Vanishing Girls: A Totally Heart-Stopping Crime Thriller

by Lisa Regan

  Like father, like son.

  Goosebumps rose along Josie’s arms.

  Lisette jarred the bed again with her walker. “What did you do to her, you son of a bitch?”

  Gosnell looked away from her. His smirk disappeared. He had an almost pained look on his face. “She was my first,” he said. “I wanted to keep her, but after a few days of people searching for her, I realized I couldn’t. So I put her down. Kept her somewhere no one would find her and left the clothes so everyone would think a bear got her. I thought for sure they would come for me. I waited.”

  “Did you hurt her? Did you touch her?”

  His eyes glazed over again. “Not the way you think,” he said. “There was no time. My wife—she was still alive. My boy was there always asking questions. I couldn’t risk it. Every time I went to see her, one of them ruined it.”

  Josie moved over to Lisette and put a hand over her grandmother’s forearm. “Gram,” she said.

  “But she was the first one I took,” Gosnell went on. His eyes lit up. “And I never got caught. Then I knew I could do it.”

  I knew I could do it.

  Josie knew from the bodies being unearthed on the Gosnell property and the videos that all of the Gosnell victims were teenagers or older. If Alton’s appetites ran along the same lines as his son’s then eight-year-old Ramona would have been a victim of convenience, not necessarily chosen based on his sexual desire. He knew she was illegitimate, and she was easily plucked from the neighbor’s yard. The perfect test subject.

  “How long?” Josie asked. “How long were you thinking about taking a girl before you took Ramona?”

  “A long time,” he said. “Since I was a teenager. I wanted to do more things, but that came later with the others. I kept the name alive for my son. That first perfect kill. I told him he needed to find his own Ramona, and he did, but then he perverted the whole thing. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I told you he was stupid.”

  So that’s where it had come from. Nick had simply appropriated the name for his little business venture even though it disappointed Alton. Perverted was an interesting choice of word. Josie tried to imagine Alton as a young man, nursing abduction and rape fantasies for at least a decade. What a thrill it must have been for him just to take the girl. To finally take a step toward making his sick fantasies a reality. That he had gotten away with it likely opened the floodgates for more of his twisted urges to come alive. Then he had killed his wife and started teaching his son how to rape and murder women and dispose of their bodies.

  “Where is she?” Lisette asked. “Where is my daughter?”

  “She’s up there,” Alton said. “She’s up there on the mountain with the rest of them.”

  Chapter Seventy

  “Gram, how come you never told me about your daughter?”

  They sat side by side on Lisette’s bed. They held hands but stared straight ahead at the open door where staff and other residents walked up and down the hall, not sparing a glance into Lisette’s room. The hustle and bustle of Rockview went on just as normal. The emotional earthquake Josie had just experienced in Alton Gosnell’s room belonged only to them. She and her grandmother. The last surviving members of their family.

  “It was ancient history,” Lisette said. Her voice sounded heavy and exhausted.

  “Now, I know that’s not true,” Josie said. “She wouldn’t have been ancient history for you.”

  A few seconds passed by. Lisette squeezed Josie’s hand. “It was so long ago, and my parents worked so hard to put it in the past and keep it there. You have to understand how it was back then. You couldn’t get pregnant out of wedlock. There weren’t single mothers. My mother wanted to send me away. There was a home for unwed mothers in Philadelphia. I was supposed to go there to give birth. Ramona would have been adopted—hopefully. Maybe she would have lived if I had done what they wanted. But I couldn’t give her up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wore them down. They came up with the idea of passing Ramona off as theirs. But they never really accepted her.

  “For a time after she disappeared, I actually wondered if they’d taken her away. But they missed her when she was gone. Then I knew that it wasn’t them. Still, when we found her clothes, they were eager to lay her to rest. They wanted to go on as if she’d never been there. She wasn’t talked about. I think my mother was relieved.”

  “Gram, I’m so sorry.”

  “Eventually I accepted that I would never know exactly what happened to her. I understood that she was dead, although I used to have fantasies about her being alive, coming to find me one day. Those passed with time. I even accepted that I would never lay her body to rest. But I have never accepted the loss.”

  “I don’t know how you could.”

  Lisette turned and looked at Josie. She smiled—the smile of a woman in excruciating pain but trying to remain upbeat. “Then there was you. A little girl. I was so happy.”

  Josie smiled back. She moved closer to Lisette and fit her head into the crook of her shoulder. Somehow, it still fit as perfectly at twenty-eight as it had at eight. “Did Dad know about her?”

  “No. No one knew but me and my parents. I never told anyone.”

  “What happened to the father?”

  “I don’t know. I never heard from him after that. I heard he was deployed overseas to fight in Korea. I always imagined he died in the war. It was easier that way.”

  “June Spencer wrote her name in Sherri Gosnell’s blood,” Josie said. “That’s why you were so upset, why you wouldn’t return any of my calls. Did you know? Did you suspect Alton?”

  Lisette shook her head. “Not right away. I didn’t make the connection. It was simply the mention of her name. It brought it all back like it was yesterday. I’m sorry I couldn’t face you. I knew you were dealing with a lot and I didn’t want to burden you with this.”

  “Oh, Gram, you could never burden me—not with anything.”

  Lisette squeezed her hand. “But then when you came the other day and told me what you’d been through and what you found. Then I knew.”

  “I’m going to put Alton Gosnell in prison.”

  She had already arrested him after his confession. Unfortunately, he was in such bad shape he would have to be moved to the hospital instead of the county jail. Even though it was pointless, and she didn’t actually have the manpower, she planned to have him moved and then put an officer outside of his hospital room. If for no other reason than to remind him that he had finally been caught.

  “He’ll never make it to prison,” Lisette said. “He’s too sick. But now I know. I know what happened to my sweet Ramona.”

  Josie felt useless and powerless in the face of her grandmother’s grief. She felt even more helpless than she had in Nick Gosnell’s dark cell. She was a doer. She thrived on action. But she knew from her own grief over Ray and the chief’s deaths that there was nothing to be done. There was no way to mitigate or ameliorate her grandmother’s grief. It existed like an entity, and it would be with Lisette until she took her last breath. Still, she asked, “Is there anything I can do, Gram?”

  “After you find the Coleman girl, you go back to that mountain and you find my Ramona. Find her for me, Josie.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  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.”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Josie followed Noah out of the room. She couldn’t listen to any more. Lampson had already been arrested in the FBI raids the day before. He would be punished. That’s what mattered.

  Noah joined her in her office, leaning casually against the door jamb. Again, she stood by the window, staring out but seeing nothing this time. “I’m fine,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Okay,” he said, even though they both knew she wasn’t. She wouldn’t be fine for a long time. None of them would.

  She turned away from the window and sat behind the desk.

  “Any word on Luke?” Noah asked.

  “They’re going to try bringing him out of his coma tomorrow.” A genuine smile crossed Josie’s lips. “He’s doing well though. They’re very optimistic. I’ll want to go and be with him.”

  “Of course.”

  They heard Trinity’s heels clacking on the tile moments before she pushed past Noah and plopped down in one of the guest chairs on the other side of Josie’s desk. The same chair Josie had sat in a little over a week ago to beg the chief to bring her back on, even temporarily. “Your coffee sucks,” she said. “When are you getting new staff? This place is a ghost town. Oh, and that FBI douche wouldn’t let me in the viewing room. Did Branson give up Luke’s shooter?”

  Noah told her because Josie couldn’t find the words. Trinity gave a low whistle and pulled out her cell phone. “Not yet,” Noah reminded her. “Wait till he’s charged, okay?”