Her Final Confession

Chapter Fifty-Six

Little Harris Quinn was a year old, and now that he was mobile, Josie couldn’t take her eyes off him for a second. His little toddler walk was still unsteady. He used her furniture to pull himself to standing and then walk from one end of the living room to the other. He’d been there for an hour, and every toy that Misty had brought with him, together with every toy that Josie kept for when he came over, was littered around the floor.

“You’re just a little baby tornado,” she told him as she scooped him up and squeezed him.

He squealed with delight, clapping his chubby little hands together. “Jo!” he cried.

Every time he said it, her heart skipped a beat. His father, her late husband, Ray, had been the only person allowed to call her Jo. Harris had only started doing it a few weeks earlier, and Josie knew it was because he couldn’t get her entire name out. He called Ray’s mother “Gam” instead of grandma, and Misty “Ma,” which had been his first word. Josie couldn’t believe how quickly he was growing. He seemed to reach a new milestone every day, and every time he said a new word, there was a flurry of phone calls among the three of them, marveling over him.

Josie settled into her rocking chair with him in her lap. She handed him his sippy cup and found one of the board books he liked to read whenever he came over. As they rocked, she read it to him. He nestled closer to her, his blond hair tickling her chin. When she finished, he held up a finger and said, “More?” That was his signal for one more, meaning to read it again. She kissed his head and turned to the front of the book to start over. Her mouth read the words with all the appropriate inflection, on auto-pilot, as she had done hundreds of times before, but her mind was on Gretchen.

Strangely, after seeing the flyer for the true crime book about the missing girls case, something had started chafing at the corners of her mind. Something important about Gretchen and the Soul Mate Strangler case. She couldn’t pry it out of her subconscious; not yet, anyway. She rocked Harris until he snored softly against her, then carried him upstairs to her room, where she had set up a co-sleeper crib next to her bed. He didn’t wake when she laid him down.

Downstairs, she sat in the living room and listened to him breathing through the handheld monitor. If Ray could see her now. He would never believe it, but he would be happy. Not for the first time, Josie wished he could see his beautiful son. But if Ray was still alive, Josie would never have gotten to know Harris. Misty, Ray, and baby Harris would be one happy little family unit, and Josie would never have been involved in his life. She would never know what it felt like to love another soul so much that you would kill or die for him without any thought of self-preservation.

“Oh my God.” She spoke the words aloud, jumping up and running over to her laptop in the kitchen. Her fingers worked so quickly, she got the password wrong three times. Muttering expletives under her breath, she finally got in, pulling up her internet browser and logging back on to the forum. It only took her a few minutes to find the thread she was looking for. She needed her phone. Back to the living room.

“Where the hell is it?”

Her hands scrabbled across the couch cushions, searching for her phone. Harris loved phones and always wanted to play with hers. She finally found it on the floor amid a set of soft blocks strewn about, covered in his sticky finger marks with only a five percent charge left.

She ran into the kitchen where she kept one of her chargers and plugged it in. Then she dialed Dr. Perry Larson. He answered right away.

“Detective?” he said. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Larson,” Josie said. “I know it’s kind of late, but this is important. I need you to do something for me, and also, I have a few questions.”