by Mia Sheridan
Josie shook her head. “He isn’t answering.”
“What’s the name of the firm where he works?”
Josie cast her mind back. “I don’t think he said. Just that it’s an architectural firm downtown.”
“All right. There can’t be too many of those. We can start calling in the car. In the meantime”—he held up a small piece of paper—“I got a call a few minutes ago from a woman who used to live next door to the Merricks. I met with her briefly last week.”
“What’d she say?”
“She just left a message for me to call her back. But I’d rather talk to her in person if you’re up for a car ride?”
Josie stood, already heading for the door, eager to follow any lead Zach had to find her friend.
Less than fifteen minutes later they were pulling into a beautiful neighborhood in Hyde Park. Zach pulled his car under the shade of a giant oak tree in front of a pretty, white brick home.
When they knocked on the turquoise door, a blonde woman in her fifties pulled it open, appearing expectant for a moment and then her face clearing with recognition as she looked at Zach. “Oh, goodness, Detective Copeland. I didn’t mean for you to drive over.”
“Mrs. Parsons.” He smiled. “It’s no trouble.”
She opened the door wider. “Please, call me Dawn and oh, I hope I’m not wasting your time.” They followed her inside to the living room at the front of the house, large bay windows making it bright and airy. Josie and Zach sat on the couch as Dawn took a seat on the chair across from them. Zach introduced Josie and simply said she was offering assistance to the CPD. Dawn gave her a distracted smile.
“I spoke with Alicia a few days ago. I’d called her after I heard the news about the missing students and that Vaughn was being questioned.” She shot a somewhat guilty glance at Zach as if she’d just admitted she’d been gossiping. “She finally called me back and we spoke briefly.” She dragged her teeth over her bottom lip. “I hadn’t realized Vaughn was a person of interest in the case until Alicia told me.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Zach answered. “Do you have information about Professor Merrick?”
She shook her head quickly. “No, it’s not related to him. Truthfully, I’m not sure it’s anything at all, Detective. But I’ve been stewing on it for the last few days, and I figured calling couldn’t hurt.”
“Of course. I appreciate it, whatever it is.”
She nodded, shooting him a relieved look. “Well, the other day there was a young man on the Merrick’s old porch. I saw him peering in the windows and then glancing back over his shoulder. Sort of suspicious. I figured he was looking for the Merricks, but he was acting odd, and so I watched him, and he went around the house and looked in a few side windows. I finally did go outside, and when I called out to him, he turned in the other direction and walked away. It was like he was purposely avoiding me.” She shrugged. “I didn’t call the police. He didn’t commit a crime, but it was just strange.”
“Can you describe this man?”
“Tall, dark hair, he kept his face turned from me mostly, but there was something familiar about him, I just couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe someone who had visited the Merricks before. I’m sure that was it, it’s just that he was acting cagey.”
Josie glanced around the pretty house as Zach asked a few more questions. She loved these older homes that had been updated, but still retained their vintage charm. She’d glanced at what she knew was the Merrick’s old family home as they’d approached Mrs. Parsons’s door and a small frisson of guilt had trembled in her stomach. That house was where Professor Merrick’s wife and daughters had sat eating dinner or watching TV as she’d had sex with their husband and father. Regret still shook her. But now she knew just how many women he’d slept with over the years. Had he once thought of his wife and girls as he’d recited Wordsworth to yet another gullible coed?
There was a photo gallery of the Parsons family hanging on the wall next to Josie and her eyes moved over it, taking in the happy smiles. Dawn Parsons and her husband had obviously adopted. They stood with two beautiful young black women in what looked like the most recent photo. There were other pictures of the family as a group and the two girls from babyhood to present. One photo in particular snagged her gaze and she frowned, standing so she could see it better. Josie tilted her head as she stared at the photo, her blood turning to ice in her veins. “Who is this?” she asked hoarsely.
