by Mia Sheridan
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Josie closed the car door behind her, staring out of the front windshield as Zach got in. She felt electric, as though a hundred vibrating needles were piercing the underside of her skin. She tried desperately to clear her mind, to put the information they’d received in order. Make sense of it.
Zach took her hand in his, his soulful eyes gazing across at her. “You all right?”
“Yes,” she said and forced a calming breath through her. She could go over the emotional ramifications of what they’d discovered later. For now, she owed it to her friend to stay calm. To compartmentalize as best she could. A tidal wave was coming. She felt it. A surge that very well might drown her.
Zach’s phone rang and he picked it up. “Great. Thanks. We’ll be there in ten.” He started the car, glanced over at Josie. “Ms. Merrick is willing to answer questions. She’s waiting at District Two.”
Zach drove to the district quickly, weaving in and out of traffic. Josie embraced the edge of nervousness that skated up her spine with each maneuver. It was distracting her, giving her time to get her emotions under control. She refused to ask what-if questions at that moment. Cooper had lied—by omission at the very least—about knowing Vaughn Merrick. Beyond that, she wouldn’t consider the reasons for his lies or what the larger picture might reveal. She would not picture him as the man who attacked and raped her. I can’t . . . I can’t.
They hurried into the station, stopping inside the front door, and Zach moved Josie aside, turning to face her. “Listen, you can’t sit in on this interview.”
“Why, Zach, I—”
“Because you had an affair with the woman’s husband, Josie.”
She felt as if he’d emotionally slapped her. God, she was so damn delicate at the moment. He’d obviously read the look on her face, because his eyes gentled and he lowered his voice. “I didn’t say that as a form of judgment. It’s just a fact, and Ms. Merrick may hold a grudge. I need her to be as forthcoming as possible.” He looked behind him, seeming to consider something. “You can sit behind the glass though? There are one-way mirrors in the interview rooms. You let me know afterward if she says anything that rings false from what you know of her husband, okay?”
Josie nodded. “Okay.”
Zach paused, looking deeply into her eyes, glancing around before taking her hand in his. “We’ve got this.”
We. She nodded. “Yes.”
Josie took a seat behind the one-way glass and watched as Ms. Merrick was escorted in, Zach sitting across from her. The door to the small room Josie was in opened and Jimmy came in, nodding solemnly and sitting beside her. Josie gave Jimmy a small smile and looked back to the interview room. She took Ms. Merrick in, memory sliding over her. That moment in the museum crystalizing before her eyes. That had been the moment, right there, that she’d begun to change, to really see, even if she’d still been seeped in the familiarity of bad choices and emotional mayhem of her own causing.
“Thank you for talking to me, Ms. Merrick. Something was mentioned to us in the course of an interview and we need to ask you about it.”
Ms. Merrick nodded, lacing her hands on the table in front of her.
“You and your ex-husband planned to adopt a child at one point?”
Ms. Merrick stilled, confusion flashing across her face. “What? Oh . . . yes. But many, many years ago. It . . . didn’t work out.”
“What was his name?”
She blinked. “Ah, Charlie. Charles Hartsman.” Zach glanced at the glass, giving a subtle nod. Jimmy got up and quietly left the room. Josie’s heart clenched and her hands fisted in her lap. Charles Hartsman.
“And his middle name?”
“His middle name? I don’t remember. Detective, what’s this about?”
“I need you to tell me about Charlie, Ms. Merrick.”
She looked as if she might be about to argue, but then sat back, her shoulders lowering. “I haven’t thought about Charlie in a long time.” She looked to the side, remembering. “Our marriage was on the rocks.” She made eye contact with Zach. “It frequently was. My husband as it’s been pointed out, had a hard time keeping it in his pants.” She looked briefly bitter but then sighed, defeat replacing the resentment. “I suppose I was looking for something to fill the void, something that might compel Vaughn to be a better husband, a better father. He’d always wanted a son but I couldn’t have more children. My neighbor and friend had fostered and then adopted and their family seemed so happy, so . . . content. Everyone praised them for their generosity, their goodness for taking children who otherwise had no one.” She paused for a moment. “There’s a website where you can look at the children in need of homes, did you know that, Detective? It’s like the pictures of animals the Humane Society posts. Names, ages . . .”
