Josie stood at the window in the chief’s office—her office now—and stared down at the street below, littered with news vans, reporters, giant mobile satellite dishes, and onlookers. Holcomb’s teams had carried out their raids the day before—the day after she, Noah, and Lisette had gotten a confession from Alton Gosnell—and the news had broken wide open about what had really been going on at the Gosnell property. Noah had hired some local teenagers to erect temporary barricades to keep them a safe distance from the station house. Someone had even installed a Porta Potti on the sidewalk. The press was there to stay, that was for sure. For once Josie didn’t feel uncomfortable with them there. They were pushy and intrusive, but they were also the watchful eyes she needed while the FBI and what was left of her staff sorted out this unholy mess.

Josie watched as a woman in a tight black dress and blue bolero sweater broke through the press barricade and sauntered toward the front doors, her four-inch heels clacking on the asphalt. Trinity was showing off. Josie had made it clear that she was to have access to Josie and Noah at all times and that she was authorized to enter the building through the employee entrance on the other side of the building. Now she was just rubbing her elevated status in the faces of all her colleagues.

Josie turned away from the window and picked up the phone on her desk. She checked her temporary cell phone but there was no more news from Carrieann, no change in Luke’s condition. Hopefully, tomorrow would bring better news. She sighed. At least Denise Poole had been released from custody, the charges against her dropped. Josie dialed Rockview and waited on hold while they went to find the director of nursing. After a few minutes, she picked up, sounding out of breath and harried. Without preamble she said, “No, Mr. Gosnell hasn’t been moved yet. The hospital doesn’t have any beds. Believe me, I’m doing what I can. Hopefully we can get him over there tomorrow.”

She hated the idea that her grandmother would have to spend one more second under the same roof as that monster. She knew Alton couldn’t hurt a fly in his present condition, but that wasn’t really the point. She had implored Lisette to come and stay with her until things settled down, but Lisette was not to be deterred. “I’m staying put,” she had told Josie. “I want to watch that son of a bitch die.”

Apparently, Lisette had been deadly serious. “We keep finding your grandmother outside of Mr. Gosnell’s room,” the director of nursing added.

“What do you mean?” Josie asked.

“I mean, we caught her outside of his room a couple of times, just standing there, staring at him. I don’t think it’s healthy. Last night, one of the night shift nurses found her inside his room, standing over his bed.”

Josie said nothing. What could she say? Alton Gosnell had killed Lisette’s daughter and gotten away with it. She was not about to apologize for her grandmother wanting to confront the man again, and she was not going to offer to talk to Lisette. What would she say?

The other woman blew out a sigh. “I’ll call you as soon as he is moved. I promise. I want this over with just as much as you and your grandmother.”

“Thank you,” Josie said, and hung up.

Down the hall she found two clean mugs in the break room and filled them with coffee, adding sugar and powdered creamer. Now that she was chief, she would have to get the department to spring for half-and-half. She carried the steaming mugs down the hall into the viewing room that adjoined the only interrogation room the Denton PD had. On a high-definition flat-screen television, Noah watched FBI Special Agent Marcus Holcomb interrogate Dusty Branson.

Noah swiveled in his chair as she entered. He smiled and accepted the coffee with his left hand. His right arm was still in a sling. Josie knew he had forgiven her for shooting him, but every time she looked at him she felt guilty. She smiled for him even though she hadn’t felt much like smiling for the past week. “Anything new?”

“Holcomb’s going in for the kill soon on Luke’s shooting,” Noah said.

Holcomb had been working steadily at Dusty for hours. He had already gotten Dusty to tell him how Sherri and Nick Gosnell had abducted Isabelle Coleman. They’d spotted her at her mailbox and followed her back up her driveway, pretending to be lost and asking for directions. Dusty wasn’t sure what exactly had transpired, but at some point Coleman realized that the two weren’t on the up and up and fled into the woods. Nick went after her, overpowered her and dragged her back to the car. It was an impulsive abduction. Gosnell rarely took women from the area, Dusty told Holcomb. Usually, Nick and Sherri took a weekend trip to a nearby state—Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, even as far as West Virginia, Dusty said—and kidnapped girls from there. They almost never took girls within a hundred miles of Denton so as not to arouse too much suspicion. They tried to target girls who were troubled and estranged from their families so they were less likely to be missed—runaways, drug addicts, prostitutes. Coleman’s abduction—like Ginger Blackwell’s six years earlier—had been an aberration, a major deviation from their standard operating procedure. Only Dusty and a small handful of others had known that Coleman was in Gosnell’s bunker.

