded a little thin, even to her, but she was beyond caring. If she was a raving lunatic, it was because Noah’s absence had made her into one. On the way back from the park, Drake hadn’t discouraged her, but he had remindedher that there was no actual evidence to support anything they’d discussed.

By the time Josie walked into Gretchen’s house, doubt had crept in. She kept remembering Mace’s shocked expression when Turner told the Phelans how Gina had died. He had appeared genuinely surprised and distraught. That didn’t necessarily mean anything though. Over the years, she’d met plenty of murderers who were Oscar-worthy actors. Mace could have been faking his reaction, but Josie had a feeling he wasn’t.

Whatever he was part of, she didn’t think he ever meant for Gina to be harmed.

When Josie finished talking, there was silence on the other end. She thought she heard the voices of several of their colleagues in the background. She was dying to know where they were, what they were doing, but she dared not ask. Thirteen texts to Turner had gone unanswered.

“Josie, I’m just not sure?—”

“I know it’s a reach. I do.” She paused, leaning over to look at Trinity’s laptop, which she’d left open on her side of the bed. Before her shower, she’d done some research on Mace Phelan. “Did you know that Mace Phelan was sued civilly four times in the last ten years?”

There was a long pause before Gretchen said, “I’m listening.”

Over a dozen tabs were open in the browser, each one containing information Josie had turned up. She clicked through them as she talked. “Three of the lawsuits were brought by the parents of teenagers who attended parties at his residence in Lewisburg where their underage daughters were given alcohol and later had some sort of accident that resulted in injuries. Two of those cases were dismissed. The third—a girl who was found dead on Phelan’s property from alcohol poisoning—settled. The last suit was brought by a twenty-five-year-old man who got intoa fight at a party at Phelan’s Harrisburg residence and sustained injuries. That one was also dismissed.”

Mace’s big sister had cleaned up a lot of messes.

There hadn’t been any criminal charges filed. Other than a couple of DUIs, his record was clean. At fifty-seven, he’d been divorced three times. He had a twenty-eight-year-old son named Ellis. However, Mace’s son had changed his last name from Phelan to his mother’s maiden name as soon as he turned eighteen. He now lived in Seattle and from what Josie gathered, he was estranged from the entire Phelan family. She couldn’t help but wonder what had caused the rift, but it wasn’t relevant so she didn’t mention it.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Gretchen said. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire but right now there is absolutely nothing linking this guy to any of these cases.”

Josie heard what she didn’t say, too. Investigators couldn’t go after Mace Phelan without those links, without a reason. They were bound to follow the evidence available to them. She knew it. Drake had reminded her of it. In her professional experience, following tangible leads while also listening to your instincts was walking a legal tightrope. Sometimes your instincts were left screaming and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it. They didn’t even have proof that Erica Slater had been inside the construction site, let alone that she’d been involved with Mace. If Josie was the lead on the Gina Phelan case, she’d track Gina’s murder suspect first and worry about linking Mace later.

But she wasn’t worried about the Gina Phelan case right now. She wanted her husband back. It stood to reason if Mace Phelan was connected to the man who’d stabbed his sister and that man had been part of Noah’s abduction, then Mace might know something about what happened to Noah.

There was one other thought that kept rattling around in her head, sending shivers through her body. If Mace and the menhe was involved with had brought Erica to the build to make her disappear, they might have done the same to Noah already. Perhaps that was the reason they’d taken him from the house.

No. She wasn’t going there.

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