Zach sat back in his chair, his posture rigid. Josie’s heart thumped heavily. Her throat felt full.
Ms. Merrick sighed. “Anyway, we saw his picture. Such a beautiful boy. He was older than we’d planned on, but we thought, why not? Most people don’t adopt older kids.”
Had they chosen an older child to one-up the neighbor? Josie wondered, but then cast the thought aside. She wasn’t going to judge this woman. Not when she herself lived in a large, glass house rife with cracks.
“Charlie came to live with us. He was such a sweet kid, very eager to please, or so we thought.” Her brow furrowed. “But then . . . he started acting out. In small ways at first, but manipulative too. He’d lie, say he hadn’t done the things we knew he did. We figured he’d had a rough start. It was expected that he’d need us to help him through the adjustment.” She sighed again, fidgeting. “We put him in therapy, enrolled him in acting classes.” She looked up at Zach and her eyes lit up. “He was such a great little actor. We thought with his looks and his talent, he could actually be great someday. Plus, it would help him act out his feelings, you know? He did these great impersonations. His imitations were uncanny and even after only studying someone for a short time. He had my husband down pat.” She released a little laugh. “He’d come up behind me and say something, and I would have sworn it was Vaughn. He’d even put on his cologne so he smelled like him. It was like he understood that you experienced people as a whole, and if every aspect wasn’t just right, the deception wouldn’t work.” She shook her head, a small turning up of her lips. “So talented, even at eleven years old.” Josie’s heart had dropped to her feet and her hand came to her mouth to hold in the sob that was moving up her throat, threatening to break free.
Ms. Merrick looked right at Zach, her smile wistful. “We called him our little copycat.”
Zach had sat stock-still as Ms. Merrick spoke and now he glanced at the window, his eyes spearing Josie though she knew he could not see her. The small nod helped her breath come easier though, and she expelled the pent-up air, willing herself to relax.
“Why did you send him back?” Zach asked.
Ms. Merrick stared at him for a moment, her gaze going stony. “I found out about another affair.” She looked away, out the window on the opposite wall. “We tried counseling. But despite our best efforts, Charlie’s behavior got worse. Then one day he almost drowned our older daughter in the pool. That was the final straw. I couldn’t deal with everything crumbling down around me and fearing for my daughters’ safety at the same time. We had to end the fostering.”
“Did Charlie know your husband had had an affair, Ms. Merrick? Did he know that was at the heart of the reason he was being sent away?”
That seemed to make her pause. “I . . . maybe. He might have heard me on the phone.” She shook her head. “I was very distraught. I needed to vent.” Ms. Merrick seemed worn down, tired, and utterly defeated.
“About the woman your husband slept with?”
As she stared at Zach, something fiery came into her eyes. Ms. Merrick leaned forward, placing her fists on the table and banging lightly. “The women, Detective. Plural. Every last one of them that willingly spit
on my marriage. Vaughn carries the bulk of the blame, don’t think I don’t realize that. But they’re not innocent. In the end, they’re all to blame for the ruin of our family.” She sat back. “They’re all to blame for us not being able to give Charlie a home.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Zach locked the door behind him and turned to Josie. She was already standing, and the look of utter devastation on her face obliterated him.
He closed the distance between them in two heartbeats and took her in his arms. She was shaking and she clutched at him tightly, allowing him to comfort her. When he stood back, he saw that she had tears in her eyes, but also that same fire he’d seen in her so long ago. He smoothed back her hair. I love you, he thought. Maybe I have since the moment I saw you, beaten and bent, but unbroken. Just like now.
“It was him,” she said, her voice clogged. “Cooper.” She shook her head, gasping out a small breath. “He impersonated Marshall, didn’t he?”