Then, a few days after Sherri’s murder, Gosnell had called Dusty in a panic. Isabelle had escaped. The first escape ever. Gosnell had put it down to him being off his game after Sherri’s death. Plus, Sherri hadn’t been there to administer the date rape drugs so it was likely that Isabelle had become much more lucid and capable of defending herself. She had run off into the woods and hadn’t been seen since.

Josie knew from what Ray had said that the department had been searching for her around the clock for days before the showdown in the bunker. Even after that, they had kept up the search in the chief’s absence, but to no avail. Now that nearly all of Gosnell’s clients and accomplices in law enforcement had been arrested, the Denton PD was considerably lighter on staff. Josie planned to use Trinity to make a public appeal for every citizen who was willing and able to join the search.

Dusty had also given up two other Denton officers for the shooting of the gangbangers and Dirk Spencer. He said Spencer had managed to find out about “Ramona” from a bar he started frequenting after June’s disappearance. It had taken him a while to get the barflies there to talk about Gosnell’s enterprise, let alone give up its location, but eventually someone did. Somehow, word got back to some of Denton’s police officers that Spencer was planning to raid Gosnell’s bunker with the help of his city friends, and they had managed to head him off. There was a dirty cop at Luke’s barracks, as Josie had suspected, who helped cover up the police involvement in the shootout. That cop had also suggested framing Denise Poole, since he knew about her past relationship with Luke and her stalker-like tendencies.

What Holcomb hadn’t yet managed to get out of Dusty was who had shot Luke. On screen, Holcomb stood at one end of the table, one hand on his hip and the other smoothing down his tie as he stared at Dusty over a pair of reading glasses. His suit jacket rested on the back of his chair. Even on television, he towered over the table in front of him. Dusty looked like a small child sitting across from the agent.

“Sit,” Noah said, pulling her from her thoughts.

She took the chair next to him, sipping her coffee. “Turn it up,” she told Noah.

Across from Holcomb, Dusty slouched in his seat. A shock of greasy hair fell into his eyes but he didn’t push it away. He wore only a plain white T-shirt, and Josie could see the yellow pit stains creeping from his underarms. His hands waved as he talked.

“It was that guy I told you about earlier—the one who helped us cover up the shooting with the gangbangers,” he told Holcomb.

Holcomb looked down at the notes in front of him and rattled off the name of a state trooper.

“Yeah, him. He saw the Blackwell file in Luke’s truck. Like, in an envelope. So he called Nick, and Nick called me.”

“Why would Nick call you?”

Dusty shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You were a frequent customer.”

The coffee burned a hole in Josie’s stomach.

Dusty shrugged. “Well, yeah. Sure, I guess. We talked about it. By that time I had a few calls from guys on Denton PD and a guy I know in the sheriff’s office. People were concerned, you know?”

“Names, Officer Branson, I need names,” Holcomb said.

Dusty rattled off a bunch of names, and Holcomb wrote them down. Then he continued, “Who made the decision to shoot Trooper Creighton?”

“No one made the decision. I don’t know. We talked about it—”

“You and the men on this list?”

Dusty nodded. “Yeah. We talked about it and agreed that someone needed to, you know, take him out.”

Noah put his coffee mug down and reached over to squeeze Josie’s forearm.

“Who shot Trooper Creighton?” Holcomb asked.

“Jimmy Frisk.”

Holcomb again looked at his notes. “James Lampson?”

“Yeah. He’s an investigator with the DA’s office. He’s been in tight with Nick for decades. Used to be a cop in Denton.”