“I spoke with Chief Rocca before you arrived.” Franklin’s voice remained cool and calm. “The man who broke into your home is refusing to talk. But he’ll crack eventually, and in the meantime, he’s safely behind bars.”
“Do you have any idea how many more men Spencer Harding can afford to hire? He’s got hundreds of millions of dollars, Franklin. That’s supervillain rich. He could pay people to come after each of us. He could send someone for Nessa’s girls, too. I fucking told you we were all sitting ducks here. My eleven-year-old daughter could have ended up like the girl on the beach. Now you’re asking me to wait for the system to work? The law won’t protect us. We have to protect ourselves.”
“You can’t take matters into your own hands,” Franklin said.
“Why not?” Jo demanded.
“Jo—” Nessa started.
Jo spun around to face her. “That’s my job, is it not? Taking matters into my own hands? If the system functioned the way it should, I wouldn’t be necessary. None of us would.”
Harriett had laid herself down on the sofa where the girl in blue had once sat. Nessa looked to her for help, but received nothing but a grin in return.
“What exactly do you have in mind?” Franklin asked Jo.
“I’m starting to think I shouldn’t tell you, Franklin. If you’re just going to keep toeing the line, it’s probably best that you leave. You don’t want to take part in this conversation. And to be honest, I don’t want what I’m about to say to be leaked back to Spencer Harding. Find the mole in your department, or my friends and I are going rogue.”
“Jo, there’s no need for that kind of talk,” Nessa said.
“Isn’t there? What would you say if a man had come after one of your daughters?” Jo stopped and shook her head. “No, you know what, it’s your house, Nessa. So you decide. Either Franklin goes, or I do.”
Nessa didn’t like what she had to say, but she didn’t hesitate for long. What happened to Lucy and the girls at Danskammer Beach could not happen again. She had a job to do, and in order to do it, she needed Jo. “Franklin, I’m sorry, but you have to go,” she told him. “I promise I’ll call you later.”
“Nessa, tell me you’re not serious,” Franklin pleaded. “I’m supposed to help you, remember?”
“God sent Jo and Harriett to me first,” she told him.
Franklin just nodded, as though he didn’t trust himself with words, and headed straight out the front door. Nessa couldn’t believe she was letting him go.
The instant he was gone, Jo wrapped her arms around Nessa. She knew the extent of her friend’s sacrifice, and it broke her heart that she’d asked for it. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Nessa sniffled but refused to cry. “We gotta do what we’ve gotta do,” she said. “I can’t let my sex life get in the way.”
“Was I right?” Harriett piped up from the sofa. “Was it what you needed?”
“Oh my God,” Nessa said. “Looks like the best time might end up being the last time, but damn, was it worth it.”
“It wasn’t the last time,” Harriett told her. “Not even close.”
“You think Franklin’s going to forgive me for what just happened? I just kicked him out of my house so the three of us could break the law.”
“Franklin’s a good guy,” Jo said. “But we’ve wasted too much time letting the police take the lead. It’s time to kick ass.”
“Claude said we have an open invitation to the Pointe, is that right?” Harriett asked and Jo nodded. “Then why don’t we rip the problem out at the root.”
“What do you mean?” Nessa asked cautiously.
“You know what I mean. Let’s kill Spencer Harding. What’s the point in waiting any longer?”
Jo had expected those words to tumble out of Harriett’s mouth eventually. The only thing that surprised her was how appealing they sounded. She glanced over at Nessa, whose face couldn’t hide her own surprise. She didn’t know about the bees. As far as Jo knew, Nessa had never seen this side of Harriett before.
“Are you serious?” Nessa asked.
“Still too soon?” Harriett shrugged casually, as if they all knew it would come to murder eventually. “All right. Then what shall we do now?”
“We should go public,” Jo said. “Put some serious pressure on the authorities and tell people exactly what we know.”
“What do we know?” Nessa said. “Franklin was right—we don’t have much in the way of hard evidence.”
“We know Spencer Harding’s wife had a photo of a murdered girl in a locker at my gym. We know the photo was a Polaroid, just like the ones a woman who called herself Laverne Green showed you when she lied about being the girl’s mother. We know Rosamund Harding is dead and Laverne Green is missing. Amber Welsh, whose daughter disappeared along Danskammer Beach Road, has vanished as well. We know that after I told the police how Rosamund Harding gave me the combination to that lock at my gym, a man broke into my house with the intention of kidnapping my daughter. I think anyone with a drop of common sense will agree that Spencer Harding has to be behind all of this, and that someone on the police force has been helping him.”
“So you want to go to the media with our story?” Nessa couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. “I suppose we could call the Times, or one of the local channels. Do you really think they’ll listen?”
“Of course not.” Harriett sighed, her first contribution to the conversation since proposing they execute Spencer Harding. “A story like ours would never make it past the fact-checkers. We’d be putting anyone who ran the story at the risk of a massive lawsuit.”
“But maybe we could convince the media to start their own investigations,” Jo said.
“The men who run the networks and newspapers all know Spencer Harding,” Harriett said. “They sit next to him at fund-raisers. They trade witty banter at cocktail parties. They clink scotch glasses with him at Jackson Dunn’s parties. And they buy their artwork from Harding’s galleries. Even if we could convince a reporter to investigate, the story would never run. Their bosses would kill it. You two are still depending on a system that you both know doesn’t work. Plan all you like; you’re just delaying the inevitable.”
Nessa bit her lip.
Then Jo perked up. “I know someone with a big audience and no corporate bosses. Someone who already wants to talk to us.”
“You do?” Nessa asked hopefully. Harriett just smiled.
Jo pulled out her phone and brought up the page for the podcast They Walk Among Us.
“He’ll listen,” Jo said.
Where Do All the Girls Go?