“I’m tired,” she said. “Your line of questioning yesterday brought up some emotions I thought I’d dealt with.”
“Yes,” Jimmy said. “I understand. The work you do often must be very emotionally difficult.”
She nodded, her shoulders seeming to relax slightly. “It’s hard not to get involved with the kids I place. I care about them, Detective. I’m invested in their well-being.”
“Of course.” He tilted his head. “Your sister is an adoption attorney, Ms. Gilbert?”
Her face drained of color, causing the dark circles under her eyes to look like bruises, and she glanced back and forth between the two of them quickly. “Y-yes. What does that have to do with anything?”
“The woman who was here with us yesterday, did you recognize her?”
“No,” she croaked, red blotches appearing on her neck. She was lying.
“Her name is Josie Stratton. We believe she was one of Charles Hartsman’s victims. He abducted her, chained her in a warehouse room, raped, and starved her. She gave birth to his child, a son, while she was in captivity, and then managed to escape. Not before Charles had taken h
er son from that warehouse though. The child’s never been found.”
She was visibly shaking now, not just her hands but her entire frame. “What does that have to do with me?”
“He came to you, didn’t he, Ms. Gilbert? He came to you because he knew you harbored intense guilt for your role in what happened to him. You blamed yourself for sending him back to that house of horrors, didn’t you? So he came to you with that newborn baby boy. You recognized Josie Stratton yesterday, didn’t you? You put the pieces together last night.” Jimmy’s voice was clear, calm, somehow hypnotic in its deep tenor.
Janelle Gilbert crumbled, nodding her head, a sob bursting from her mouth as she shrunk back in her chair. “He told me it was his baby. Told me his girlfriend had given birth and then died of a drug overdose. He didn’t know what to do. I didn’t doubt him, Detective,” she said, her voice high with panic. “The baby, he, he looked just like him. He was tiny and a little malnourished, but that boy was obviously his. There was no doubt.”
Zach’s heart was drumming a staccato beat, adrenalin pulsing through his veins. Oh dear God. “What did you do with the baby, Ms. Gilbert?”
She grabbed a tissue off her desk, wiped at her nose. “He asked for my help. I . . . I had to help him, Detectives.” Her eyes moved quickly between them, beseeching. “I’d let him down so terribly before. And . . . and all he needed was to find a loving home for a son he couldn’t raise. That’s all. It was a kindness. That’s all.”
“Your sister help you with that?” Jimmy asked.
She bobbed her head, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Yes, but I’m the one to blame here. I asked for her help and she gave it because she loves me. Because she thought it was the right thing.”
“Because she thought she was helping an innocent kid with no parents who might otherwise go into the system, the system you could personally verify was full of horror stories.”
She swallowed, desperation filling her expression. “Yes. Yes. We were just trying to help. To do our best for that poor little baby. To send him to a loving home.”
“Didn’t you see the news around then? The hunt for the baby stolen from Josie Stratton?” Jimmy asked, voice still somehow soothing, though Zach heard the underlying note of anger in his partner’s voice, even if Janelle Gilbert did not.
“I read about that crime, about that baby. But the father of that child, and the man who’d abducted that woman killed himself. This was clearly Charlie’s son. There was no denying it.”
“Where’d he go, Ms. Gilbert?” Zach asked, his voice low, menacing even to his own ears.
She looked hollowed out, her darkly circled eyes staring vacantly, lips bloodless. “He was placed with a couple who live in Kentucky, right across the bridge. A loving couple. He was placed with good people, Detectives. I made it right, the thing I’d gotten so wrong the first time. I made it right for Charlie.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Josie felt stir-crazy. At least at her own home, she’d had plenty of work to keep her busy, even if she had to accept the fact that she was being shadowed by members of the CPD. She paced Zach’s bedroom, looking out the window now and again to watch for his car pulling up to the curb outside his apartment building. It was after four o’clock and he’d left early that morning. Where was he and why hadn’t he called her?
She hated feeling caged. She rubbed her hands over her bare arms, trying to push away the resentment at Zach for leaving her there, trapped in a single room. He was working. He was trying to solve a case not just for her, but for the other women Cooper . . . Charles had murdered, including her own mother. Zach was out slaying dragons and she was bitter about it. She felt ashamed of herself.
And truthfully, her own desire to be alone was trapping her. She could go out to the living room where the other two officers were. She could chitchat with them, watch television, whatever it was they were doing. She just didn’t want to.
Josie sank down onto the edge of Zach’s bed, putting her hands over her face. It felt like there was a balloon in her chest, slowly expanding so that it would eventually burst, blowing her to smithereens.
She heaved out a breath, picking up the remote and turning the TV on. She settled on a cooking show and was able to zone out for half an hour as the chef went through the steps of preparing chicken marsala. When a commercial came on, she flipped around for a few minutes, pausing when she heard Zach’s name. Josie sat up straighter, watching as Zach exited a restaurant—what looked like a small sandwich shop—his arm around a pretty, flaxen blonde as he attempted to shield her face from the cameras, tucking her against him and dodging the questions that reporters threw at him. Josie’s heart stalled at the obvious intimacy between Zach Copeland and the unknown blonde woman, old feelings of betrayal and inadequacy rushing to the forefront of her heart and mind and causing a whooshing in her brain.
She heard the front door open and clicked the TV off quickly, standing and wiping her shaking hands down her hips as she listened to Zach greet the other two officers. Obviously, whatever she’d seen on the news had been from earlier.
The bedroom door opened and Zach came in, a strange look on his face that made her muscles tense. But then he smiled at her, even if his smile was a little sad.