The Girl With No Name

Chapter Thirty-Five

As Josie and Noah walked back to her vehicle, Noah clenched and unclenched his fists. His face flamed red with anger. “That guy needs a serious ass-beating,” he grumbled as they got into Josie’s Escape. He kept talking about Dunn, about all the things he’d like to do to the guy while Josie tried to get her keys into the ignition. Her hands were shaking. “He has Luke,” she mumbled.

“I know you can’t beat misogyny out of someone,” Noah went on. “But I sure as shit would like to try.”

“He has Luke,” she said again.

Her keys fell to the floor. Awkwardly, she leaned around the steering wheel, stretching her arm to try to reach them.

“What did you say?” Noah asked.

Her fingers searched the rough fabric of her floor mat. “He has Luke,” she said for the third time. “Didn’t you hear him? He said it’s not wise to piss off the people who have what you want most.”

Noah said, “He didn’t even know who you were. You think he even knows that you and Luke were together?”

Josie’s hand closed around the keys. Finally, she found the ignition and fired up the engine. “Are together,” she corrected. Maybe their relationship wouldn’t survive this—especially if he had been sleeping with Kim Conway the last few months—but she would deal with that when she found Luke. Alive. Hopefully.

“I’m sorry, boss,” Noah said.

“He knows plenty,” Josie added. “But he’s too smart to let on to the police that he knows anything at all. Even if we had him on tape doing something illegal, he’d deny it. It’s easier for him to deny, deny, deny and then send in a team of lawyers if he gets charged with something. Eric Dunn is not the kind of man who has ever been held accountable for his actions.”

“What do we do?” Noah asked.

“We need to put someone on him,” Josie said. “Wherever he goes, they go. We can pull a couple of people from patrol to be on standby for backup. Maybe Gretchen. I can relieve her in a few hours.”

“Boss, I don’t think that’s a good id—”

“He has Luke, and we have nothing. We follow him, we find Luke.”

“Do you really think he is going to just lead us to Luke? Just like that? He’ll be too careful for that. He’s got people to do his dirty work. People he can later claim no longer work for him.”

“Then we follow his people too,” Josie said.

“We don’t have the manpower for that,” Noah pointed out. “We’ve still got a missing baby, a missing accident victim, and all the other usual shit that goes on in this city.”

“Then we’ll ask the state police for help. You know they’ll give it. Call them, see what they can do. We have to find him. Dunn will kill him.”

“We don’t even know how many people he has with him,” Noah pointed out.

“Gretchen might know. She interviewed the staff at the Eudora when she was checking out Kavolis. She’s on her way now.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then Noah asked, “Do you think he has Misty’s baby?”

Josie closed her eyes for a moment. The thought of a tiny infant at the mercy of someone like Dunn was enough to make the hair on her arms stand up. Her mind’s eye kept returning to the photo of Ray on the cryobank’s donor sheet. She opened her eyes again and regarded Noah. “I don’t know. I don’t know why he would want Misty’s baby. There’s no connection between Misty and Dunn.”

“Except for Conway and Twitch.”

Those were the pieces that didn’t fit. Josie was guessing that Dunn had sent Kavolis to get Kim from her brother’s house and things had gone horribly wrong. Luke had gotten caught up in it. But none of that explained why Kim or Twitch’s prints had been found at Misty’s house or why any of them—Kim, Twitch or Dunn—would want Misty’s baby.

“We need to find out who the other donor was,” Josie said. “The one whose sample was mixed up with Ray’s. When Gretchen gets here, we’ll see if she got anywhere with the sperm bank.”