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Jo and Arnett slipped through Oakhurst’s deepening darkness for nearly two hours, searching every pub and bar in town. When they came up empty-handed, they returned to Murphy’s house, hoping he’d returned home while they were away. He hadn’t. They called his ex-wife again, but she refused to answer their call. They went directly to her house, but she wasn’t at home.
Jo rubbed her brow with her fingertips. “I guess we can try nearby towns? But with no other idea where he might be, I’m at a loss.”
“At this point we’re wasting time and energy we need for other things,” Arnett said. “Just as likely he met a woman and is back at her place right now.”
It was a valid point. “And I guess that means if we can’t find him, Ossokov can’t find him.”
“Here’s hoping.” He glanced sideways at her. “I have an idea, but I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”
Her stomach flopped. “Let’s hear it.”
“We can’t stake out Ossokov, but we can stake out Murphy. You need to go get some sleep, but I’m gonna be up all night worrying about this anyway, so I might as well come back with my own car and keep watch. Goran and Coyne were planning on relieving the other team at four in the morning, I’ll see if they can come here instead. That’ll give me time to grab a few hours’ sleep before heading in, and that way whenever Murphy comes home, we’ll have eyes on him.”
Jo started to speak, but couldn’t find a tactful way to say what needed to be said.
“Just spit it out,” Arnett said.
She sighed. “What if Ossokov is just as happy to run into you here as he would be to find Murphy? We have no way of knowing you’re not his next target. You go home and I’ll stay to keep an eye out.”
Arnett pointed in the general direction of her house. “Nope. You need a full night’s sleep so we can get some evidence on this bastard. And I don’t think he’d hesitate to kill you any faster than he’d kill me.” He threw up a palm to preempt her objection. “Sorry, but this is my fight.”
Jo scrunched up her face. “Oh, cut the let-him-come-get-me-macho-BS or I’ll call Laura right now and tell her what your plan is.”
He stared at her, unbelieving. “You’re seriously threatening to rat me out to my wife?”
“If you insist on being completely careless.”
His face flinched like it couldn’t pick an emotion. Finally a wily smile cracked his face. “Then I’ll go to the station and pick up an undercover vehicle with tinted windows. If Ossokov spots it, he’ll know it’s a cop, but have no reason to think it’s me.”
Jo sighed a frustrated burst of air. She’d rather he stay far away from the situation, but those were her personal feelings, not her professional ones. Danger was a part of law enforcement, and if it were her, would she skulk off and hide under her bed? No way in hell.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll allow it.”
But as she drove home after dropping him off, the unsettled feeling nagging at her stomach intensified. Damn Goran and Coyne for allowing themselves to be spotted, and damn Ossokov for spotting them—
Something about that clanked with her but she had no idea why. Ossokov had made it clear he thought he was being targeted by the police, so it was reasonable that he’d have been on the lookout for a tail—
So reasonable in fact, it was almost predictable. Like maybe he’d even purposefully provoked it…
But why would he want the police to try to tail him, only to pull them off? To buttress his harassment claim? But surely it ran the risk of interfering with his real primary motive, the murders?
There was something here she couldn’t put her finger on. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Ossokov was playing them, that he had them right where he wanted them instead of the other way around. The little inconsistencies, they were trying to tell her something—there was some layer to Ossokov’s plan she hadn’t figured out yet. And with Arnett hanging around like a sitting goose, it was vital she figured out what he was up to.
She rubbed her temples. She was thinking about it all too hard. When her brain got like this, she needed to give it space to untie its own knots. To let all the little pieces of information she’d been accumulating bounce around and come together. A long shower, or a snifter of Calvados in a dark room with jazz playing, something to point her mind in another direction and let her subconscious take over.
Frustrated, she smacked her palms against the steering wheel. Maybe the team was right and the problem was there was no problem. Maybe she was overthinking this, looking for complications where there weren’t any, trying to impose rationality onto someone who wasn’t rational. Ossokov was angry—enraged—about the misconduct that had put him behind bars. Fueled by that sort of rage, was he really playing the sort of manipulative mental chess game she was crediting him with? He was killing the people he felt were responsible, any and all of them, even tangentially. That was all that mattered.
That, and the fact that he wasn’t going to stop until they stopped him.
* * *
As she turned in to her driveway just before midnight, Matt’s car loomed up in front of her.
Damn, damn, damn—she pounded the steering wheel again as she said the words. Both because she really, really needed some alone time to process everything that was going on, but also, how could she have completely forgotten him again? She hadn’t called or texted him all day, something she’d rarely failed to do when theyweren’tliving together. How had moving in with him sent him to some black-box purgatory in her head like the mental equivalent of socks missing from the laundry?
Her mind flitted back to the question Lopez had posed over dinner. Was she destined to end up like Sandra Ashville, putting all of her passion into a job that would one day either kill or abandon her? Why couldn’t she find the balance between being a dedicated detective and a reliable partner?
Because, a voice in her head answered back,the situation with Matt isn’t about workaholism. It’s about your screwed-up defense mechanisms.
