Where the Blame Lies

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?”