“And?” she prompted after he drifted away for a moment.
His eyes snapped back to hers and he rubbed at the back of his neck. “The first one on the list moved overseas apparently. She lives there now with her husband and two kids. The second one on the list disappeared without a trace thirteen years ago.”
Josie’s eyes widened. “Disappeared?” she whispered, dread streaming through her. She swallowed, leaning back against the counter. “Do you think she was the victim of Marshall Landish too?”
Zach shook his head. “Couldn’t be. Marshall Landish was eighteen and had just enrolled in the Army. He was in basic training in South Carolina at the time.”
“South Carolina,” she repeated. “Couldn’t he have driven to Ohio on a weekend?”
Zach blew out a breath. “South Carolina is a nine-hour drive from Ohio. And what reason would he have to drive to Cincinnati, abduct a woman, and drive back? He’d never been to Ohio at that point from what we know. He moved there years later to be closer to his sister who had recently relocated to Cincinnati when she got a job at Proctor and Gamble.” He paused. “But if he did drive to Ohio from South Carolina and abduct that woman, however unlikely, what was his connection to her, and to Vaughn Merrick?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Josie chewed at her lip. The abduction—and probable death—of the woman thirteen years before, her own abduction, and the most recent victims were all similar in that they were involved with the professor. That couldn’t be a coincidence. But Zach was right, what was Marshall Landish’s connection to the professor, if any? A sinking feeling made Josie sag against the counter behind her. It was becoming more and more plausible that the man who had abducted Josie hadn’t been Marshall Landish. But her mind still fought against the notion. It had been him. She hadn’t known him well, but she’d recognized his voice—not just his stutter, but his tone, cadence, depth—his smell, his body and the way he’d carried it. “Did he have a twin?” she asked Zach. “Or a brother?”
Zach shook his head. “Neither. Just a sister.”
Josie looked away. “His sister insisted he didn’t do it,” she murmured. “The detectives who originally worked my case questioned her thoroughly. She wanted to talk to me but”—she shook her head—“I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I was afraid I’d recognize him in her and I just . . .” She made a helpless sound. She’d been too traumatized to expose herself to more potential trauma. As it was, she’d felt like a walking black hole.
Zach approached her, taking her in his arms, holding her to him closely. “I understand that. There was no need for you to speak to her.”
She leaned back. “Sometimes I wonder if I would have questioned her too, if maybe . . . if maybe she did know something about my son.” But the detectives had assured Josie that Marshall’s sister didn’t know anything. They’d been convinced and they’d convinced her as well. Whatever Marshall had done with her baby, he hadn’t told a soul. At least not one who had come forward.
If it had even been Marshall . . .
Zach smoothed her hair back, kissed her temple. “They had the best detectives in our department working on your case. Men who know how to tell if someone’s lying.”
Josie nodded, but she still felt unsettled.
“Jimmy’s looking more thoroughly into Landish’s background right now,” Zach said. “Because all the evidence pointed to him at the time, and because it was assumed you were his only victim, there wasn’t a need to do an in-depth information pull on his past.” Zach paused. “Jimmy did get his medical file from the Army though and found one thing that was unique.”
“What?” she asked, her muscles tensing.
“He was color blind.”
She frowned. “Color blind. What . . . what does that mean?”
“It’s nothing that would have been visually distinguishable. It just meant that he couldn’t perform certain duties in the Army.”
Josie’s heart clutched. Did you not wear these r-red panties for me, you slut? Her eyes flew to Zach’s. She shook her head. “I don’t think the man who abducted me was color blind.” She told him what she remembered.
His jaw clenched and his eyes went dark as she spoke the words Marshall Landish—or the man she’d believed was him—had said to her that awful, horrific night. He glanced away, obviously considering. “Are you sure?”
“Very. I’ve been going over those memories, Zach. I’ve . . . allowed my mind to go back . . . there.”
His jaw ticked again. “There’s no other way he could have known the color of your . . . clothes?”
She shrugged, a small movement of her shoulders. “I don’t see how.”
They were both quiet for a moment, Josie’s mind traveling back to that moment. Unlike the days prior, she didn’t just probe the memory, she lingered there, recalling the way he’d ripped her clothes and later, the way he’d looked standing in front of that window, the light shining in. There had been something about that moment . . . something, but it remained out of her grasp.
Everything she came up with felt incomplete or circumstantial, like the recollections that didn’t exactly fit could still be explained away. A band of frustration tightened around her.
“I need to talk to his sister,” Josie said. “I wasn’t emotionally able to back then. But I need to now.”
“You don’t need to. I can talk to his sister. Jimmy can talk to his s
ister.”
She shook her head. “No, no. I need to. If I was wrong about him. If it was someone . . . I don’t know, posing as him somehow or . . .” She let out a frustrated breath. “I don’t know, but I need to look in her eyes and talk to her about her brother. About who he was. Zach, I have to.”