by Regan, Lisa
The pickup truck sat next to it, partially covered with a blue tarp. The ambulance was parked just feet away from the front door. As she pushed her way through heavily armed FBI agents, she saw the paramedics maneuvering a gurney out of the house. On it, a shriveled husk of a man lay on his side. He wore a T-shirt and adult diaper. His arms and legs were permanently bent and curled into his body. His eyes bulged from his head, and his skin pulled tightly against the bones of his face. He didn’t even look like a living thing.
“Frances Thornberg,” she said when Drake met her in the doorway.
“We believe so, yes.”
“Where is my sister?”
Drake’s mask of professionalism slipped, and in that moment, Josie saw a number of emotions: rage, frustration, panic, and sorrow.
“Drake,” Josie said quietly. “Just tell me.”
Rip the Band-Aid off, she thought. We’re too late.
He looked behind him into a large foyer. “She’s not here.”
Josie looked around. “She’s not in the house, but she has to be here. We just need to look.”
“I already dispatched search teams onto the rest of the arboretum property and Hanna Cahill’s hundred acres behind us.”
Josie put a hand on her hip. “Where is he?”
“Detective Quinn—”
“Where is he?” she repeated, her voice rising to a shout.
He stepped aside and she moved past him, into the house. “He’s already been read his Miranda rights,” Drake called after her.
Drake’s agents held him in the kitchen, which didn’t look like it had been updated since the early eighties. The walls were dark wood paneling and the cabinets looked almost identical. The faux-brick tile floor was worn and chipped. Alex Thornberg sat in a chair with his hands cuffed in front of him. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists. When Josie entered the room, he sat up straight. She thought she saw a smile, or at least the beginnings of one. It took everything in her not to punch him right in the face.
Three agents surrounded him, but when they saw the look on her face, they backed away, giving her room. She pulled one of the other chairs over and pushed it as close to him as she could get it and still have room to sit down. A look of surprise lit his face as she took her seat, her knees between his, her face inches from his. He had no choice but to back up slightly, holding his bound hands up between them.
Josie used one hand to gently push them down into his lap. “Your father calls you Max,” she said. “Because he can’t say Alex, isn’t that right?”
Confusion creased his face. “Yes,” he murmured.
“You left your sister’s bones behind Trinity’s cabin.”
“No, I—I left a piece behind Trinity’s cabin. You needed to know it was me.”
“The ‘piece’ you left behind the cabin was made up of your sister’s bones.”
“That’s not possible.”
Josie stared at him. What was he trying to accomplish by denying that Nicci was his sister? This made no sense. She tried again, drawing out her words. “Nicolette Webb was your biological half-sister.”
His head reared back ever so slightly. He blinked. Then he leaned back in toward her and said, in a voice that was almost childlike, “We don’t say her name. Not ever.”
“What about the name Zandra? Can we say that name? Where is Zandra, Alex? Is she here?”
His chin dropped to his chest. “She went away a long time ago. I made her. She did bad things. Worse things than me.”
Behind him, Drake lingered in the doorway. Josie met his eyes and he shrugged and shook his head. His team had cleared the house. There was no one else there.
Josie looked back at Alex. “Does Zandra have Trinity?”
He didn’t answer. Josie kept her expression carefully blank even though she was baffled by his behavior. “Alex,” she said loudly, firmly.
He looked up just in time for her to see something in his dark eyes shift. It was barely perceptible but Josie saw it. The childlike moping was gone, replaced by the keen intelligence that had been there only seconds earlier. She asked, “Does Zandra have Trinity?”
He sighed. “I told you, Zandra is gone. She has nothing to do with this.”
“Then where is Trinity?”
“Do you think I’d tell you that easily?”
“I think this game is over, and I won. You can tell me where she is, and I can pull whatever strings are available to me to make the judicial process easier on you—maybe argue against the death penalty. Or you can not tell me and rot in hell, because whether I know where she is or not, I’ll be free and you’ll die in prison, and every single day of my life I will work to make sure that people like you don’t hurt people like my sister ever again. I’ll track down Zandra and find out just how much she knew about your crimes, and if I have to, I’ll send her to prison as well. So what’s it going to be, Max?”
“Detective Quinn, the game’s not over.”
Josie tapped on the cuffs circling his wrists. “I think it is, Alex.”
He smiled. “No, it’s not over. It’s your move.”
Sixty
“Detective Quinn,” Drake called. “Upstairs!”
Josie struggled to keep from jumping out of her chair and sprinting into the foyer. She slid her chair back slowly, placed it back under the kitchen table, and walked calmly out of the kitchen, head held high. She made herself walk slowly up the steps so Thornberg wouldn’t hear her footsteps pounding on the stairs. Drake stood outside the bathroom. “He was keeping Trinity here.”
Josie peeked around him and saw a large clawfoot tub with a blanket inside it. On the floor was a pair of Louis Vuitton heels. On top of the sink was an old typewriter. A stack of paper sat beside it. Josie snapped on some gloves and went over to peruse the pages. “This is his story,” she said. “He was making her write his story.”
