Page 25 of Close Her Eyes

He didn’t hesitate, answering her kiss with his own, lips hungry and insistent. As his hands found all the right places on her body, he said, “Then we won’t.”

FIFTEEN

Josie woke alone mid-morning on Sunday, annoyed when she saw how late she had slept. She wasn’t due into work until the afternoon, but while her sister and Drake were visiting, she wanted to be present as much as possible. After a quick shower, she found Trinity peering out the kitchen window while Trout snoozed on the runner near the sink.

“What’s going on?” Josie asked, joining her sister at the window.

“Grill lessons, take two,” Trinity said as Noah and Drake emerged from the side of the house, wheeling a brand-new grill into the backyard.

“This is why he let me sleep,” Josie mumbled. “I would never have agreed to this.”

The two men paused near the back door, having some sort of discussion. After a minute, they each grabbed a side of the grill and hefted it off the concrete walkway and onto the grass. Once it was twenty feet from the house, they set it down. Noah knelt down and opened the tiny cabinet beneath it, studying its insides.

Trinity said, “Twenty bucks they destroy that thing in the next hour.”

Josie groaned. “That is not a bet I want to take. I don’t even want to know how much my husband paid for that. In February, no less. Who grills in the winter?”

“You’d be surprised. Early in my career I did a piece on Tips for Winter Grilling. Besides, maybe he’s learning now so he can grill a lot in the summer.”

Josie looked at her sister with a raised brow. “He will not use that thing all summer long. That’s a bet I’ll take.”

Trinity smiled, catlike. “You’re on.”

Josie walked over to the coffeemaker, stepping over Trout. She fished two mugs from the overhead cabinet and poured them each a coffee. “I need to know about this case you’re looking into. The one in Everett County.”

Trinity assembled the creamer, sugar, and spoon at the kitchen table. “Really?” she said, eyes alight. “Why the sudden interest?”

Josie sat down and pushed a mug across the table toward Trinity. “The murder we caught yesterday has a connection to the town of Bly. That’s all I can say.”

Trinity dumped several ounces of half-and-half into her coffee. “It has to do with my case? The Jana Melburn case?”

“No. I don’t know. Gretchen, Mett, and I had to pay a visit to the police department there, and one of the officers thought I was you.”

“Dressed like that?” Trinity blurted out, pointing at Josie.

Looking down at her Denton PD polo shirt and black slacks, Josie said, “What’s wrong with this? These are work clothes.”

“Not important,” Trinity said, stirring sugar into her coffee. “What did the officer say?”

“He was kind of upset,” Josie said. “Said he’d told you everything you needed to know.”

Trinity scoffed. “That’s a crock. I made two right-to-know requests for the Jana Melburn case file and both times I was denied. Everything I need to know is in that file. Sure, I got some standard crap from an officer there, but it certainly wasn’t much. My source, Hallie Kent, knows much more than he told me. She knew someone in records at the police department and managed to get copies of a lot of stuff, at least until that person retired, but it’s not everything. Not enough. There could be things in there that could help me break this wide open, but I can’t access them because I’m stuck going through these officers.”

Josie leaned across the table and took the creamer, sugar, and spoon, preparing her own coffee exactly the same way as Trinity. “I’m not sure having someone in records making copies of police files and sneaking them to a civilian is legal.”

“If you’re a police officer worried about what’s admissible in court,” Trinity said. “That’s not my problem. I have a source and she is reliable.”

“Right,” said Josie. As a journalist, Trinity wasn’t held to the same standard of evidence as police. She wasn’t building a case that would go to trial. She wasn’t limited by police or evidentiary procedures. She would never be faced with an onslaught of motions to suppress evidence from defense attorneys. She wouldn’t have to exclude things from her story because someone somewhere along the line hadn’t followed procedure to the letter. It wasn’t even necessary for her to disclose her source on air, as long as they were reliable, and she could verify the facts or documents provided by them. “Was the officer you spoke with Sergeant Cyrus Grey?”

“I’ll tell you.” Trinity disappeared upstairs and returned moments later with both her laptop and the file folder that Josie had nearly knocked over the day before. She flipped the folder open and started paging through a stack of her own personal notes. Josie recognized her handwriting. “Yes, Sergeant Grey was one of the people I spoke with at the Bly Police Department. He was not very forthcoming. He said Jana Melburn’s death was an accident and I should ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ because it might be painful for her family to drag all this back up again after so many years.”

Josie took a sip of her coffee, the taste of it heaven. “Didn’t you say it was Jana’s family who contacted you? Her foster sister, right? Hallie Kent.”

“Yes. Jana Melburn didn’t know her biological family,” Trinity said. “She grew up in a foster home in Bly along with Hallie.”

From the back of the file, she pulled up a printout of a satellite view map from Google. Pushing her own coffee aside, she unfolded it and smoothed it out on the table. Several pages had been taped together to create the full picture of Bly. Josie recognized the large gray building in the center of town that housed the police department as well as the Hadlee farm several miles away.

Trinity pointed to a collection of houses a few miles from the police station. One of them had been circled with a red marker. “This is where Jana grew up. A local couple fostered several children, including Jana and Hallie. When Hallie was about sixteen, the husband died of pancreatic cancer. At that time, the couple only had Hallie, Jana, and one other foster child, a boy named Mathias Tobin. The wife kept the three of them since Hallie and Mathias were teenagers— sixteen and seventeen—and close to aging out. Jana was seven years old and quite attached to her older foster siblings, and the woman didn’t want to disrupt their lives unless it was absolutely necessary. She decided that she just wouldn’t take in any more children. Didn’t want to do it without her husband. About a year and a half after her husband died, she passed as well. Heart attack.”

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