Both Mrs. Parsons and Zach stopped speaking and walked to where she stood looking at a photo of five children sitting at a picnic table in a backyard, plates of food in front of them. Josie’s eyes moved slowly from Dawn’s two daughters, to the Merrick girls, and to the beautiful little boy—older than all four girls—sitting at the end, a large smile on his face, a slice of watermelon in his hands.
“Oh, that’s Charlie.”
“Charlie?” Josie asked. She felt slightly out of her body.
Dawn nodded, a frown appearing on her face. “Yes. Many years ago, Vaughn and Alicia fostered a little boy named Charlie.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Sorry. I . . . have to admit, I pushed the idea. My husband and I had a wonderful experience with the foster to adopt program. Our girls completed our family. I sang its praises. They took in a boy, oh he was about ten or eleven at the time I suppose. Their . . . well, he wasn’t a great fit for their family, and they weren’t able to keep him.”
Josie’s heart had started beating triple time.
“Do you know Charlie’s last name?” Zach asked.
Dawn wrinkled her forehead in thought. “No. You’d have to ask Alicia.”
“What about another picture?” Josie asked, her voice thin, reedy.
Dawn cast her eyes away in thought for a moment before she turned abruptly. “Hmm . . . let me see.” She went to a bookshelf and pulled a photo album down, leafing through it for a moment.
“Mom?” They turned as one of Dawn’s daughters stopped in the open doorway. “Did I hear you say Charlie’s name?”
“Yes, honey. Ah, this is my daughter, Nia,” she said, glancing at Zach and Josie. “Nia’s a junior studying graphic design at the Art Academy.” She turned back to Nia. “Why do you ask about Charlie?”
Nia looked from her mother to Zach and Josie. “I saw him a few years ago. I don’t think I ever mentioned it. You were out of town, and I just forgot.” She shrugged. “He recognized me and said hello. I don’t think I would have recognized him otherwise. I was so young when he lived next door.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he said he was doing great. He asked after the Merricks and I told him about the woman who’d been yelling on their lawn about Mr. Merrick and gotten arrested by the police.” She paused, looking down, seeming embarrassed. “I probably shouldn’t have. It was gossipy. But he just laughed, said, ‘same old Vaughn.’ I don’t know if it’s important or not, but I know you’re trying to solve those cases and I heard you mention his name, and that memory came to me.”
“Thank you, Nia,” Zach said. “We appreciate the information.”
“Could that be why the man on the Merrick’s porch looked familiar, Mrs. Parsons?” Zach asked.
She appeared to think about that but then shook her head. “I can’t say for sure. Possibly, but no way I could swear to it. I just didn’t get a good enough look at him.”
Nia left the room and Dawn turned around, continuing to leaf through the album. “I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t thought about Charlie in a long, long time,” she said, replacing that one and pulling another one down. “I suppose he must have felt like a throwaway boy.” She flipped another page, and another. “In some ways, I suppose he was right.” She stopped, turning to them. “Ah, here we go.”
Zach and Josie both met her in the middle of the room. They stared at another photo—this one closer up—of all five kids standing on the curb, backpacks slung over their shoulders, a first day of school sign held in the only boy’s hands.
He was young, just a kid. But Josi
e knew him immediately. It was Cooper.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As it turned out, there were thirty architectural firms in downtown Cincinnati. Zach called into the station and put out an APB on Cooper Hart. Jimmy was calling the firms Cooper might work at in an effort to locate him. Josie tried his cell phone number again and shook her head when Zach looked at her, indicating his voicemail had picked up once again. She looked shell-shocked, distant.
“He can’t have anything to do with this,” she whispered, shaking her head as if to deny it further to herself if not to him. She turned to face him as he drove toward Professor Merrick’s house. “He can’t have hurt me, Zach. I . . . I would have known him, wouldn’t I? I can’t understand this. No. There’s some other reason he lied. Something . . .” She sat up straighter as though something had just occurred to her. “Also, Cooper’s gay.”
That stopped Zach up. He hadn’t had that impression. The way he’d looked at Josie . . . Zach had the notion Cooper was a man who’d long carried a torch for her. Hell, Zach had been jealous. Christ. “Yeah?” he said.