Drake rubbed a hand over his face. “She could still be alive.”
“But where?”
“We’ll get dogs,” he said. “If she’s here, we’ll find her. Also, I’m going to have my people comb through every one of these sickos’ backgrounds—Hanna Cahill, Frances Thornberg, and Alex—to see if we can find this Zandra person. She could be an accomplice, for all we know. She could have taken Trinity. We can’t believe anything this psycho says.”
“Zandra could well be another victim,” Josie said. “You’ll also need to search both the arboretum and the Cahill property for the remains of the mirror victims.”
* * *
Alex Thornberg was transported to Denton where he was booked and put in their holding area, which was a little-used group of cells in the basement of police headquarters. It was mostly reserved for rowdy college students and drunks who needed to sleep it off. They’d only be able to keep Alex there for a day, two at most. Once he was charged, he would be transferred to the county’s central booking office which was roughly forty miles away. It was much more secure, manned twenty-four hours, and the sheriff supplied transportation of prisoners to and from court. There he would be arraigned and held until it was time for his trial.
After Drake dispatched a separate team to try to track down the mysterious Zandra, Josie, Noah, Gretchen, and Mettner joined the FBI, state police, and Easton police department in an exhaustive search of the arboretum and the property behind it. Josie’s team worked in twos. She and Noah searched for six hours while Mettner and Gretchen slept in the vehicle. Then they traded off. Noah fell asleep instantly, reclined in the passenger’s seat. Despite her overwhelming exhaustion and the headache that just wouldn’t quit, Josie forwent rest to read the pages that Trinity had typed while in captivity. The narrative was choppy, with many typos, and sometimes it didn’t make sense at all. Trinity must have been typing as Alex spoke, trying to get everything down. There were references to Zandra, but Alex didn’t identify exactly who she was—Trinity had typed his sister??? in parentheses the first few times Alex talked about her. The
re was no mention of Nicolette at all.
From what Josie could gather from Trinity’s stab at the Bone Artist’s biography, Hanna had been the more loving and stable of the two parents in this reclusive family, which wasn’t saying a lot considering she let Frances do anything he wanted—including making Alex sleep in the shed for several years from a very young age. By Alex’s account, Frances was cold, manipulative, and mean. If there was serious traumatic abuse beyond the burn on his face, Alex had not confessed it to Trinity. He had, however, noted that Zandra frequently harmed Hanna, and that it was a source of great contention in their family. Although after Frances’s “accident” the attacks seemed to stop. Zandra wasn’t mentioned much after that, and yet, Alex seemed to blame her for all his woes.
Who the hell was she? Josie wondered. Had he killed her?
She didn’t have time to puzzle over it since Mettner and Gretchen were back, and it was time for her and Noah to join the search once more. They spent another six hours on the two properties with dozens of other searchers.
But Trinity wasn’t there.
Nor were the remains of the mirror victims. Or any human remains, for that matter.
Even the trusty K-9 unit failed to find anything. The search and rescue dogs followed Trinity’s scent to the truck. The cadaver dogs gave several passive indicators on the Cahill property behind the arboretum, lying down when they detected the scent of human remains, however, after digging up several areas, no human bones were found.
“That doesn’t mean someone wasn’t here,” one of the handlers explained. “If someone decomposed in these places where the dogs are indicating, there could be cells or other decomp materials that have leeched into the soil. What’s most likely is that there were bodies in these places, and they were moved.”
Josie trudged back to the caretaker house where Drake dealt her another blow. “There is no one named Zandra. My team couldn’t find any evidence that she even existed. They interviewed staff and faculty from the college going back thirty years. Several people remember Frances and Hanna. They remember them having a little boy, but that’s it. Two people even remembered Nicolette and confirmed that she ran off one day and never came back. The only possibility is that Hanna gave birth to Zandra at home. That’s the only thing that would explain why there is no record of her.”
Josie swiped at her brow with her forearm. She badly needed a shower. All of them did. “Maybe,” she conceded. “But if that’s the case, we have no way of knowing if she’s alive or dead. Either way, she’s not here. No one is here. No bodies, no Trinity. Drake, he took her somewhere. He would have known all we’d have to do is get the dogs out here and we’d find her.”
“All right, let’s say he figured out that we might be onto him or he simply decided to take precautions in case we showed up on his doorstep, which meant moving Trinity,” Drake said.
“He moved her, but he stayed even though he suspected we were coming for him,” Josie added.
“Why?”
“Because we’re still playing his game,” Josie said. “And it’s my move.”
“But why?” Drake asked. “Why continue when he’s caught? He gets nothing out of this now. I guess—I guess unless she’s dead. Then he has the satisfaction of you figuring out his cryptic, sick little game, knowing that you’ll be devastated in the end. Or he gets the satisfaction of this Zandra escaping forever because she technically doesn’t exist.”
Josie shook her head. “No, Zandra isn’t part of this game.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The way he talked about her—”
Drake shook his head. “You can’t believe anything this guy says. You know that, Quinn.”
