The Girl With No Name

Chapter Fifty-Eight

While Gretchen finished up with the Nance crime scene and Noah tailed Rowland, Josie had no choice but to spend some time catching up on her chiefly duties. The rest of the day was spent signing off on overtime, reviewing the staffing schedule, responding to grievances both within her department and those made against her officers by citizens. It was mostly petty stuff that was easily resolved. She authorized some equipment requisitions and took a stab at some quarterly evaluations.

It was tough to stay seated at her desk when her mind was so consumed by anxiety. She kept checking her phone, but there was no news from either Trinity or Diana. In her mind, she replayed the scene with Rowland over and over again. He had been willing to bribe her to keep his connection to Aaron King private, but he wouldn’t give up Victor Derossi. Because admitting that he had kidnapped a baby—or had a hand in doing it—would put him in prison, most likely.

There had to be someone else involved. Someone caring for the baby. Assuming Victor Derossi was still somewhere in Denton. Josie texted her team at Rowland’s house, but they hadn’t seen any sign of a housekeeper or anyone else coming or going from his property.

The day wore on. She checked incessantly with Gretchen, Noah, and her other officers but no one had anything of use to report. She tried to keep working through the mound of paperwork on her desk but her mind kept drifting, picturing Luke’s lifeless body in various scenarios. How had Dunn’s men done it? she wondered. A bullet to the head? A slit throat? Had they tortured him first? What had they done with his body? Would they ever find it?

Alone in her office, consumed with thoughts of Luke being tortured and killed, she finally let out the tears that had been fighting to burst forth. The tension and fear from the last few days raged through her, and she let them come. When it had run its course, she dried her face, patted some foundation on her skin, and headed home. She needed a drink. A very big drink. Carrieann waited at home, an uneaten pizza in front of her on the living room table. She was slumped in front of the television in almost exactly the same posture Luke had been the day that this all started. She glanced at Josie but was nice enough not to mention Josie’s red-rimmed eyes.

“I guess if there was news, you would have called me,” she said flatly as Josie took a seat beside her.

“We might have a lead on the baby,” Josie said and told her about Rowland’s connection to Victor Derossi. “We brought him in,” Josie added. “He brought his lawyer. I got to talk to him privately, but it ended in a stalemate. Carrieann, you should know, we’ve now run out of leads on Luke’s case.”

Carrieann looked at her. “What about Rowland? He must have Victor. He has to—where else would that baby be? If he took Victor from Dunn, then he must have Luke.”

“But there’s no connection between Rowland and Luke, and no reason for Rowland to have taken Luke from Dunn. I think it’s important—” Josie broke off, her voice cracking. Collecting herself, she tried again. “I think it’s important that we be realistic.”

Carrieann looked away, wiping tears from her eyes. She sat up and leaned her elbows on her knees, rocking back and forth. After a few minutes, she said, “I was never one for realism.”

Josie laughed. “Really? I always had you pegged for a realist.”

“A pragmatist,” Carrieann clarified. “Not the same thing. I’m not giving up and neither should you. You said Dunn’s men were dead when you got to that church. Their bodies were there but Luke’s wasn’t.”

“We don’t even know that Luke was still there when those men were killed. Carrieann, we don’t know anything.”

“What about a connection between Rowland and Dunn? What if Rowland’s people caused the accident that killed Dunn and his crew?”

“I thought of that,” Josie admitted. “Except I don’t know why he would suddenly decide to eliminate him, and in a way that makes it obvious it really wasn’t an accident? Although Rowland—or his people—did know where to find little Victor, that much is clear. Which means they were probably keeping tabs on Dunn and his men for some time. Maybe even for as long as Rowland’s been trying to make the deal to get his surveillance systems into the casino Dunn wanted to build here.” She shook her head. “I still feel like I’m missing something,” Josie said. “Something important.”

“Well,” Carrieann said. “We’re going to figure out what it is—one way or another.”

Between the two of them they nearly finished the bottle of Wild Turkey that Gretchen had brought to the cemetery the night before. It didn’t help them figure anything out, but it made Josie feel slightly less anxious and turned Carrieann into a weeping mess. Not their finest hour, Josie mused as she stumbled up the steps to her bedroom, collapsing fully clothed and face first into her king-sized bed.

