She had promised Carrieann that she wouldn’t return to the hospital, but Josie couldn’t leave without seeing Luke one more time. The nurse let her stay an extra ten minutes. It had only been a day, but he already looked thinner. She touched his cool skin and carefully avoided the mess of tubes and wires so she could lean in to kiss his cheek and whisper, “I’m sorry,” before a nurse ushered her out.

Before leaving, she took a quick scan of the waiting room to make sure Lara wasn’t in there, only to find two troopers sleeping in chairs and a handful of worried relatives. Josie was about to turn away and leave when the sight of Trinity Payne on the television caught her eye. She stood outside the Denton police department, hair whipping in the wind, microphone in hand. Along the bottom of the screen scrolled the words: “Prisoner Taken.” Josie had to get close to the television to hear what she said.

“… there was only one officer on duty in the holding area this evening when a masked gunman stormed the back door, shot Officer Noah Fraley and kidnapped June Spencer…”

A masked gunman?

Guilt was a sharp pain in her chest. Noah had lied. She shot him, and he lied for her. If ever there was a sign that he wasn’t involved, it was this one, perfect lie. But why had he reached for his gun, she wondered? Why hadn’t he tried to convince her that he was innocent, instead of trying to handle her?

You wouldn’t have believed him, a voice in her head confessed.

Then a horrible thought struck her. What if he had been reaching for his gun to surrender?

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she muttered to herself.

But it didn’t matter. At the time, she had no way of knowing if he was an enemy or not. She had done what she had to do and June was safe.

Her cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She ducked out of the waiting room and down the hall as she pulled it out and looked at the display before answering.

“Ray.”

“Where is June Spencer?” he asked.

“Last I heard she was in a holding cell in the basement of Denton’s police building,” Josie said.

“Are you really going to do this?”

“Do what?” she said, with a little more feigned innocence than she had intended.

“Lie,” he growled, his voice growing louder.

She laughed. “Are you really going to do this? Lecture me about lying? You?”

There was a long silence. Probably while he catalogued the vast number of lies he had told in the last several years. Then, quietly, he said, “Are you fucking Noah Fraley?”

She let out a short, uncontrolled burst of laughter. She couldn’t help it. The thought was so absurd. Then the implication of what he was asking sunk in. Was he really implying that she could not possibly accomplish anything unless she used sex to do it? “Maybe your little stripper girlfriend needs to use her vagina to get things done, but I do not.”

“Jo,” he said, voice softening for a moment.

“Why would you even go there?”

“Noah erased the security footage. He left a goddamn trail of blood from holding to the CCTV room. He erased it all—from the outside and the inside.”

Her heart leapt. “Security footage of what?”

Again, he sighed. “You know goddamn well what.”

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

She could hear that he was speaking through gritted teeth. “This is not a game, Josie. I can’t protect you if you take this much further. Tell me where June is. I’ll go get her and take her back. They’ll never have to know for sure that it was you.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. It’s for your own good. Please, Jo. This is serious. I know you’re not good at backing off, but I’m telling you that your life depends on it.”

A chill enveloped her entire body. The hand holding the phone to her ear trembled. “You think I can just forget about this? Stop asking questions and go back to my life like normal? What about the next time a teenage girl goes missing, Ray? I’m not backing away from this. I remembered where the Standing Man is, and I’m going there.”

“Josie, don’t. Jesus. Don’t go there. You don’t understand. They’ll kill you.”

She thought about the woman she elbowed for selling her four-year-old for drugs. She thought about Noah Fraley lying on the tile floor, blood blooming from his shoulder. About Luke in the hospital bed, and June curled up under her prison cot like a child. She had a sudden flash of memory of her mother, of all people. “You can’t always be all roses and sweetness,” she had always told Josie. “That don’t get shit done.”

“Maybe,” she said to Ray. “Or maybe I’ll kill them.”