“I believe so,” he said quietly. “That’s what it looks like.”
Her gaze grew distant. “Once I was sure of who he was, I didn’t question the small inconsistencies.”
“It’s what the mind does, Josie. It fills in gaps. You cannot blame yourself for that.”
“He impersonated him, and then he killed him. Made it look like a suicide.”
He gripped her head, bringing her eyes to his. “We’ll find him, Josie. We will.”
She nodded her head, a jerky movement, and he caught a tear with his thumb, wiped it away. “Zach,” she whispered, her expression crumpling, “do you realize what this means? Cooper is the father of my baby. All this time . . . I’ve been looking in the wrong direction. All this time . . .”
Zach opened his mouth to speak when a knock came at the door. Josie stepped back, swiping the wetness from her cheeks as she nodded.
Zach brought his lips to her forehead quickly and then opened the door to Jimmy. “We got his address. He was living in an apartment in Price Hill under C. Cooper Hartsman. The place is cleared out. He’s gone.”
Zach swore harshly. “Did you search the whole building?”
“The whole thing. No trace of him, and no sign of anyone else.”
No sign of Reagan.
Zach rubbed at his temple. “So he had to use his legal name to work and rent an apartment, but otherwise, went by Cooper Hart.”
“From what we can tell so far.”
Of course, the guy was apparently a brilliant impersonator and a master manipulator. He could appear anywhere as anyone. And in the meantime, Reagan was probably chained up in some dark underground room.
“We have the name of his social worker. She’ll be able to tell us who took him in after the Merricks dumped him.” Dumped him. Accurate enough, though Zach refused to feel empathy for a murdering psychopath.
Josie stepped up to them. “Can I come with you?” she asked and when she obviously spotted the doubt in Zach’s face, she hurried on. “Please. I can’t be left out of this now.”
“Everyone’s on this, Cope,” Jimmy said softly. “We can’t spare anyone to provide her security.”
Josie looked grateful that Jimmy wasn’t going to lobby to cut her loose. And Zach could admit that she knew this case as well as they did at this point. To have to sit at home and wait for information from them would be like a kick to her gut.
“All right, fine,” Zach said, shooting her a concerned glance. “I’ll drive.”
It was nearly five p.m. when they walked into Janelle Gilbert’s office at the Department of Job and Family Services. The petite woman with short gray hair and large brown eyes stood as they entered. Jimmy had called her on the way and she’d waited for their arrival, though it had sounded like she was packing up to leave when they’d spoken.
Introductions were made and after they’d sat, Zach got straight to the point, telling Janelle that one of the foster kids for whom she’d been an advocate was a suspect in a murder investigation.
“Charlie Hartsman?” she repeated, her face going pale.
“He was placed with a family for a short period of time and then returned. Do you remember?”
She nodded, visibly shaken. “Yes, yes, of course I remember.”
“What happened to him afterward, Ms. Gilbert?”
“Janelle,” she murmured, casting her eyes to the side. “What happened to Charlie was terrible. I . . . I’ve never been able to forget it.”
“Tell us, please. A woman’s life could be at stake,” Jimmy said, his tone gentle.
Janelle looked at Jimmy, seeming to be comforted by his voice and his craggy face the way many victims and interviewees were.
She stood, moving to a file cabinet behind her desk. She opened the top drawer and after rifling through it for a moment, pulled out a manila folder. She returned to her chair, placed the file on the desk in front of her and opened it. Zach saw the picture of a little boy paperclipped to the inside cover. Janelle’s eyes lingered on it for a moment before she looked up. Zach saw guilt in her gaze. Did she feel responsible for not finding him a permanent home with the Merricks? “He’d been with a couple before he went to live with the Merricks,” she said. “It . . . didn’t work out with them either. Charlie kept running away. They said he was troubled, too hard to handle. I thought the Merricks would be a better fit. They seemed so stable—a professor and his pretty wife. I was hopeful it would work out. Charlie had been tossed around for most of his life at that point, born to two addicts who had no business having children and surrendered him to the system.”