The sound of her cell phone ringing woke her at eight in the morning. She hadn’t moved all night and had slept way later than she had intended. She rolled about on the bed, patting herself down until she found the phone in her back pocket. It had only a fourteen percent charge on it. She answered with a groggy “Hello?”

“Boss?” Gretchen said.

Josie sat up. “Yeah.”

“Thought you’d want to know. Feist finished the autopsy on Nance. Same cause of death as Twitch. The pistol in his car was unregistered. The serial number was filed off. We found no prints on it.”

“Which means someone wiped it down.”

“Right.”

Josie sighed. “Call Noah. I’ll meet the two of you at the station in an hour, and we’ll figure out where to go from here.”

“You got it,” Gretchen said and hung up.

On autopilot, Josie brushed her teeth, showered, and put on work clothes. Her mind was consumed with Carrieann’s suggestion that Rowland had Luke as well as the baby. Was there any reason that Rowland would have taken Luke or was she just so desperate for any chance that Luke was alive that she was stretching the limits of plausibility? She tried to focus on Victor Derossi. She was certain Rowland had him.

In any other case, she would take Rowland’s life apart piece by piece. Land records, companies, associates, friends. She would find out everything she could possibly find out about him and everyone he knew. She would have her people follow him and anyone associated with him she felt was likely to lead to little Victor. She had already started that process, but she couldn’t shake the feeling she was running out of time. Rowland couldn’t keep a kidnapped infant forever. Especially now, with law enforcement breathing down his neck.

In the kitchen, she put fresh coffee on and leaned against the counter, waiting for it to brew. From upstairs, the sounds of Carrieann’s snoring drifted down the steps. Josie focused on it so she didn’t have to think about how every single thing in her kitchen made her think of Luke. A sudden banging on her front door startled her out of her reverie. As Josie made her way to the foyer, she heard a woman’s voice. “Quinn! Open up! I need to talk to you now.”

Josie flung the door open to find Trinity Payne standing on her doorstep. For the first time since Josie had known her, she wasn’t camera ready. She wore an oversized New York Yankees T-shirt, a pair of gray sweatpants and Uggs on her feet. No make-up. Her black hair was mussed, and in her arms she clutched a laptop and a stack of papers. She rushed past Josie and into the kitchen. “Oh good,” she said. “You made coffee.”

Josie stood in the kitchen doorway, arms akimbo, watching as Trinity started spreading pages across Josie’s table. “Have you been up all night?”

Trinity glanced up from the table and smiled. “Yeah, I have, and I could really use some coffee. Just give me a second. Trust me, this is going to be worth it.”

Josie got two mugs from the cabinet and poured them both coffee. “How do you take your—”

“Two sugars and lots of half-and-half,” Trinity interrupted. “You have half-and-half, right? Please tell me you have half-and-half.”

Josie opened the fridge. “That’s exactly how I take my coffee.”

Hurriedly, she prepared their coffees and went back to the table. She handed Trinity a mug, and she gulped the liquid down. The table was covered with what looked like online news articles, donor profiles and grainy photos that had been printed on computer paper using a black and white printer. “Was I right?” she asked Trinity. “About Eric Dunn?”

Trinity put her mug down, now half-empty, and nodded. “Yes, you were right. Eric Dunn was Peter Rowland’s son. I don’t know how you made that connection, but yes. Aaron King is also Rowland’s son. You were right about that as well.”

“Cleaned up for court, Aaron King looks just like him,” Josie said. “Eric Dunn’s resemblance isn’t as strong, but I googled and found some photos of him as a teenager where you can see some resemblance to Rowland. Still, it was a shot in the dark. If I hadn’t known that Dunn was a donor baby, it never would have occurred to me. Trinity, this is big.”

“Oh no. It’s not. Not compared to what else I found.”

Josie raised a brow. Trinity rarely got this excited. “Tell me.”

Trinity plucked a set of pages from the corner of the table. “This is Rowland’s donor profile, the one you sent me. I did some digging. Your friend, Sweeney, was incredibly helpful. Talk about a source; I wouldn’t have shit without her help. Anyway, as it turns out, Rowland’s donation was used nine times.”

