After that, the recording came to an end. Jo leaned forward and pressed the stop button.
“That girl would be dead if she hadn’t fought back. How many teenage girls would kick a cop in the balls? Every girl in America should be able to do what she did.”
“Now we know how Rocca was involved,” Harriett said. “He was using his job to kidnap teenagers.”
“The girl on the tape said Rocca approached her the beginning of July, the day before the Newsnight episode,” Jo said. “That’s three whole weeks after Spencer Harding’s helicopter went down.
“What does it mean?” Nessa asked.
“It means that not only was Rocca involved—he didn’t stop after Spencer died,” Franklin said.
Defiled
“Jo.” Art was gently shaking her.
“What!” She sat up so quickly that she almost bumped heads with him. “Is Lucy okay?”
“She’s totally fine,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The sun was streaming through the bedroom windows. For the first time in ages, she’d missed sunrise. “Oh my God,” she said, her hand reaching for her phone on the nightstand. “What time is it?”
“Eight thirty. I knew you got home late, so I let you sleep in. Lucy’s been fed and she’s keeping herself entertained. But I gotta hop in the car. I have a meeting in Manhattan at eleven.”
“Isn’t it Saturday?”
“Every day is a workday for the foreseeable future,” Art said. “That’s showbiz.”
“Okay, no problem.” Jo yawned and planted a kiss on his chin before scooting around him to the edge of the bed. “Go make good art. I got it from here.”
She grabbed a pair of leggings off the top of the hamper and pulled them on.
“Hey, before you run off, there’s something I wanted to talk about.”
“Sure,” she said as she searched for a top to put on over the sports bra she’d worn to bed. “What is it?”
“I’m going to have a lot more meetings on my calendar going forward. There will be times when I need to spend the whole day in the city. After a while, I’ll need to be there all night, too.”
If he hadn’t been half out the door, she would have climbed right on top of him. This was the Art she’d fallen for—the one who could go for days without sleep when he was in the zone on a project. The one who always had three projects lined up. That Art had been gone for so long that Jo had started to wonder if he’d been a figment of her imagination. And yet here he was, sitting on the side of her bed. He even looked years younger than the man she’d been married to a few weeks earlier. If she hadn’t known better, she would have wondered if the man in her room was a time traveler.
“We have plenty of money for a pied-à-terre,” Jo told him. “Why don’t you look for a small place in Manhattan or Brooklyn?”
“Jo,” he said in his serious voice.
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for the family to be apart. It’s gotten too dangerous. For God’s sake, Josh Gibbon was murdered yesterday.”
Unpleasant memories from the previous day flooded back into her mind. “In Brooklyn,” Jo pointed out half-heartedly. She knew where Art was headed, and she knew he was right.
“He was murdered because of what happened here in Mattauk,” Art replied. “You’ve been telling me that the story is bigger than anyone knows—that there are other people involved in what happened at the Harding house. And you know what? You are totally right. One of them just murdered a podcast host. Do you honestly think our family is safe if we stay here?”