The Girl With No Name

Chapter Thirteen

The mystery woman had no identification on her, and Josie’s team found nothing in the house that connected to her. Josie waited impatiently while Gretchen took a crack at questioning her in the back of the cruiser. Josie and Noah stood on the porch, watching the two women speak. “I should have had you do it,” Josie mumbled. “She might have responded better to a man.”

“Boss,” Noah said. “If she’s lost her memory, she’s lost her memory. Could be concussion, trauma, amnesia even?”

“She doesn’t have amnesia,” Josie said. “She’s faking.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I just know.”

“You sure it’s not the fact that she’s wearing Luke’s T-shirt?”

He didn’t miss a thing, damn him. Josie shot him an icy look, but he was already walking away from her, pretending to confer with the officer standing guard at Luke’s front door. Then he disappeared into the house.

Josie put her hands on her hips and blew out a stream of air. She watched Gretchen get out of the back of the cruiser, scribble some notes in her notebook, and make her way toward Josie. “I got nothing, boss,” Gretchen said. “She’s sticking to her story.”

“You think it’s a story?” Josie asked.

“Don’t know. She knows the year, the month, the president. She can add and subtract. I gave her some random pop culture questions which she answered correctly, but she claims she doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from or where she is now. No signs of physical injury. I mean I know people can have that fugue state amnesia where a traumatic event causes them to lose their memory, but something’s just not right.”

“I agree,” Josie said.

Gretchen looked back to the cruiser where Jane Doe sat in the backseat staring straight ahead. “I’ll get her to the hospital. Have her checked out and then get her back to the station for an interview.”

They both looked over at her now as she lifted her cuffed hands and tucked her hair behind her ears, one after the other, before relaxing back into the seat. “She’s too calm,” Josie said.

Gretchen said, “Shock?”

“No,” Josie said. “I’ve seen people in shock. When I knocked her down, she was breathing heavily, but that was from the exertion of running away from me. Her heart wasn’t pounding; she wasn’t shaking, she didn’t cry. Even now, look at her. If I woke up in a crime scene with no memory of who I was or how I had come to be there, I’d be pretty fucking upset.”

“Problem is, how do we prove she’s faking?”

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “But the first step is getting a doctor to confirm there’s not a damn thing wrong with her.”

Noah came back out, holding up Luke’s phone. “This has been dusted. You want to have a look?”

Josie tried not to snatch it too enthusiastically from his hand. Quickly, under the watchful eyes of Noah and Gretchen, she scrolled through his calls and text messages. “Nothing,” she muttered.

There were calls and texts to her, to his sister and parents, to three coworkers whose names she recognized, including Brady Conway. They’d been texting back and forth the night Luke went over there to watch a game and found the carnage. She hadn’t realized that Luke had kept the message thread. She wondered how often he looked at it, trying to reconcile the normalcy of the texts with what he found when he arrived at Brady’s house. She handed the phone back to Noah, but he motioned for her to keep it. “We don’t need it. It’s got nothing useful on it. Hold on to it and you can give it back to him when we find him.”

Noah. Always the optimist.

Josie didn’t miss the look that passed between Noah and Gretchen. Then Noah cleared his throat. “Uh, boss…”

He trailed off. Josie looked from him to Gretchen and back. “What?” she snapped.

Gretchen said, “Usually, when we’re investigating a crime, we start with the people closest to the victim.”

“And that would be me,” Josie said, understanding their discomfort.

“We know Luke is your fiancé but if you, uh, know anything, it would be helpful,” Noah said.

Josie sighed. “I don’t know anything. I don’t know what he was into or what was going on with him that would have ended this way. I didn’t even know he was going to Foxy Tails to see Misty. He’s been cold and distant since the Conway shooting. I thought it was just because of the shooting. Whatever he was involved in, he didn’t tell me anything.”

“You walked through the house,” Gretchen said. “Was anything missing? Disturbed?”

In other words, was it a home invasion? A robbery? “No,” Josie said. “Not that I could see.”

The only thing unusual about the house was that someone had been sleeping in Luke’s bed. People didn’t drive miles out into the farmland to rob someone who had nothing of real value. Luke had some guns but the safe had been undisturbed, and he didn’t keep large sums of money lying around. His prized possession was a small fishing boat he kept in his barn, but that was hardly worth stealing. No, whoever had been there hadn’t been there to steal. They’d been there to do harm. The blood spatter made that quite obvious.

But who had come for him? Or had they come for the Jane Doe and Luke had gotten into a struggle defending her? Why? Who the hell was she?

“What about his sister?” Noah asked.

Josie blinked, trying to focus on Noah. “What?”

“His sister. Would she know what was going on? If he was caught up in something?”

“I doubt it,” Josie said. “She lives a few hours away and they don’t see each other much. I’ll give her a call. I have to call her anyway, to tell her…” she broke off, swallowing hard over the lump in her throat. “Did you call the medical examiner?”

“There’s no body,” Noah said. “She’s not coming out unless there’s a body.” He held up a hand as Josie opened her mouth to speak. “But I sent her some photos of the blood spatter. She said it’s unlikely that a person losing that amount of blood would survive without a transfusion.”

He stopped there, but Josie heard the words in her head anyway. I’m sorry, boss.