“Zach, the man in the warehouse, raped me. Repeatedly.”
His shoulders tensed as he glanced at her. Her eyes were slightly wild. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to bring her along. Maybe he should drop her off at the station while he worked. But fuck it all, he wanted her directly in his line of sight. Especially now. “Josie,” Zach said evenly. “Rape is a crime of violence, not of sex.”
She stared at him for a moment. His every nerve was stretched taut at the picture their conversation evoked, the fact that he could do nothing to make what happened to her go away.
Josie let out a stilted breath. “Yes . . . I, I know.”
“What about his eyes? What color are Cooper’s eyes?”
“Brown. Dark brown.” She looked at him, something dawning in her gaze. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “It’s why there was that unusual ring of brown around the outside of Marshall’s—my captor’s—eyes.” She looked back to the road, her expression dull. “He was wearing contacts.”
Contacts. Okay, but how had the man who held Josie sounded just like Landish? Smelled like him? Moved like him? Zach’s mind was reaching in all directions, arranging and rearranging the puzzle pieces that were being thrown at him by the moment. Cooper . . . Charlie had known about the woman in Tennessee, Deanna Breene, because he’d run into Nia Parsons. Had he taken a day trip there? Would they find her bones sooner or later, wrists still shackled to a basement wall?
Vaughn Merrick was a prolific cheater. Cooper . . . Charlie, if it was him, couldn’t have known about every single woman the man had cheated with unless he’d tailed him twenty-four/seven. He must have considered what Nia told him opportune information.
But why? Why did he go after the girls that Merrick slept with? Why was that so important to him?
It suddenly occurred to Zach that Reagan had sat in front of Cooper in Josie’s living room and confessed her own affair with the man. Jesus. Had she delivered her own death sentence in that very moment as Cooper sat listening innocuously, a chocolate-chip cookie hiding his expression?
Something else dawned on him “The call, Josie. It came right after Cooper left your house, right?”
She nodded, swallowed. “The background noise.” Her eyes widened. “Was it . . . could it have been an . . . engine? His car?”
Possible, yes. Zach’s jaw tightened, his mind continuing to whirl. The profile. Cooper/Charlie matched Pickering’s profile. White, late twenties, smart . . . although they didn’t know any of his past to determine if he’d been abused. Still so many damn questions, and not enough answers.
They pulled up to the curb on Vaughn Merrick’s street and Zach spotted the officer sitting in his car across from the professor’s house. He turned to Josie. “Stay here. Your presence could keep the professor from talking to me, and I need him to talk.”
Josie looked like she was about to argue but then closed her mouth, nodding. Zach got out of the car and jogged over to the unmarked vehicle, asking the officer to keep an eye on Josie while he went to talk to the professor for a few minutes. The officer agreed, and Zach walked to the house and quickly up the steps to the front door, rapping loudly. When there was no answer, he rapped again, even more loudly. He knew the bastard was home. The officer surveilling his house would have known if he’d left. Zach saw the curtain shift slightly and moved to the window. “Professor, I need to talk to you,” he yelled through the glass.
“Set up an interview with my lawyer, Detective,” he yelled back. “I refuse to talk to you without counsel present.”
Motherfucker. “I just have a couple of quick questions about—”
“Talk to my lawyer,” he said again. “Or bring a warrant.” The curtain shifted again and Zach saw his form moving away, back into the recesses of his house. Zach splayed his hands and beat once on the wooden front door.
“Bastard!” he yelled.
When he got back in the car, his muscles were tense. Josie didn’t say anything, obviously surmising what had happened. He picked up his cell phone and dialed Alicia Merrick’s number next. She didn’t answer and when Zach called the police detail who was watching her, they told him she was in the grocery store. “Go in and get her for me, would you?”