“Not the way he talked about her when I spoke to him. The way he talked about her to Trinity when she was taking down his story. Zandra wasn’t nice to him. She didn’t believe in him. She was a thorn in his side. I don’t know what happened to her, but she’s not part of this game. I still need to find my sister. We need to maintain focus on that goal.”
Drake threw his arms in the air. “What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the last forty-eight hours, Quinn? You think I like slogging through almost two hundred acres of mud and bird shit looking for human remains? You think I’m here for a damn vacation?”
“Calm down,” Josie told him.
But the cool façade of professionalism had cracked. Drake whirled and kicked at the front door. Grunting, he kicked and kicked until the wood splintered.
“Drake,” Josie said.
“I’ll calm down when we find her,” he shouted. His fists pummeled the door at lightning speed. Sweat poured from his hairline. The tendons in his neck pulled taut. Smears of blood dotted the front door. His knuckles bled.
“Drake!” Josie shouted. She tried to grab at his arm but nearly took an elbow to the face. In his frenzy, she had no chance against him. He was too big, too powerful.
She looked around for another FBI member, or any other law enforcement colleague, but there was no one. She thought about calling someone from her own team, but they would take at least ten minutes to get here and the blood on the door had gone from smudges to streaks. Drake was seriously going to hurt himself.
She jumped on his back.
He spun, once to his right and once to his left, but Josie hung on, applying a light choke hold on him as she spoke into his ear. “Dammit, Agent Nally. Stand down. Stand. Down!”
She felt him heaving beneath her, but his fight with the door had ceased. He stumbled down off the stoop, taking a few steps onto the grass in front of the house. When he stopped moving, Josie dropped off him. With mangled hands, he rubbed his throat.
“I’m sorry,” Josie said. “For choking you. But you were… I mean, you freaked out. Drake, you can’t—”
He didn’t look at her, his gaze on the grass, but he cut her off. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just—I just lost it.” He looked at his hands. A large splinter protruded from the middle knuckle of his left hand. He shook his head. “Quinn, I think I love her. I’m in love with her.”
Emotion threatened to bubble up, but Josie pushed it back down. Focus. She had to focus. “You need to stow that, Agent. Put it away. Right now.”
He met her eyes finally. “Is that what you do? Is that how you do this?”
“I have to.”
“I used to be able to,” he said. “I never had a problem before…” He waved his bloodied hands. “Before this. I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” Josie said.
Drake laughed. “She’s your sister! How are you handling this better than I am?”
Josie put a hand on her hip. “I’ve had to do this since I was a child,” she admitted. “Compartmentalize. Maintain focus on one thing. It helps in my job, but it used to be a matter of survival.”
“You survived a lot,” Drake noted. “From what Trinity told me.”
“She told you? About my childhood? Wait till we find her. She’s going to be sorry. I’m going to throttle—oh my God.”
A realization hit her like a thunderbolt. Every fine hair on her body stood on end. Her vision tunneled momentarily and then came back into focus. Drake said, “Hey, are you okay?”
“I know how to find Zandra,” she said.
Sixty-One
Eight hours later, Drake stood with Josie and her team in the CCTV room next to Denton’s interview room one where two weeks earlier Mettner and Gretchen had questioned Jaime Pestrak. Now, Alex Thornberg sat calmly at the same table, waiting for his court-appointed attorney.
Drake said, “Quinn, if you do this, you’re going to blow this whole case.”
Noah raised a brow. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
Drake pointed to the television screen. “If you do this, you’re presenting this guy with a defense that could not only keep him off death row, it could even keep him out of prison. The best case scenario is that the case spends years in litigation because he�
�ll be deemed not competent to stand trial.”
From her seat at the table, Gretchen said, “That’s what trial experts are for—exactly these issues. The prosecutor will get a psychological expert to bolster their case. After everything this guy has done—everything he’s already admitted to doing—there’s no way he’s walking.”
Mettner added, “If the boss is right, it’s going to come out eventually. If I’m the defense attorney and I get even an inkling this guy has a psychological problem this deep, I’m milking it for all its worth. If the defense attorney doesn’t figure it out, and it comes out during trial, you’ve got a mistrial.”
Josie stared at Drake. “They’re right. I’m not jeopardizing the case. I’m trying to find my sister while there’s still a chance that she’s alive. His lawyer will be present. No funny business. Nothing out of bounds.”
A knock sounded on the door and Chief Chitwood popped his head inside. “Kids,” he said. “Thornberg’s lawyer is here. Shut down the CCTV and vacate this room while they consult.”
They turned off the CCTV apparatus and filed out of the room as Alex’s public defender entered the interview room. They went back to the great room where they waited in tense silence until she came to get them. “My client is willing to talk to Detective Quinn,” she said. “Detective Quinn only.”
“Thank you,” Josie said and followed her back to the interview room.
She waited a long moment until she knew her colleagues were in the CCTV room and saw the red light beneath the camera come on, indicating that the interview was being recorded. She noted the date and time as well as the names of all present for the camera before she looked at Alex.
“I need to talk to Zandra.”
His attorney raised a brow. “I’m sorry, but who is Zandra?”
“Alex knows who she is, don’t you Alex?”