She took a deep breath, her shoulders rising and falling. “When Charlie came back to us, I reached out to the couple who had had him previously and they agreed to foster him again. Charlie he . . .” Her voice trailed off, and for a moment Zach thought she might cry, but she seemed to gather herself, looking to Jimmy again. “He begged me not to send him back to them. Started telling me what I thought were lies about them locking him in the closet, starving him as punishment. I didn’t believe him. Charlie was wildly intelligent, but he was also manipulative, a chronic liar.” She paused. “Much to my everlasting regret, I sent him back to them anyway. They tortured him, there’s no other way to say it. They used a dog chain to tie him up in a room in the basement, starved him, and left him alone for days at a time with barely enough water to keep him alive.” She swallowed and Zach glanced at Josie, who was listening to Janelle with rapt attention, her hands fisted in her lap, lips trembling. “A neighbor finally called in, reported that he’d heard a kid yelling, that he’d seen the adults leave the house the day before and they still weren’t back. They’d gone on a trip to Indiana for the weekend and left him chained up there. When they found him, he was emaciated, he’d been bitten by rats . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Jimmy muttered.
Janelle looked at him again, nodded. “Yeah.” She paused, her fingers tapping unconsciously on the open folder in front of her. “They were arrested. It was on the news, though because he was a minor, Charlie’s name wasn’t mentioned.” Zach tried to remember hearing a story like that on the news . . . what would it have been? Eighteen or nineteen years before? He couldn’t. “The couple actually ended up being killed in a home invasion later. Tied up. They were found a week later. Police seemed to think it was drug related, from what I recall.” She closed the folder, pushed it across the desk. “Anyway, it’s all in here.” She tilted her head. “You said Charles Hartsman is a suspect in a murder investigation? Was it recent?”
“Yes and no, actually,” Zach said, not glancing at Josie. “He may have been involved in crimes dating back many years.”
“I . . . I see.” Her gaze moved to Josie, held, before she looked away.
“What happened to Charlie after he was saved from that house?” Josie asked, bringing Janelle’s gaze back to her. Zach’s heart swelled when he heard the clarity in her voice, the strength. This was shaking her to the core, but she was holding it together like the warrior she was.
&
nbsp; Janelle’s lips turned up in a small smile. “An older woman took him in. I visited him often there to make sure he was doing well. After all, I owed him, you know? Part of the blame for what happened to him was mine.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Zach’s apartment smelled of old food and musty air. He grimaced as he shut the door behind them and punched in the alarm code. He shot Josie an apologetic look. “Guess I forgot to take the trash out,” he said. “Go ahead and make yourself at home in the living room and I’ll be right in.”
She wandered in the direction he had pointed her, still feeling dazed. She’d barely spoken on the drive from Janelle Gilbert’s office to Zach’s apartment, and he’d—thankfully—left her to her thoughts, seeming to understand that there was a war being waged inside of her. A mighty attempt to catalogue everything she’d learned since that morning. Had it only been a day? Had she woken in a cabin in Tennessee, just beginning to get a fingerhold on the fact that Marshall Landish might not be the man who’d abducted her?
Josie sat on Zach’s couch, glancing around dazedly, hardly taking in the details. The furniture style and color scheme was modern and masculine. It was slightly messy, but also somehow un-lived in. Zach had said he was married to his job and his apartment spoke of that. He came here to eat and sleep and toss things out of his pockets. A feeling of deep affection pricked through the gloom of shock she was still wandering through. She was getting another piece of Zach Copeland, the man.
He came into the room holding two glasses filled with amber liquid and handed one to her, taking a seat on the couch. She couldn’t help the small smile that emerged on a huff of air. “You must think I’m falling apart.”
“I know you’re not falling apart.” His eyes ran over her face. “But today has been one blow after another. I thought we both could use something to take the edge off.”