The officer told Zach he’d have Ms. Merrick call him back as soon as possible and Zach thanked him, clicking over to the other line when he saw that Jimmy was calling. “Called every firm on the list and not one of them has a Cooper Hart or a Charlie Hart working there,” he said. “I also called the UC admissions office and there is no record of anyone by either name ever having attended their school.”
Zach hung up. “Fuck,” he murmured. He told Josie what Jimmy had said.
“He never went to UC?” she whispered. “Why . . . why would he say he did?”
“Josie, I don’t know, but something is very wrong here.”
Her eyes were haunted, distressed, and Zach was tempted to stop the car and comfort her, but they didn’t have time. They needed to figure out what the fuck was going on and hopefully save Reagan from the same fate as the other girls they’d found shackled and starved.
“You said Cooper worked at a coffee shop nine years ago?”
Josie seemed to come back to the present, nodded. “Yeah. Right near campus. Reagan and I used to go in there a lot.”
“Why don’t we go talk to them, see if anyone there still talks to him. It’s better than waiting.”
Josie nodded. They drove to the area near the campus that had restaurants, a few clothing shops and other businesses college students frequented. The coffee shop buzzed with activity on a weekday at three p.m., and when they entered, Zach moved to the front of the line as college students in need of caffeine shot him dirty looks. He showed his badge to the young barista and requested a manager. She nodded, eyes wide as she walked quickly to the back and then came out a moment later, telling Zach the manager would be right with them. They took a seat at the one empty high-top table near the back and a few minutes later, an older black woman emerged. Josie recognized her. “She used to work here when Cooper did,” she told Zach.
The woman approached them, holding out her hand to Zach first and then to Josie. “Detective? I’m Susannah Washington. What can I do for you?”
Susannah sat down at the third seat and Zach explained what they wanted. She looked pensive. “I do remember him. Real good-looking guy, right? All the girls giggled and flirted with him and he flirted right back, even though I think he dated the guy next door.” She paused for a minute. “I’d have to contact the owner to forward employee records from nine years ago. We don’t keep that kind of information in the store, and we got a new computer system five years ago. But I can do that right away.”
“That’d be great,” Zach said. “The sooner the better.” He paused again. “You did know him as Cooper though?”
She tilted her head. “Yeah. But I think that was his middle name. First name was j
ust an initial. C I think? Maybe R? I don’t remember exactly, and I just don’t remember his last name. Hart doesn’t sound right, but I can’t say why. But the guy he dated? Ron? He still works at the sandwich shop next door. He owns the place now. If I were you, I’d go talk to him.” Zach thanked her, handing over his card so the records could be emailed to him.
When Zach and Josie entered the sandwich shop next door, a bell tinkled over the door. The place wasn’t quite as crowded as the coffee shop, but it still hummed with activity, kids with laptops taking up the round tables, the looks on their faces focused, intense.
A good-looking brown-haired man was talking to an employee and when Zach and Josie approached, the kid walked away, and the man turned to them with a smile. Josie felt herself wheeling back in time, snatches of music filling her head as a guy had looked at her and Cooper across a crowded bar, his eyes filling with pleasure as Cooper approached. He gave Josie a slightly perplexed look as though he recognized her too but couldn’t place her.
“We’re looking for the owner? Ron?”
“That’s me. What can I do for you?”
Zach flashed his badge and introduced them. “I’m trying to find some information on a man I believe you dated about nine years ago? Cooper Hart?”
Ron’s face morphed into surprise. He signaled them to a table and they all sat down. “Yeah, I knew Cooper.”
“And you knew him as Cooper Hart?”
“Yes. What is this about if I may ask?”
“He might have some information about a crime we’re investigating.”
Ron’s brow furrowed.
“You did date him, right?”
“Nah, hardly. Truthfully? He was a tease.” He let out a small, uncomfortable laugh. “He’d flirt in public, but then when I tried to get him alone, he turned all cold.” He paused, glancing at Josie and then back at Zach. “You wanna know the truth? I suspected he didn’t like guys at all.” He shrugged. “Like it was all a great big act. Why he’d pretend though? It’s beyond me.”