Trinity gestured to the row of pages across the bottom of the table, all grainy photographs. “Nine kids ranging from fifteen to twenty-four. Eric Dunn was the oldest, followed closely by Aaron King. Some of them were born in the same year. Most of them were born in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. The rest were scattered up and down the East Coast and one in Ohio.”

Josie looked at the faces. Most appeared to be from Facebook profiles.

“That was the easy part,” Trinity continued. “Sweeney was able to provide me with the names of the couples. Tracking down the children took forever, but I did it, and here’s where it gets interesting. With the exception of Aaron King, who is on trial for murder, all of Rowland’s donor children have died in the last twelve months.”

“Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” Trinity replied. “Every one of them, and get this: every one of them died in some kind of ‘accident’.”

Josie had to sit down. Trinity reached for one of the news articles she had printed out and held it up for Josie to see. “This boy lived in Philadelphia. He was out for a jog along the Schuylkill River Trail. Two days later his body was found in the river. Accidental drowning.” Josie took the article from Philly.com and skimmed it. Trinity scooped up four more articles and held them out to her. “Two hit-and-run accidents. Ohio and Florida. They never found the drivers. This girl,” she said, picking up another page, “lived in Baltimore. Boating accident. Here’s another girl, camping in Bucks County, crushed by a falling tree in her tent. This kid fell off a balcony. This one died of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Oh my God,” Josie said.

“And you know yourself what happened to Eric Dunn.”

Josie paged through the articles in disbelief while Trinity stood by looking triumphant. “You’re not serious—Rowland’s killing off his donor children?” Josie said.

“Well, I have no proof of that precisely, but it’s too much of a coincidence that all but one of his offspring have been killed in the last year—and the one that survived is either going to prison for life or getting the death penalty.”

“And it wouldn’t be that difficult to arrange an accident in prison, I’m sure,” Josie said. She thought of little Victor Derossi and a chill ran through her. Rowland had been so certain that the baby wasn’t his. Not because of the age of his sperm sample, but because he already knew. With Rowland’s resources, he had probably had a DNA test run on the baby already. If he really was Ray’s child, would he be allowed to live? “Why?” Josie asked aloud. “Why is he killing them?”

Trinity shrugged. “Who knows? Because he’s uber-rich, and he doesn’t want any of this getting out? I mean, one of them is a serial killer.”

“According to these articles a couple of his victims had criminal records,” Josie said. “The kid in Philadelphia had felony charges pending.”

“Right,” Trinity said. “Not good PR for someone like Rowland. What I can’t figure out is how the hell he found them all. I was only able to do this because of your source—and don’t worry, I’m going to protect her. No one will ever know she helped me.”

Josie thought back to her conversation with Rowland. “He’s got hackers and unlimited funds,” she told Trinity. “He probably had someone hack into the sperm bank’s computer system.”

“I’m going to my producer with this.”

“Let me bring him in first,” Josie said.

“What? Like, arrest him? How are you going to do that? All you can prove is that these are his donor children, and they all died in accidents. You have no proof whatsoever that he killed any of these people—or had them killed by someone else.”

“Says the woman who plans to allege that very thing on television,” Josie said.

Trinity raised a brow. “I don’t have as high a standard as a court of law. All I have to do is release a story about these donor children being his and how they all died in the last year of mysterious accidents. The public draws its own conclusions. You, on the other hand, would need to provide definitive proof to a jury that he was behind all these accidents. You don’t have that.”

“Then I’ll get it,” Josie said.

“That could take months,” Trinity pointed out. “You’d have to get all of these police departments to reopen their investigations and try to first find evidence of foul play and then find a connection to Rowland. If you bring him in for questioning, you tip your hand.”

“If you run your story,” Josie said. “Then he knows what we’re after. I have to try to talk to him first.”

Trinity stared at her as if she’d just grown another head. “You really are out of your mind, aren’t you? No way that man is talking to you without a lawyer. Plus, we’re talking about multiple murders here. You think he’s just going to admit to them?”

“I think I rattled his cage when I told him I knew about Aaron King,” Josie replied. “I think he’s holding Victor Derossi. I have to do something.”

“Well,” Trinity said. “Do it fast.”